{"id":912791,"date":"2026-06-14T16:12:46","date_gmt":"2026-06-14T21:12:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2026\/06\/14\/fdds-president-has-no-idea-what-to-do-about-hormuz\/"},"modified":"2026-06-14T16:12:46","modified_gmt":"2026-06-14T21:12:46","slug":"fdds-president-has-no-idea-what-to-do-about-hormuz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2026\/06\/14\/fdds-president-has-no-idea-what-to-do-about-hormuz\/","title":{"rendered":"FDD\u2019s President Has No Idea What To Do About Hormuz"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Foreign Affairs<\/p>\n

FDD\u2019s President Has No Idea What To Do About Hormuz<\/h2>\n

With the government finally pursuing exactly the strategy he prescribed, Clifford May admitted he is stumped about handling its consequences.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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\"clifford-may\"\n <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/section>\n

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Few think tanks have enjoyed more success with the Trump administration than the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), the pro-Israel lobby group founded and led by Clifford May, its president. FDD has aggressively<\/a> lobbied<\/a> for sanctions<\/a> and military action<\/a> against Iran for years. This week, as the government pursues the very strategy he prescribed, May admitted that he has no idea what to do about its consequences.<\/p>\n

May was otherwise bullish at the Thursday, May 21 lunch event. When asked what the Trump administration should do next, he said the U.S. needs to finish the job with military strikes, confidently explaining that Israel already has the targets selected. Asked about the \u201cCrown Prince\u201d by another luncheon guest, May bragged about his close relationship with Reza Pahlavi, the son of the former shah, and reassured the attendee that Pahlavi\u2014who has not been in Iran since the 1970s\u2014is in fact popular among the Iranian masses. \u201cThe problem is they don’t have access to weapons,\u201d May said. (Reporting<\/a> from Israel\u2019s Channel 14, among others, has suggested<\/a> otherwise.)<\/p>\n

But after his confident opining on military strategy, May admitted aporia about the Strait of Hormuz, the chokepoint through which roughly a fifth of the world\u2019s oil passes, which has been effectively closed to commercial traffic since U.S. strikes on Iran began in February.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI don’t know what we do about that,\u201d May said.<\/p>\n

He did, however, understand the problem well enough to explain it. The U.S. has destroyed Iran\u2019s navy, he noted, but it doesn\u2019t matter because Iran has drones, some costing as little as $3,000 to produce. This is enough to keep the strait effectively closed and insurance rates for any vessel attempting to transit elevated.<\/p>\n

That closure has sent oil prices surging, prompted the largest emergency release from global strategic reserves in history, and forced Americans to pay 53 percent more for their gas. This supply shock could well up prices in the long term.<\/p>\n

It is a problem which did not exist on February 27, and which U.S. officials had warned about if the Trump administration followed FDD\u2019s counsel. According to the Wall Street Journal<\/em>, chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff Dan Caine briefed<\/a> Trump multiple times before the war that an American attack was likely to prompt Iran to close the Strait of Hormuz.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the many tragedies of this war,\u201d wrote<\/a> Joe Kent, the former director of the National Counterterrorism Center who resigned in opposition to the Trump administration\u2019s decision to bomb Iran, \u201cis that before the war began the U.S. Intel Community, including the CIA, were in agreement that Iran would target U.S. bases in the region and shut down the Strait of Hormuz if they were attacked by Israel & the U.S.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

For FDD, the Hormuz closure is an inconvenient complication to their narrative that the Iran War is going according to plan. Of course, the act means they can never admit they were wrong.\u00a0<\/p>\n

On March 29, Clifford May predicted<\/a> that \u201cTrump intends to end the conflict in a few weeks…Can the Strait of Hormuz be secured in that timeframe? Military experts I\u2019ve spoken with believe that\u2019s possible.\u201d Nearly two months later, Trump has not ended and the Strait is still closed.<\/p>\n

Also in March, Rich Goldberg, an FDD senior fellow, presented<\/a> the theory, endorsed by FDD CEO Mark Dubowitz, that the U.S. could \u201cdivert [its] destroyers to escort duties and augmented missile defense for tankers\u201d and reopen the strait.. The Pentagon tried exactly that under Project Freedom, an escort mission launched to reopen the waterway, and aborted it within its first day.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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At the luncheon, the FDD president offered his preferred creation myth of his organization, explaining to the audience how after the attacks of September 11, Jeane Kirkpatrick and Jack Kemp recruited him to build an organization to confront threats to \u201cWestern civilization,\u201d ones that were not political like the Soviet Union, but \u201ctheological.\u201d He did not mention that, before it was known under its current moniker, the organization was called EMET,\u00a0 Hebrew for \u201ctruth.\u201d Clifford May incorporated it in April, 2001 with the explicit<\/a>, IRS-filed purpose to \u201cenhance Israel\u2019s image in North America.\u201d While FDD\u2019s funding sources are opaque, donors reportedly<\/a> include the Bronfman whiskey family, the Adelson casino family, Michael Steinhardt, and Paul Singer, among other pro-Israel billionaires.<\/p>\n

Undercover footage featured in Al Jazeera\u2019s suppressed\u00a0 2018 documentary, The Lobby<\/em>, revealed<\/a> the director-general of Israel\u2019s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, Brig. General Sima Vaknin-Gil openly declaring that \u201cwe have FDD,\u201d describing the organization as one of several assets working on behalf of the Israeli government for \u201cdata gathering, information analysis, working on activist organizations, and money trail[s]\u201d against American citizens.<\/p>\n

Despite its miscalculations and murky agenda, FDD\u2019s influence on the Trump administration appears only to have grown since the start of the war. Notably, FDD Action\u2019s Nick Stewart joined<\/a> the staff of the U.S. team negotiating with Iran, and the White House adopted FDD\u2019s graphics<\/a> and messaging on Iran\u2019s nuclear program as their own. So when May and company eventually think up a solution to the Hormuz impasse, the administration has demonstrated it will follow their counsel to the letter, no matter the cost to the Americans in whose name they’re ostensibly acting.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

Harrison Berger
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Foreign Affairs FDD\u2019s President Has No Idea What To Do About Hormuz With the government finally pursuing exactly the strategy he prescribed, Clifford May admitted he is stumped about handling its consequences. Few think tanks have enjoyed more success with the Trump administration than the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), the pro-Israel lobby group<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":912792,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[150250,851],"tags":[150249,6180],"class_list":["post-912791","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-fdds","category-president","tag-fdds","tag-president"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/912791","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=912791"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/912791\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/912792"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=912791"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=912791"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=912791"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}