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In one of America’s daily political subplots that would have been rejected from a pre-2025 Armando Iannucci script for being too silly, it turns out Donald Trump was recently smuggled out of Air Force One in a catering container for fear of being assassinated by Iran. He was visiting Turkey last month, and apparently intelligence came in warning of an Iranian threat. Trump had already forgone his Qatari bribe jet, which has not yet been outfitted with the usual security systems, and so was traveling on the old presidential 747.
It seems he was too frightened to use that plane as well, so he boarded by the normal door in sight of the cameras, then was quickly bundled out the side entrance onto a catering truck and into a military jet. (Of course Trump let all the journalists and even some of his own staff fly on the decoy plane, where they might have all been killed; he doesn’t care in the slightest if any other person in the world but himself lives or dies.)
It turns out there are fairly good reasons for the previous quasi-taboo against assassinating enemy heads of state. Iran never tried to strike Barack Obama, presumably out of fear of severe retaliation, but now that Han Solo Trump shot first by killing Ayatollah Khamenei on the first day of his war with Iran way back on February 28, it’s open season. And as the IRA once said, Iran only has to get lucky once.
If we could summarize Trump’s signature brand of foreign policy, we could do worse than “belligerently stupid violence that eventually blows up in everyone’s faces, including Trump’s.” And an Iranian attack that was potentially thwarted by hiding the president in among the airline pretzels is only the start.
As we have been covering here in the Aftermath series, it was clear within days of Trump’s Pearl Harbor–style sneak attack that Iran had the strategic advantage. Despite the Khamenei assassination, Trump failed to topple the regime, which quickly seized control of the Strait of Hormuz. Dislodging that control in the age of cheap drones would have required an open-ended, dangerous, and expensive military escort operation, or a full-blown invasion and occupation of Iran itself, or for the regime to be bought off somehow.
The first option would likely lead to significant American casualties and yet more serious wear and tear on the long-suffering U.S. Navy—crews are reportedly running short of food on some vessels, and Whiskey Pete Hegseth has reportedly already burned through most of America’s stock of precision-guided munitions, missile interceptors, and other critical weapons. The second one, a full-scale invasion, is politically out of the question. The war and Trump himself are already deeply unpopular; if thousands of American soldiers were being killed every week, there would be riots in the streets.
That leaves some kind of deal. To achieve one, Trump has been hyperactively flitting between all prior tactics Americans have used with Iran since 1979—military strikes, sanctions, an embargo, and negotiations—with precisely zero success at any of them. Often he is doing more than one, or all of them, simultaneously. Over the last 24 hours, at time of writing, he was preparing to ratchet up sanctions according to the AP; near to a deal with negotiations in Pakistan according to Bloomberg; shooting at ships attempting to run the American blockade according to The Wall Street Journal; and likely to order more strikes soon according to CNBC.
A successful negotiation strategy must in part rest on credibly communicating one’s intentions. While it’s not impossible to use contradictory tactics as part of a carrot-and-stick approach, Trump’s wild flailing does not communicate “strength and clarity of purpose” so much as “profound mental illness.” This is not some Metternich-esque master of war and diplomacy; this is a man whose constant temper tantrums must be managed with a playlist of his favorite Broadway show tunes, like some colicky infant. And it’s why we’ve seen the same pattern of failed negotiations, followed by attacks, counterattacks, promises of negotiations on Sunday afternoons to calm the markets, and more negotiations that fail, for the past five months.
What’s at least a little mystifying is why investors keep falling for this charade and lowering oil prices every time Trump says definitely, absolutely, no doubt, this time there will be a deal, only for that to collapse and oil to rise again. It is either the greatest case of Lucy and the football in the history of real life or a matter of willful blindness, with investors just wanting to believe that the leader of the free world couldn’t possibly be this stupid. (Oil executives, however, are raking in the dough and loving it.)
The most plausible deal with Iran is total American capitulation—lifting all sanctions, withdrawing American forces from the Middle East, giving Iran permanent control of the Strait of Hormuz, and maybe supplying a fat war reparations payment as an extra sweetener. Indeed, the Journal reports that Gulf states are reconciling themselves to indefinite Iranian control of the strait as the least-bad option. Permanent Iranian tolls on everything coming out of the Persian Gulf, plus 250 years of American policy on freedom of navigation being thrown in the garbage—these are just the prices to be paid for the dumbest war of aggression in American history.
Whether Trump could actually agree to such a humiliating climbdown is another question. In the current set of negotiations, for instance, he has taken to demanding Iran pay the U.S. rather than the other way around. And in addition, he’s trying some Jedi mind trick to pretend that the war and its attendant problems don’t actually exist. “Low-keying” it, is what Trump has called it. Forced amnesia is unlikely to work on anyone but Trump himself.
Some in the administration seem to be resigning themselves to a permanently closed strait, like Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who recently claimed that the strait is “irrelevant” because so many oil pipelines are being constructed in the region. (Luckily, as we all know, oil pipelines are totally immune from drone attacks and can be built, like Trump’s ballroom, in “two weeks” or so.)
If I had to guess, that’s what I would say happens. So long as Trump is president, the strait will not ever be fully open.
–Ryan Cooper |
