Dem
47
GOP
53
At this point, we must have written at least a thousand times that Donald Trump does not play 3-D chess, or even 2-D checkers. The man seems to be fundamentally incapable of anticipating the consequences of his actions, particularly two or three or four steps down the line. In domestic politics, he's made that work for him, thanks to a fawning base that eats up whatever he says, and a whole bunch of pliant Republicans in Congress. But it's not an approach that works in foreign affairs, as the mess in Iran is demonstrating.
At this point, Trump has figured out that he's got a burgeoning oil/gas price problem and, more specifically, a Strait of Hormuz problem. The petroleum markets have already been thrown off kilter in a manner that will take months or more to resolve. And the longer there's a bottleneck in the Strait, the longer it will take for the markets to settle down. Trump has already tried a bunch of things to try to address the problem, from trying to arrange escorts for tankers to trying to serve as insurer. No dice. So, over the weekend, he took yet another tack, namely demanding that the United States' allies and/or China help clear the Strait.
These would be the same allies that Trump has spent the last year pissing on, and the same China that would love to see the U.S. economy take a giant hit. Further, when it comes to the allies, Trump seems to have no awareness that they have polities that they answer to, too, and that helping Trump would be one nail in the coffin of a Keir Starmer or a Friedrich Merz, while getting involved in a forever war they were not consulted about would be a second nail. So, they all (predictably) told Trump to pound sand.
Trump responded to this with one of the few diplomatic "tools" he has left, namely bluster. He decreed that really, the United States is fighting this war FOR those other nations, and that it actually has plenty of oil without needing the supplies that pass through the Strait of Hormuz. So, he concluded, if other countries aren't willing to help out, "Maybe we shouldn't even be there."
Forgive our judgmental language, but we are (almost literally) banging our heads against the wall here: Is he really that colossally stupid? First, if you're trying to build an international coalition like this, threats and di**-waving are never going to get you anywhere. Second, does he not realize that America's single-largest foreign source of oil is... Canada? About 55% of all U.S. petroleum imports come from there. And if the U.K. or France or Italy or Spain are running low, and offer a higher price than the U.S. is paying (or, for that matter, the same price as the U.S. is paying), do you think Canada might jump at that? (Note: See allies, pissing on.)
But wait, it gets worse. Because Iran controls the Strait of Hormuz, and because they know where they placed mines, their ships are moving through those waters without difficulty. In fact, as remarkable as this sounds, The Wall Street Journal reports that Iran is actually shipping more oil right now than it was before the war, because it doesn't have to share shipping lanes with anybody. Sure, the U.S. or Israel could fire on one or more of those ships, but then they would get massive blame for the resulting ecological disaster.
But wait, it gets even worse than that. Iran is reportedly considering re-opening the Strait to non-Iranian ships, but only for trades conducted in Chinese yuan. That would be fine and dandy for oh, say... China. And, of course, while the U.S. is unlikely to fire on an Iranian oil tanker, it would never fire on a Chinese tanker. Talk about World War III—that would probably do it.
In short, despite having declared victory on Day 1 (raising the obvious question: Why is there still fighting going on?), the Trump administration has utterly botched this thing, and at the same time is being completely outmaneuvered by the Iranian government. Undoubtedly, Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon are rolling in their graves.
And it is abundantly clear that Trump knows he's dug himself a hole, and that he's starting to feel the heat. The best way to take the President's temperature, of course, is to take a look at his shoot-first-ask-questions-never social media platform. And if you happened to take a look on Sunday night, you saw that he fired off an absolutely unhinged rant about Jerome Powell, and tariffs, and Joe Biden and a whole bunch of other things that ran to nearly 1,000 words. You simply cannot read it and say it's the work of a healthy mind. It's like reading Ulysses or Infinite Jest, except that once you do the hard work of parsing it, there's actually nothing there.
On Monday, Trump turned to another trick he loves to use to try to prop himself up and to deflect responsibility, namely the old "someone told me..." bit. The problem is that when you start a foreign war that appears to have no end in sight, some Joe Palooka off the street isn't going to move the needle. After all, who cares if Joe thought it was a good idea to bomb Iran? And so, for this particular usage of this item from the bag of tricks, Trump went big and said that he spoke to "one of the former presidents who I actually like" and that president allegedly said he liked the decision to bomb Iran and that "I wish I did it."
There are, of course, only four living presidents. Trump strongly implied it was a Democrat, and said outright it wasn't George W. Bush. That leaves us with Joe Biden, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. Trump hates all of them, and none of them are particularly likely to speak to him on the phone, much less speak to him to tell him, "Yeah! Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb bomb Iran!" And if this logic is not enough, well, spokespeople for all four former presidents denied that Trump spoke to them about Iran.
One wonders what happened here. Did he just make it up, not thinking that his story would be verified, and his lie would be caught? Or was he engaging in some wordplay? Did he talk to himself in the mirror, and say "#45, what do you think about all of this?" Or did he maybe stop by the White House portrait of, say, Ronald Reagan, and have a chat with St. Ronnie? Did he talk to A president (say, the president of Israel, Isaac Herzog, or maybe the president of Oracle, Larry Ellison) and just imply it was a U.S. president? Did he hallucinate? Did he have a dream? We'd kind of like to know.
Anyhow, the upshot is that he's showing his usual signs of desperation. The problem here is that Trump has dug himself into a bigger and more dangerous hole than any other he's faced. We stand by our view that the correct political AND human move here is to declare victory, get the hell out of Iran, and try to minimize the fallout. But that does not seem to be the current plan and if, in particular, the world's oil economy begins to transition to the yuan, that could mean very bad things for the U.S. economy, long-term. (Z)