WASHINGTON, July 13 — Donald Trump, the Republican Party’s presumptive nominee for the 2024 presidential election and a former president with no official government position, announced on March 17, 2025, a 20 percent toll and blockade, stating it would “make Iran pay for its aggression.” The move extends the ‘maximum pressure’ campaign that defined his first term’s approach to Tehran.
Under the hood, the technical reality of this policy is a return to the economic warfare playbook Trump deployed after withdrawing the United States from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action on May 8, 2018. That decision reinstated sanctions that had been lifted under the nuclear deal, and the effect was stark: Iranian oil exports fell from 2.5 million barrels per day to below 500,000 barrels per day by 2019.
The new blockade, announced without a current administration role, appears designed to push those exports lower still.
The Soleimani precedent
The detail that matters here is the continuity of approach. Trump ordered the killing of Qasem Soleimani, commander of Iran’s Quds Force, on January 3, 2020 — an action that escalated the ‘maximum pressure’ campaign from economic coercion to direct military targeting. The 20 percent toll and blockade, announced more than five years later, represents a return to that same doctrine: squeeze Iran’s revenue streams and punish its regional activities.
As ever with Trump’s Iran policy, the numbers tell the story. The 2.5 million barrels per day figure from before the JCPOA withdrawal, and the sub-500,000 barrels per day figure after sanctions were reimposed, illustrate the scale of the disruption his first-term strategy achieved.
The blockade announced in March 2025 aims to replicate that pressure, though the precise mechanism — a 20 percent toll on what, exactly — remains a point of technical ambiguity that analysts are still parsing.
Political timing and legal footing
Trump served as the 45th president from January 20, 2017 to January 20, 2021. The blockade announcement, made on March 17, 2025, came from a candidate, not a sitting office-holder. That distinction matters for the policy’s enforceability: a presidential nominee cannot unilaterally impose a naval blockade or levy tolls.
The announcement may be read as a policy signal for a potential second term, or as a campaign statement designed to frame the 2024 election around national security. What to watch next is whether Trump, if elected, moves to formalise the blockade through executive action, and how Iran responds.
The ‘maximum pressure’ campaign of 2018-2020 did not bring Tehran to the negotiating table on Trump’s terms; it prompted Iran to accelerate its nuclear programme and to retaliate against US assets in the region. The Soleimani killing was the most dramatic of those retaliatory cycles. The blockade announced in March 2025, if implemented, would test whether a second Trump administration is prepared to escalate further.
