White House: Trump Was "Joking" on Hormuz US Territory Claim
🛢️ HORMUZ — The legal threat evaporates; the blockade and the gas prices don't. 📌 LOOK CLOSER: Walking back the territorial claim removes the legal tripwire — no sovereign soil, no automatic war threshold. But the blockade stands, SPR stays below 300M barrels, and Hormuz runs at 8-15 daily transits. Tehran now knows Washington blinked on the escalatory framing. The MOU negotiations absorb this as a signal of limits.