Vice President JD Vance revealed Thursday that the Trump administration is doing “a lot of things” to pressure Iran to stop firing on ships in the Middle East. “There are a lot of things we are doing, a lot of things we are doing, of course, to try to pressure the Iranians to stop shooting at commercial ships, accepting that they will continue to try to shoot at commercial ships. Obviously, we are protecting a lot of ships, which is why we haven’t had a global energy crisis,” Vance said at the White House press briefing. “I can’t repeat this enough. Without President Trump’s leadership and the hard work of our troops, we would have had an energy crisis because the Iranians refused to stop acting like terrorists in the Strait of Hormuz,” he continued. “That said, of course, there are many additional tools that we have at our disposal, some of which the president will use and some of which he won’t. But I’m not going to announce exactly how we’re going to engage with the Iranians in the months and years ahead, because, frankly, it would take away the president’s decision space,” Vance added. “But everything that could happen is on the table. Economic pressure, military pressure, diplomatic pressure, covert pressure. Of course, these are things, they are tools in the president’s toolbox,” he also said. “But part of the reason they are tools in the toolkit is because the vice president, hopefully, is not foolish enough to stand up to, you know, all of you and a million Americans watching at home and say exactly what it is that we plan to do.”
