rinse and repeat...
Trump may have caused all this damage, but America voted for him, and that will be remembered long after Trump has gone.
And what does he do? He tries to do both at the same time.
Yesterday Trump told reporters that Iran “gave us a present and the present arrived today. It was a very big present worth a tremendous amount of money,” he said. “It wasn’t nuclear-related, it was oil and gas-related,” he added.
Today Katherine Doyle, Courtney Kube, and Dan De Luce of NBC News reported that U.S. military officials have kept Trump up to date on events in the war on Iran by showing him a two-minute montage video of “the biggest, most successful strikes on Iranian targets over the previous 48 hours,” or, as one put it: “stuff blowing up.”
Although Trump also receives briefings through conversations with military and intelligence officers, news reports, and foreign leaders, some of Trump’s allies expressed concern to the reporters that he is not “receiving—or absorbing—the complete picture of the war, now in its fourth week.” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called their observation “an absolutely false assertion coming from someone who has not been present in the room,” but officials noted that briefings tend to focus on U.S. successes rather than Iranian actions.
The story of corruption in the Trump administration broke open after Trump fired Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem as stories about contracting irregularities have leaked into the media. The suspicious timing of trades in S&P 500 and oil futures on Monday about fifteen minutes before Trump announced his team had been negotiating with Iran—although it hadn’t—has raised public accusations of insiders trading on national security information and thereby endangering Americans.
Yesterday Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top-ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, wrote a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi in response to a disclosure the Department of Justice (DOJ) had made, likely inadvertently. As part of the Republicans’ attempt to smear special counsel Jack Smith, who investigated Trump’s retention of classified documents when he left office after his first term, on March 13 the DOJ provided the House Judiciary Committee with documents related to Smith’s investigation.
Raskin noted that some of those documents potentially violate the gag order Judge Aileen Cannon placed on that material as part of the attempt to keep it from public scrutiny. This suggests, he wrote, that the DOJ appears to take the position “that it can violate Judge Cannon’s order and grand jury secrecy whenever it sees an opportunity to smear Jack Smith.”
The documents also “include damning evidence” against Trump. The documents show that highly classified documents from his time in office were mingled with material from after he left, suggesting he illegally retained documents.
The documents the DOJ provided to the committee, Raskin wrote, “suggest that Donald Trump stole documents so sensitive that only six people in the entire U.S. government had access to them, that the documents President Trump stole pertained to his business interests, and that Susie Wiles, then the CEO of Donald Trump’s super PAC, witnessed President Trump showing off a classified map to passengers on his private plane. This glimpse into the trove of evidence behind the coverup reveals a President of the United States who may have sold out our national security to enrich himself.”
A prosecutor’s memorandum provided to the committee by the DOJ suggested that “the disclosure of these documents represented ‘an aggravated potential harm to national security.’ The prosecutors also wrote that these were ‘highly sensitive documents—the type of documents that only presidents and officials with the most sensitive authority have.’ One ‘particularly sensitive document was accessible by only 6? people, including the president.’”
Raskin noted that Trump took classified documents on a flight to his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, possibly showing people on that flight, including now–White House chief of staff Wiles, a classified map. Raskin also pointed out that at about the same time, Trump was entering into business partnerships with Saudi-backed LIV Golf and a state-linked Saudi real estate company, and that Trump told a ghostwriter he had “classified records relating to the bombing of Iran.”
Raskin wrote: “It is now clear that DOJ is in possession of evidence that President Trump has already endangered national security to further the interests of Trump family businesses. It is time for you to stop the cover-up and allow the American people to know what secrets he betrayed and how he may have cashed in on them. Our country is at war, American lives are at stake, and the answer to these questions has never been more pressing.”
Raskin asked the DOJ to answer questions about what was on the classified map Trump showed people on his plane, which documents Trump retained were important to his businesses, which family members knew what was in the classified documents, which document was so sensitive that only six people had access to it, whether any of the documents Trump stole or showed to others related to plans for war in the Middle East, and which, if any, foreign actors tried to access—or succeeded in accessing—the documents. He gave it a deadline of March 31 to answer these questions, and a deadline of April 14 to produce “all remaining investigative files” from Smith’s investigations.
Zach Everson of Public Citizen’s Trump Accountability Project noted that when Trump left office in 2021, his businesses were mainly real estate and hospitality and he had massive amounts of debt coming due. At the time, he had no interests in crypto and Trump Media didn’t exist.
Today the DOJ announced a settlement with right-wing activist Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security official who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his conversations with Russian operative and ambassador Sergey Kislyak before Trump took office. Trump later pardoned him, and Flynn worked to overturn results of the 2020 presidential election to say Trump won.
In 2023 Flynn sued the DOJ for $50 million in damages, claiming he was wrongly prosecuted because of his association with Trump. A federal judge threw out the lawsuit in 2024, but Flynn’s lawyers renewed their case when Trump was reelected, and the DOJ engaged in negotiations. Today’s settlement notice did not specify a financial amount but said there will be a payment of “settlement funds.” Alexander Mallin of ABC News reported this evening that the amount was approximately $1.2 million.
In the New York Times yesterday, Lauren McGaughy reported that White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller is urging Republicans in state legislatures to pass extremist legislation on issues like immigration that Congress cannot, especially if one or both of the chambers in Congress flip to the Democrats in 2026. Texas House Republican Caucus chair Tom Oliverson told McGaughy that legislatures like that of Texas “can be a place where some of those ideas can be tried out because they’re difficult to do at the federal level.” Miller has called, for example, for Texas to pass a bill to end public education for undocumented children despite the 1982 Supreme Court decision striking down such a law.
But Democrats are also working at the state level to expand their own vision of equality before the law and government protection of ordinary people, including in places like Minnesota, where officials yesterday sued the Trump administration for access to information about shootings by federal officers, including the shootings that led to the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
Those state-level efforts to defend everyday Americans resonate tonight because today is the anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911, in which 147 workers, mostly girls and women, died either from smoke inhalation or from their fall as they jumped from high factory windows after their employer had locked the fire escape to prevent them from stealing the blouses they were making.
The horrors of that day led New Yorkers to demand the government stop such workplace abuses. “I can’t begin to tell you how disturbed the people were everywhere,” recalled Frances Perkins, a young social worker who witnessed the tragedy. “It was as though we had all done something wrong. It shouldn’t have been. We were sorry…. We didn’t want it that way. We hadn’t intended to have 147 girls and boys killed in a factory. It was a terrible thing for the people of the City of New York and the State of New York to face.”
Perkins joined a committee charged with investigating working conditions in New York, including long hours, low wages, the labor of children, and so on. It worked with a Factory Investigating Commission set up by the New York State legislature that examined working conditions around the state. They found children working in factories, women bending over poisonous chemicals, and overcrowded factories that workers could not escape in case of emergency.
New York City politicians like Al Smith cheered on the “do-gooders” but remained convinced that only political changes could make the deep and lasting changes to society necessary to improve the lives of everyday Americans. He worked to build a coalition to create those changes, and managed to usher 36 new laws regulating factories through the state legislature in three years.
Lawmakers in other states began to write similar measures of their own, and when voters elected New York’s Franklin Delano Roosevelt to the presidency in 1932, the nation was ready to take such legislation national. Roosevelt brought Frances Perkins with him to Washington, where as secretary of labor she helped to usher in unemployment insurance, health insurance, old-age insurance, a 40-hour work week, a minimum wage, and abolition of child labor.
Perkins later mused that the state efforts that led to national changes might have helped in some way to pay the debt society owed to those whose suffering brought horrified awareness that something in the nation had gone horribly wrong. “The extent to which this legislation in New York marked a change in American political attitudes and policies toward social responsibility can scarcely be overrated,” she said. “It was, I am convinced, a turning point.”
President Trump, in his latest broadside at Europe, castigated its leaders for refusing to help keep open the Strait of Hormuz. “They complain about the high oil prices they are forced to pay,” he said on social media last week, but they reject “a simple military maneuver that is the single reason for the high oil prices.”
However impulsive his outburst, it pointed up a deeper truth: Mr. Trump has put Europe’s leaders into a kind of double bind.
Iran’s de facto closure of the strategic waterway has set off a full-blown energy crisis across the Continent. With skyrocketing oil and gas prices angering voters throughout Europe, the pressure is mounting on its leaders to take more forceful actions to reopen the shipping lanes.
Yet at the same time, Europe’s political winds are blowing ever more fiercely against the war, raising the stakes for leaders to take part. The military campaign is faulted by many Europeans, especially on the left, who say it is gratuitous, illegal and now is threatening Europe’s fragile growth. The leaders also remain haunted by the Iraq War, which Britain supported, to its lasting regret.
“We are divided as usual,” said Gérard Araud, a former French ambassador to Israel and the United States. “Europeans are showing their weakness on several levels. We are in a state of total shock about what is happening.”
Already, the war is tilting politics. In Italy, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni lost a referendum to overhaul the judicial system that leaves her politically damaged. The perception that she is close to Mr. Trump, who is deeply unpopular in Italy, did not help, especially when he did not bother to call her before the war.
In France, a far-left party opposed to Mideast intervention, France Unbowed, scored gains in mayoral elections last week. That came despite the party getting caught up in controversies, including the arrest of two party aides after the killing of a right-wing activist. Analysts said the party benefited from the votes of Muslims who are angry about the war.
Still, for all the political hazards, there are compelling reasons for Europe to ensure the Strait of Hormuz is not blocked for a prolonged period. In Germany, gasoline has topped 2 euros per liter, the equivalent of $9.48 per gallon. That has forced Germany and other countries into costly tax cuts and price caps to cushion the shock.
“The Europeans have every interest in opening the strait to tanker and other trade, and in showing the smaller Gulf states that they are reliable allies,” said Peter Westmacott, a former British ambassador to France and the United States. “So, once satisfied that they are acting defensively rather offensively, those who can are looking for ways to help.”
For all Mr. Trump’s pressure on Europe, he has not made it easy for its leaders to support him. The United States did not consult allies on the joint U.S.-Israeli operation or, in most cases, even give them a heads-up. The lack of collaboration came after a fraught period in which Mr. Trump escalated his threats of a takeover of Greenland and zigzagged in his support for Ukraine.
Mr. Trump has since been insulting to European leaders, particularly Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain, who worked assiduously to cultivate him. Mr. Starmer is “no Winston Churchill,” he said, before circulating a mocking British TV sketch of the prime minister quaking before a phone call with the president.
R. Nicholas Burns, who served as American ambassador to NATO during the Iraq War, said “the scurrilous comments that Trump made about the British prime minister” were the latest in a series of hostile gestures that would make it politically untenable for European leaders to take part in offensive military operations.
“All of that has contributed to the political problems that European countries have, and they’re all democracies,” Mr. Burns said.
Even when he appealed to the Europeans to step up, Mr. Trump managed to disparage them. The United States, he said, did not actually need their military assets. Diplomats and military officials say that laid bare his real motive: to force Europe to assume the political risk of joining the military campaign.
While analysts note that Europe could contribute to a military operation in the strait — deploying minesweepers, for example, or other warships to escort tankers — they say that Europe’s military assets are secondary to the value of having its political buy-in for the broader campaign.
“There are realities where it would be convenient to have more ships,” said Michel Yakovleff, a retired French general and former NATO planner. “But that’s not the Trump line. If Trump were open to saying, ‘Quite frankly, given the magnitude of the problem, we’d like to have more,’ then the calculation could be different.”
But since Mr. Trump dismissed the value of Europe’s military contribution, General Yakovleff said, “that means it’s political.”
He said European leaders were right not to give Mr. Trump political cover because he has yet to clarify his strategic objectives or lay out an exit ramp for the war. On Monday, the president said “very good” talks were underway to end hostilities, a contention quickly disputed by Iranian officials.
To put together a coalition for the strait, General Yakovleff said, Mr. Trump would need to hammer out an agreement with members on the scope of the operation, what each would contribute, the chain of command and rules of engagement. Such a process would take at least two months, he said.
Last week, leaders from Europe, joined by several from Asia and the Persian Gulf, dropped their resistance to taking part in such an operation. But their statement was hardly full-throated: “We express our readiness to contribute to appropriate efforts to ensure safe passage through the strait,” it said.
President Emmanuel Macron of France is working behind the scenes to obtain the imprimatur of the United Nations for a post-conflict operation to keep the strait open. European Union officials have raised the idea of expanding the mandate of other naval protection missions in the region.
Given Europe’s history of negotiating with Iran on its nuclear program, said Mr. Araud, the former ambassador, it could play a more meaningful role diplomatically in helping wind down the conflict.
But he said Europe was hamstrung by three interlocking factors: Mr. Trump’s distrust of Europe, especially after its refusal to support the war; Europe’s fears that antagonizing the president could lead him to punish Ukraine; and Iran’s suspicion of Europe, given its reluctance to confront him more openly.
“We could play the role of go-between, but Trump would rather have the Pakistanis,” Mr. Araud said, adding that “the Iranians don’t trust us either; they think we are in the pocket of the Americans.”
Trump wanted a short-term intervention, presumably to score points in the congressional elections. And he certainly dreamt of bringing Iranian oil under American control – much as he had done in Venezuela. And, of course, he no doubt hoped for the cheers of gratitude from the Iranian people, who would now be able to take their fate into their own hands. Then he’ll definitely would be in line for the Nobel Peace Prize – in gold, of course.
1. Iran acknowledges that Donald Trump is the best president the US has ever had.
2. The Strait of Hormuz will henceforth be known as the Strait of America.
3. Iran will cease to resist. That is truly cheeky.
4. Iran agrees to pass on the Revolutionary Guards’ expertise in the field of shooting civilians to ICE agents.
5. Iran recognises Donald Trump as its religious and political leader.
6. Iran will build at least twelve Trump International Golf Resorts and four Trump Hotels.
7. Iran will join Donald Trump’s Peace Council.
8. All Iranians must watch the film ‘Melania’ immediately.
9. Iran shall purchase all remaining stocks of Trump trainers, Trump Bibles, Trump trading cards and Trump condoms.
10. All potholes on the Strait of Hormuz (hereafter the Strait of America, see point 2) shall be repaired immediately.
11. Iran shall immediately cease being on the verge of completing a nuclear bomb, as it has been for over 30 years.
12. Iran will host Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump every other weekend.
13. Iran agrees to store the Epstein files in Tehran and then ‘accidentally’ destroy them.
14. Iran grants the US the right to drill for oil anywhere in Iran.
15. Donald Trump receives the Nobel Peace Prize.
In an interview with Reuters on Monday, Singapore’s minister for foreign affairs, Dr. Vivian Balakrishnan, put in bald language the change in the world order instigated by President Donald J. Trump.
“For 80 years,” Balakrishnan explained, “the US was the underwriter for a system of globalisation based on UN Charter principles, multilateralism, territorial integrity, sovereign equality.” That system “heralded an unprecedented and unique period of global prosperity and peace. Of course there were exceptions. And of course, the Cold War was still in effect for at least half of the last 80 years. But generally, for those of us who were non-communists, who ran open economies, who provided first world infrastructure, together with a hardworking disciplined people, we had unprecedented opportunities.
“The story of Singapore, with a per capita GDP of 500 US dollars in 1965. Now, [it is] somewhere between 80,000 to 90,000 US dollars. It would not have happened if it had not been for this unprecedented period, basically Pax Americana and then turbocharged by the reform and opening of China for decades. It has been unprecedented. It has been great for many of us. In fact, I will say, for all of us, if you look back 80 years.
“But now, whether you like it or not, objectively, this period has ended…. Basically, the underwriter of this world order has now become a revisionist power, and some people would even say a disruptor. But the larger point is that the erosion of norms, processes, and institutions that underpinned a remarkable period of peace and prosperity; that foundation has gone.”
In its place, as scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder said to me in a YouTube conversation yesterday, Trump is aligning himself with international oligarchs like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Saudi Arabia’s Mohammad bin Salman (MBS), and China’s Xi Jinping. Because of his position as the president of the United States of America, this means he is aligning the United States of America with this oligarchical axis as well, abandoning the country’s democratic principles and traditional allies.
On February 28, Michael Birnbaum, John Hudson, Karen DeYoung, Natalie Allison, and Souad Mekhennet of the Washington Post reported that Trump initially launched the strikes on Iran at the urging of MBS and Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, despite the assessment of U.S. intelligence that Iran did not pose an imminent threat to the U.S. and would not for at least a decade. Both countries see Iran as a threat to their power and want it weakened. Netanyahu has been eager to get rid of the Iranian regime for decades and has urged previous U.S. presidents to attack without success.
On Tuesday, March 24, Julian E. Barnes, Tyler Pager, and Eric Schmitt of the New York Times reported that MBS sees a “historic opportunity” to remake the Middle East and so has been pushing Trump to continue his war against Iran. MBS, the journalists report, has urged Trump to use troops to seize Iran’s energy infrastructure and drive the regime out of power. He has assured Trump that the jump in oil prices will be temporary, although most observers disagree.
Judd Legum of Popular Information notes that the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF) controlled by MBS invested $2 billion in the private equity firm of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, one of Trump’s volunteer Iran negotiators, before the war. A report by Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee and House Oversight Committee released on March 19 says that “since 2021, Mr. Kushner has collected more than $110 million from the government of Saudi Arabia for investment management services that have reaped little to no return.”
The fallout from the Iran war has also benefited Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Despite reports that Russia is aiding Iran in the fight, the Trump administration dropped sanctions on Russian oil that was already at sea, giving Russia an injection of up to $10 billion a month into its cash-strapped war effort against Ukraine.
Today Trump reposted Russian propaganda claiming that Ukraine discussed funneling money to Biden’s reelection campaign. Also today, four Russian lawmakers arrived in Washington, D.C., for the first such visit since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 to talk with lawmakers and officials, “part of the normalization of relations with the United States of America,” as one of the Russians told the Russian press.
Trump declared he was determined to achieve peace between Russia and Ukraine, but this week, according to Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky, administration officials said the U.S. would not guarantee Ukraine’s security unless Ukraine withdraws from its own land in Donbas. Ceding the region to Russia would essentially give Putin what he launched the war to grab. It is the same region that was at stake in 2016, when Russian operatives told Trump’s 2016 campaign manager they would help Trump’s presidential candidacy if he would look the other way as Putin installed a puppet over the region.
This afternoon, Noah Robertson and Ellen Francis of the Washington Post reported that the Pentagon is considering diverting weapons intended for Ukraine to the Middle East. They also noted that on Monday, Pentagon officials told Congress that it was going to divert about $750 million in funding provided by NATO countries for Ukraine to restock military weapons in the U.S. instead. About allocating weapons, Trump told the reporters, “we do that all the time. We have them in other countries, like in Germany and all over Europe. Sometimes we take from one and we use for another.”
Last week, the U.S. eased sanctions on banks in Russia’s ally Belarus, and today Trump announced he would ease further sanctions on Belarus to try to get fertilizer into the U.S. since Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz has stopped the transportation of about 20% of the world’s fertilizer. Also today, Belarus’s president Alexander Lukashenko signed a treaty with another of Putin’s allies, North Korea’s president Kim Jong Un, announcing a “fundamentally new stage” of the relationship between the two countries as they “oppose undue pressure on Belarus from the West.” Both Belarus and North Korea support Russia in its war on Ukraine.
Trump has openly endorsed Orbán for reelection in Hungary’s April 12 elections, posting on social media yesterday: “Relations between Hungary and the United States have reached new heights of cooperation and spectacular achievement under my Administration, thanks largely to Prime Minister Orbán. I look forward to continuing working closely with him so that both of our Countries can further advance this tremendous path to SUCCESS and cooperation.” Urging Hungarians to vote for Orbán, Trump continued: “He is a true friend, fighter, and WINNER, and has my Complete and Total Endorsement.… I AM WITH HIM ALL THE WAY!”
The framers of the Constitution tried to set up a system that would make it impossible for a president to go to war for private interests or the benefit of other countries, establishing that Congress alone can declare war. The framers wanted the American people to weigh in on whether they wanted to dedicate their lives and their fortunes to a war.
But Trump simply began the Iran war without consultation with Congress, and administration officials have refused to appear at hearings, instead briefing Congress behind closed doors. At an annual fundraising dinner for Republican members of Congress, Trump appeared to acknowledge he was violating the Constitution. He spoke of the “tremendous success” of what he called his “military operation” in Iran. He continued: “I won’t use the word war ’cause they say if you use the word war, that’s maybe not a good thing to do. They don’t like the word war because you are supposed to get approval. So I will use the word military operation.”
Now, as the war costs at least $1 billion a day and Trump’s declarations fluctuate wildly from saying the war is over to suggesting he is considering deploying ground troops to posting this morning that Iranian negotiators “better get serious soon, before it is too late, because once that happens, there is NO TURNING BACK, and it won’t be pretty!” even Republicans are starting to have misgivings. The war has pushed Trump’s approval rating down to just 36%, while a new Reuters poll shows that only 25% of Americans approve of how Trump is handling the cost of living. Today the stock market, which has generally trended downward since the invasion, dropped sharply as traders apparently recognized that the cost of oil is not coming down anytime soon.
Yesterday, after a classified briefing, House Armed Services Committee chair Mike Rogers (R-AL), who backed the Iran strikes, told reporters that Congress members “want to know more about what’s going on, what the options are, and why they’re being considered,” adding, “And we’re just not getting enough answers on those questions.” Chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee Roger Wicker (R-MS) commented: “I can see why he might have said that.”
In an in-depth interview with Hunter Walker and Josh Kovensky of Talking Points Memo yesterday, Representative Joe Morelle (D-NY), who sits on the House Appropriations Committee, explained how Trump’s Iran incursion has become a “mess” for the president. The administration has suggested it is going to ask for $200 billion for the war, and Morelle noted that we are already closing in on $30 billion in spending on it and that“when you consider all the things that Trump rejects or the Republicans reject as too costly, the fact that they have now spent $30 billion in effectively the span of a month without even talking to Congress about this expenditure is really somewhat staggering.”
Morelle noted that even if the White House or the Pentagon did start to provide specifics, “I’m not sure it would matter anyway because the president changes his mind so frequently. He might say something and literally without exaggeration, a half hour later say something completely different, or even sometimes within the same press conference, give two wildly different answers.”
Morelle told Walker and Kovensky: “They fight us on things that will help American families be able to pursue dreams, take care of the food, housing, and healthcare needs of millions of families that they can’t afford”—precisely the things that, as Minister Balakrishnan noted, the post–World War II international order enabled people around the world to attain. “But,” Morelle said, “they can go into an ill-conceived military action that has neither the support of Congress nor the support of American families, which has no clear objectives, shifting goals, and has alienated our allies and made us less safe.”
A war of regression: how Trump bombed the US into a worse position with Iran
Analysts fear Iran has played a weak hand well and the US has blundered into a defining strategic failure
Four weeks into a war that was going to take four days, and that has so far cost the US about $30-40bn and Israel $300m a day, Washington is further away from a diplomatic agreement with Iran than it was in May 2025.
Not only has the war failed to persuade Iran to agree to dismantle its nuclear programme in the comprehensive and irreversible way the US demanded in a 15-point paper that it tabled on 23 May last year, Washington is now having to negotiate to reopen the strait of Hormuz, a strategic waterway that has been open ever since the invention of the dhow, with a short exception of a tanker war in the 1980s between Iran and Iraq.
This regression is proving to be perplexing for the American high command. Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defence, recently said that “the only thing prohibiting transit in the strait right now is Iran shooting at shipping”, but this was not quite right. Iran has not been shooting at shipping that much in recent weeks. Instead, it is the fear of Iran shooting at shipping that is scaring off insurers and tanker owners.
Still worse from the US perspective, Iran has set up a waterside stall whereby prime ministers and tanker owners can bargain with the Iranian navy over the toll they are willing to pay for their tankers to be given “free passage”. Iran plans to turn the strait into a money spinner, just as Egypt charges for access to the Suez canal. By some calculations, given the massive scale of the traffic that passes through the strait each year, Iran could raise $80bn a year. If a law currently being rushed through the Iranian parliament passes, tankers carrying oil from favoured non-hostile nations such as India, Japan, Pakistan, South Korea and China will be waved through or offered cheaper rates.
Little wonder Trump is thrashing around. The US along with Israel continues to bomb Iran, but he has now twice put back the date of threatened strikes on Iran’s civilian power stations – an action that would constitute a war crime. He continues to insist Iran has been defeated and yet Iran continues to behave as if it is not.
That is partly because this struggle is not just being fought in command posts, but on the trading floor. The price of oil is the key metric for Iran’s success, along with its remaining supply of missile launchers. As a result, 95% of traffic through the strait of Hormuz remains blocked, depriving the markets of 10-13m barrels of oil each day. Such is Iran’s stranglehold even Trump describes Iran allowing ships through as a “present” to the US.
Trump admits he is surprised the price of oil is not higher. Jason Bordoff, the founding director at the Center on Global Energy Policy, agrees. “At some point, the physical reality of the loss of that much oil per day has to catch up with the paper markets, the trading expectations,” he says. “There is no policy intervention that can cope with a disruption that large.”
For Iran, oil trading anything above $100 a barrel is pitched high enough to destroy demand and disrupt the world economy. But it is not just oil. The strait provides passage for chemicals, helium, metals and fertilisers. As during the Covid pandemic, the world is discovering something new about the inter-connectedness of supply chains and how geography has blessed Iran with a unique chance to break these chains.
Mary I supposedly said: “When I am dead and opened, you shall find ‘Calais’ lying in my heart” – a reference to the painful English loss of Calais to the French in January 1558. For Trump, the word may be Hormuz, the waterway where his presidency ran aground. For it is hard to find a serious commentator, of any nationality or expertise, who thinks the advantage in this war currently lies with the US.
Sir Alex Younger, the former head of MI6, told the Economist that – much as it pained him – it was Iran, his old adversary, that had the upper hand. “The reality is the US underestimated the task and I think, as about two weeks ago, lost the initiative to Iran. In practice, the Iranian regime has been more resilient than anyone would have expected. They took some good decisions as early as last June about dispersing their weapons and delegating authority for using those weapons which has given them extra resilience. Through the strait they have globalised not internationalised the conflict. They have played a weak hand pretty well.”
Mairav Zonszein, a senior analyst on Israel at the International Crisis Group, says: “It is becoming painfully clear that not only the United States and Israel are losing this war, but that this is one of the biggest strategic failures of the west, with the most significant consequences for regional geopolitics and the global economy since world war two.” He said the US was nowhere near meeting its original strategic goals and had only created new problems.
Domestic politics in the US is also becoming ominous. Curt Mills, the executive director of the American Conservative, says: “Trump’s legacy is at stake in Iran: if the war drags on, that will be all that will be remembered of his second term. George W Bush also did not want to be a war president: he had goals regarding education, immigration and social welfare. None of this was accomplished; his record was crushed by the war in Iraq.” Americans, including Republicans, want this war to end, adding to the pressure on Trump to prove that sending 10,000 troops to the Middle East would not be the definition of a strategic quagmire.
Inside the Iran regime, where survival was the objective, there is a growing sense that the balance is tilting in their favour, so much so that Iran may indeed overplay the weak hand to which Younger referred. The Iranian media, for instance, is repeatedly picking up stories from western thinkers and retired generals claiming Trump’s strategy has failed.
The speaker of the parliament, and supposedly Trump’s preferred leader, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, is clear: US soldiers will only find they cannot fix what their generals have broken. Without naming the United Arab Emirates, he said he was aware a country was planning to join a US effort reopen the strait by force and that country would find nothing would be spared.
Not surprisingly, at his more than hour-long pre-cabinet press conference on Thursday morning, Trump denied that the US was ensnared. He reiterated that the military campaign was well ahead of schedule. The Iranians know they have a disaster on their hands, he said, adding that “they were begging to negotiate, not me”. He said: “If they don’t negotiate, we are their worst nightmare. I am the opposite of being desperate.”
Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, reiterated the US’s key demands laid out in his updated 15-point plan: no domestic uranium enrichment, no stockpiles, removal of enriched uranium from Iran, restrictions on missile capability and reopening the strait of Hormuz. Witkoff claimed there were strong signs that the Iranians knew after their 27-day pummelling that they were at an inflection point.
But he took no account of the counterdemands now tabled by Iran on the strait of Hormuz, a problem that has only arisen owing to the US decision to attack Iran, or on sanctions relief.
Philip Gordon, a former foreign policy adviser to Kamala Harris when she was US vice-president, thinks “there is no chance Iran will agree to Trump’s demands and the longer the US holds out for them, the more costs and pain everyone will endure. In the short term at least, limits on Iran’s nuclear programme, ballistic missiles, support for proxies and threat to the strait are all more likely to be ensured through deterrence and prevention than with a comprehensive, formal agreement, and the sooner we recognise that, the better off we will be.”
The former head of the Iran desk at Israel’s military intelligence, Danny Citrinowicz, also predicted that by the expiry of Trump’s latest 10-day deadline, Iran would not surrender, would not accept the 15-point framework, would not relinquish control of Hormuz and would continue attacks on Israel and the Gulf states. After that, Trump will face a decisive choice: a further escalation of tensions, a retreat or a push for a negotiated settlement similar to the one Iran offered in March. The UN is not going to sanction the use of force to reopen the strait, Europe will not participate and the G7 will not endorse it.
One diplomat recently involved in the peace talks says he fears that if Trump cannot see a way out, he will resort to a nuclear weapon.
Emile Hokayem, from the International Institute for Strategic Studies, senses that “Trump wants to avoid a long, protracted war of attrition so the Pentagon is giving him high risk, high investment options with potential high impact, as if one big blow will change the trajectory of the war, or at least the perception of it – ie that Iran retains strategic leverage by having identified and developed control over the centre of gravity of the war, Hormuz.
“This reminds me of when US and Israeli analysts and officials were arguing that Rafah in May 2024 was going to be the big, final blow in the Gaza war. How did that work?”
