Will Trump sacrifice US troops in the name of cheap gas?

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. 

Because 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, its murderous regime would become harder. It would widen the war by attacking Gulf states. It would retaliate by threatening the global economy. And it would, yanno, fight to the last man. 

Because they’re Iranians. 

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Yet time and again, Trump’s advisors “downplayed” the risks in favor of a chance for him to play a war president on TV. They believed Iran’s leadership was going to fold like Venezuela’s did. Benjamin Netanyahu sold Trump on the idea that Iranians would revolt once 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 that we’re talking about, the president has lost control of the war. Even though it's battered and bruised, the Iranians still have control of the Strait of Hormuz, that narrow gap in the Persian Gulf. With control of the strait comes a stranglehold on a quarter of the world’s supply of oil. Three tankers were attacked Wednesday. Three more were attacked Thursday. (A Times analysis 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, and South Korea 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 told the Financial Times. 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 or worse – that he may be deciding whether 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 off-ramps don’t work anymore because Iran is driving the asymmetric action.”

While the president'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 his 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, and even if the US Navy escorted every tanker through the strait, that might not be enough to quell fear in the oil markets, because all it takes to shake the confidence of insurers is the sight of a sunk tanker.

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, stopping oil shipments takes just “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.” 

Even without a navy, a source told Reuters, the Iranians still have “plenty of options, including fast-attack craft, mini submarines, mines and even ​jet skis packed with explosives.” 

Such risk almost certainly spooks insurers. “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.”

It’s a situation in which little Iran has Trump where it wants him.

Even if the president were somehow able to instantaneously mount a massive, 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 and enduring 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 assuring insurance and shipping firms that it’s safe, 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 those assurances.

So the solution is a political one. But as long as Trump believes he can do whatever he wants whenever he wants, the Iranians have him over a barrel. And 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.