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America’s Imperial Wars, Then and Now

From Korea to the Strait of Hormuz.

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

I recently drove to a gas station in Massachusetts to fill my tank with regular gas, the cheapest around, and, to my surprise, given what’s going on, it was only $4.59 a gallon.

OK, OK, I take back that “only” and admit it. It’s not good to joke about the nightmare of gas prices these days. But in truth, that may indeed still prove to be the good news, since Donald Trump remains at war (or perhaps at chaos) with Iran, a country a mere 6,300 miles or so from Washington, D.C., and so crucial to American power on this distinctly overheating planet of ours. (Right?) And even as I was writing this, Iran had indeed again closed the Strait of Hormuz through which about 25 percent of global oil and 20 percent of global natural gas normally passes, and Donald Trump was threatening to take over the Strait himself.

The terrible (even terrifying) logic of what he is now doing is (or at least should be) overwhelmingly obvious to anyone who has even a faint memory of this country’s imperial history since it emerged victorious from World War II in 1945. And yet give Donald Trump credit. People deal with him as if he were a unique figure in American history and in some ways, of course, he couldn’t be more so. But not, it turns out, when it comes to American-style war. There, he seems almost boringly part of a story (now more than three-quarters of a century old) of how the seemingly greatest power on Planet Earth in the endless decades after World War II simply couldn’t—no, not ever!—win a war.

After all, Harry S. Truman got us into a major conflict in Korea, almost 7,000 miles from Washington, D.C., in 1950, and when it ended three years later, the U.S. left........

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