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Donald Trump’s preposterous proposal to take control of the Strait of Hormuz and charge a 20 per cent toll for the privilege of crossing safely lasted all of 24 hours.
It was always a non-starter – for one thing, a 20 per cent charge on the value of a ship’s cargo was a silly number, plucked from nowhere. It would have added about $US16 to the cost of a barrel of oil overnight, according to analysts.
Trump now says the US will protect the strait but Gulf countries that heavily depend on it – Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Bahrain – will invest more in the US to cover the costs of that protection.
Well, we’ll see. Nonetheless, this thought bubble – which Trump has raised several times, as far back as April 6 at a White House news conference – will have a legacy beyond its brief life.
It certainly won’t be forgotten by Iran, which seized on the president’s proposal as an admission that it was fully entitled to charge for “maritime services” provided in the strait (read: allowing your ship to cross without being fired upon).
“POTUS is absolutely right,” said Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, in possibly a first for an Iranian statesman. “Whoever provides secure and safe passage of commercial vessels through the Strait of Hormuz should be compensated for this service.”
If the war enabled Iran to weaponise the strait in the first place, the toll proposal only gives them more ammunition.
But it is also a sign of a White House and a US administration that is flailing as it struggles to gain control over an escalating conflict it thought had ended.
“I actually read his statement … as being an indication of desperation,” said Richard Nephew, a nuclear weapons expert and senior researcher at the Centre on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, before Trump’s inevitable backflip.
“He’s grasping at straws. He thought he had a good military strategy, and that didn’t work, so he had to get a deal. He told everybody: not only is this a great deal, but these people are totally reasonable – he achieved regime change.
“He made up this story that he changed the regime to something that is better. I think what this all adds up to is: the last week has proven pretty conclusively that everything he said is wrong.”
Trump has come close to admitting he was wrong about Iran’s so-called new leadership. When he was asked at the recent NATO summit why he had gone from calling them rational and smart to “scum” and “cuckoo”, he said: “I got to know them.”
But, as Nephew points out, Trump is not one to ever really admit fault. And that has him worried. Despite the US president’s apparent reluctance to go back to full-scale bombing, he has ordered strikes almost every night for a week, and notified Congress that the conflict has resumed.
“If you’re [Trump], and you can’t admit any kind of failure, what this means you have to do is hold down on your original approach,” Nephew says.
“He, at this point, thinks the only shot he’s got is to ramp up the intensity of the violence, and the threat of closure [of the strait] is all part of that.
“You saw this in a domestic US political context on January 6 … His response to these kinds of big humiliations is to expand and to double down and to intensify risk.
“It does make me actually quite fearful of what he may choose to do if he feels like he is going to lose here.”
Nephew is not suggesting Trump would use nuclear weapons. “[But] I think you would be a fool if you didn’t at least open the possibility that he may choose to expand his target selection.”
The surviving portion of Monday’s announcement is that the US has revived its blockade against Iran. While that constitutes an act of war, it doesn’t involve dropping bombs.
It’s hoped that the measure will squeeze Iran’s damaged economy hard enough that it forces the regime to change course. “There’s a possibility of that,” Nephew says.
“But let’s remember what that brings us back to – it brings us back to the Memorandum of Understanding, which still granted functional responsibility and control over the strait back to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.”
Indeed, the agreement only countenanced toll-free shipping in the strait for 60 days. It said Iran and Oman would have a dialogue about long-term management of the waterway, along with the Gulf states that border it.
“Yeah, the Iranians hate the blockade, yeah, they would prefer to go back to the MOU,” Nephew says.
“But the MOU wasn’t great. The outcomes in the MOU may be better than what we have right now, but the long-term arc of the MOU is quite dangerous.”
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