Georgia Rivera arrived Thursday, April 9, healthy and loud and already sharing a birthday with her father Jason. She’s Geraldo Rivera’s sixth grandchild, born to his daughter Simone. A small, sweet thing in a week that gave the world very little sweetness.
Rivera, the veteran journalist and Long Island native who has covered the Middle East since the Yom Kippur War of 1973, wrote about Georgia’s arrival in his latest column. Then he pivoted, hard, to what’s unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. That pivot tells you everything about where his head is.
Here’s the situation as Rivera laid it out. After more than a month of crushing bombardment, Iran agreed to a cease-fire and historic peace talks with the United States. The talks collapsed over the weekend after a 21-hour marathon session in Islamabad, Pakistan. Gone. Just like that.
President Trump’s response was not subtle.
He ordered the U.S. fleet to blockade the Strait of Hormuz, one of the most critical shipping chokepoints on the planet, a narrow waterway through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil supply moves. The stated logic, as Rivera describes it, is a kind of preemptive defiance. Iran had been demanding payments from ship operators to pass through the Strait unmolested, roughly $2 million per vessel in untraceable bitcoin. Since one supertanker’s oil cargo runs between $140 million and $200 million, plenty of operators were quietly paying the ransom. Trump won’t accept that.
So now we’re blocking the thing we didn’t want Iran to block. Rivera calls the irony unavoidable. Hard to argue.
The Law of the Sea and various international treaties guarantee freedom of navigation through the Strait as an international waterway, which is precisely why those ransom payments are considered illegal bribes. But the legal framework that makes Iran’s demands illegal also complicates what happens when a U.S. Navy vessel stops a ship sailing under a Chinese flag. Those details, according to Rivera’s column, were still being worked out at press time.
The strategic logic isn’t crazy. If Trump can choke off oil revenue, Iran’s only significant economic lifeline, Tehran might eventually bend. Still, Rivera isn’t optimistic. His rule, built from more than five decades of reporting from the region, is that the news always gets worse.
That’s a grim standard. It’s also, historically, a pretty reliable one.
The deeper architecture of the conflict matters here. Rivera traces the current war back to a relationship between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Trump. Netanyahu, according to Rivera, convinced Trump that Israeli interests and American interests aligned when it came to eliminating what they both viewed as an existential Iranian threat. Trump then committed U.S. forces to the fight. Many Israelis and Jewish people broadly, Rivera writes, believe there has been no choice but to wage a war of survival since the October 7, 2023 attacks.
The Middle East Policy Council has long documented how layered and intractable the region’s conflicts are, with competing religious claims, ethnic divisions, and factions that share little except, as Rivera bluntly puts it, a common hatred of Israel.
Rivera’s column, published Sunday by Long Island Press, doesn’t pretend to have answers. What it has is a particular kind of weariness that only comes from watching the same fire burn for fifty years.
But it starts with Georgia.
That choice feels intentional. Not sentimental exactly, but grounding. A new person enters a chaotic world on a Thursday in April, sharing a birthday with her dad, carrying what Rivera calls “special karma.” He wonders if it might rub off on the rest of us. Lord knows, he writes, the world could use it.
For Long Islanders following the overseas situation from a comfortable distance, Rivera’s column is a useful gut check. He’s not a policy analyst working from a think tank. He’s a reporter who has been standing in the middle of this story, on and off, since Gerald Ford was president. When someone like that says things will probably get worse before they get better, it lands differently than a cable news chyron.
Georgia probably doesn’t care about the Strait of Hormuz right now. She has other priorities. But her grandfather is watching, and writing, and hoping that somehow the news breaks the other way for once.