on Iran<\/a> in February, disrupting global energy supplies and \u200bdrawing opposition from a majority of Americans before congressional elections in November.<\/p>\nTrump’s threats over Kharg Island<\/p>\n
While President Donald Trump’s administration seeks to pivot toward an economic clampdown on Iran by widening sanctions, the president himself has kept open the possibility of military action.<\/p>\n
On Aug. 31, Trump issued a one-line social media post accompanied by an AI-generated video depicting Kharg Island being “blown to smithereens.” Iranian authorities have vowed a strong response if Kharg is attacked.<\/p>\n
Iran is the third-largest producer in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and exported 90% of its crude via Kharg Island before the war. Flows have been disrupted \u200bsince a U.S. blockade of Iranian oil exports began in mid-April.<\/p>\n
Trump has spoken of an attack on Kharg before. He said on June 11 that he \u200cwanted to take \u200cover the island, but \u2060then said a military operation there was off the table, days before Tehran and Washington signed an interim agreement aimed at ending the war on June 17.<\/p>\n
A U.S. attack on Kharg would further pressure Iran’s oil industry and its wider economy, which is already reeling from the U.S. naval blockade.<\/p>\n
The U.S. imposed its blockade on Iranian ports after Iran effectively shut the Strait of Hormuz, \u200can important waterway that carried one-fifth \u200bof the world’s oil supply before the war.<\/p>\n
Brent crude futures closed at their \u200chighest level since July 24 on \u2060Friday, at $96.28 a barrel, \u200bas tensions in the Middle East drive global supply concerns.<\/p>\n
\n The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"DUBAI, United Arab Emirates \u2014 U.S. and Iranian forces fired at vessels in waters around Iran on Saturday,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":279796,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[3],"tags":[551,550,3528,553,559,34,552,558,179,42,81,555,556,549,554,547,557,548],"class_list":["post-279795","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-iran","tag-cars","tag-classifieds","tag-finance","tag-homes","tag-international","tag-iran","tag-jobs","tag-local","tag-military","tag-news","tag-politics","tag-radio","tag-salt-lake","tag-sports","tag-television","tag-traffic","tag-utah","tag-weather"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/117221924697726383","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279795","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=279795"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279795\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/279796"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=279795"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=279795"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=279795"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}