The president isn’t playing 4D chess and what his war has already broken in the global economy won’t be easily fixed — if it gets fixed at all.
There’s a persistent myth that President
Donald Trump knows what he’s doing. That his actions are strategic, rather than impulsive.
That he’s “playing 4D chess” — anticipating, manipulating and generally outthinking opponents.
That anything he breaks he can put back together — on terms
more favorable to himself.
This still-prevalent view has reached its limit
with the Iran war, even if many haven’t realized it yet.
Economic disruption is already locked in and growing daily.
The global economy is already broken and Trump can’t fix it.
The earthquake has hit; the ensuing tsunami just hasn’t reached your shores yet.
To avoid canceling contracts or shutting down, oil brokers will chase existing supply, offering to pay more.
Producers across the world will sell as much as they can, charging whatever the market will pay, but there’s no spare capacity they can quickly tap to make up the shortfall caused by Trump's naval blockade.
Resulting shortages and price increases will raise the cost of everything downstream — gasoline, food, washing machines, you name it — and increase inflation overall.
This process is already underway, seen in an
unusually high number of tankers going to the Gulf of Mexico, causing backups at American facilities.
Pete Hegseth bragged that ships are lining up, which only shows that he doesn’t understand that a backup is the opposite of things running smoothly. It means something has gone wrong.
Oil companies could make windfall profits, but for almost everyone else, this means higher prices.
Economic disruption is already locked in, even if the Trump agreed to open the strait tomorrow.
Even the best-case scenario for Trump involves considerable economic damage.
Iran’s leadership demands that the Americans
reopen Hormuz, which had freedom of navigation before Trump attacked.
No matter how many times Trump says Iran “
has no cards,” it clearly does, and with the pending global energy supply crunch, time is on its side.
Trump has been so erratic, with a long record of reneging on promises and changing stances, that no one can trust the U.S. to honor any agreement.
America has no credibility, which makes it hard to get a deal even if the Iranians wanted one.
Economic problems are mounting, and Trump can’t even get Iran to negotiate anymore He’s not even close to allowing commerce to fully resume, let alone a deal in which the U.S. wins concessions.
Trump started the Iran war, but now that the Iranians have survived the initial assault,
Iran is more in control of events.
Physical reality is real, no matter how hard Trump insists it isn’t.
Americans can collectively pretend for a time, but that has its limits, and usually makes the reckoning worse.
Some things are too big for Trump to lie his way through.
Trump’s options are
accepting a humiliating defeat or escalating, which could end up in a more costly humiliation.
Not wanting to do either, he’s strung things along, pretending that a deal is imminent (it isn't), that Iran is eager to make one (the U.S., not Iran, is clearly more desperate) and that he called off recently scheduled talks (the Iranians did, and afterward Trump pretended it was his idea).
But as economic problems multiply over the coming months, reality will become increasingly unignorable. And this crisis is entirely of Trump’s own making.
Contrary to popular myth, Trump was
never good at business or at making deals. Bluster isn’t really strength.
Threats and bombing from afar
don’t make other countries capitulate. Launching this surprise-attack war without legal authorization, allied support or a strategy for success has engendered goodwill for Iran, not America.
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