“I’m not going to start wars,” Donald Trump told voters on election night in 2024. His decision to bomb Iran on 28 February in partnership with Benjamin Netanyahu was astonishing both in its aggression and its audacious break with this promise. Trump did nothing to prepare the US for war, gave seemingly no thought to the fact that Iran would inevitably hold the strait hostage if it came under attack, and resorted to contradictory explanations for his decision. In the war’s early days, he described “what we did in Venezuela” as a model for what he hoped to achieve. “He thought he would go down in history as the American president who had resolved the Iran problem,” Nasr told me. “In his mind, this was a legacy-building transformation that would be quick and cost-free.”
That has proven a fatal miscalculation. Pete Hegseth, the US self-styled “secretary of war”, said the early US strikes that killed Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, had “cut off the head of the snake.” But regime change is now a distant prospect. Trump underestimated the resilience of the Iranian regime and overestimated the power of protests against it. After just five months, his misadventure is as unpopular with American voters as the Vietnam war was six years in. It could yet escalate into a wider regional conflict, with the Houthis threatening a maritime embargo on Saudi Arabia. Even Trump – whose private firm, The Trump Organization, is at work on a skyscraper in Dubai – won’t be insulated from the consequences of this violence.
What happened to the ceasefire?
The memorandum of understanding, a vague, short document that the US and Iran signed on 17 June, gave a brief respite from the strikes and (supposedly) initiated a 60-day negotiation period in which time both sides could reach permanent agreement on – among other things – the future of the strait. But it broke down when Iran fired on three commercial tankers that had used a shipping lane close to the shores of Oman, rather than a route off the Iranian coast approved by Tehran. “When ceasefires are violated, you have two options; either react to preserve the ceasefire, or use the violation as an excuse to end it,” Nasr says.
Trump went with the latter option, calling Iran’s leaders “scum” and declaring the ceasefire “over” earlier this month. This week, the US energy secretary Chris Wright said the US mission had shifted towards ensuring oil shipments could move through the strait. It’s worth remembering that the strait had never been closed for an extended period. Before 28 February, ships had been sailing through it without obstruction. The US is now framing the potential of a return to this old status quo as a victory.
Iran and the US are still negotiating, and Tehran has signalled its desire to permanently control the strait, including by charging tolls on passing vessels. “The US is now in a situation where it either has a long, protracted war, which would keep the strait closed, or keeps escalating to the next level with the hope of knocking Iran out,” Nasr says.
A serious misjudgment
There are signs that Trump and Netanyahu seriously misjudged the likelihood that Iran would seize control of the strait. In an interview earlier this year, Netanyahu admitted “the problem of the Hormuz strait became understood as the war went on.” As our diplomatic editor Patrick Wintour wrote at the time, in a piece suggesting the consequences of Trump’s excursion could prove greater than the Vietnam war, this was an “astonishing admission.” The closure of the strait is the type of doomsday scenario that previous administrations, and most Iran experts, would have considered.
But the US government now has very few Iran experts, because Trump has instead chosen to surround himself with a royal court of loyalists. Nate Swanson, a former state department representative on Trump’s Iran negotiating team, was forced out earlier this year after far-right activist Laura Loomer accused him of disloyalty.
“Folks who’ve watched this Iranian system … would have told [Trump]: ‘They’re not businessmen from New York. They’re made of a different type of DNA’,” Alex Vatanka, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington DC, recently told Guardian US political correspondent, Robert Tait.
Consequences, consequences
Inflation caused by rising oil prices is making everyday life more expensive and hiking the costs of borrowing for governments (including Burnham’s here in the UK). If there is no agreement until 2027, some are predicting global growth could fall by 1.3%, if not more. Europe may be uniquely exposed: since the Russia-Ukraine war, the continent has turned towards the Middle East for its gas, particularly to Qatar, which has had to slow production during the conflict. We could be facing a winter of shortages, bringing to mind the 1970s oil crisis, when the British government enforced power cuts to conserve energy supplies.
Who’s in charge of the sea?
Many of Trump’s proposed solutions to the conflict seem to have been thought up on the spot. He briefly suggested that the US could charge tolls on ships entering the strait in exchange for safe passage, despite European leaders and even Marco Rubio, his own secretary of state, having previously said these would be incompatible with international law. The fact the US and Iran have even proposed such tolls is a sign of the wilful disregard for international law that has become a defining feature of this conflict (notably, Iran, the US and Israel are among a small handful of nations that don’t ratify the UN convention on the laws of the sea). Freedom of navigation is a cornerstone of international law: without it, shipping starts to resemble a protection racket, where nations extract fees from passing vessels.
Some experts now worry that other shipping routes could become more militarised, as coastal nations watching Iran use the strait as the ultimate bargaining chip try to take advantage of other important waterways. “A lot of other countries that feel they’re like Iran, and could use passageways as a deterrent” Nasr says. “If nations like the US and Israel can attack your country at any time, you’re going to resort to whatever you can in order to protect yourself.”
Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu seemed to have not thought through the full consequences of attacking Iran. Photograph: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
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