The Circular Logic of Trump’s War with Iran

President Donald Trump has imperiously waffled about on his reasons for aggressively attacking the sovereign country of Iran: for example, to support local protestors; for regime change; to knock out an Iranian nuclear program that he claimed he “obliterated” last year; to weaken Iran’s military, and especially its ballistic missile program. But in war, the enemy has a vote.

And the Iranians have voted by militarily threatening oil tankers and other maritime traffic moving through the narrow Strait of Hormuz and firing missiles and drones at Israel and Gulf Arab countries, including at their oil infrastructure. The president and his immediate advisers were apparently oblivious to these probable Iranian countermoves, but they were maybe the only people in the world who were. Also, the Yemeni Houthis, who attacked shipping around the entrance to the Red Sea in support of Hamas during the recent Israel-Gaza War, have now jumped into Trump’s war with Iran. If the Houthis make the Strait of Bab-el-Mandeb, which leads to the Red Sea and Suez Canal, dangerous for seaborne commercial traffic to traverse, Iran and its proxies will have debilitated two major maritime choke points.

After neglecting the notification of and consultation with U.S. allies about his pending attack on Iran, Trump was then angered when they balked at helping the United States undertake the dangerous and expensive mission of using their warships to convoy oil tankers and other commercial ships through the Strait of Hormuz. And because the Iranians have effectively thumbed their nose at Trump’s threats against Iran’s oil and civilian infrastructure (a war crime if carried out) if they didn’t open the strait, somebody is going to need to undertake opening and keeping open the strait. Yet, Trump has now said that the allies need to do so to take their oil, because much of the oil imported into the United States does not transit the Strait.

That statement exhibits the president’s profound ignorance of the oil market. The market is global, and more oil put on the market by any country (including Iran) tends to lower the world price, and any oil blocked or taken off the market by any country tends to raise it. That means that if neither Iran nor the allies opens the strait, Americans will likely still pay more for gasoline and diesel fuel. Thus, Americans will suffer, and so will the already precarious political fortunes of Trump and the Republicans next November.

The analysis above also applies to Kharg Island, where 90 percent of Iran’s oil exports originate and then pass through the strait. Trump’s threat to destroy these facilities would cause the global oil price to jump even more, again hurting Americans too. And if the United States instead tries to capture the island, fighting there probably would cause damage to those facilities, especially if the Iranians decided to torch them so that America would not control them, nor would the world benefit from the added oil production. Even if the Americans were to capture the facilities intact, any oil exported would still need to transit the dangerous strait.

Thus, everything seems to come back to the strait. So ironically, the de facto goal of any successful Trumpian war, whether he likes it or not, would be to reopen the strait. Yet only Trump’s aggressive attack on Iran in the first place caused the waterway to be effectively closed.

But despite Trump’s rhetoric that the allies should open the strait, the ground forces that Trump is building up in the Persian Gulf region will likely be used for something, but they total only about 60,000 to 70,000. About all they could do in the strait would be to take an island in it or try to control the shores of the waterway on the Iranian side. The Iranians have a large military and a huge zealous Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, armed with still plentiful missiles and drones, which could be used to conduct of a war of attrition, even from afar, against many fewer American forces clinging to the island or the strait’s shores (the same sitting duck status might apply to any U.S. forces that tried to capture and hold Kharg Island).

One last possibility would be to use some U.S. forces to snatch and grab Iran’s nuclear material, which would be much harder than it was to snatch Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro from his bedroom. It seems the Iranians have piled dirt on the entrances to the underground nuclear facilities, thus requiring much time on the ground to unearth the dangerous material. Also, the Iranians have been alerted to the possibility of this threat for a long time, so they could have moved the material or have forces ready to prevent U.S. entry.

In short, Trump is finding out that in war, even a weaker enemy should not be underestimated, has a say, and will fight back on its own indirect terms. He is learning that wars should not be fought merely for military dominance, as the U.S. has shown, but to achieve political aims. Trump’s war is still in search of such aims; the Iranian regime’s goal is clear: survival; it has already been achieved.