There were two revealing moments during Donald Trump’s speech to the nation last night on the war in Iran, and another in a luncheon speech he gave earlier that day. The first was his threat to bomb Iranians “back to the Stone Age where they belong.” Trump was echoing, whether consciously or not, a comment that Air Force General Curtis LeMay had made in a 1965 book. LeMay advised that if North Vietnam didn’t bow to American aims in South Vietnam, the United States “should bomb them back to the Stone Age.”
LeMay’s comment violated fundamental norms of American war and diplomacy. America was supposed to be a “city on the hill,” a “moral exemplar.” Well before the mass protests against the war had started, there was outrage at LeMay’s quote, and it became a permanent stain on his reputation. I.F. Stone famously called him a “caveman in a jet bomber.” That Trump, the elected president of the United States, could use a similar threat says something about him and about the depth to which the country has sunk to tolerate this kind of rhetoric from its leader.
In his speech, Trump also ceded the responsibility for opening the Strait of Hormuz to “the countries of the world that do receive oil through the Hormuz Strait,” which, he claimed, did not include the United States. This repeated a statement he had made on Truth Social. There are two ways to interpret Trump’s statement, and I don’t know which is right. First, Trump could be declaring defeat in the war in Iran. If Iran controls traffic through the Strait, it can threaten the world economy and, in effect, Republican electoral chances in 2026. If Trump’s principal care as president (besides plastering his name on buildings) is the state of the stock and bond market, Iran has the upper hand if it controls the Strait.
Secondly, Captain John Konrad, an expert in shipping and the editor of the website gCaptain, argues that Trump could use the military to open the Strait of Hormuz, and is using his power to do so to extract concessions from the countries, chiefly in Europe, that depend on oil and gas from the Strait. These could include control of Greenland.
Konrad notes that Trump has ordered the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation to provide an insurer for Gulf shipping that would, in effect, replace Lloyd’s as the insurer of last resort and give the United States power over a key choke point in the international economy. I don’t know whether Konrad is right. His argument, as he notes, does not presume that Trump started the war to win control of the Strait in this manner, but that in the course of the war, he (and probably Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent) hit upon this as an ancillary benefit of the war.
Finally, I should mention a statement Trump made in an Easter luncheon speech that day. He said:
The United States can’t take care of daycare. That has to be up to a state. We’re a big country. We have 50 states. We have all these other people, we’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of daycare. You’ve got to let a state take care of daycare, and they should pay for it too. Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things. They can do it on a state basis. You can’t do it on a federal [level]. We have to take care of one thing: military protection — we have to guard the country.
As numerous posts on X noted last night, Democrats could effectively use that statement in the 2026 election to show that Trump cares more about fighting “forever wars” in the Middle East than about providing health care and daycare to Americans. It’s America Second, or in some minds, Israel First. Trump was conceding the point that his critics on the left and right have made against him. On April Fool’s Day, he was playing the fool.
