Transcription
It is extremely hard if you want to try and open up the uh Strait of Hormuz and the rest of the Persian Gulf by force. Uh, for a kickoff, you'd have to be sure there were no mines, which means you're going to have to put some mine sweepers in. Uh, you can't just leave them as sitting ducks, which means they're going to have to have some Arley Burke class destroyers next to them to shoot out any incoming missiles. You're going to need air cover above them, pro, possibly submarines beneath them because there's submersible uh drones that the Iranians have. So, you might even have to go and invade an island or two to take out the defenses there.
Tim Marshall, we had a pretty strong intervention from Donald Trump talking about how NATO is a paper tiger. He says they don't want to help open up the Strait of Hormuz, which he described as a simple military maneuver. Is opening up the Strait of Hormuz a simple military maneuver?
It is extremely hard if you want to try and open up the uh Strait of Hormuz and the rest of the Persian Gulf by force. Uh, for a kickoff, you'd have to be sure there were no mines, which means you're going to have to put some mine sweepers in. Uh, you can't just leave them as sitting ducks, which means they're going to have to have some Arley Burke class destroyers next to them to shoot out any incoming missiles. You're going to need air cover above them, pro, possibly submarines beneath them because there's submersible uh drones that the Iranians have. So, you might even have to go and invade an island or two to take out the defenses there. So, and that's just the beginning, Nick. We focus on the Strait of Hormuz, which is 21 miles across that strait. You're saying no, you've got to look at the whole Persian Gulf.
It is relatively shallow. And also the tankers, you you mentioned 21 miles across, which is correct, but um, through the strait you've got a two-mile uh corridor to get tankers in. You've got a two-mile corridor to get tankers out and then a two-mile corridor between them. So you're only talking about that that six miles that the actual tankers go. We've demined it, which is extremely difficult, and they haven't actually got all the ships necessary, which is why Trump, you know, if you read through Trump's words, what he's actually saying in this bluster um and calling out people as cowards is that someone's told him, "Sir, we can't actually do this by ourselves at the moment."
Is it right that the Iranians on their speedboats can sort of hide in an inlet, inlet, and then come out in the dead of night?
Yes. Um, it's 600 miles long, but if you include what in in Persian they call water valleys, fields if you like, there's 900 miles of coastline. That's a lot. And in them they have dispersed almost certainly many of their fast speedboats which you can fit with explosives, that they are very heavily armed. You can hide some of your drones there, your underwater drones, your surface drones. Uh, you can hide um some of the shorter ship missiles which can be dug into the rock face. The Americans can probably blow out of the water anything that's coming towards them. But you are only talking a very short distance from the shoreline to where the tankers are. So, you know, it's an it's a words fail me about how how complicated it is.
Just a couple of drones and a couple of speedboats and you basically bring the Western economy to its knees.
Well, I mean, they've already done it, haven't they? Just the threat of it. And if in this incredibly easy event apparently of clearing it, if they then set off on the convoys and one of them was hit, it would just immediately stop again. You might also have to take out the island right at the very head of um Strait of of Hormuz, Keshum Island. This is six miles off the coast. It's known for its it's got a population about 150,000. It's known for its natural beauty and its natural salt caves, but there are huge numbers of salt caves and tunnels underneath this island in which, and this is known to be true, it's called Missile City. The Iranians have hidden a lot of weaponry there. If you really want to be sure, you you might even need to take that island, which is why the USS Tripoli. This is an amphibious assault ship. It's sailed out of Okinawa a few days ago. It's got 2,200 US Marines on it. Among them are 800 uh infantry in what's called a battalion landing team. And it went through the Strait of Malacca. It's somewhere in the Indian Ocean. I've looked at it and thought it might be there about the middle of next week and it's there to give Trump options, but it's a hell of an option if you want to take it.
So, we've been talking about the Strait of Hormuz, sort of in the south of the Persian Gulf and the islands nearby, and you briefly mentioned K Island, a really small island right up at the north just off the coast of Iran. Tell us about the significance of K Island.
This is another option that I think the Marine Corps are going to bring to uh Trump's decision-making menu. Um, K Island is uh it is a small island. It's about five miles long, about two miles wide, and 90% of Iran's oil exports are piped to it and from there loaded onto tankers and sent off to places like China and India and Pakistan, who who are buying their their oil. 90% of their oil exports. It's something like 60% of their economy. So the Americans have already bombed it and taken out most of its defenses. But they made absolutely sure they didn't touch the pipelines or or you know, all the loading kit, because that is the economic bloodline. It's the veins through which the Iranian economy works. So if they keep it intact and then they go and seize it, they have their knee on the throat of the Iranian economy. And I thought it was interesting. I was I was reading into this earlier in 1979 when the Shah fell, there was an oil strike and the oil strike was drying up the revenue to pay the Shah's uh troops and the army and all the rest of it. If they took K Island and the economy starts to shrink, and we're talking weeks, you know, this this could be over next week or it could be over next year. If you squeeze that lifeline and people stop getting paid, you you're trying to crack uh the regime open. Now, the the real danger of this is, and we've seen an example of it this week, the Israelis hit the Qatari, the Iranian gas field. Immediately, the Iranians responded by hitting the Qatari gas field. This is the unwritten rules of of war that, you know, they're not stated, but everybody knows them. If you do that, we'll do this. And if the Americans do that to K Island and the regime is going down, there is a strong possibility it would retaliate in kind by hitting the uh infrastructure in Saudi, Kuwait, etc.
Is it your judgment that it may be tempting for Donald Trump to try and take K Island, and he's been talking about it since doing since 1988? Is it your view that they may be tempting for him because you say that's the choke on the Iranian economy, but there may be a very, very high price in terms of Iranian retaliation?
You'd be gambling uh you'd be gambling that they wouldn't then try and take out uh everything on the other side. If I was the Iranians, I'd have held stuff back for this very this very reason. It's why the Gulf countries are now over the next few days got a very hard decision to make. Do they band together and try to force Trump to go to the negotiating table, or do they band together and say, "We're actually going to join in." And if the Iranians are deemed to have seen to have pretty much triumphed in this, then their bid to be the dominant power in the Middle East will come back onto the table because they were, but they were taken apart over the last two years because of what happened in Syria and Lebanon and Gaza. If they're just going to come back and start moving forward again. And who backs Iran? Iran is backed by China and backed by Russia. So the stakes you're playing for here is that if you if the Americans go home without um opening the strait by force, uh you are theoretically having a generational change where the Gulf is in hock to Iran and the Chinese and the Russians are the influence over Iran. They're playing for big stakes.
And to quote Donald Trump in another context, a big decision, and they hold the cards. I I still think the Americans have got more cards to play, but geography, geography is on the Iranian side. Even the water in in the Persian Gulf is highly salinated. That's a terrible environment for a warship and all the specialist equipment they've got. The the weather is against them. The coastline is against the the Americans. There's a hell of a lot against them, which is why people are so reluctant to to get involved.