On Thursday, President Trump threatened Iran with an “economic D-Day” if they didn’t make a diplomatic agreement on his terms. On Friday, President Trump declared the Strait of Hormuz to be American territory. What does all that mean?
Not much. The Strait could be the coastal waters of Iran, the UAE, or Oman. But it’s not: it’s supposed to be an international waterway and Iran wants to control it.
The Iranian people are going to suffer but the IRGC and the ayatollahs (or whatever is left of them) don’t care.
Mr. Trump’s Hormuz declaration is the easy part. It’s meaningless unless U.S. forces impose our national will on the Iranians and reopen the Strait, free of any Iranian interference. Anything less would be a U.S. capitulation. That seems more and more likely because the war is at a stalemate.
Mr. Trump finds himself in a situation reminiscent of his dispute with Denmark over Greenland and his renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. The Danes aren’t anything like the Iranians but they had no interest in turning Greenland over to the U.S., even if we bought it. Denmark is a NATO ally, and Mr. Trump’s attempts to push them around didn’t work.
Neither did his attempt to rename the Gulf of Mexico. While U.S. federal agencies and a few among the news media agreed to relabel the Gulf, no one else does. There are billions of maps and globes around the world that still show the Gulf of Mexico.
But now, with Mr. Trump’s asserting ownership of the Strait, how are we to force Iran to accept that? There is no way to do so short of resuming the bombing campaign and seeing it through to conclusion. Think about it.
If the Strait is U.S. territory, we have the right to possess it, to run shipping through it and to assert U.S. authority over it. Iran won’t tolerate that so we are clearly — for a second reason — at war with Tehran. It was right for Mr. Trump to take us to war with Iran to overcome its nuclear ambitions but has the Strait become so valuable that we should go to war over it? It obviously hasn’t.
And what are the new economic sanctions that the president will announce today? On August 19, he wrote on Truth Social that,
No one has given the Islamic Republic of Iran a greater opportunity to make a Deal than me. TRAGICALLY, for them, they have failed to take it. Therefore, today, I am announcing the MOST CRUSHING ECONOMIC OPERATION EVER TAKEN AGAINST ANY COUNTRY! This will be Economic Warfare and Isolation on an unprecedented scale.… This will be an ECONOMIC D-DAY, and we need all of our Allies to stand with the United States of America to isolate, and defeat, the Iran threat.
He also said that any country providing any lifeline to Iran “will itself face TREMENDOUS economic consequences.” But will they?
The key part of that is for our allies — such as they are — to join us in the isolation and economic defeat of Iran. That is very unlikely but one of our artificial Middle Eastern “allies” — the United Arab Emirates — suspended Iran from all financial and economic cooperation including its banking system, possibly depriving Iran of one of its back doors to the global banking and economic systems.
That’s the hard part: getting other allies — and adversaries such as China — to ban Iran’s participation in global banking and economics. China won’t participate in any U.S. economic blockade of Iran, but will our so-called “allies” such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, Oman, and Egypt? They bloody well should but it’s highly unlikely that they will.
China has already pushed back on the issue of further sanctions arguing that they would increase the danger to the region.
So where do we go from here? The deadline for a diplomatic deal, set in the June 18 “Memorandum of Understanding” has passed. In his August 19 comment on Truth Social, Mr. Trump said that he’d given Iran every opportunity to make a deal but they wouldn’t.
Mr. Trump’s new economic sanctions will work hardships on the Iranians and their people but Iran seems almost immune to those pressures. As this column has said many times, the Tehran regime is composed of fanatics. They — the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps in particular — don’t care about the Iranian people or whatever hardships they may suffer.
The Iranian people are going to suffer but the IRGC and the ayatollahs (or whatever is left of them) don’t care. We have probably missed the opportunity to arm the potential revolutionaries and help them communicate to aid them in another Iranian revolution.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian called for an end to the war on Friday. He said, “The war must come to an end at some point,” Pezeshkian said Friday. He added, “It is better that we demonstrate our strength and dignity today and tell the world that we have won and that we are ending the war.”
But Iran will never make a deal on Mr. Trump’s terms.
The Iran war is highly unpopular among American voters but will they care enough to vote against Mr. Trump’s candidates this fall? If they do, Mr. Trump will be the lamest of lame ducks in 2027.
The U.S. is now more than $40 trillion in debt. How long can we sustain this war? It won’t be up to the president if he loses the 2026 election which now seems likely.
READ MORE from Jed Babbin:
The Iran War: Trump Must Choose Between Victory and Defeat
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