Scott Ritter: US Blockade an Act of WAR but Navy Is TOO Scared to Enter the Hormuz Strait
Scott Ritter argues the U.S. naval blockade at the Strait of Hormuz is ineffective posturing, noting Iranian shipping has shifted to the Indian Ocean while major powers like China and Russia refuse interference. He asserts the Navy avoids the strait due to missile threats and that the blockade lacks evidence of an Iranian nuclear program, labeling Israeli allegations as fabricated forgeries used by Donald Trump to withdraw from the JCPOA. Ritter proposes a compromise limiting enrichment to 3.75% under IAEA supervision, accusing Benjamin Netanyahu of controlling U.S. policy and suggesting the blockade aims only for a political off-ramp rather than actual security. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Iran's Nuclear Blockade00:14:06
Well, CENTCOM says that more than 10,000 U.S. sailors, Marines, and airmen, along with over a dozen warships and dozens of aircraft, are executing the mission to blockade ships entering and departing Iranian ports.
And during the first 24 hours, no ships made it past the U.S. blockade.
Six merchant vessels complied with direction from the U.S. forces to turn around and re enter an Iranian port in the Gulf of Oman.
There are other reports that two Iranian sanctioned ships by the United States.
Have now made it through.
Another Panamanian ship also getting through.
So, a lot of differing stories about what's getting through and what's getting blocked around all of this.
That's why we wanted to bring in today from our UN weapons inspector, Scott Ritter, who has obviously been following this very, very closely to talk all about this.
Scott's not quite here yet.
So, maybe we can talk about what we're seeing here these other naval blockade ports.
And what we're looking at here is where the actual Strait of Hormuz is, where Iran has.
Actually, shut down the Strait of Hormuz and what the United States can actually do there.
Now, I think what the U.S. plan was, was to block at the opening of the Strait.
And so, you know, we are getting mixed reports about who can and cannot pass.
And, you know, comically, the Iranian embassies have posted, this is not social media.
You can't block someone who's blocked you.
That's not really how this works.
So, what we're asking and that we have been asking since the weekend began is, How can you do that?
And is it a danger?
Are you prepared to follow up these words with firepower, which I don't think anybody wants because we are still in a ceasefire?
Yeah, that was my concern.
So, what happens?
What if somebody's just like, no, screw it, we're going anyway?
What are we going to do?
Shoot a merchant vessel out of the water?
Like, really?
That's piracy.
Exactly.
Exactly.
You know, this is something Iran has said is like you will be in deadly whirlpools that, you know, you cannot test this.
It does not seem like, you know, there has been major firepower, but the mere threat of it is a serious threat.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, how effective this will actually be, who knows?
And whether Iran will comply with it already threats, of course, against other U.S. ships.
And how much time we have left in this whole.
Ceasefire agreement, just a few more days in the ceasefire agreement.
If you look at Polymarket, I don't know where these people get their data, but Polymarket right now is trading, people are betting that tomorrow by April 15th, this entire conflict ends.
What?
Under what's a 75% chance that this is all done tomorrow?
What world are they living in?
Done for who, though?
Because conflict is over.
Iran, Israel, U.S., conflict ends.
Tomorrow on the weekend.
But certainly not for Lebanon.
There is nothing at this moment that seems to be stopping Israel from its continued assault on Lebanon.
There is plenty of world condemnation, strongly worded tweets, and letters attached to said tweets, but it does not appear that Israel is going to stop in any form or fashion in Lebanon.
It's interesting that this has continued to raise awareness about what happened and what is continuing to happen in Gaza because the ceasefire is still being.
Violated inside Gaza.
And again, you know, the rhetoric online is well, there's Hezbollah.
Hezbollah's there.
And so they need to do this.
But something Clayton posted on his ex last night, you know, you're not going to get rid of the Hezbollah by bulldozing a building.
This other buildings exist.
Like, what is the purpose of that?
I don't know.
Exactly.
Let us know in the comments if you have any questions.
We can put them up on the screen here.
We're just waiting for Scott to dial in here.
There he is.
Is Scott here yet?
I see his face.
Sorry.
Thank you for your patience, everyone.
The audience anticipating and waiting and waiting and waiting.
Okay.
Well, let's get to Scott then.
Let's ask him Scott, thank you so much for joining us today.
What is your sense of how much the United States will escalate if the blockade is not holding, which it does not seem like it is?
Do you think it can do anything?
Is there any there there?
Well, I mean, of course, there's something there.
If the United States wanted to resume the pattern of behavior that they had been undertaking prior to the ceasefire, then they can send airplanes in to bomb Iran ineffectively.
And they can sit back and absorb Iranian missiles as Iran continues to destroy billions of dollars of U.S. infrastructure.
They can keep their navy away from Iranian shores because the Iranian missiles would threaten to sink the ships.
And they can be humiliated on the world stage as they prove yet again that they're incapable of defeating.
Iran militarily in a conventional fight.
So, this is why they're not going to do that.
The United States is looking for an off ramp.
It just has to be a politically acceptable off ramp.
You know, and I know, and pretty much everybody in the world knows that this blockade is a joke.
It was always going to be a joke.
But it allows the president to posture, it allows the president to say that he has done something decisive.
And then the next thing is for the president to say that because of his decisive behavior, The Iranians have reached out and they want to have negotiations.
Now, we know that Iran hasn't reached out.
It's the United States reaching out to Pakistan, but their president will spin it the way he wants.
And I think on Thursday, you're going to see a resumption of negotiations because the United States has no option.
They've reached the cap of their conventional escalation capabilities.
There's nothing left for them to bomb, they don't know what to bomb.
What they were bombing wasn't effective.
So there's no sense in them continuing this.
So, CENTCOM is saying more than 10,000 U.S. sailors, Marines, airmen, dozen warships, dozens of aircraft are all involved in this operation, turning ships around.
How effective will that be?
What do you see the Iranian response to this?
Or how do you see the Iranian's response to this?
Well, first of all, you have to understand the majority of Iranian shipping has already left the trade of Hormuz in the Indian Ocean, it is out around the world.
They've loaded a whole bunch of oil up on tankers, and because of sanctions, they were unable to offload that oil.
So that oil is out there right now, and it's being offloaded because there's high demand for oil right now.
And so this isn't going to have any impact on Iran at all.
China, Russia, India, and other nations have told the United States to pound sand.
To prove one instance of them boarding a Chinese vessel and turning it around.
They're not.
They won't touch them.
And I also ask what these 10,000 sailors, airmen, Marines are doing to the ships that just skirt the Iranian coast.
Okay, so you come out of the Strait of Hormuz.
We know the United States Navy is not in the Strait of Hormuz because they'll be sunk.
So the ships come out of the Strait of Hormuz, and what happens if they just skirt the Iranian coast?
What's the United States going to do?
Send its vaunted Navy into.
To challenge shipping on Iran's coastline?
No.
They'll get sunk.
So, you know, this is just pure posturing.
There's nothing real about this blockade.
Plus, I need to point out that a blockade is an act of war.
The last time I checked, the United States hadn't declared war against Iran, it was a military operation.
Now there's a ceasefire.
So I think the United States is going to have to come up with a different term to describe what they're doing.
I think it's called just sailing around in circles.
It's a pleasure cruise, really.
I want to ask you about the negotiation about nuclear because the president just keeps screaming, Iran can never have a nuke.
I mean, we never had proof that they did, but Iranian officials are saying, we just are not going to let them tell us that we can't use nuclear power.
We are not going to let them tell us what to do anymore.
If they're uncomfortable with our uranium, they can come and inspect it.
This has always been the case.
You know, but we continue to move the football.
So, what is the stage of the negotiation about a nuclear weapon at this point?
And I want to tie this in because I was reading something over the weekend about chemical weapons because Iran had the technology to have chemical weapons when they were attacked by Iraq in the Gulf War or in the 80s rather and refused to use them.
So, maybe you can tell us about what you know about whether or not Iran has a nuclear reactor.
Or a nuclear bomb, what they're doing with their uranium, because you've said many times they should not have enriched to 60.
It was antagonized, it antagonized us.
So, can you give us a state on that?
Well, sure.
We know that Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program.
They never had a nuclear weapons program.
There's no evidence to sustain any allegations that they've had a nuclear weapons program.
All evidence that's been put on the table in that regard have been shown to be fabricated.
Remember in 2018, the Israelis launched some sort of famous attack, a raid on Tehran, where they broke into a facility and stole documents.
And then they did that in early 2018.
And then they went to Donald Trump and they showed Donald Trump the documents.
And Donald Trump said, This is proof they're cheating.
And he withdrew from the JCPOA because he only takes instructions from Israel.
But the interesting thing is, when these documents, some of them were made public, it turns out that these documents had already been previously submitted by the Israelis to the International Atomic Energy Agency back in 2004 and were shown to be outright fabrications, forgeries.
And that's the reality of the Israeli case against Iran.
It's 100% fabricated, consisting of forged documents or documents that are.
Taken out of context.
There is no Iranian nuclear weapons program, never has been, and there never will be because Iran doesn't want a nuclear weapon.
They've made that quite clear.
It's not just that they don't want it, but it's also incompatible with their religious beliefs.
There are fatwas or religious edicts that have been passed by the first two supreme leaders that said no to this.
As you pointed out, the Iranians are serious about this because even when Iraq was using chemical weapons against Iranian troops, inflicting serious casualties on these troops.
Iran never responded in kind, saying that chemical weapons, weapons of mass destruction in general, are against Islamic jurisprudence.
So it's not that they say one thing and do another.
They're consistent all along.
I have pointed out that 60% enriched uranium is a provocation.
I asked the Iranian president straight to his face, Why did you do it?
Because it makes it look like you're moving towards a nuclear weapon.
What his foreign minister answered, and after talking to him, Arachi said, We're doing it so that we have negotiating leverage.
You know, the world has to take us seriously because right now the United States doesn't.
They just say zero, zero, zero, zero.
And the Iranians are saying, You don't get to say zero.
So the idea was to have this so that there would be a card to play so that they can retain enrichment, but not enrich to a level they've demonstrated they have.
And this seems to be backed up because prior to this.
Most recent round of conflict starting on February 28th.
The Iranians had met extensively with Jared Kushner and Steve.
Where they basically agreed to get rid of their 60% enriched uranium and also agree that they would never again enrich, that there would be inspections that would limit the enrichment to 3.75%, which is the enrichment level needed for fuel using the Bushir nuclear reactor.
Iran has an inherent right under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to possess the totality of the nuclear fuel cycle, inclusive of enrichment.
The United States and Israel do not get to dictate things that deviate from the treaty.
And this is what Iran is saying.
There will be no Iran exception to the treaty.
Iran will do what Iran is allowed to do under Article 4 of the NPT.
But Iran will agree, I believe, and if the United States would agree to low levels of enrichment, Iran would agree to close the door on higher levels of enrichment to limit the number of cascades they have to limit the amount of nuclear material that would be accumulated and do so without any sunset clauses so that these limitations would become permanent.
And that's how you get out of this nuclear issue.
But the problem is Israel refuses to allow.
Iran to have a nuclear enrichment program.
It's somewhat ironic since Israel is neither a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and they possess nuclear weapons.
So it's stunning that the United States and the world continues to even listen to what Israel has to say on this issue.
This is the easiest part of the negotiation if the United States would just use common sense.
Allow Iran to enrich uranium to 3.75%, to so under the You know, supervision of International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors.
And Iran will agree that all pathways to, you know, enrichment at a higher level will be shut down.
Hunting Netanyahu's Secrets00:03:27
Therefore, there is no pathway to a bomb.
Therefore, there is no potential of a nuclear weapon.
Therefore, Donald Trump gets to say that he has a better deal than the JCPOA.
This is how you get out of it.
And this is what I believe is the direction they'll be going.
Do you think that President Trump is trapped?
And yesterday, Tucker Carlson in an interview said that President Trump is a slave to Benjamin Netanyahu.
And when challenged on it, he followed it up with clearly he doesn't want to do this.
He's being pushed to do this, and he has no choice but to do it.
So do you think that he's trapped?
You know, I'm thinking, okay, are we allowed to say this?
You know, we are up against major filters.
The real end of the story, so I'm sorry.
Well, no, no, but this, what's interesting is we can designate kill lists.
Of terrorists as long as they are Muslim.
We can do that.
We do it.
Obama did it every Tuesday.
He had Taco Tuesday where he was given baseball cards of who he decided to kill.
And if I were to say, okay, let's kill this, you know, who I think is whatever opposition leader, you know, Palestinian leader, I could absolutely say that.
Hey, let's kill that guy.
I could say, let's kill Osama bin Laden.
I could say that.
Absolutely.
Right.
We could say that.
What the filters now are is, you know, who we can and cannot target.
And so I think it's worth pointing out.
What's interesting?
You know, the contradiction.
You know, again, I'm being a little bit extreme.
Of course, we don't hunt down and kill Benjamin Netanyahu.
He's the leader of a sovereign state, but we don't let him do this either.
But I want to make the following point.
You know, the International Criminal Court, when they seek to hold Americans accountable to the rule of law, to international law, we passed a law that basically said if an American ends up under their jurisdiction, we can send the United States military in to recover them.
Why?
Because we don't allow other nations or entities to hold jurisdiction over us.
And yet, this is what Netanyahu is doing.
He's holding jurisdiction over us.
And this is a national security threat to the United States of America, one that cannot be tolerated.
And you're 100% right.
If we had a.
I mean, to give you an example, there's talk that Muammar Gaddafi had the goods on Sarkozy back in 2010 or so because Sarkozy, a corrupt individual that he is, was taking Libyan gold and Libyan money to finance his campaign.
And then.
You know, felt threatened by that Libya having that knowledge.
So Sarkozy helped cook up the invasion of Libya and the elimination of Gaddafi.
So it happens.
It happens.
When people have the goods on you, you sometimes will hunt them down and take that.
Why do you think Manuel Noriega is in prison for the.
I think he might not be alive right now, but, you know, because he had the goods on us.
Manuel Noriega knew all the secrets.
So we made sure that he could never tell the secrets to anybody.
Benjamin Netanyahu has the secrets.
So, what do we do to people who have the secrets?
Yeah.
Well, yeah.
I mean, at the very least, can we do what we did to the president of Venezuela?
Can we put him on trial inside our own country for whatever corruption that we know the Justice Department has?
Dirty Laundry and Noriega00:04:01
Right.
Can we have a Nuremberg style trial where we actually get to the bottom of this?
Yeah.
Can we have him here?
You know, at least can we go and get him and keep him here?
No, he comes here and he gets the red carpet.
And if you saw.
Dirty laundry, and we do his dirty laundry.
Great.
Literally.
Yeah.
No, literally.
He comes in with his dirty laundry and makes the State Department do his dirty laundry.
The State Department needs to burn his laundry, burn his airplane, and arrest him on the spot.
I mean, this man insults America on a daily basis.
This is a man who brags to his Jewish constituents how he owns America, how he owns the American Congress.
Listen to me, America.
This is a Jewish leader in Israel bragging about how he owns the United States Congress, your Congress, your House, your representative.
He says he owns them.
He can make them do anything he wants, and apparently he can.
And apparently, he owns the presidency as well.
You know, for all the MAGA people out there, my God, you've surrendered.
The second you say we support Israel, you've surrendered.
You don't support the United States anymore.
You support a foreign entity.
And if you're not MAGA, if you're just an American patriot, this is intolerable.
Intolerable.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't know.
Every American patriot I know is furious about this.
I mean, I get texts all day from people all over the country.
And it's anecdotal, of course, right?
But it is absolutely indicative of the Feeling that people, you know, individuals who may, you know, voted for President Trump who are absolutely furious about being sold out to Israel.
Scott, I guess we'll get you out of here on this.
On the Strait of Hormuz, over the next 48 hours or so, just militarily, what do you see happening from the U.S. side and the Iranian side, maybe over the next 48 hours, 72 hours?
I don't think Iran cares.
They're already doing the tolls.
They're collecting their money.
No ship goes through there without paying money to Iran.
They're shipping their own ships.
Iranian tankers are leaving.
They're skirting the coast.
The United States will never touch them.
Chinese tankers are leaving.
The United States will never touch them.
Russian tankers are leaving.
The United States will never touch them.
We may pick on some tanker from Trinidad and Tobago because we're the United States.
Why not?
And do something.
We'll put Navy SEALs on board and we'll take photographs and we'll show everybody how tough we are, how we.
Took down this tanker that violated everything.
But the bottom line is the Pakistani prime minister is saying we got to have these negotiations.
We got to restart them.
And they're talking about Thursday.
And you got Donald Trump saying, yeah, maybe we'll go back because the United States, Trump knows the longer this, right now, he can still, there's still enough oxygen thieves in the MAGA industry, the mouth breathers out there on social media who will post how this is genius 5D chest.
And Donald Trump is the greatest thing in the world.
He's Christy, apparently.
And that he has reached down and he has touched the Strait of Hormuz, and everything is good.
And for the next couple of days, they can sell this lie.
But very soon, it'll just be exposed as a lie.
And this president needs to end this blockade as soon as possible and move on to negotiations.
He can claim all he wants that the only reason why he received that phone call from the Pakistani president was that the blockade was working so well and everybody's scared to death of the might of America.
Let him sell it the way he wants.
I mean, he's been lying to us.
Since day one, just go ahead and accept more lies.
I don't care what lies he tells as long as we end up at the negotiating table on Thursday in Pakistan, in Islamabad, and we bring this thing to a close.
According to the Iranians, we were this close.
The Islamabad Memrad of Understanding was about to be signed when Benjamin Netanyahu made his magic phone calls.
Again, I want to remind the American people of that.
The United States decided they were ready to come this close to ending this war when Benjamin Netanyahu called and said, No, you're not, because we're not ready to let you.
We're taking direction from the prime minister of Israel, and it's to the detriment of the national security of the United States and global peace and security.
The 1975 Plutonium Offer00:04:23
Real quick question here from True Texan.
You can put this up on the screen.
True Texan asks you, Scott, can Iran not buy enriched uranium or a weapon?
Thank you for that super chat.
Well, if it's easy to buy a weapon, I think people have done it by now.
So, since there's no recorded instance of somebody buying a weapon, I would say that that probably exists in the minds of Hollywood screenwriters as opposed to reality.
Enriched uranium, again, it's a highly controlled substance that has to be handled very carefully.
There are limited instances on the black market where radioactive materials in small quantities have been put out there.
Many of them were sting operations.
So, you know.
It's not as though there's loose nukes out there.
But now you're missing the point with your question.
It doesn't matter what's possible.
Iran doesn't want to.
Iran doesn't seek to.
There's no evidence that Iran has been trying to do anything of this nature.
First of all, why would Iran seek to purchase enriched uranium?
They have built their own uranium enrichment process, which they're very proud of.
This is something that the United States and Europe said we didn't want Iran to be able to do.
Israel insisted that Iran not be allowed to do this.
And Iran, despite all that, was able to build using its own.
Capabilities, it's owned to engineering to build a highly effective uranium enrichment program.
They don't need to buy it from anywhere.
They have their own capabilities.
Did you know that in 1976, Washington offered the Shah the technology to extract bomb grade plutonium from spent reactor fuel, which would have.
So there was a time when we backed the Shah when we wanted them to have enriched in radium and all the tools.
But then when they overthrew the Shah, Washington went to Iran and tried to kill the protesters to see if the Carter administration had the stomach to, like, can we tamp down this revolution?
Can we make it stop?
Can we kill them?
So, my how times have changed.
You know, we are not consistent when it comes to Iran.
We've only made them an enemy because Israel wanted us to.
The interesting thing is there are all these people today who call themselves Iranian experts who say Iran is an oil producing country.
Why do they need nuclear power?
My God, why?
You see, it's a scam.
They don't need nuclear power.
They have energy.
They have oil.
Why?
Why?
This civilian use.
I'm like, yeah, but you know, when they first made that argument back in 1975, it was the Shah that made the argument.
And what the Shah said is we are an industrializing nation.
We are modernizing.
And the more we modernize, the more energy we will consume.
And the more energy we consume domestically means the less energy available for sale on the, on the, on the, Foreign markets where we derive the bulk of our income.
So, in order to maximize over time our ability to earn money, we want to create a nuclear power capability that provides energy for our domestic use, liberating the energy for sale abroad.
This is 1975.
And the Ford administration said, Genius, we love it, we support it.
Then they turned on, as you said, and said, We'll give you the totality, give you access to the totality of the nuclear enrichment.
A nuclear fuel cycle to include reprocessing, because that's what they're talking about.
They're talking about taking spent nuclear fuel rods and reprocessing them.
And what you do is you extract the plutonium.
Now, that doesn't mean that Iran would keep the plutonium.
Iran would then sell the plutonium to the United States for disposal.
But the point is, you know, we were saying, no, the Iranians can have all of the technology, just like Brazil and Japan have all of the technology.
You know, the Iranian revolution came in, and we suddenly decided they can have no technology and actively blocked them in total violation of the nuclear nonproliferation treaty.
Nothing we have done with Iran is legal.
Nothing we have done with Iran is legal.
Well, some person in our chat says Scott was a former UN weapons inspector.
He knows more than demented Trump.
Somebody else says, Thank you, Scott, for speaking the truth.