President Donald Trump may have canceled "Project Freedom," a plan for U.S. naval forces to help commercial ships pass through the Strait of Hormuz, in response to pressure from Saudi Arabia. 

Trump announced the plan on Sunday afternoon, which angered the leadership of Saudi Arabia, NBC News reported, citing unnamed sources. Saudi Arabia told the U.S. that it wouldn't allow the U.S. military carrying out operations for the project to use the Prince Sultan Airbase southeast of Riyadh or fly through Saudi airspace.

Aimen Dean, a former member of al-Qaeda who was recruited by the Secret Intelligence Service and became an MI6 spy in 1998, said in a post on X that NBC is misunderstanding what occurred. Dean said that America's Gulf allies were told of the operation about 12 hours before it was announced, and there were originally no objections. 

The Gulf Cooperation Council – an intergovernmental alliance between Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, and Qatar – later became concerned with the lack of rules of engagement. The operation would expose the countries' energy infrastructure to attacks from Iran, but Trump was avoiding escalation by responding to any such attacks, which would jeopardize negotiations with Iran. 

"Because from the Gulf perspective, this stopped looking like strategy and started looking like desperate political vanity mixed with deadly wishful thinking," Dean said. 

According to NBC, phone calls between Trump and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman failed to come to an agreement on the matter, leaving the president to have to choose between carrying out the operation and losing access to critical airspace, or bringing "Project Freedom" to an end. 

The Strait of Hormuz is currently restricted by two blockades. The U.S. is stopping ships from transiting the waterway, through which 20% of the global crude oil passes, to reach Iranian ports, and Iran is attacking non-Iranian ships from transiting the strait.