Donald Trump is pretending to be shocked by a crisis he ordered into existence. He signed off on a joint US-Israel decapitation and infrastructure campaign against Iran, based on the fantasy that a few assassinations and bombing runs would make Tehran fold. Now, as the Strait of Hormuz chokes and missiles and mines do exactly what every sober analyst said they would, he feigns surprise at the global fallout.
Hormuz is not an obscure inlet. It is the textbook energy chokepoint, the artery through which a fifth of the world’s oil and a major share of LNG flows. Shut it, or make it uninsurable, and you do not just “punish Iran.” You detonate energy prices, crush Gulf equity markets, shock European industry, and spray stagflation across an already brittle global economy. Even the cautious models, looking only at the first few months, put up to $2.2 trillion of global GDP at risk, and this is in a world where there is no credible plan on the table to actually reopen Hormuz rather than simply bomb around it. Any president who claims to be blindsided by this is not merely uninformed. He is lying or treating the rest of us as fools.
The same willful ignorance runs through his treatment of the dollar. For half a century, the United States has lived above its means because the dollar is the world’s invoicing and reserve currency, anchored in no small part by dollar‑denominated oil trade and the perceived safety of US Treasuries. That “exorbitant privilege” is what quietly props up the debt Trump keeps inflating. Undermine confidence in the currency, in the Treasury market, in US restraint, and you are not just risking market volatility. You are gambling with the core asset of American power.
Yet Trump has spent years cheering a weaker dollar as “great,” bullying allies, weaponizing sanctions and payment systems, and now lighting a match in the most sensitive energy corridor on earth. He is sending every major importer and producer the same message: find alternatives, find workarounds, find other ways to price and settle your energy trade. BRICS governments, Beijing and its Gulf partners, sanctioned exporters like Russia and Iran, and nervous central banks are all too happy to take that invitation and build pipes, platforms, and contracts that cut the dollar out.
The president who campaigned as a hard‑nosed businessman is running the empire’s balance sheet like a bankrupt casino, cashing in the furniture for one last night at the tables. He is not auctioning America’s power to any one buyer. He is putting it on the block for a queue of rivals and hedge‑builders, from Petro‑BRICS dreamers to yuan‑denominated oil traders, to take what they can get at a discount.
So, what did he think would happen? The honest answer is worse than simple stupidity. He thinks in television segments and polling bumps, not supply chains and reserve flows. He calculates personal image, not systemic risk. The war he expected to last “weeks” can drag on for months or years, but the damage to trust in the dollar system, once done, is not easily reversed. Trump is not just bombing Iran. He is quietly putting the foundations of American power up for sale, and the line of buyers is already forming.
Related reading
- Trump’s Iran War, China Trip and the Vanishing Empire
- The Foundation for War Crimes: A Factual Record of Trump’s Iran War and Where It’s Going Part 2
- The Foundation for War Crimes: A Factual Record of Trump’s Iran War and Where It’s Going
- America’s Suicidal Empire: The Iran War, the Death Spiral of a Failing Hegemon, and the World We Are Destroying
