Dem
47
GOP
53
You can be excused if you can't remember who is blockading the Strait of Hormuz on any given day. It's hard to keep track of, what with the competing blockades. Suffice it to say that not much oil is getting through right now and the average price of gas was $3.97/gal. this morning, down from a high of $4.17 on April 7th. But let's get to the important stuff first: What the voters think of the mess in Iran.
Here is the latest poll on Iran from Politico/Public First.
It says that only 27% of Americans think Donald Trump has an Iran plan, 15% think he doesn't have a plan but he'll muddle through somehow, and 41% don't believe he has any plan. The latter is up 3 points since the March poll. The other 17% don't know what or where Iran is. That aside, only 38% back the military strikes, a majority think the war is not in the interest of the American people, and nearly half think Trump has been spending too much time on the price of oil and not enough on the price of milk. Even 29% of his 2024 voters think he is too focused on international affairs.
One Republican strategist, the Michigan-based Jason Roe, blamed the poor showing on the lack of messaging. He said: "The American people were not conditioned to prepare for this thing." Absent a direct attack on the United States, like Pearl Harbor, Americans do not like going to war unless the president makes a strong case in advance why the war is in America's interests. Trump didn't do that. Our guess is that he was so puffed up by doing a dictator swap in Venezuela, that he thought Iran would crumble in a day or two and the war would be over before anyone was even aware of it. He should have checked with his buddy Vladimir Putin, who has some actual experience starting wars with mid-sized countries in the expectation they would be over with a clean victory in a week at most.
Polling aside, reality does matter at least a little because gas is up, farmers are paying an arm and a leg for fertilizer, and many products that use oil as an input are about to get more expensive. As of this morning, the Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed to Western shipping. Iran apparently means it. On Saturday, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard opened fire on a tanker and a container vessel. Although Iran's official navy has been destroyed, the Revolutionary Guard has thousands of mosquito boats. These are small, lightweight, speedy boats that can easily catch a sluggish tanker or container ship and fire missiles or drones at them. The boat in the foreground below is a mosquito boat. The Guard's "navy" is estimated to be about 50,000 men. And since Iran is with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on DEI, they are all men:
The U.S. Air Force has trouble finding and destroying the mosquito boats because many are stored until needed in deep caves excavated along the rocky coastline. They are also too small to be easy to pick out on satellite photos.
Trump has repeatedly said that a final deal with Iran is within reach, but even with super-negotiator and Iran expert
J.D. Vance in Pakistan yesterday, there has been no progress. Yesterday, Trump
said
that he is sending Vance to Pakistan to fail again deliver another ultimatum to Iran. Iran has not confirmed that
talks will take place. That doesn't mean they won't happen, though. All we know for sure is that if Vance "negotiates"
the same way this time as last time ("take it or leave it"), the talks will fail again. Iran has the momentum and time
is on its side. It is in no hurry to reopen the Strait and Trump is in a very big hurry. Iran knows this and knowledge
is power.
It is not even clear that Vance knows what his side wants. Initially, the war was nominally about preventing Iran from having nuclear weapons—you know, those things that use U-235 or Pu-239 to go bang. But the war has suddenly made Iran realize that it has another "nuclear weapon" that doesn't use any enriched uranium or plutonium: It can close the Strait of Hormuz whenever it wants to and inflict massive damage on the entire world. And the good part about this other "nuclear weapon" is that it does not create any radioactive fallout in the region, which a U-235 weapon most certainly would. And while U.N. or I.A.E.A. inspectors could try to verify compliance with a deal relating to uranium enrichment, it is hard to imagine any deal which would take closing the Strait off the table. All that requires is a large fleet of Shahed drones, which cost about $35,000 each and which Iran can make in secret factories in large numbers. Here is the Shahed-136 model (You can't get one on Amazon—yet. Sorry.):
Now what? Probably one of these days some Republican senator will ever-so-carefully tell Trump that his war is not popular with the voters and it will cost Republicans the Senate—meaning a genuine trial when the House impeaches him next year, and no more Cabinet or judicial appointments. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) told reporters: "I hope that we are arriving at an exit strategy here to bring this to a close to preserve our security interests and bring down the cost of gasoline." Who knows, maybe Hawley will someday work up the courage to say it to Trump instead of to reporters. Other senior Republicans are quietly saying that when Trump tries to get Congress to appropriate tens of billions of dollars or more for the war, senators are going to ask what the exit plan is.
Trump may or may not be aware of this, but if Vance made a deal with Iran today and a mine-free route through the Strait were opened immediately, it would take weeks before any oil got to buyers. It would take many months before all the damage Iran has inflicted on the energy infrastructure of Qatar and the U.A.E. could be repaired and production returned to pre-war levels. At least 80 oil-related facilities have been damaged, many of them severely. In case you are not an oil-price geek, the spot price for oil closed Friday at $99 vs. the futures price of $90. This means if you actually want a tanker of oil delivered right now, you gotta pay more. The two prices are normally much closer. The gap reflects the ongoing uncertainty about how long it will be before oil flows freely again (but maybe not "free" if Iran imposes a toll).
An interesting question is: "If Trump ends up with an Iranian deal worse than the one Barack Obama made in 2015, will he be able to sell it to the country? Fox will parrot anything Trump says and his base will believe it, but will independents? Suppose he says that Iran has surrendered all its enriched uranium and NASA shot it into the sun last week. How many voters will buy that?
Trump is obsessed with Obama's deal. At a cabinet meeting on March 26, Trump said: "Barack Hussein Obama—what he did, where he gave them the Iran nuclear deal, gave them free will toward a nuclear weapon. Basically, he chose Iran over Israel and others that didn't want him to do it." This is nonsense, of course, but the in the post-truth era, what matters is what independent voters believe. Now that Iran understands that it can inflict massive pain on the world whenever it wants to, it is hard to imagine it will give Trump a better deal than it gave Obama. Getting the genie out of the bottle is easier than putting it back in. (V)