Trump to Iran: Next week we take out the power plants

For a country that pays for every litre of fuel at a price set by a narrow sea passage four thousand kilometres away, this is not distant news. Around a fifth of the world’s energy supplies moves through the Strait of Hormuz, and in a Fox News interview broadcast on Tuesday evening US President Donald Trump announced that the next phase of the campaign will hit Iranian civilian infrastructure unless Tehran returns to the negotiating table. Serbia has no leverage in that passage whatsoever, but it does receive the bill, delivered through Brent.

“Next week comes the power plants. Next week comes the bridges. We’re going to knock out all their power plants. We’re going to knock out all their bridges unless they get to the table and negotiate,” Trump said, adding that he is saving energy targets for last. It was the most explicit threat to civilian facilities since this round of the conflict began and, judging by its tone, a demand for capitulation rather than a diplomatic offer.

What has actually happened over four days

This is the fourth consecutive day of American strikes. On Monday, Central Command released footage of a one-way attack drone hitting a submarine and ship maintenance facility in Bandar Abbas. Early on Wednesday came the first direct US strike on the Iranian military itself: thirteen missiles hit the 388th Brigade ground forces barracks in Bampur, in Sistan and Baluchestan province in the country’s south-east. The Iranian army confirmed seven soldiers killed and thirteen wounded, condemned the strike and pledged a “decisive response” to what it called “US aggression”. Government spokeswoman Fatemeh Mohajerani said more than thirty civilians had been killed in recent attacks on southern Iran.

The maritime track runs in parallel, and in economic terms it may weigh more than the missiles. Hours earlier Trump had withdrawn his proposal for a twenty percent fee on all cargo passing through Hormuz, citing objections from Gulf allies, only for Washington to reimpose the naval blockade of Iranian ports on Wednesday morning. The blockade was first imposed in mid-April and lifted in mid-June after an interim agreement, and the sixty-day negotiating window opened then has since stalled. In the first seventeen hours of the renewed blockade, US forces turned back two commercial vessels that had tried to evade it.

What will this cost Serbia?

The answer is already written into the trading screens. Brent closed on Tuesday, July 14, at $84.73 a barrel, up from around $69 in June. That is a rise of nearly twenty percent in little more than a month, and not a single day of an actual Hormuz closure has occurred. If Trump follows through and hits Iranian power plants, the market will not price the damage to Iranian substations but the risk of retaliation inside the strait itself, and that risk registers immediately, not a week later.

For the Serbian consumer the chain is short and familiar: Brent up, the import bill for crude and refined products up, pressure on pump prices up, then on transport and on everything transport moves. There is no sanctions regime and no diplomatic channel through which Belgrade can shield itself from the price of a barrel. What does exist is a calendar: Trump has set himself a one-week deadline, and Tehran has so far answered every ultimatum by letting it expire.

European capitals are, for now, keeping quiet more loudly than usual. Neither Brussels nor Paris has issued a joint assessment of the threat to civilian infrastructure, even though it touches the foundations of the multilateral legal framework the Union invokes in every other conflict. That silence is itself a message: this time the transatlantic link is not being tested in public.

Do you think Tehran will come to the table before Trump’s one-week deadline runs out, or is this threat merely the prelude to the next round of strikes?