Petrol queues and rationing: How Trump and his secretary of war ignored the lessons of history

March 19, 2026 — 11:30am

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Big Fords and Chevrolets idled like junkies hanging out for a fix.

Opportunist students offered to jockey cars through endless gasoline-station queues for a few dollars, freeing frustrated drivers to line up at phone booths to cancel business appointments.

More kids turned up on roller skates hawking drinks to drivers fuming in the queues.

An odds and evens rationing system prevailed: cars with number plates ending in odd numbers lined up for fuel on the odd days of the month, and vice versa.

The dread word Iran was on everyone’s lips.

Someone called an ayatollah had turned the world and its fuel supply upside down.

How easily the past slots into the present.

How easily we forget.

Ever since then, US presidents – with the notable exception of George W. Bush and his adventure in Iraq – have observed some caution in the knowledge that various countries in the Middle East, and Iran in particular, if pressed, could seek to shred the West’s economies by simply turning off the crude oil supply.

If Trump’s America is not winning this war – and it’s not – who is?

Peter HartcherPolitical and international editor

Political and international editor

Every president, that is, before Donald Trump.

Every military strategist since the lessons of the 1970s worried that if Iran was really hunted into a corner, it could, and probably would, close the Strait of Hormuz to ensure ships carrying oil to a fuel-hungry US and its allies would lie........

© The Age