I’ve written a few posts now about a simple fact that is so apparent in news coverage that it is almost hiding in plain sight: the entire discussion of President Trump’s war with Iran right now is not how close he may be to achieving whatever his war aims might be. It’s the impact of the conflict on global energy prices and how this may impact the cost of gas in the U.S. and thus Trump’s electoral fortunes in November. We now have two closely reported articles which make clear that this wasn’t even a contingency that the White House planned for.
This passage is from a new CNN article which comes after a similar one in the Times ….
Top Trump officials acknowledged to lawmakers during recent classified briefings that they did not plan for the possibility of Iran closing the strait in response to strikes, according to three sources familiar with the closed-door session.
The reason, multiple sources said, was administration officials believed closing the strait would hurt Iran more than the US — a view that was bolstered by Iran’s empty threats to act in the strait after US strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities last summer.
It’s hard to overstate this level of stupidity, incompetence and arrogance. You don’t need to be a foreign relations or region expert to know about this. If you’re even a medium-saturation news consumer you’ve seen maybe a hundred CNN panels on just this subject over the last 30 years. It’s one of the central planning scenarios for the U.S. military. And war games and training scenarios virtually always focus on Iran, or a made-up country meant to stand in for Iran, as the culprit for the simple reason that the U.S. been the guarantor of free navigation in the Gulf since the early 1970s and Iran has been its top regional adversary since 1979.
The idea that Iran wouldn’t have the nerve to impede trade through the Gulf or that it would hurt Iran more than the U.S. is not only contradicted by decades of military planning. It conflicts with the White House’s own stated goals. When you define the goal of your war as overthrowing the adversary government itself, all things become possible, all threats become real. The threat of a short- or medium-term cutoff in oil exports is by definition not an unthinkable threat to a government whose very existence is gravely imperiled by foreign attack. It’s a very big threat to the United States since the U.S. currently faces no real threat to its territory or population or even its military forces in the region.
Another way of looking at this is that … sure, a stoppage of oil exports hurts Iran more than the US. But that’s not the question. The Iranian government is fighting for its life. The White House is focused on optimal economic conditions leading up to the November midterm. So again the standards of pain are not the same. In the backdrop is the simple fact that Trump started this war without caring that much about any of the issues involved. It was just his latest momentary hobbyhorse because he’s currently focused on foreign wars as an emotional support power to help him cope with his declining popularity and power at home.
Looking a bit closer at the CNN article, you get a sense of how this transpired. The article quotes Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth saying that article was bogus and that military planners have always taken the threat of a Gulf blockade seriously. That’s certainly true. But the military’s contingency planning is about keeping sea lanes open and providing critical supplies to the United States. It’s not about the congressional generic average or basis points on the consumer price index. Some presidents are going to be willing to sacrifice their presidencies over a war that they believe is critical to the future of the United States. That was never going to be the case here. For Trump, this was really just a lark, a feel-good interlude like scarfing a half gallon of ice cream in the middle of the night after a really hard day.
The article also notes that the Treasury and Energy secretaries were involved in at least some of the planning meetings for the conflict. The issue, says CNN, was “Trump’s preference of leaning on a tight circle of close advisers in his national security decision making [which] had the effect of sidelining interagency debate over the potential economic fallout.”
I’d interpret this as follows: this likely came down to a discussion involving Secretary of State Marco Rubio and a few other Iran hardliners. That’s where the decision was going to be made. There were probably people on the margins of these planning sessions who knew about the threats of a blockade and possibility of a cutoff in energy supplies. But they would have known these buzzkill remarks weren’t what Trump or his inner ring of advisors wanted to hear. This is the nature of personalist rule. It’s down to the leader’s gut impulses. He doesn’t want to hear about problems. And even for Treasury or Energy, the kinds of advisors and area experts whose advice you’d lean on right now have probably already been fired or resigned. In any case, those issues only come to the fore when Trump realizes that something can go wrong which directly impacts his electoral prospects in the midterms. Then it’s a big deal. Because unlike with Pentagon planning, for Trump it’s a popularity and electoral issue. This is how we got here.
I think this may finally be the self-inflicted crisis Trump cannot simply unwind or polarize to his own advantage. There’ve been so many that this seems like quite a bold thing to say. But even with tariffs, the U.S. could have pulled the plug on them at any moment. They were a crisis of Trump’s own making. But in the short- to medium-term they were also almost entirely under his control. Iran now appears to be escalating efforts to close the Strait of Hormuz. It will be pretty hard for Trump just to declare victory now and end this in the hopes that Iran will follow suit and stand down too. And remember that Iran only has to be partly successful at disrupting tanker traffic through the strait to have a big effect on prices and supply. Lurking over this whole three-week drama has been the very different scales of risk which apply to militaries and civilian commercial traffic. War zones are inherently risky. It’s all a matter of degree. Tanker companies want to operate in no-risk environments. If the chance of your tanker getting sunk is more than 1% that’s probably way too much. Once you’ve introduced kinetic risk into the equation, it seeps through the whole fabric of commerce. And it’s very hard to wring out. Ironically, the Iranians are showing that regime change can go both ways.