Iran literally has Trump over a barrel — of oil

I do not have a background in international relations. I do not possess any special knowledge of foreign affairs. I would struggle to explain the difference between military strategy and military tactics. Yet, apparently, I knew something our president did not.

The Iranians were never going to roll over.

They are Iranians.

Somehow that escaped Donald Trump’s attention. On Monday, he “expressed surprise at the breadth of Iran’s retaliation,” according to the Post. “They hit Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait. Nobody expected that. We were shocked. ... They fought back.’’

Of. Course. They. Did.

No one was shocked – except perhaps a titanically self-centered president surrounded by yes men. In fact, he was warned time and again, if he goes to war with Iran, that its murderous regime would become harder; that it would widen the war by attacking neighboring Gulf states; that it would retaliate by threatening the global economy; and that it would, yanno, fight to the last man.

Because they’re Iranians.

Yet time and again, Trump’s advisors “downplayed” the risks in favor of a chance for him to play a war president on American TV. They believed Iran’s leadership was going to fold like Venezuela’s did. Meanwhile, Benjamin Netanyahu sold Trump on the idea that Iranians would revolt after the regime’s leader was dead, even though his own intelligence said they would get “slaughtered.”

Because no one appears to have remembered that these are Iranians we’re talking about, the president has lost control of the war. Battered and bruised, the regime still has control of the Strait of Hormuz, that narrow gap in the Persian Gulf and with that, a stranglehold on a quarter of the world’s supply of oil.

Three tankers were attacked Wednesday, three more Thursday. (A Times analysis on Monday found that “at least 16 oil tankers, cargo ships and other commercial vessels had been attacked.”)

The president panicked over the weekend. He said “hopefully” other nations like China, Japan, South Korea, France and the UK would send warships to secure the strait. By Monday, he was threatening allies in Europe. “It will be very bad for the future of NATO” if they do not join the effort, he said. Just three days prior, he admitted to knowing that NATO’s enemy, Russia, was helping Iran. He rewarded that effort by lifting sanctions on Russian oil. Perhaps as a result, NATO allies told him you’re on your own.

Trump is now acting like he didn’t need any help anyway, a sign of desperation and perhaps that he may be getting closer to deciding to send American ground forces to secure the strait.

Indeed, a White House source told Politico: “[The Iranians] hold the cards now. They decide how long we’re involved — and they decide if we put boots on the ground. And it doesn’t seem to me that there’s a way around that, if we want to save face.” Another source said: “The terms have changed. The off-ramps don’t work anymore because Iran is driving the asymmetric action.”

While Trump’s goal at the beginning of the war was unclear and ever-changing, it is no such thing now, as the Iranians have now determined what Trump’s goal must be: sending America’s sons and daughters to sacrifice their lives in the name of cheap gas.

“Any American troops on the ground would remain targets for Iranian attacks,” the Wall Street Journal said this morning. “The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps – 190,000 troops strong – and its elite Quds Force specialize in asymmetric warfare and have spent decades backing insurgents throughout the Middle East, including in neighboring Iraq, where they helped militants launch deadly attacks on U.S. troops following the 2003 invasion.”

But even if American forces occupied the entire coastline of Iran along the Persian Gulf, and even if the US Navy escorted every single tanker through the Strait of Hormuz, that might not be enough to quell fear in the oil markets, because all it takes to shake the confidence of insurers is a sunk tanker here and there.

During a meeting last week, Trump demanded to know why the US can’t immediately reopen the strait. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff explained, according to the Times, that all it takes to stop oil shipments is “one Iranian soldier or militia member zipping across the narrow neck of the strait in a speedboat [firing] a mobile missile right into a slow-moving supertanker.”

Though Iran's navy has mostly been destroyed, a source told Reuters, it still has “plenty of options, including fast-attack craft, mini submarines, mines and even jet skis packed with explosives.”

Such risk almost certainly means insurers won’t underwrite shipping through the strait. It’s a situation in which little Iran has Trump where it wants him. “With oil already hovering around $100 a barrel, and insurance premiums for transiting the Persian Gulf surging,” the Times said, “the image of more burning tankers would make the Iranians look more powerful than they really are.”

And even if the president were to mount a generation-defining occupation, the goal of bringing down oil prices would not be realized in the short-term. Two hundred dollar barrels of oil could be a reasonable expectation, Rogé Karma wrote in The Atlantic on Friday, “if the strait remains closed for even a month.”

Indeed, the only real way of restoring the flow of oil is by convincing insurance and shipping firms that it’s safe to go through the strait, the Wall Street Journal said, and the only way to do that is convincing the Iranians that it’s in their interest to provide insurance and shipping firms the assurances they need.

So the solution is political. As Trump believes he can do whatever he wants on his own, however, the Iranians have him over a barrel. With oil prices currently at their highest since 2023, the American middle class is going to burn up as long as he’s over it.

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