Trump To World: Please Help Me Un-Shoot My Own Leg Off

The Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway connecting the Persian Gulf to the Indian Ocean via the Gulf of Oman, has been effectively closed for over two weeks, since the United States and Israel began their war of aggression against the nation of Iran and Iran responded by, in part, warning ships that passage of the strait would not be permitted and attacking some of those that tried to pass through it. This is a big deal, as you likely know: A critical portion of the world's petroleum and liquid natural gas passes through the strait on its way from the Middle East to basically everywhere else. Oil and energy prices have spiked, turning an immoral and multiply illegal war that was unpopular from the outset into a political cataclysm for its perpetrators.

None of this had to happen. By all available reporting and the variably coherent statements of various officials, nothing in particular precipitated this war other than power being in the hands of the wrong people in the U.S. and Israel and those people deciding, for reasons they cannot explain and may not really understand, Hey, let's attack Iran. Now that it is happening, it is not so easily ended except on terms that will only add harm to the bloodthirsty morons who elected to start it. It's quite a pickle.

The aggressor nations of course did not anticipate this, or in any event failed to plan for it. That is because they are run by some of the dumbest losers ever to live, a grade of men who are bad at both anticipation and planning due to having no theory of the minds of others and only the most rudimentary inkling of an idea that other people even have minds. Because of this incuriosity and ignorance they are continually caught flat-footed by other people behaving as anything more than simple buttons to press. In a nutshell, this is the problem. With, in a nutshell, basically everything currently happening in the world.

The Trump administration has tried various means of dealing with the strait's closure, all of them asinine. Donald Trump—who pulled mine-sweeping ships from service in the Middle East shortly before electing to make war on Iran—has tried browbeating oil-tanker captains on social media, exhorting them to, in so many words, man up and run that damn strait, as though those captains (I'm sure they're checking his Truth Social posts religiously!) might be moved to pointless acts of maritime self-sacrifice by the prospect of their bravery taking some heat off the faraway shit-for-brains directly responsible for their peril in the first place. The U.S. government has explored providing extra insurance coverage to companies whose ships must navigate the strait—as if the crews of actual humans being asked to risk death at sea might be spurred into action by knowledge that even if they hit a mine and die, some executives and investors might still turn a profit. The U.S. military has attacked and destroyed some number of Iranian mine-laying boats, which if anything adds to the prohibitive sense of danger around navigating the strait.

Trump reportedly dressed down his military brass last week over the continued shutdown of the strait, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had to explain to him the asymmetry of the conflict. A single speedboat with one or two guys aboard can do enough damage to destroy a skyscraper-sized oil tanker, and there are a lot more speedboats and guys than there are oil tankers. In fact there probably are more speedboats and guys than there are sophisticated 21st-century munitions for destroying every speedboat-and-guy combination that enters the Strait of Hormuz. You might like a head of state not to need this explained to him midway through the war he started for no reason and with no legible strategic goals. Ah well.

On Saturday, Trump took to his social media account again, to make the dubious claim that "Many Countries, especially those who are affected by Iran's attempted closure of the Hormuz Strait, will be sending War Ships, in conjunction with the United States of America, to keep the Strait open and safe." As usual with Trump, what he initially phrased as a statement of fact was at best a petulant demand, and more likely the confused raving of a senile lifelong liar. A couple sentences later (after a ludicrous claim to having "already destroyed 100% of Iran’s Military capability," which would make all of this redundant if true), he whined:

Hopefully China, France, Japan, South Korea, the UK, and others, that are affected by this artificial constraint, will send Ships to the area so that the Hormuz Strait will no longer be a threat by a Nation that has been totally decapitated.

As Germany's defense minister Boris Pistorius (amazing name) observed, this plea, taken as a sincere request for assistance, is absurd right on its face. If the U.S. Navy can't keep the strait open, the addition of some number of European and east Asian frigates can't really be expected to move the needle: All those countries' navies put together couldn't match the roided-out extravagance of America's, which by many reports is already running low on missiles for the conflict. Moreover, it isn't those other nations' war and up to this point hasn't been; rushing to help the U.S. reopen the Strait of Hormuz would amount to those nations declaring war on Iran for Donald Trump's sake. Why would they do that? By any sane apportioning of responsibility the U.S. and Israel are the countries that have shut down the Strait of Hormuz, by recklessly attacking a nation whose first response, in absolutely any plausible set of circumstances, would be to halt all shipping through the strait.

What Trump is asking for, in any event, isn't really for other countries to come open the Strait of Hormuz for him. What he's asking is for them to voluntarily share in the blame for the enormous catastrophic mess he started: Please, come to the Gulf of Oman and make it look like all of us shat down our pants leg together, instead of just me. It's a classically Trumpian move: If those countries throw in their lot with his, he will blame them for the disruption to the global economy; if they decline to throw their lot in with his, he will blame the disruption to the global economy on their refusal to help.

So far this is going just about how anybody might expect:

This is just some of what's bad about electing leaders who gleefully piss all over a durable system of alliances dating back to World War II and attempt to replace it with a coercive protection racket. Stay tuned for vivid illustrations of the rest!