A LOT CAN CHANGE IN A WEEK.

At the beginning of the week, a Daily Kos diarist posted a cartoon critical of United States war aims.

That's likely a dig at Our President's dig at Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Over the weekend, though, the United States Navy demonstrated Iran's blockade of the Strait of Hormuz to be a paper blockade.  According to Victory Girl Darleen Click, "Terrorist State Iran Chooses Unwisely — Trump Closes Strait of Hormuz."  That's inaccurate, the Navy began securing free passage for ships with consignments for or from Gulf Arab ports while barring passage of ships headed for or from Iranian ports.  Marc Thiessen referred to the action as "flipping the script."

Trump is preparing for Phase II of his operation: a U.S.-led international escort mission. He is using the ceasefire to clear mines Iran laid (and then lost track of), allowing the U.S. Navy to establish a safe route through the waterway. Once this work is finished, Trump can give Iran’s leaders an ultimatum: If they do not reopen the strait to all shipping, then the U.S. will open it by military force — and allow passage of all commercial ships except those from Iran.

Think of what that means. Before, Iran was allowing its own ships to pass through the strait, but not those of the U.S. and its allies. Trump’s plan would reverse that: U.S. and allied ships would be permitted to pass, but Iranian ships would not. Instead of running a highly profitable protection racket — collecting up to $2 million per ship “tolls” for safe passage — Iran would lose hundreds of millions a day in forgone trade and revenue.

What was a "confounding weekend" has turned into a confounding week, and Noah Rothman's "Anyone who tells you they know for certain what’s going to happen next is operating under the spell of undue self-confidence" describes this week and the upcoming weekend is likely to be confounding as well.  But the expert class "learning humility," don't bet on that.

Sometime yesterday, Iranian negotiators offered a proposal to allow ships to use the passage the Navy had been preparing along the Omani side of the strait.  "The proposal appeared to be more of a gesture than a move that would, on its ‌own, offer an immediate breakthrough for hundreds of ships waiting to pass through the key waterway, which handles about 20% of the world's oil and liquefied natural gas flows."  Reuters, predictably, muddies that reporting with all sorts of niggling of the sort you'd ordinarily encounter at a faculty meeting.  It's a publicity stunt, confirming what the Navy demonstrated a week ago, namely that passage along the Arab states' coastline is feasible.  Those mines?  Just kidding.  Never mind. 

As of sometime today, Our President has been announcing that Iran have opened the Strait of Hormuz, although Our President also notes that the U. S.  Navy are still blockading Iranian ports.  That's got Outside the Beltway's James Joyner puzzled.  "Granting that the U.S. blockade is ostensibly only on ships carrying Iranian crude (which, oddly, we’ve lifted sanctions on otherwise), it leaves us in the awkward position of violating our own longstanding policy and making Iran look magnanimous."  That is, if the Iranian announcement is credible.  It's hard to credit any statement from an Iranian government official as representing, well, the position of an Iranian government.

More critically, when Iran's distributed authority responded to the loss of the top ranks of their government by putting their missiles on spray-and-pray settings, that caused damage to military targets such as skyscrapers in Abu Dhabi.  Under such circumstances, maybe those Gulf Arab states will no longer keep financial secrets.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stepped up and quietly announced the part that actually ends regimes.

Bessent made it clear: because Iran attacked its Gulf neighbors earlier in the conflict, those same countries are now cooperating with the United States to expose Iranian financial assets sitting in their banking systems.

Read that again.

The people who were helping you hide your money… are now helping your enemy find it. That’s suffocation.

For years, Iran survived sanctions by playing a shell game. Oil revenues routed through intermediaries. Funds parked in regional banks. Transactions buried under layers of plausible deniability. That system worked—because everyone involved had an incentive to keep it quiet. Until Iran blew that arrangement up—literally.

Now those same countries are opening the vault.

Accounts tied to the IRGC. Holdings connected to regime leadership. Networks that once operated comfortably in the gray are now being dragged into full daylight.

And then Bessent dropped the hammer. Secondary sanctions.

If you are buying Iranian oil, you'e exposed. If you are holding Iranian money, you'e exposed. If you are doing business with the regime, you are risking access to the U.S. financial system.

Which means, assuming the preceding is true, that even if Iranian ships move, whether or not there are United States sanctions on their movement, payments going to accounts subject to U.S. Treasury supervision are not going to get back to the mullahs or their nuclear physicists or their gang-bangers elsewhere in Asia Minor.

Make of it what you will that Windward have not posted an Iran War Maritime Intelligence for 17 April yet.  The 16 April report summarizes conditions as "The operating environment now reflects simultaneous enforcement, compliance, and continued attempts to sustain Iranian maritime flows under increasing pressure."

Who knows what sort of surprises, pleasant or otherwise, await us over the weekend?