Trump just said it plainly:
"We don't need the Hormuz Strait, but we do it because we cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon."
Larry Johnson, thirty years across CIA and State, caught the contradiction that sentence buries.
For two weeks CENTCOM said the entire bombing campaign existed to stop Iran from choking off Hormuz shipping.
Now the president says Hormuz doesn't matter, it's about the bomb instead.
Which means: threatening tankers has nothing to do with nuclear weapons, and no version of the mission holds still.
The wild part? The threat underneath may be hollow anyway.
Trump vowed to destroy a bridge for every ship Iran hits, but no insured vessel is running Iran's gauntlet now, so there may be no ship to trigger it.
Turns out the campaign is drifting backward.
Nineteen radar and satellite systems across seven Gulf states now knocked out, roughly $5 billion to replace and stalled on rare-earth shortages, leaving American forces blind and pulling back from Jordan toward Israel.
His clock: two more weeks before oil near $95 and gas back at four dollars force the climbdown.
@NewSonof
