Trump's War Won’t Go Away

Why has the fight over the Strait of Hormuz restarted? Can a permanent resolution be found?

After a brief respite the Iran war is back on. The question at the heart of the latest exchanges of fire is who is to control the Strait of Hormuz, to which the current answer is ‘nobody’ because both sides can deny control to the other and it is not obvious how either can change the situation solely through military action. Iran is betting that Trump’s concerns about the midterms and inflation will lead him to agree to almost anything to make the war go away, as he appeared ready to do when the memorandum of understanding (MOU) between the two sides was signed on 17 June. The US is betting that by denying Iran the economic benefits that came with the MOU, and by battering it with waves of air raids, it will be coerced into a more accommodating position.

Trying to work out how this will unfold is challenging because on the one hand there is a hubristic regime in Iran, pushing its luck, and on the other an erratic one in the US that sends a different message every day.

Some of what Donald Trump says can be dismissed easily. When he suddenly had the bright idea on 12 July that the US would not only control the Strait of Hormuz but charge a 20 percent fee on all cargo shipped, it was obvious that this was unlikely to last for more than a few hours. So it proved. It is only because he is president that the media felt obliged to treat this as if it was a serious proposition. It did not require the ‘shipping operators and logistics experts’ the New York Times consulted to know that the fee ‘would significantly increase the cost of transporting oil and other products through the crucial waterway.’

This article noted that ‘Mr. Trump did not explain exactly how the 20 percent fee would be calculated’ as if he had made a calculation rather than pulled a number out of the air because it sounded like an appropriate rake off for almost any deal in which he might have been engaged.