I'm Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle: an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum on the news of the day — then “my take.”

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Today’s read: 14 minutes.

Our latest edition.

Senior Editor Will Kaback’s answer to a question about Tangle being too left-leaning in our mailbag edition on Friday drove a lot of discussion in our comments. So did Editor-at-Large Kmele Foster’s answer to a question about the Artemis II mission.

Quick hits.

1. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán conceded to opposition leader Péter Magyar in the country’s parliamentary election, ending Orbán’s 16-year rule. Magyar’s party won 53.6% of the vote compared to 37.8% won by Orbán’s party. (The results)
2. Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) suspended his campaign for California governor after multiple women came forward accusing him of rape, sexual assault, and sexual misconduct. Swalwell said he denies the accusations but apologized to his friends, family, and supporters for “mistakes in judgment I’ve made in my past.” Swalwell has not indicated that he plans to resign from his House seat. (The suspension)
3. President Donald Trump criticized Pope Leo XIV in a social media post, calling the pope “weak on crime” and “terrible” on foreign policy. Pope Leo has repeatedly called for an end to ongoing conflicts in the Middle East, writing on Friday, “God does not bless any conflict.” (The comments)
4. On Friday, the Labor Department reported that the consumer price index rose 3.3% on an annual basis in March, an increase from February’s gain of 2.4%. Energy prices rose 12.5% from a year earlier. (The report)
5. The United Kingdom paused its transfer of the Chagos Islands — a group of seven atolls in the Indian Ocean — to Mauritius after President Trump withdrew his support for the plan. The UK and the United States share a military base on the largest island in the Chagos, and while both countries would have continued use of the base after the transfer, the UK said it cannot proceed without U.S. support. (The pause)

Today’s topic.

Negotiations with Iran. On Sunday, President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. Navy will impose a blockade on the Strait of Hormuz after peace negotiations with Iranian officials failed to produce a breakthrough. While Iran has largely restricted transit through the strait over the past month, it has allowed some ships to pass through by paying a toll; in other cases, vessels linked to friendly nations like China have been granted passage. President Trump suggested the U.S. blockade will shut down the waterway entirely, though U.S. Central Command later said the blockade would not apply to ships passing through the strait to or from non-Iranian ports. 

Back up: On Tuesday, Trump announced a two-week ceasefire with Iran, saying that a 10-point Iranian peace plan offered “a workable basis on which to negotiate.” Iran has accused the United States of violating the terms of the ceasefire over the past week, while President Trump has criticized Iran for refusing to reopen the strait. Furthermore, ongoing Israeli strikes in Lebanon have created an additional point of tension; the U.S. and Israel claim the ceasefire does not apply in Lebanon, and Iran says it does. 

Over the weekend, Vice President JD Vance, Special Envoy Steve Witkoff, and Jared Kushner met with an Iranian delegation for peace talks mediated by Pakistan. After 21 hours of discussions, Vance told reporters on Saturday that the sides had not reached an agreement, calling it “bad news for Iran much more than it’s bad news for the United States of America.” Later that day, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baqaei said in an auto-translated X post that the negotiations had focused on “the Strait of Hormuz, the nuclear issue, war reparations, lifting of sanctions, and the complete end to the war against Iran and in the region” but did not specify where the talks had failed. 

In a Truth Social post on Sunday morning, President Trump suggested that the future of Iran’s nuclear program was the sticking point, writing, “In many ways, the points that were agreed to are better than us continuing our Military Operations to conclusion, but all of those points don’t matter compared to allowing Nuclear Power to be in the hands of such volatile, difficult, unpredictable people.” In announcing the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, he called Iran’s restriction of the waterway “WORLD EXTORTION,” adding that the Navy would seek to interdict any ship that had paid a toll to transit the strait. 

On Sunday, Iranian state media reported that the country’s military has deployed navy special forces to its southern coastline in anticipation of a potential invasion by U.S. forces. Since the start of the two-week ceasefire, the U.S. military has deployed additional troops to the Middle East, including thousands of sailors and Marines. On Sunday, President Trump alluded to resuming military operations against Iran if the stalemate persists. 

Today, we’ll share perspectives from the left and right on the breakdown in negotiations and the blockade. Then, Executive Editor Isaac Saul gives his take.

What the left is saying.

• Many on the left worry that the war is headed for a re-escalation. 
• Some note the political tightrope Vance has to walk as lead negotiator. 
• Others suggest Trump is still looking for an off-ramp from the war. 

In CNN, Nic Robertson called the failed talks “a blow to hopes of finding an off-ramp to crisis.”

“The two sides were simply too far apart, not just in substance, but in style and temperament. The respective delegations went into these talks with vastly different approaches: US Vice President JD Vance appeared to be after a relatively quick solution after the implementation of a two-week ceasefire, but Tehran typically moves much slower, negotiating over the long term,” Robertson wrote. “If there are going to be more talks, Iran will have to change its position somehow. Iran believes the talks failed because of ‘excessive’ US demands, and it’s clear from both sides that nuclear enrichment is a key sticking point.”

“The two-week ceasefire itself was struck against the backdrop of a maximalist threat from US President Donald Trump to annihilate a civilization and blow up Iran’s power plants and key infrastructure. Whether that threat comes into play again is now a key question,” Robertson said. “Two other fundamental questions hang in the air: How will Iran respond to the US walking away? And how much longer will the global economy be stuck in limbo?”

In MS NOW, James Downie said “JD Vance may regret leading peace talks with Iran.”

“The vice president was reportedly Iran’s preferred negotiating partner, but his elevation looks less like a boon to his standing as a diplomatic force in the administration and more like a poisoned chalice,” Downie wrote. “In the nearly six weeks after the United States and Israel first attacked Iran, Vance has sought to balance his fealty to President Donald Trump with his image as a skeptic of interventions… That development has threatened his standing as the GOP’s 2028 front-runner: Skepticism of foreign interventions may be a key feature of Vance’s political identity, but most Republicans have supported the war with Iran.”

“Meanwhile, the U.S. has less leverage than it did before the conflict began… Trump’s attempted ‘madman’ gambits have hit a dead end; while the U.S. can threaten military action if talks break down, everyone knows the political will for war does not exist,” Downie said. “All these factors, and more besides, have hampered the chances of a deal. But while Trump loves to declare victory out of nothing, Vance is facing intense pressure to secure something other than the status quo.”

In The Washington Post, David Ignatius explored “what really happened in Islamabad — and what Trump is trying now.”

“Some commentators speculated that with the failure to reach a deal in Islamabad, the United States might be marching deeper into another ‘forever’ war — that the talks could have been a prelude to a new and perhaps more dangerous phase of conflict,” Ignatius wrote. “After talking Sunday with people close to the negotiations, my sense is that the Islamabad impasse won’t necessarily mean a return to war. The blockade is a pressure tactic, to be sure, but not primarily a military one… [Trump’s] aim instead is to put a severely battered Iran into an economic vice to see if its leaders will set a different course in a big, comprehensive deal.”

“If a still-emboldened Iran tries to press what it sees as its advantages, through military or terrorist attacks, Trump could be forced into the escalating military confrontation he hopes to avoid. That’s the risk of the strategy the Trump team adopted in Islamabad — they showed how much the U.S. is willing to offer to get a peace deal,” Ignatius said. “But Trump doesn’t negotiate by increments. He thinks small deals produce small results. That’s the logic here. Make the cake bigger, even as you tighten economic pressure on Tehran to accept U.S. terms.”

What the right is saying.

• The right sees the naval blockade as an effective counter to Iran’s selective shutdown of the strait.
• Some say negotiations were unlikely to succeed — and the war’s future is murky.
• Others suggest Iran has lost any leverage it had before the talks. 

The Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote “Trump blockades the blockaders in Iran.”

“Iran’s failure to come to terms was predictable. Tehran took Mr. Trump’s eagerness for a cease-fire as a sign of desperation and confirmation that its energy strategy is a winner. The regime won’t even open the Strait amid the cease-fire,” the board said. “As Vice President JD Vance explained after marathon talks failed, ‘We need to see an affirmative commitment that they will not seek a nuclear weapon and they will not seek the tools that would enable them to quickly achieve a nuclear weapon.’ The latter half is the key. No matter what Iran’s regime says, the only reason it needs domestic uranium enrichment capability is to pursue a bomb.”

“‘Iran will not be allowed to profit off this Illegal Act of EXTORTION,’ the President wrote Sunday. Why should Iran alone be exempt from the costs of its illegal actions in Hormuz, raking in revenue while it starves the rest of the world? Even as the U.S. sought to pressure the regime, it was undercutting itself by encouraging Iranian oil exports,” the board wrote. “Iran now has an incentive to restore traffic in the Strait. As does China, whose tankers had been given priority. Rather than smuggle new air defenses to Iran, as U.S. intelligence suspects it is doing, let Beijing pressure the regime to resume oil shipments.”

In Fox News, Robert Maginnis argued “[the] Islamabad talks were always doomed to fail.”

“Clausewitz wrote that war is the continuation of policy by other means. The corollary — which Washington perpetually forgets — is that diplomacy without strategic clarity is just theater. This weekend in Islamabad, we got the theater,” Maginnis said. “Tehran’s delegation… presented four non-negotiable conditions before the session even began: full Iranian sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz, complete war reparations, unconditional release of frozen assets and a durable ceasefire across the entire West Asia region. Those are not opening bids. They are a declaration of intent.”

“If the ceasefire collapses without a diplomatic track to replace it, pressure to resume strikes will build fast. But more bombs will not force Iran to surrender. The logic of sustained escalation leads to one place: a large-scale ground war,” Maginnis wrote. “Iran is not Iraq. Iraq favored maneuver warfare across open terrain. Iran is mountainous, with limited mobility corridors. Naval power is largely irrelevant. Ground forces would have to grind through prepared defenses at enormous cost in lives and treasure — and the American people are not prepared for that war.”

In The Free Press, Eli Lake said “Iran wasted the ceasefire.”

“Despite coming into the talks demanding everything from war reparations to military control of the Strait of Hormuz, the Iranian delegation left Islamabad with nothing,” Lake wrote. “The Iranians also insisted before the talks that the initial two-week ceasefire applied to Israel’s war against Iran’s proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah. Threats to scuttle the talks last week over the Lebanon issue seem to have been a bluff… Iran suffered another setback when Lebanon’s elected government agreed to talks in Washington with Israeli envoys.”

“For Iran, the clock is ticking. It seems to have lost its ability to play for time in dazzling feats of negotiation with American counterparts who want a deal more than any particular nonnegotiable outcome from a deal. And, if the U.S. Navy succeeds in neutralizing the threat to commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, Iran will have lost its only piece of real leverage,” Lake said. “This may force the regime to accept a new reality. Its military is defanged. Its nuclear program is severely degraded. Its economy is in ruins.”

My take.

Reminder: “My take” is a section where we give ourselves space to share a personal opinion. If you have feedback, criticism or compliments, don't unsubscribe. Write in by replying to this email, or leave a comment.

• Negotiations so far seem unproductive.
• Trump instituting a blockade in the Strait of Hormuz invites more questions, and makes global shipping more tenuous.
• I worry economic disruptions are on the horizon if talks don’t produce agreements, and soon.

Executive Editor Isaac Saul: I want this war to be for something — I want Iran denuclearized, proxies defeated, regime gone, and an opportunity for a new Iranian government, somehow paired with a stable Middle East. But my fear since the start has been that the Trump administration lacked a clear plan, clear goals or a clear off-ramp, even if it correctly views Iran as a global threat. Even if we’ve killed Iran’s top leaders and seriously damaged its military capabilities, the plan we had going in clearly seems to be running into snags (or wasn’t that well thought out to begin with).

On Thursday, I expressed my skepticism about the ceasefire:

Worse yet, I think [President Trump] is still trapped and still feeling the walls as he walks through the darkness, guessing on his next moves. I think this war is not over, Iran’s control over this economic lever has not been removed, and we have not found our way out. If you can even call this situation a ceasefire at all, I’m skeptical it will survive the time between me writing this sentence and it being published.

Pretty much everything that has happened in the last five days has affirmed this view for me. Vice President JD Vance represented the United States at the marathon talks with Tehran over the weekend. While he was there, President Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio attended a UFC event in Miami, Florida. A lot of political junkies tend to overestimate the importance of these optics — the president could still care a great deal about the war while relying on his team to help him manage negotiations. But Trump told reporters on his way to the event that it did not matter to him if a deal was reached or not. “Whether we make a deal or not makes no difference to me,” he said. “We win regardless.”

Yet the negotiation does matter. With talks failing, the administration has decided to blockade the Strait of Hormuz. This means a prolonged naval presence in the region, with no timeline and no particulars. Our navy is perfectly capable of executing such a blockade, and analysts believe we’ll use the time to sweep the strait for mines and establish a protected passage for commercial ships. Military insiders I’ve spoken to doubt the U.S. Navy will be seriously threatened by Iran, given how much we overpower other countries at sea. Still, uncertainty remains.

What will the U.S. do to ships that try to break the blockade in the meantime? How will it affect our allies in the Persian Gulf, like Kuwait, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE)? If Iran attempts to attack our navy, how will we respond? Who will help the U.S. clear the Strait of Hormuz? Who will help us enforce that it stays open?

We don’t have answers to those questions, but the information we have isn’t particularly encouraging. Trump promised other countries would help un-block the Strait of Hormuz, but so far: no takers. It’s true that many of our allies purport to share our interests yet aren’t answering the call, but at the same time, the president should have accounted for that outcome by planning the operation in conjunction with our allies. Iran, for its part, has called any potential blockade an “act of piracy” and said no port in the Persian Gulf or the Sea of Oman will be safe if Iran’s ports are threatened. It promised to protect its territorial waters and said no U.S. vessel will pass through the Strait of Hormuz (although the U.S. said that two American Navy destroyers entered the strait and destroyed an Iranian surveillance drone on Saturday before exiting safely). That all sounds less like progress on a negotiated peace and more like reasons to continue fighting.

Meanwhile, it’s unclear how long our allies will be able to tolerate a global economic disruption — and how long until the pain hits home in a serious way. And Iran still has some cards to play. Saudi Arabia and the UAE have both completed “bypass pipelines” to move oil from the Persian Gulf across the Arabian Peninsula to the Red Sea, avoiding the Strait of Hormuz. Those pipelines are vulnerable targets for Iranian sabotage. The Red Sea also has its own choke points: the Suez Canal, which demonstrated its value during the pandemic, and the Bab al-Mandeb, which you may hear more about soon. That 20-mile waterway separates Djibouti and Yemen, where the Iran-backed Houthis — who have already wreaked havoc in the Red Sea — operate.

Oil from the gulf mostly goes to Asia, while transit through the Red Sea affects the whole global supply chain. That means we can get a sense of the impact of a potential Bab al-Mandeb disruption by looking at how the current situation is affecting Asia. As this excerpt from a new Wall Street Journal report shows, the current economic damage for some Asian nations is being described as worse than the pandemic: 

The oil shock of Iran paralyzing the strait is already rippling through Asia, where factories are curbing production to save energy and some gas stations are rationing fuel. Some airports across Asia and Europe are beginning to run out of jet fuel, and it could take months for inventories to recover. For countries in the Gulf, the economic damage is shaping up to be the worst in decades, eclipsing the pandemic. Researchers at Capital Economics forecast Qatar’s gross domestic product to shrink by 13% this year, the United Arab Emirates’s by 8% and Saudi Arabia’s by 6.6%.

That kind of economic damage hasn’t reached our shores yet, but that doesn’t mean it won’t. Jet fuel shortages, supply chain disruptions and energy price spikes ripple out from the source in today’s global economy, and we will probably feel them in ways we may not totally understand or expect right now. If you don’t share my opinion that our economic situation is tenuous, listen to the president. On Sunday, Trump was asked in a Fox News interview if oil and gas prices will be lower in November — that’s seven months from now — when voters hit the polls. “I hope so,” he said. “I mean, I think so. It could be…or maybe a little bit higher. It should be around the same. I think this won’t be that much longer.”

Confidence, this is not.

Not to beat a dead horse, but in key moments like this, we need to constantly remind ourselves what the administration has said and then what has actually happened. When these strikes began, Trump said they would last four weeks or less. Around the four-week mark, the White House began considering a ground operation to take Kharg Island or capture Iran’s enriched uranium. Trump then held a national address on April 1, telling Americans the conflict would be over in two to three weeks. It’s now been two weeks since that address, and — on the back of failed negotiations — we just announced a seemingly indefinite blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, with the added risk of escalation if anyone tries to stop us. And while we’re cajoling our allies into helping, news just broke that China is preparing a weapons shipment to Iran. That kind of escalation is a concerning reminder of the global alliances we’re facing in this power struggle.

Nobody really expected these negotiations to solve anything substantial in a single day. The Obama-era Iran nuclear deal took two years to hammer out, and we’re in wartime now, which always complicates things. But the expectation here is necessarily different because the circumstances are dire. The strait needs to reopen soon, unless we want the global energy crisis to metastasize. And we really need to avoid being drawn into a kind of ambient war, lest we accept our soldiers being at daily risk and our coffers being regularly emptied to the tune of billions of dollars, all while the needle never really moves. 

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Your questions, answered.

Q: I keep hearing about the ‘petrodollar’ system. I had no idea this existed — what is this system and what is its relevance in our current conflict?

— Alex from Huntsville, AL

Tangle: This goes back to the post-WWII economy. In 1944, delegates from 44 countries gathered in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to lay out a new economic system that incorporated lessons from the Great Depression and the recent global wars. They created the Bretton Woods system, launching the International Monetary Fund and establishing standards for currency convertibility. Perhaps the system’s defining feature was the definition of the U.S. dollar as the global reserve currency, pegging its value at $35 to one ounce of gold. 

That system came to an end in 1971, when President Richard Nixon officially declared that the dollar would no longer be based on the gold standard. A few years of uncertainty followed, culminating in the 1973 oil crisis. Out of that tumult emerged the petrodollar: an informal arrangement in which Saudi Arabia would price its oil in U.S. dollars and invest in U.S. treasuries, in exchange for U.S. military aid and protection.

Over time, the calculus has shifted. The United States has been producing more of its own oil, China has become Saudi Arabia’s largest customer, and various writers speculated about the end of the petrodollar as Donald Trump campaigned for a second term on U.S. energy independence. Now, with the war in Iran, the U.S. is also no longer a guarantor of regional security. Industry experts have said Iran is letting ships that pay in Chinese yuan through the Strait of Hormuz as the dollar’s share of global foreign exchanges falls to a 25-year low, from 71% in 1999 to roughly 57% today.

Neither the Trump administration nor Iran has made the petrodollar a centerpiece of the war, but removing the standard would benefit Iran far more than the U.S. Yes, U.S. oil would become more valuable — but the dollar would become less stable, U.S. bonds would face higher yields, the debt would become more expensive, and deficits would loom larger and larger. So in the coming weeks, and after the recent release of the White House’s proposed 2027 budget, the petrodollar’s relevance in the current conflict will likely become more and more central.

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Under the radar.

On Thursday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released provisional data showing that the U.S. general fertility rate hit a record low in 2025, continuing a multi-year downward trend. A significant driver of the decline is lower birth rates among women in their teens and 20s; in 2025, the birth rate for women aged 35–39 exceeded the rate for women aged 20–24 for the first time. Birth rates have been declining across the world, particularly in countries with advanced economies, raising concerns about long-term population stability. “People are waiting longer to enter parenthood and probably want to make sure that things are set in their lives before they do so,” Wendy Manning, a demographer at Bowling Green State University, said. “There might be a lot of uncertainty, and that might not be good for a society in general.” The Wall Street Journal has the story.

The extras.

• One year ago today we had just published a conversation between Isaac and Richard Hanania.
• The most clicked link in our last regular edition was the DOJ investigation into Cassidy Hutchinson.
• Nothing to do with politics: Some tips for sufferers of seasonal allergies.
• Our last survey: 3,163 readers responded to our survey on the war in Iran with 39% saying the conflict will last until the next presidential administration. “The war will continue as long as Iran and Israel exist. And America will continue to pay the price for Israeli expansion,” one respondent said. “I expect Iran to Capitulate very quickly to Trump. Let’s see if I am right,” said another.

Have a nice day.

A St. Paul, Minnesota, restaurant is offering a unique solution to the partisan political divide. In a personal email to all Minnesota lawmakers, Sweeney’s Saloon owner Will Rolf offered free meals to state politicians who sit down to eat with a member of the opposing political party. “I think people are sick of the fighting,” Rolf said. “They’d like to see people get along and get things done.” So far, four lawmakers have taken Rolf up on the deal. Fox 9 Minneapolis–St. Paul has the story.