Trump uses your money and people's lives to bet his blockade will defy history and break Iran

[Mahmoud Ahmadinejad]

Donald Trump’s maritime blockade is the latest attempt to test a thus far unproven theory of the Iran war — that superior US might will inevitably break the Islamic Republic.

“The blockade is genius, OK?” Trump said Wednesday. “Their economy is in real trouble. It’s a dead economy.” The president is so pleased with the plan that he’s steeled aides for it to last much longer, CNN reported.

The US economy is far larger than Iran’s, so this should be no contest. Then again, a US-Israel air assault hurt Iran’s military, but wasn’t able to secure a strategic victory.

Trump’s bullishness will confront two questions that will decide the fate of his latest strategy in a war that seems to lack a rationale or endgame.

The first is how long Trump, his fellow Republicans and the American people can take the rising costs of the war, including $4-plus gasoline and a likely rise in inflation. Midterm election voters are already angry at high costs and Trump’s economy.

The second question is whether the plan is based on realistic intelligence about conditions in Iran and sound reasoning on how its leaders might react. There is, after all, a long and dubious tendency in Washington to apply American logic to Middle Eastern societies that don’t react as US presidents expect.

The president is betting that Iran’s leaders will react purely on economic motives — as perhaps he might in their shoes.

Trump might not have time to wait for a hoped-for Iranian counter-revolution. His approval ratings are at historic lows and Republicans fear losing the House and the Senate in November. The longer the war goes on, the greater the damage in the US.

 

[Mahmoud Ahmadinejad]

Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, said that Trump is the latest US administration to believe, wrongly, that a pressure campaign could force Iran to give in.

“There is that constant search for that silver bullet, that one point of pressure that causes the Iranians to either collapse, capitulate or just mend themselves to America’s wishes,” Parsi said. “And almost every time the US goes down that path, it ends up disappointing itself.”

Trump’s confidence also reflects another familiar Washington trend — a never-reconciled belief that the Iranian economy and regime is perpetually about to collapse.

“They have to cry uncle, that’s all they have to do. Just say, ‘We give up, we give up,’” the president said in the Oval Office on Wednesday.

He will only have proved yet again that the Islamic Republic’s willingness to take punch after punch can neuter far greater American power.

 

[Mahmoud Ahmadinejad]

To some monitoring the war’s impact on global energy supplies, Trump’s predictions of imminently erupting pipelines looked like another policy position rooted more in hope than reality.

“We are banking on being saved by a silver bullet that is flawed in a number of ways,” said Brett Erickson, managing principal at Obsidian Risk Advisors, which specializes in financial crime, including the ways oil is routed to evade sanctions like those imposed on Iran.

“This is the latest theory of victory they have seized on, not because it makes a lot of sense, but because it is quick and easy and has a time frame they like,” Rosemary Kelanic, an energy scholar and director of the Middle East Program at the foreign policy think tank Defense Priorities, said.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.