Blockade bites hard at Irans borders Trump cant cave now

To understand the economic devastation Iran is now experiencing, look no further than the trucks choking its borders.Thousands of them have lined up at land crossings into neighboring Turkey and Afghanistan, with many drivers sitting idle for weeks.They are there because overland routes are the only way that Iran can circumvent the punishing air and naval blockade imposed by the United States — but the regime can’t escape the cumbersome customs and security inspections that cause endless bottlenecks at the border.Yet to listen to Iran’s leaders, you’d think they held all the cards.At the UN General Assembly in New York this week, Tehran named its price for a deal: Lift the blockade, release frozen assets and end the “economic war.”In return, it pledges to halt its attacks on ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz — a waterway it has no right to close.President Donald Trump should impolitely decline: Time is on America’s side.“Economic Fury,” the operation launched by the Treasury Department as a complement to the US military’s “Epic Fury,” is biting hard.The reimposition of the blockade in July has resulted in Iran’s oil loadings collapsing by 85% — even as US forces supported the transit of more than 1 billion barrels of crude oil through the Strait of Hormuz, assisting more than 2,000 commercial-vessel transits.Iran’s domestic supply has been suffocated by the lack of imports, with reportedly only two months of fuel remaining.More broadly, Iran’s GDP dropped by more than 10% in a matter of weeks — and over the last year the national currency, the rial, has lost half of its value.Hence the traffic jams on Iran’s borders.But getting goods in and out is now much slower, much costlier, and woefully inefficient.Transporting a container overland costs about four times as much as by sea.Worse for the regime, the truckers, railways and shippers who carry these loads demand payment in precious hard currency — preferably dollars — n...