Trump, Hormuz and the End of the Free Ride For half a century, Western strategists have known that the Strait of Hormuz is the acute point where energy, sea power and political will intersect. That knowledge is not in dispute. What is new in this war with Iran is that the United States, under Donald Trump, has chosen not to rush to “solve” the problem. In Hegelian terms, he is refusing an easy synthesis in order to force the underlying contradiction to the surface. The old thesis was simple: the US guarantees open sea lanes in the Gulf, and everyone else structures their economies and politics around that free insurance. Europe and the UK embraced ambitious green policies, ran down hard‑power capabilities and lectured Washington on multilateral virtue, secure in the assumption that American carriers would always appear off Hormuz. The political class behaved as if the American security guarantee were a law of nature, not a contingent choice. Their conduct today is closer to Chamberlain than Churchill: temporising, issuing statements, hoping the storm will pass without a fundamental reordering of their responsibilities. Trump’s antithesis is to withhold the automatic guarantee at the moment of maximum stress. Militarily, the US can break Iran’s residual ability to contest the Strait; that is not the binding constraint. The point is to delay that act. By allowing a closure or semi‑closure to bite, Trump ensures that the immediate pain is concentrated in exactly the jurisdictions that have most conspicuously free‑ridden on US power: the EU and the UK. Their industries, consumers and energy‑transition assumptions are exposed.
By declining to supply the synthesis on demand, and by explicitly telling London and Brussels to “go and take it” themselves, Trump forces a reckoning. European and British leaders must confront the fact that their energy systems, their industrial bases and their geopolitical sermons all rest on an American hard‑power foundation they neither finance nor politically respect. The longer the contradiction is allowed to unfold, the stronger the eventual synthesis can be: a new order in which access to secure flows, Hormuz, Venezuela and beyond, is explicitly conditional on real contributions, not assumed as a right.
Bill,
Here a link* to a short article by VDH, “A Foolish NATO was a Big Loser in the Iran War,” that makes should be read along with Thorne’s post on X.
Vito
* https://victorhanson.com/a-foolish-nato-was-a-big-loser-in-the-iran-war/
Thanks Vito, and Happy Easter to you and the famiglia. Do you think my ‘decadent’ is appropriately applied to the Brits and the Euros? I speculate that their inanition and fecklessness is due in large part to a worry that cracking down on Islamist outrages in their countries will ignite unc0ontrollable internal dissent that could spill over into civil war.
An excerpt from the VDH piece:
>>During the 1982 Falklands War, a solitary Britain faced enormous logistical challenges in steaming halfway around the world to eject Argentina from its windswept and sparse islands.
U.S. aid was critical to the effort.
So America stepped up to help with intelligence, reconnaissance, the supply of some two million gallons of much-needed gasoline, and crucial restocking of Britain’s depleted Tomahawk missiles.
The American tilt to Britain prompted anger from most Latin American nations of the shared Western hemisphere, as well as from many Hispanic American citizens at home.
No matter—Ronald Reagan rightly saw the importance of solidarity with a NATO member and a long-time American ally. So he gave Britain a veritable blank check for American aid.<<
Bill,
Happy Easter to you and yours.
“Do you think my ‘decadent’ is appropriately applied to the Brits and the Euros”?
It is certainly an appropriate descriptor of much (Uk, Spain, France, Germany, and others) but not all of Europe (Hungary, Slovakia, Czechia).
You are right that “part of their inanition and fecklessness is due in large part to a worry that cracking down on Islamist outrages in their countries will ignite uncontrollable internal dissent that could spill over into civil war.”
But we also have to consider the extent to which certain parities of the Left, such as the Labour Party and Greens in the UK and the PSOE, Podemos, and Sumar in Spain, depend on the Muslim vote. In the UK, for instance, Muslims (6.5 percent of the population of England and Wales) vote overwhelmingly for Labour (80-86 percent in 2019 and 60 percent in 2024, when a large number backed other parties of the Left, such as the Greens, to express opposition to Labour position on Gaza after October 7). This Muslim vote constitutes only about 4 percent of Labour’s national vote, but in a number of urban constituencies of England, it accounts for 20-40 percent of the electorate and thus important for the party’s control of parliament. This pattern is reproduced in Spain, where the corrupt and virulently leftist Sanchez government, strongly favored by Muslim and other immigrant voters, has naturalized about 250,000 Moroccans since 2018 and offered an additional 500,000 illegal aliens permanent residency, the first step toward citizenship.
In both countries, we also have to take into account the traditional anti-Americanism of the Left, which is magnified by a general hatred of Trump in Europe by those on the left and in the center, including almost all of the media.
Vito
Bill,
This morning on X, Zineb Riboua outlines the broad, radical strategic vision of the Trump administration that underlies the president’s recent, seemingly wild statements and decisive actions in the Middle East. *
“Trump is running two operations simultaneously: one against the IRGC, and one against the assumption that the United States will indefinitely underwrite regional security at its own expense. His threats to leave NATO, vow to send the IRGC back to the stone age, and triumphalist mid-operation address thanking Gulf partners for their support are not the improvisations of an undisciplined communicator. They are the deliberate signaling of a strategic repositioning, designed to press allies into assuming greater responsibility abroad. The operation itself is a demonstration of what American military power can accomplish when it decides to act without hesitation.
Trump is also using the Strait of Hormuz crisis to accelerate something the administration has sought from the beginning: a Middle East in which American allies assume primary responsibility for their own neighborhood. Burden sharing was long treated as a European conversation about defense spending. The Strait of Hormuz has just expanded the terms of that project to the entire Eastern hemisphere by including Gulf countries as well.”
*https://x.com/zriboua/status/2040995098784113019
Vito
Happy Easter, Bill. (“Al-Messiah qam! Haqqan qam!”)
I just now saw this piece on Trump’s handling of Hormuz. The flow of oil is certainly one of the war’s second-order effects, and could have been as such before the war broke out.
War aims change after the bullet’s been fired. The US did not go to war with Iran in order to increase leverage over its allies because Hormuz, but now Hormuz security will be part of the understandings at war’s end. A new war aim has been added.
Thorpe’s piece is a well-reasoned speculation but there’s a lot of that out there on “Epic Fury’s” knock-on effects.
Pundits are trying to think a few moves ahead. I’ve seen connections between the war and US-China relations, the souring of trans-Atlantic relations, the Abraham Accords, the substitution of Israel for the Euros as the US’s most trusted ally, and so on.
I think Thorpe overestimates the US ability to open the sea lanes and underestimates a hostile Iran’s ability to create trouble there.
A normal Iran without all that jihadist stimulation would be a different matter,
I just want to know how this thing is going to end.
Best,
J.
Thanks, gentlemen. I value your opinions on these matters that lie beyond my main spheres of interest.
Vito, have you subscribed to VDH’s Blade of Perseus?
I have not Bill, but I will look into it. I normally follow him on YouTube and X. Vito
Bill,
One final comment: In the coming days, there is going to be a storm of protest by gauchistes and quislings both at home and among our “allies” in Europe if the president targets the “civilian” infrastructure of Iran. Since the noun phrase “international law” will be endlessly uttered, it is worth keeping in mind this informed observation made yesterday by the military strategist John Spencer.
“Yes, despite all the Xperts on the law of armed conflict, targeting bridges, power plants, oil and gas facilities, airfields, and other dual-use infrastructure like factories, communications nodes, and rail lines that serve both civilian and military needs may be lawful. The law does not decide targets just by calling something civilian infrastructure. It looks at what the object actually does. An object counts as a military objective when by its nature, location, purpose, or use makes an effective contribution to military action and its total or partial destruction, capture, or disabling offers a definite military advantage in the circumstances at the time.
But being legal is never automatic. Every strike has to meet military necessity, distinction, proportionality, and feasible precautions. Leaders/Commanders decide based on what they know at the time whether the target is really a military objective that gives a definite military advantage. They weigh whether the expected harm to civilians and civilian objects would be excessive compared to that advantage. They also take all feasible steps with the target to minimize civilian harm. These choices happen in real conditions with limited information and get judged on what was known then, not later.”
*https://x.com/SpencerGuard/status/2040877782566346994
Vito