Clarissa Eden famously declared that ‘in the past few weeks I have really felt as if the Suez Canal was flowing through my drawing-room’. Does Melania Trump feel the same about the Strait of Hormuz? Or perhaps Donald will be reminded of the strait every time he hits one over the water at Bedminster. He ought to be. The Iran war will define his presidency. It is his legacy – just not in the way he imagined.

In 1956, a British prime minister discovered that we were no longer a great power. It was an end to illusions. We liked to think we had the best navy in the world, but that was irrelevant to whether we could keep a canal in Egypt. Today, the United States has the most powerful and expensive military in history, but it cannot impose its will on a country with the world’s 34th-largest economy.

There is a crucial difference between Suez and Iran. Anthony Eden folded because the US threatened to cause a run on the pound (something to remember if you are sentimental about the ‘Special Relationship’). No outside power forced President Trump’s climbdown. His voters wouldn’t put up with gas at $4.50 a gallon; he expected ‘bedlam’ when America’s strategic petroleum reserve ran out. He ‘choked’, as he would say.

The problem for the President is that there are diminishing returns for his crazy talk

The problem for the President is that there are diminishing returns for his crazy talk

That Iran would close the strait and that this would damage the global economy was both predictable and widely predicted. Trump still seemed surprised by these developments. Now – in a familiar pattern – he has retreated into a fantasy version of events. At the weekend, he posted on his Truth Social: ‘BEST ECONOMY EVER! Greatest Military in the World, by far. We are WINNING on all fronts, WINNING LIKE NEVER BEFORE.’ Aneurin Bevan’s verdict on Eden comes to mind. If Trump is ‘sincere’, he is ‘too stupid’ to be President.

The Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) – agreed with Iran as a basis for talks – represents almost total capitulation by the US. Trump, who knows little and cares less about history, actually signed this........

© The Spectator