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The Blockheaded Thinking Behind Trump’s Plan for a Hormuz Blockade

The president’s latest proposal to force Iran to negotiate an end to his feckless war somehow makes less sense than all the other ones.

A billboard in Tehran asserts that despite the threats of President Donald Trump, Iran will retain control over the Strait of Hormuz.

To almost no one’s surprise, the ballyhooed launch of last weekend’s “marathon” negotiations in Islamabad for a stable ceasefire accord with Iran collapsed in much less time than it took for Trump’s first-term communications director Anthony Scaramucci to be ditched. Then, in equally short order, President Donald Trump fired off another impulsive policy diktat from his social-media website, announcing a total blockade of the Strait of Hormuz by the United States. And no sooner than Trump had nonsensically assured the country that a double blockade of the vital shipping route would magically reverse the harm wrought by Iran’s initial bid to control it, the administration was walking back this latest smoke-and-mirrors bid to simulate progress in its disastrous Iran war; it amended Trump’s trademark policymaking-by-stream-of-consciousness, explaining that the United States would only blockade shipping traffic coming from or heading to Iranian ports.

It was the kind of “I’m rubber, you’re glue” diplomacy that has become synonymous with the Trump presidency, and it also quite plainly is not going to work. Trump’s congressional allies must soon face a very sour electorate that had been promised a golden age rather than indefinite, self-inflicted economic suffering. Meanwhile, Iran’s tyrants have proven quite willing to wantonly slaughter their own civilian protesters to preserve their grip on power. So the answer to the question of who can “endure more pain” in the Iran conflict should be obvious: It’s not us. The blockade also makes it plain that Trump continues not to understand, even on a basic level, why most ships refuse to transit the Strait of Hormuz and how difficult it will be to return to the status quo ante as long as Tehran’s leaders want the critical shipping channel to be choked off.

Trump has floated countless ideas to fix the Hormuz problem, and has seriously pursued precisely zero of them until now. It has, for example, been nearly six weeks since Trump said the United States would start escorting tankers through the Strait. That was around the same time he unveiled a harebrained scheme to have America insure everyone’s tankers. Once again, the second act in this policy set piece involved the realization that no one in the administration had the slightest idea how the breakthrough maneuver was supposed to work. With his other proposals flaming out, Trump ended up lifting sanctions on Iranian oil in March in a failed effort to keep prices down—an economic windfall for the enemy he was trying to outsmart. Before long, Trump was reduced to making the argument that high oil prices were actually good for the American economy—by which he meant, as usual, the corporate grifters who are his allies and donors.

It’s also been more than two weeks since Trump switched tactics again and declared, during a televised primetime national address, that America doesn’t need the Strait of Hormuz anyway and that it was up to unspecified allies to “build up some delayed courage” and then “​​grab it and cherish it.” In the same speech, he also argued that the Strait would “open up naturally” after the war, which would also end at any moment, given that he also said, “We’ve........

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