Trump threatens to re-impose naval blockade on Iran

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. The United States is about to mark its 250th anniversary. And so on the Global Story podcast from the BBC, we're telling surprising tales of American influence on the world stage and in ordinary people's lives all across the globe. We have this ability to export our story and a lot of people have bought it. I feel like the American dream is alive but not well. From the BBC, it's the United States at 2.50. Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:01We will let you know if that happens. We're also going to remember a man called Pat Oliphant. He was described in the New York Times obituary today as the dean of US political cartoonists. He's died at the age of 90. Pat Oliphant was so widely syndicated that he appeared in the newspapers that would have been read by almost every American. So we all had Oliphant's cartoons as a shared visual language through which our current political moment and particularly our presidents were being looked at very carefully and very critically. More on Pat Oliphant in just under 20 minutes. But we're going to begin with the latest abrupt change in President Trump's approach to Iran.

1:44This time yesterday on the programme, we brought you his announcement that the US would guarantee safe passage for ships through the Strait of Hormuz in return for a fee set at 20 % of the value of their cargo. Today, that plan was scrapped. Why? The President was asked in the Oval Office today. Because I don't think anybody should be able to charge a fee for the Strait or for any other Strait relationship in terms of other sections of the world. I don't think anybody should be really in that position. Mr. Trump said by way of further explanation that he'd been phoned by a series of Gulf Arab leaders who persuaded him to ditch the levy in favour of what he said were trade and investment deals.

2:26What is going ahead, though, as far as we understand, is a resumption of a US naval blockade of Iranian ships. That was due to start as of just a few minutes ago. And Mr. Trump insisted that he would not back down as his ceasefire with the Iranians crumbles. I wanted to give them a chance at making a deal. You know, we had a deal two days ago. It was done. And then all of a sudden, they couldn't do it. They didn't like something about the deal. They couldn't do it. And they shot first. And that was a big mistake that they shot first because we have been knocking the hell out of them. Becca Wasser is defence lead for Bloomberg Economics.

3:02First thing, is shipping still stuck in the strait? We've seen lower levels of shipping, in part because of this back and forth and because of the uncertainty over the strait. And that makes a lot of sense. Commercial shipping is reticent to move forward and insurers are, you know, equally reticent to ensure that they can go through the strait as things are currently popping off and there is consistent violence and there's uncertainty over who controls the strait and what is the best route out of the waterway. In terms then of the picture with the ceasefire, I mean, are you seeing an escalation in the level of attacks that both sides are trading in?

3:48Or is it a case of it's just this sort of drumbeat of attacks which suggests that the ceasefire is beginning to crumble? I think both things can be true. We have seen consistent levels of violence throughout this conflict. But even so, even during this purported ceasefire, which President Trump has termed as, you know, fighting, but just at a lower level and continuing to shoot, but at a lower level, we're continuing to see that kind of tit for tat attacks. And we're continuing to see consistent violence. But I think there's been an uptick in the past few days where you have had an increase in U.S.

4:31attacks in terms of intensity and consistency. And that in itself is kind of auguring towards the fact that the ceasefire is crumbling, that both sides are getting impatient with each other. And they are both trying to battle for control over the Strait of Hormuz and trying to set forth what might happen in the next round of fighting. And indeed, given that a naval blockade is seen as an act of war, presumably if this goes into effect and stops Iranian ships from exiting their ports, one would imagine that the Iranians would try and hit back harder. Potentially. I think the greater risk here is what the U.S.

5:11decides to do in terms of ensuring commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. Currently, the U.S. has been, quote unquote, guiding ships through the strait, largely by providing armed overwatch with aircraft and drones and providing guidance for them to move through the U.S.-approved southern route closer to the coast of Oman. But if the US decides to increase some of that activity and potentially enforce it with additional maritime power, that could lead Iran to escalate further and respond with violence. And that runs the risk of putting the US and Iran in a very tricky situation where they could have an escalatory spiral.

5:58Beka Wasa from Bloomberg Economics. As we saw during the more intense conflict earlier this year, Iran isn't just flexing a chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz. It's also been attacking regional allies of the US, in particular targeting US bases. Jordan's been in the firing line for the last three days. What's the damage, I asked Jawad Anani, Jordan's former foreign minister. The damage has been very minimal. I don't think that we have reported any killings or any wounded persons. some property damages that is not significant at all. Not significant in terms of physical damage then, but significant in other ways, I assume.

6:35Significant is that Jordan is being targeted and that is not what we would like to see. We are blaming Iran for its aggressive action and Jordan has been taking a sort of rational approach to this whole thing because we don't want to get involved nor do we want the Jordanian territory to be exposed to fighting between Iran and Israel. Yes, understood. But I suppose, yes, blame Iran in the first instance, because they are the ones who are launching missiles. I'm just wondering whether there is any criticism at Donald Trump for launching this war against Iran on the 28th of February, and in so doing and restarting hostilities, albeit at a lower level over the last week, bringing US bases in Jordan into the crosshairs?

7:28I mean, do you attribute any criticism to him? Well, you know, we as politicians try to stick to the basic principles that we need the United States, although we can be critical of some of its policies or actions. But we would still want to maintain amicable relations with them because we have large trade with them. We also have received sizable aid from the United States. But as you were saying, I mean, the cold truth is that Jordan gets billions of dollars in direct assistance from the United States. It's really not in a position to say to Donald Trump or really any other administration, you are not allowed to conduct your foreign policy in the Middle East in this way.

8:16We talked to some of the senators in the Senate and some U.S. representatives in the House of Representatives, and they know that we are not happy with this war, simply because as long as this war is waging, then we cannot control the outcome. And it could also be ruinous to all the plans that the Gulf is putting into pipelines. If that happens, then I have 1 million people working in the Gulf who are remitting to Jordan about$6 to$7 billion a year, which is a sizable amount as far as balance of payments is concerned. We have large investments from the Gulf here. And also we have large investments as Jordanians in the Gulf.

9:02We don't want the world to continue leading to the destruction of those economies. and at the end of the day we find ourselves completely up in the air, naked and dry. Jawad Anani, former foreign minister of Jordan. So where might we be heading? Alan Eyre is Distinguished Diplomatic Fellow at the Middle East Institute in London and a former senior US State Department diplomat who worked on the Iran file. Well, I think that's the most important task he has in front of him now. A nuclear deal is wildly improbable. he's got a better chance of of getting out of the mess that he created with this war but that's going to take effort the current strategy he seems to have decided on by default if it's a strategy and not merely a fit of peak is trying to use u.s military force to keep the straight open enough long enough so that the blockade against iranian ports can have an effect and force iran to to cry uncle and i don't think that's going to happen well i was going to ask i I mean, I suppose it's about how much pain the Iranian leadership think they can sustain and that actually, perhaps more importantly, the country can sustain.

10:13They've shown a pretty big endurance threshold up to this point, haven't they? Very big. And don't forget, we've in many ways set the dial back to zero because after the siege fire, we allowed Iran to export its oil and its oil-derived products. So they emptied a lot of the storage it was filling up when they couldn't export these products. They got a lot of dollars as a result of these exports. So the previous cumulative effect of the U.S. blockade has been largely negated. So as I said, if we have this two clocks issue of the clock of the U.S. blockade against Iran and the clock of the straits being closed or constrained, we've really done ourself an own goal by the ceasefire.

10:58I was speaking to somebody who held a senior position in the Trump administration, first Trump administration on national security who made this argument to me. And I just wonder what you make of it, which is that the world should be grateful for what the US has done in the Strait of Hormuz as much as, or with Iran, and now with Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz, because as much as anything, it's taught the world that, you know, were, for example, Russia to launch a new attack westwards or China to invade Taiwan and Iran to decide that it was going to choke off traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, well, it won't be a surprise anymore.

11:41How far do you think that argument holds water? I think it's all the water's leaked out of that argument. It's nonsensical. One doesn't need to have a prolonged closure of the Strait of Hormuz to realise the negative economic effects of a closed Strait of Hormuz. That's what history is for. That's what the imagination is for. Again, this caught no one by surprise. Everyone knew that if you went after Iran, they would close the strait. It's strategy 101. So, yeah, there are lessons to be derived from this ruinous war. But the main lesson is don't enter into a ruinous war. Given we are where we are and given also the imprecise language that many people have talked about in the Memorandum of Understanding as to who should control the strait and how shipping should be allowed to go through.

12:32How would you construct the deal which will at least give some sort of certainty about how shipping can transit the Strait of Hormuz in the long term? Well, in the long term, the problem goes away because people are having workarounds. And I think eventually the world, China, others will not allow Iran to maintain long-term substantive control of the strait. But I'm not worried about long-term. I'm worried about short and mid-term. And there, Tim, I don't see a solution. The U.S. is incapable or unwilling to negotiate seriously. This whole problem could have been avoided had the U.S. put more effort into serious and sustained negotiations.

13:15At this point, there's so little bilateral trust, and I think both sides expect the other side not to follow through on commitments. A diplomatic solution, even with good, experienced diplomats, could well be out of reach. Alan Eyre, a former US diplomat who worked on the previous multinational agreement with Iran on its nuclear programme. Coming up, we'll look at and hear about the story of a teenager who aced her piano exam, even though she can only play one-handed because of an injury.

13:54I couldn't pick up a pen. I couldn't hold a hairbrush to do my own hair in the morning and then finally gave in to get it treated. And at the start, we didn't really know what it was. And it took me about a year before we heard that it would be unlikely that I would be back to to playing with two hands again. But she learned how to play with just one hand and play beautifully. We'll hear more about that remarkably resilient and talented teenager coming up in about 20 minutes here on New South.

14:38You're with the BBC World Service and live from London, and this is NewsHour with me, Tim Franks. The world's most expensive fossil has just been sold at auction, sold for more than$50 million. To call it a fossil slightly undersells it. This was one of the biggest and most complete specimens of Tyrannosaurus rex ever discovered. The 67-million-year-old beast was excavated over the last few years on a ranch in South Dakota. Steve Brussati is Professor of Paleontology and Evolution at the University of Edinburgh. What does he make of the sale? So there's a lot of inflation these days with everything, and it's come for dinosaurs as well.

15:18And clearly there's a community of people, of people with means and with money that love collecting dinosaurs, and this is the latest example. I'm not entirely sure, actually, to whom this has been sold, whether we've heard who it's been sold to, but on the assumption that it's a private collector, do you have any issues about that? i'm not sure who has purchased the fossil the auctions only just happened and a lot of times it takes you know some time for that information to come out sometimes the buyers never go public it's just an anonymous buyer and in these situations that's where things get a little bit dangerous and frankly a bit sad for us as scientists and educators because if a fossil is purchased by an individual or a hedge fund which is also happening a lot these days essentially it disappears.

16:06If that person puts it in their house or they put it in a vault to accumulate value so they can sell it again later, that fossil is not available for scientists to study. But even more importantly, it's not available to be put on display in a museum where it can inspire people and educate people. So if that's the case this time, and it is a private individual that's purchased it and the fossil disappears, that would just be a tremendous shame because this is a beautiful and very scientifically important T. rex skeleton, one of the best skeletons of T. rex that has ever been found. So why scientifically important or potentially important?

16:40It's certainly important because this is a relatively complete, really a nearly complete dinosaur. This thing is 66 million years old. These dinosaurs have hundreds of bones. This is an animal the size of a bus, and almost all of it is there. The preservation of those bones is really, really, really good. So that's exactly the kind of fossil that as scientists, we love to study. That tells us so much about this animal, about T-Rex, about what it looked like, how big it was, how it moved, what it ate, the environment that it lived in. These fossils are really the clues from prehistory that tell us about how our Earth has changed over time.

17:16And this is a really good one. So scientifically, there's so much we can get out of it. But frankly, it's not really about me as a scientist or my students in Edinburgh where I teach. You know, we're the academics. There's not a whole lot of us. What this is really about is the public. This is about the millions of people that could see a fossil like this if it was put on display. That's how I was inspired when I was a teenager. I saw a T-Rex on display in Chicago back home at the Field Museum. Sue the T-Rex. Purchased at auction, but purchased by a museum. So I hope that's what happens in this case.

17:50This fossil finds its way to a museum. I just wonder, though, whether also there's an issue as far as there might be an issue as far as scientific journals are concerned, because I understand that if a fossil is held in private hands, that, you know, even if you as a scientist go and investigate it, you can't then use its findings in a publication? Yes, that's generally correct when it comes to our academic research. And this is really just about the repeatability. As scientists, we have to make our evidence, our data, our analyses open and repeatable to other scientists. So if I study a fossil and I interpret it a certain way, other scientists need to be able to check that.

18:35And that's why we study fossils that are in museums. If I publish something, then another scientist can go to that museum and see it. Professor Steve Brissati from Edinburgh University. One of the great figures of American journalism has died. Pat Oliphant was 90 years old. He was also not a writer. He was a cartoonist. In the words of the New York Times obituary today, the dean of political cartoonists. Molly Schwartzberg is curator of printing and graphic arts at Harvard University. Why did Oliphant matter so much? First, he mattered because back in the 70s, 80s and 90s, when his career developed and came to its height, newspapers were one of the primary ways that we all absorbed and thought about politics and major national and global news.

19:24So Pat Oliphant was so widely syndicated that he appeared in the newspapers that would have been read by almost every American. So we all had Oliphant's cartoons as a shared visual language through which our current political moment and particularly our presidents were being looked at very carefully and very critically. And he was quite scabrous, wasn't he? He was. It was terrifying to be put in pen by Oliphant. But at the same time, his cartoons were considered so brilliant that it was an honour to be criticised by him. And supposedly, in Washington, in the offices of political figures, you would put any cartoon of you by Oliphant up on your wall as a point of pride, no matter how bad you looked in that cartoon.

20:16What was it about the way in which he caricatured? I mean, how did it sort of lacerate in a way that others perhaps didn't? I think part of it is, for instance, with presidents, he developed a character, a characteristic, a set of characteristics for each president. And then he would continue those throughout the time that he caricatured that leader. There was so much going on in each cartoon that if you were a visual thinker or a linguistic thinker or a meta thinker, you would find something in that cartoon that would strike you. You know, famously, I was reading the obituaries. He sort of took on everybody on the left, on the right.

20:56Was there something that drove him? I think part of it was that from his childhood, he had an anti-establishment personality and he preferred to be on the outside. And I think that it's this choice of being an outsider and then the fact that he was literally an outsider coming to the US from Australia earlier in his career that made him so successful. You talk about his sort of anti-establishment bent. I mean, I suppose early on in his career, you might imagine that there'd be no greater honour than winning a Pulitzer Prize. But that was one illustration of him sort of kicking against the establishment, wasn't it?

21:38That's right. He didn't like the idea of the Pulitzer Prize and he didn't like how they awarded political cartoonists. And so when he submitted cartoons, he specifically submitted cartoons that he didn't like and that he thought were simplistic. And he was awarded for exactly the kind of cartoon that he didn't think represented what political cartooning is at its best. He sort of retired pretty much, I mean, not entirely, but pretty much from cartooning back in 2015 as his eyesight began to fail. There was some measure of regret there because he wished that he could have carried on caricaturing, cartooning when the Trump presidency began.

22:22Yes, and I had many conversations with him about Trump. And I think in some ways, he was disappointed. But in other ways, he felt as though Trump parodied himself. I think that one thing about Oliphant is that he represents the pinnacle of newspaper political cartooning and satire. And then we have seen the almost complete disappearance of this genre over the last decade. In the time since he retired, many newspapers no longer have political cartoonists or the newspapers are all merging and the political cartoonists are losing their jobs because the larger corporate ownership does not like having very harsh criticism of our leaders in their newspapers.

23:08Political cartooning is an unknown in the future. We don't know how this genre is going to look going forward. And the younger political cartoonists who are still active today, I think, would probably be the first to say that Oliphant represented a sort of pinnacle moment and that now we don't know what's going to happen. Molly Schwartzberg, curator of printing and graphic arts at Harvard, paying tribute to Pat Oliphant, who's died at the age of 90.

23:38The United States is about to mark its 250th anniversary. And so on the Global Story podcast from the BBC, we're telling surprising tales of American influence on the world stage and in ordinary people's lives all across the globe. We have this ability to export our story and a lot of people have bought it. I feel like the American dream is alive but not well. From the BBC, it's the United States at 2.50. Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

24:10Welcome back to News Hour. It is a truism of authoritarian regimes that there isn't much insight into decision-making. Hence, during the long decades of communist rule in the Soviet Union, there was a whole field of study called Kremlinology. You could say the same thing of the present Chinese Communist Party. A robust parliament and a vibrant press in China, there are not. So when from time to time we get to hear about a big ruction at the top of the power structure, China watchers really do sit up and pay attention. In today's case, a member of the Politburo, the top decision-making body headed by President Xi Jinping, has been expelled and accused of corruption and abuse of power.

24:53So let's turn to one of those China watchers. Steve Zhang is a professor and director of the SOAS China Institute in London. What do we need to know about the downfall of Ma Xingwei? Ma Xingwei was one of China's most distinguished scientists, who then was picked to work in the political arena. His most recent major job was as head of the party in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region, and therefore a very important position indeed. And he was a member of the Politburo, which makes him one of the top 25 leaders in China. He is the latest to fall foul for, well, he's been charged with corruption and abuse of power.

25:47What do you think is going on? Since the start of the so-called reform and opening up under Deng Xiaoping in December 1978. Removing a Politburo member would be seen as a very big deal. It would have to be something very serious. And Xi Jinping has removed three of them in the space of less than a year. You will have to go back to the period under Chairman Mao during the Cultural Revolution to find something like this. So what do you read into this? I mean, clearly, you're making the point that this is extremely significant, just in sort of historical terms in the Chinese Communist Party. What do you think is going on?

26:33It's more like a matter of signalling Xi Jinping's commitment to cement his powers and crack the whip to make sure that all his top lieutenants will do exactly as he says In his first two terms, his first decade in power, of the over 100 so-called tigers, senior level people removed from office, none of them was a Xi Jinping protege. So he is now making a very clear signal that don't think you are protected simply because you are a Xi Jinping protégé. You have to deliver what Xi Jinping has asked of you. And if you fail to deliver that, you are for the job. Professor Steve Tsang, director of the SOAS China Institute in London on President Xi Jinping further consolidating power in Beijing.

27:40This is NewsHour, live from the BBC. In March this year, in Spain, Noelia Castillo chose to die by euthanasia. She was just 25, a young woman who'd become paraplegic after a suicide attempt which followed a serious sexual assault. Noelia's death made headlines around the world and dominated social media networks. Her father had fought for two years in the courts to halt her euthanasia. In the end, he failed. Noelia died. But since then, there's been an important legal change. Spain's Supreme Court has ruled that those with a particularly close connection to the person wanting to die, a family member or a loved one, may have the right to contest the death wish.

28:21It's a decision which challenges the notion of individual autonomy in Spain's euthanasia law. Our reporter Linda Presley was in Madrid and Barcelona recently with the BBC producer Esperanza Escribano. They met two people with very different takes on how the law governing euthanasia works in Spain. We meet Monica on a cafe terrace in Madrid. She discovered, quite by chance, that her mother had begun the process of asking for euthanasia. Esperanza translates. I found out through another family member that relative's pet dog had died recently from natural causes. She didn't have the dog put to sleep.

29:02And she said to me, not like your mother who's going to have euthanasia. I was completely shocked. Monica, who's in her 40s, didn't want us to meet her mum. She said she's too fragile. So this is solely Monica's version of events. Certainly her mother's health had declined. She'd spent time in hospital, had a stroke and was dependent on carers.