US President Trump speaking on the Hugh Hewitt Show, says Iran has lost control of Hormuz, and won’t hesitate to take military action unless current measures deliver what the US wants

• US is monitoring Cuba very closely and wants to get Cuba done before he leaves office; asked whether he’d be okay with a little military force or a short campaign, says he would certainly consider it.

Rhetoric of this kind from the sitting US president on Hormuz has a well-worn market template: crude and freight premia build first, crude tends to front-run any actual supply loss because the risk is concentrated in the marginal tanker flow, and the premium has historically faded where the strait was never genuinely shut, since full closure has been threatened repeatedly but rarely attempted. The claim that Iran has lost control of Hormuz is notable in itself; whether it reflects a verifiable change in control of the waterway or rhetorical escalation is the first thing to establish, and the distinction matters, since actual disruption to tanker traffic or insurance rates is what transmits into Brent and WTI, not commentary. The Cuba aside is a separate and lower-grade file; conditional verbal consideration of military action there has historically had negligible read-through beyond regional assets. The established follow-ons are any corroboration from shipping data, war-risk insurance pricing and naval positioning in the Gulf, plus the Iranian response, which in past episodes has been the tell for whether rhetoric is stair-stepping toward kinetic action. The pattern on comparable headline-driven spikes has been a bid for crude, gold and the dollar with equities marked lower, then retracement in the absence of a physical trigger. As verbal escalation without accompanying action, the immediate move has tended to live or die with the next headline.