Transcription
Is the Gulf of Hormuz open?
[laughter] [laughter] WELL, IT DEPENDS WHO YOU ASK, JUDGE. The IRGC Navy tells you that of course it's open if you follow the procedures of the new organization, the Persian Gulf Association, of course, and if you pay your transit fees. And then no problem. The Americans say, "Okay, it's open because we open it." No, no, no, no, no, that's not the case. And of course some most, in fact, shippers they look at the two possibilities to navigate close to Iranian territorial waters and follow the IRGC IRGC Navy recommendations and procedure, etc., or risk Omani navigation uh territorial waters. Very, very tricky. They don't know if this is going to to work or they'll be interception by the IRGC Navy after that. They don't know if the Americans can guarantee their safe passage. And of course nobody is going through the middle of the Strait of Hormuz, which is heavily mined. So it's an extremely tricky situation. Once again, it [laughter] depends what kind of tanker are you, who owns your tanker, where you going, and who you want to talk to.
Has the United States Navy, which as I understand was for over 600 km from the actual corner of the street. Has the US Navy departed the area?
No, they are still between the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea, which is between as as you mentioned 600 to 1,000 km east of the Strait of Hormuz. A very, very far away in huge area. You cannot patrol the Arabian Sea. You [laughter] You would need You would need, you know, the Vikings to do that. With a thousand Viking [laughter] vessels. No, it's not working. So, uh what we know for sure from our Iranian sources is that tankers that are Iranian, Chinese, or Iranian and are going to their uh um Asian clients, they are going through via the usual territory water near the island of Qeshm with no problems, following those procedures.
Wow. Uh let's get to the reason we have an memorandum of understanding signed by President Trump at the Palace of Versailles with all the the historical meaning of that. We can talk about that another time or later, but how significant in Trump's thinking from your sources was the radical depletion of the United States strategic petroleum reserve, and how panicked was Trump when they told him how low the reserve was?
Well, I received a report a detailed report from one of my old school deep state sources. At the time I lived in Washington a long time ago. And he read one of my articles and he told me directly, "Look, you missed the main point." And then he detailed the main point. Is that according to the numbers, the point of no return for the strategic reserves is going to be mid-August. And when Trump was confronted with the numbers, this was mid-June. So he had to act immediately. If he decided to act a few weeks later in July or late July or early August, it would be too late. And then there's a set of numbers explaining why we're going to have we will reach a point where it will be impossible to basically feed the American military machine. This This is the key point. When when the strategic reserves reach a certain level. If I'm not mistaken, it's around 263 million barrels or it is in the article. I quote the report in detail.
So we all know before you go on, so we all know what happened. The federal government tapped the strategic reserves to give the oil companies more oil to refine in gasoline so as to as high as gasoline went, I paid $5.99 a gallon 6 days ago to try and keep that number down. And then they reached the point where they couldn't couldn't take any more oil because there wouldn't be enough for the military.
Is that it? Yes. Yes, that's it in a nutshell, Judge. So Well, after I read the report, I was convinced that yeah, I had missed the the point. Because my article was essentially on the geopolitics and the geo-economics of the whole situation. And of course, uh the contours of uh how Iran they could do anything they wanted with the Strait of Hormuz, and they already had the mechanisms in place, and everybody was already paying without even discussing. So, but this was not the main point. From the point of view of uh trying to disguise the strategic defeat of the US, there was a much more interesting uh a much more pressing issue, which is if we get to mid-August and not and the Strait of Hormuz is totally blocked or almost totally blocked like it was a few days ago, then there's no extra to be dumped by the Americans, and the global economy will go down the drain. In a matter of days.
What does this tell you about uh Hagel, Seth, and military planning? Um even the Department of Energy, that they would allow this number to get so low that they came running to the president at the last minute saying, "You got to stop the war cuz we'll run out of oil."
I think it proves to all of us and to the whole planet that there's no planning at all. It's It's as as simple as that. If they had at least foreseen Look, we can dump our reserves or maybe a month or two, but not like almost indefinitely, which was the case until Trump took this decision only a few days ago. If If he If these numbers were not available to him, and there are many ways it could be lost in the Washington bureaucracy, you would have been too late. If he If he took the same decision 1 month from now, in mid-July, it would have been too late already. This is what the reporter I received was saying explicitly. And of course, they were saying, "Look, the point is not you block the Strait of Hormuz, and then oil gets to 100, 120, and all that. It's It's not the price tag. It's the long-term implications. If you take, I think it's more than 1 billion barrels of oil off the market, you destabilize the global market completely, which is the the stage that we are now. And this was essentially because of American actions.
Did Trump come to the rescue, so to speak, too late? In other words, are these problems triggered by the closing of the Strait of Hormuz and the depletion of the American strategic uh uh petroleum reserve? They're not going to be solved overnight.
No, they won't. And that's why we need to wait for what's going to happen between now and let's say mid-July and late July. Uh it depends, of course, on the Americans really ending their blockade of Iranian ports, which is not a blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. They decided to blockade all Iranian ports uh exporting from uh the Persian Gulf. Let's see if this happens. Number one. Number two, uh they're already complaining that the Iranians cannot charge anything on their territory waters. But this is a a a sovereign Iranian issue. They don't depend on the United States if they decide to charge uh maintenance fees, security fees, environmental fees, whatever any way you want to describe it, right? So this is what's going to happen in the next few weeks. If we see uh Hormuz getting back to a semblance of normality compared to in relation to the beginning of the before the beginning of the war, maybe we can save you through the depletion the American depletion. But if Don't forget that the depletion continues, uh judge. It's not that they stopped it. They're still putting American reserves on the market to suppress the price of oil. So this has not started. This has not the new situation has not started yet.