Trump Says the US Controls Hormuz "100%." Nobody Shipping Through It Agrees.
Trump flips Iran's own compensation demand back on Tehran, oil spikes past $90, and the what two decades of UAE lobbying couldn't buy
What you need to know
Trump claimed on Monday that the US Navy has “100 per cent” control of the Strait of Hormuz and has swept it clear of mines — “It’s open now.” Shipping reality suggests otherwise.
Trump then demanded Iran compensate the US for “50 years” of alleged killings, flipping Iran’s own six-point compensation demand back on Tehran.
Iran’s foreign ministry says the Oman shipping-route map is agreed, but the strait stays shut until the US meets all six of Iran’s conditions — a harder line than Sunday’s “final stages” language.
Oil spiked above $90 intraday on Trump’s compensation post before settling around $87.65 — the market now pricing a long standoff, not a resolution.
Trump says the US Navy controls the Strait of Hormuz completely and it’s open for business. Ask any shipping company currently not sending vessels through it, and you’ll get a rather different answer.
Morning. Steve Moore here.
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“It’s Open Now” — According to Nobody Actually Shipping Through It
Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday that the US Navy has “mined swept the entire” Strait of Hormuz and now holds “100 per cent” control of it, calling the American posture a “steel wall” and waving off Iranian mine-laying as an “occasional” nuisance. “It’s open now,” he said. “The only one that has control of the Strait of Hormuz right now is the United States Navy.” The New York Times, rather politely, pointed out that this doesn’t match observable reality — the strait has been effectively closed since the war began. Only US Navy-escorted vessels are currently cleared to pass through it. Declaring victory over a body of water that traders, insurers and shipowners are all still actively avoiding is one way to manage a news cycle.
Then, in a Truth Social post early on Tuesday, Trump did something more consequential than the “open” claim: he turned Iran’s own list of demands back on Tehran. Responding to Iran’s Supreme National Security Council secretary Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, who set out six conditions on Saturday — lift the blockade, lift sanctions, withdraw US forces from the region, pay war reparations, release frozen Iranian assets, end attacks on Iran’s allies — Trump wrote: “I am likewise demanding compensation from Iran.” His bill covers US military casualties, Iranian protesters he says Iran has killed over “50 years” (elsewhere claiming 52,000 dead in the last five months alone), the families of the 17 sailors killed in the 2000 USS Cole bombing, and damage across Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Gaza that he attributes to Iran. Analysts reading this see it correctly: it’s a rejection of Iran’s demands dressed as a counter-invoice, and it extends the impasse rather than resolving it.
Iran’s Line: The Map Is Done. The Deal Is Not.
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei confirmed on Monday that talks with Oman are “progressing smoothly and constructively” and that a shipping route map has actually been agreed — real, tangible progress, for once. But he was careful to separate that from the political question entirely: the strait, he said, won’t reopen until Washington meets all six of Zolghadr’s Saturday conditions, full stop. Baghaei also took a swing at Treasury Secretary Bessent’s claim that sanctions are “suffocating” Iran, calling it evidence of “America’s compulsive addiction to sanctions.” By Tuesday morning, in other words, both governments had spent 24 hours escalating their compensation demands rather than moving an inch toward each other. The route map exists. The war doesn’t seem to know it does.
Oil Takes the Rollercoaster, Then Gets Off
Brent breached $90.03 a barrel intraday on Sunday and Monday as the market reacted to Trump’s compensation post, then settled back down to around $87.65 by Tuesday close, with WTI at $82.14. That’s not a market convinced the crisis is easing — it’s a market concluding that the standoff is going to run longer, and repricing accordingly rather than panicking. HDFC Sky called it “flatlining near one-week highs,” which is a reasonably accurate way of describing a market that has simply gotten used to the war.
The strain is showing up in stranger corners of the market than crude itself. European diesel futures surged more than 10% after refineries in Libya and Russia came under attack, tightening supply of what Bloomberg calls the “workhorse fuel” of the global economy — and hiring an oil tanker out of the Middle East now costs up to $500,000 a day, a rate that would have sounded like a typo six months ago. Bloomberg also reports around a dozen ships have now switched their oil cargoes outside Hormuz entirely. At the same time, barrels keep flowing, evidence that the workaround economy Adnoc Gas is only beginning to build is already operating informally elsewhere in the region. Saudi Arabia extinguished a fire at its Jazan refinery early on Sunday, with the Houthis claiming responsibility hours later; the UK navy separately confirmed on Tuesday that it received reports of an incident involving a container ship and military forces in the Gulf of Oman, and a cargo vessel struck by an unknown projectile off Yemen’s Red Sea coast, with casualties.
Iran’s own economy, meanwhile, is not quietly absorbing any of this. The rial has fallen more than 10% since the war began, inflation has reached 77% year-on-year, and much of the country’s industrial capacity and crude export capability has been degraded by the US blockade — the kind of pressure that sparked violent nationwide protests earlier this year. However, there’s no sign yet of them resuming. Anwar Gargash, senior diplomatic adviser to the UAE president, put the regional exhaustion plainly on X this week: “The region cannot remain indefinitely in a state of neither war nor peace. Its stability and the future of its peoples require clarity in vision and direction.” It’s about as close as senior Emirati officials get to saying, in public, that everyone would like this to be over.
Dubai Real Estate Isn’t Reading the Same Headlines
Emaar posted Q2 net profit up 9% year-on-year to AED 3.67 billion, with H1 profit up 22% to AED 8.67 billion and a total backlog of AED 164.9 billion, up 13% on the year. Emaar Development, the build-to-sell arm, did even better — profit up 43.5% to AED 2.6 billion. Shares still fell 5.6% on the week after missing consensus by 12%, and quarterly property sales were down 84% from Q1’s launch-heavy period. However, the underlying story is a business that’s been absorbing a regional war for five months and still growing. It’s a useful reminder that “war economy” and “resilient economy” aren’t mutually exclusive descriptions of the same country.
The FT’s Big Read: Two Decades of Influence Bought a Lot — Just Not Immunity
A Financial Times investigation published this week traces how the UAE went from a post-9/11 Washington liability — some on the Hill genuinely viewed it as an al-Qaeda financing hub after 2001 — to one of Congress’s most trusted Middle East partners today. The turning point, per the FT, was Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed’s response to Congress killing DP World’s 2006 attempt to buy six US ports: a deliberate, sustained campaign combining lobbying (more than $270 million over the past decade, per OpenSecrets), sovereign investment, military cooperation, and the 2020 Abraham Accords with Israel, which one former State Department official called “a gigantic gaping backdoor around the criticism” the UAE used to face. Ambassador Yousef Al Otaiba, in the post since 2008, gets much of the credit for what the FT calls “the ultimate case study in how to run a government public relations campaign in DC.”
The payoff has increasingly been technological. Mubadala and MGX now hold stakes or partnerships across OpenAI, xAI, GlobalFoundries, Cerebras and major US data-centre operators; MGX also picked up a 15% stake in TikTok’s US operations. Washington, in turn, has loosened export controls to let the UAE buy advanced American chips — the same access underpinning this week’s Adnoc Gas and ADNOC infrastructure buildout, in the sense that a country this deeply wired into US tech and capital markets isn’t one Washington wants to see destabilised. Democrats have pushed back, tying the chip decision to MGX’s $500 million stake in the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial; Senator Chris Van Hollen told the FT bluntly that “the UAE has a lot of influence here in Washington, too much influence... they have got away with things that other countries couldn’t.” All of which makes the FT’s actual conclusion the more striking one: for all that access and capital, Abu Dhabi could not stop the US-Israeli war with Iran that has since cost it 16 tankers, a foiled cyberattack, and five months of a half-closed strait. Influence bought a seat at the table. It didn’t buy a veto.
A Very Public Show of Institutional Continuity
At Qasr Al Watan on Monday evening, with President Sheikh Mohamed in attendance, Vice President Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid convened a formal reunion of every current and former minister who has served under him over the past two decades. This genuinely unusual public gathering read less like nostalgia and more like a deliberate signal about federal governance continuity, three days after the UAE Pro League’s own gala at the same venue. Al Ain, incidentally, swept seven of the eight season awards on offer, including Coach of the Year and the Golden Boot for Kodjo Laba’s 25 goals.
The Aviation Split Just Won’t Close
Etihad’s Bahrain and Kuwait flights remain cancelled “due to operational reasons” after Monday’s reversal, bookable from 12 August with no confirmed restart. Emirates still lists Wednesday’s routes as simply unavailable. flydubai is now carrying the entire UAE-flagged load on both routes, which means it’s also the airline most likely to feel booking pressure if this drags into the mid-August travel surge.
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Watch Today
Whether any UAE leadership figure responds publicly to Trump’s “100 per cent control” claim or his compensation demand — silence so far has been the more diplomatic option.
The Sudan military materiel case, due to be heard at Abu Dhabi’s Federal Supreme Court today — a read on the UAE’s broader post-war legal posture.
Emirates and Etihad’s Thursday flight status, refreshing Wednesday morning, for any sign the aviation gap is finally narrowing rather than widening.
Steve Moore
Emirates Wire · launching 9 September 2026, National Liberal Club, London
emirateswire.co.uk · steve@emirateswire.co.uk
A note on how this is made: Substack recently launched an AI-detection feature and published its policy on it, “Against Claudefishing” by CEO Chris Best. In that spirit, here’s our disclosure: Emirates Wire is reported, written and edited by Steve Moore. AI tools help with research aggregation and early drafting, but every fact is personally verified, and every sentence is personally approved before it goes out. Questions welcome any time at steve@emirateswire.co.uk.
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