Ol’ Donny Trump Has Really Stepped in It This Time

If there is a core feature of the phenomenon of Donald Trump, it’s impunity. This has less to do with Trump’s personal intelligence or ability than with luck—in the early 2000s, his largely fake business empire was on the verge of collapse when NBC bailed him out by putting him on The Apprentice—along with a broader cultural movement among American elites that nobody beyond a certain social status should ever face consequences for wrongdoing, no matter how heinous. Even the Biden administration repeatedly attempted to give Trump the good ol’ boy treatment for keeping stolen classified documents in his bathroom in Mar-a-Lago (which, to be fair, Biden had stashed in his house, too, though not to the same degree).

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But there is a limit to American elites’ bailout capacity, luck is in the hands of the gods, and it’s looking like there will be no escape from at least some consequences for Trump’s war of choice on Iran. Judges might refuse to hold him in contempt even as he directs violent threats against their own family members, the Supreme Court might declare him a king formally above the law, but they can’t stop a naval drone, or rebuild a shattered natural gas processing facility.

The latter is what happened in Qatar this week, as Iran attacked the Ras Laffan liquefied natural gas (LNG) facility in retaliation for an Israeli strike on its gas infrastructure. The facility used to produce about 17 percent of Qatar’s LNG, or 3 percent of the world total, and will reportedly take three to five years to repair—assuming Iran doesn’t hit it again. While I was drafting this article, Iran also hit an F-35 with anti-aircraft fire, forcing the pilot to make an emergency landing.

While LNG shortages are probably good news for U.S. producers, much of the Qatari supply was bound for Asia, which is approaching a crisis right now and happens to be where much of the world’s manufacturing comes from. Taiwan’s electric grid runs to a large degree on LNG; nearly all high-end semiconductors come from TSMC facilities in Taiwan, which require a continuous and stable supply of energy. Chip fabrication also needs helium, which is also primarily produced in … Qatar.

The easiest way to cripple the global economy is to abruptly halt semiconductor production. We may be days away from seeing how easy.

Donald Trump, Oil Market Obliterator

TRUMP’S NEW WAR OF AGGRESSION has to be ranked among the most idiotic decisions in the history of military conflict. It’s up there with Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, or Pickett’s Charge, or the Battle of the Little Bighorn, except if the aggressor armies in those conflicts forgot to bring any fuel, tanks, or rations.

The reason even extremely bellicose previous presidents like George W. Bush did not start a serious war with Iran is that it is stone-cold obvious that Iran would retaliate by blockading the Strait of Hormuz—which, as we’ve all learned, carries a fifth of global oil and liquified natural gas production, a tenth of aluminum, and much else—and there would be no way to open it back up short of an immense and ongoing naval escort mission, or a land invasion of a large country with very rugged terrain and a population of more than 90 million people.

The Pentagon has filing cabinets stuffed with war plans dealing with this possibility. The U.S. might take out most of Iran’s formal military, but even back in the 1980s during the Tanker War, when Iran was much less developed than it is today, the Navy found it very difficult to stop irregular forces from laying mines at night, or planting limpet bombs, conducting missile attacks from speedboats, and so on. Operation Earnest Will, an escort mission to keep the strait open, required more than two dozen ships operating simultaneously (including support from both the British and the French), went on for more than a year, and saw significant casualties.

Today, not only do we have drone technology making these types of attacks much more dangerous and effective, but also the U.S. Navy is much smaller than it was at the end of the Cold War. In particular, it has almost none of the frigates and minesweepers that were core to the Tanker War’s escort mission. Half of its old minesweepers were decommissioned last year, and several of the littoral ships meant to replace them are, mystifyingly, 4,000 miles away in Asia.

Not only did Trump plow ahead anyway, but his whole administration either had no plan for what to do if Iran blocked the strait, or didn’t look at the ones they did have. According to CNN, it didn’t even occur to them.

Trump has showed a similar incomprehensible sloppiness in international support. He has spent much of the last year edging right up to a shooting war with the European Union over his desire to conquer Greenland, despite America already having military access to the entire place. It got so bad that Danish troops were ready to blow up the runways at Nuuk and Kangerlussuaq.

Now, after infuriating and alienating the entire EU, and after the war had already started, Trump started begging them for help. “It’d be nice to have other countries police it with us,” he told reporters. “We’re always there for NATO. We’re helping them with Ukraine.” He even asked China for help. Unsurprisingly, help was not forthcoming.

And as I previously wrote, Trump didn’t even bother to refill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve last year when oil was cheaper than it had been in years.

Making everything worse is Trump’s alliance with Israel, whose government is evidently bent on turning Iran into a stygian nightmare of death and suffering. As noted above, the destruction of Ras Laffan was touched off by an Israeli strike—and it happened after Trump asked Israel not to. Iran struggles to hit back at Israel, but it can hit at the allies of Israel’s most important ally, and increase the pressure on the global economy.

What Trump usually does when one of his dotard plots backfires is to retreat—chicken out, as Wall Street has called it—and pretend it never happened. That sort of works with something like tariffs, where long-term damage takes a long time to appear. But it likely won’t be possible here.

The easiest and least painful way to end Trump’s war is likely just to give up and let Iran seize the strait.

The developing situation in the region is that Iran is consolidating formal control over the strait. Some ships are getting through outside the traditional international corridor, hugging the Iranian coast and halting for a time just off Hormuz Island, presumably for an inspection. Only nations that have friendly relations with Iran, like China, are getting anything out. In a black irony, Iran is so far exporting more oil than it was last year.

The easiest and least painful way to end Trump’s war is likely just to give up and let Iran seize the strait. Whatever extortionate tolls they might charge, it can’t be worse than choking off an artery controlling a quarter of international shipping. The likeliest reason that wouldn’t work is that Iran would not be satisfied; for obvious reasons, it is going to want some guarantees that America will not attack again, and even some reparations for all the child murder.

But allowing Iran to set up a toll gate across the Strait of Hormuz is the outcome all American military plans have prioritized preventing at any cost. Allowing it to happen would probably collapse the alliance system with the Gulf states overnight. It would make Trump look like the world-historical imbecile he in fact is.

It would also send the D.C. political press into a paroxysm of bloodthirsty rage. When President Biden ripped the Band-Aid off and ended the occupation of Afghanistan back in 2021, D.C. reporters savaged him mercilessly for weeks over the blow to their imperial pride, causing a dip in his polling numbers from which Biden never recovered. (After that, of course, the D.C. press went back to paying as much attention to Afghanistan as they had during the previous 20 years of failed occupation, which is to say none whatsoever. Pakistan killed over 400 people at a drug rehab hospital in Kabul this week. Did you hear about it?)

So if Trump tries to cut and run, he will face one of the few things he reacts to—a storm of criticism on television—plus fierce pushback from the D.C. blob. Even if he were to try to do it, Israel almost certainly would bait him back into the conflict by inciting more tit-for-tat bombing.

If Trump doesn’t cut and run, he faces a hole in global energy needs that grows by about 20 million barrels of oil and 20 billion cubic feet of natural gas every day, with steadily increasing damage to the delicate energy infrastructure all around the Persian Gulf that will take months or years to repair, and more and more American soldiers wounded or killed.

It would be a thorny situation even for the wisest statesmen in world history. Alas, all we have is an elderly idiot whose primary method of diplomacy is posting barely literate screeds on his personal social media site. Folks, it isn’t looking good.