Why was Iran attacked with scarce and expensive BGM-109 Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles — costing around $3 million each — rather than ordinary gravity bombs dropped by fighter-bombers? Accuracy cannot be the answer: with so-called “JDAM” guidance kits, regular bombs become very accurate indeed, and they are still simple enough to be mass-produced cheaply.

Nevertheless, US forces had launched 850 Tomahawk missiles against Iran by 27 March this year, amounting to almost half the country’s global stockpile, though the Pentagon has since announced a huge $22.9 billion contract for more Tomahawks. Air-launched AGM-158 missiles, some of whose models can fly up to 1,000 miles, and which cost as much as $1.6 million apiece, were also used, along with Army’s Precision Strike Missiles are yet more expensive.

What makes these missiles so costly is their great virtue: they are all so-called “stand-off” weapons, which can safely be launched hundreds of miles from their targets. This means an attacker’s aircraft can remain outside enemy air space, where they could be exposed to detection by radars, and then to interception by air-defense fighters and surface-to-air missiles. There is simply no way of producing such missiles cheaply. They need powerful rocket propulsion and complicated electronic guidance to fly such vast distances and hit their targets successfully.

All this is very straightforward, and hardly a novel development in the evolution of warfare. As early as 1940, Winston Churchill’s seemingly instinctive understanding of the technology meant that Britain famously had 22 “Chain Home” early-warning radars along its southern and eastern coasts. Without them, RAF fighter pilots would have had to rely on chance encounters with German aircraft, and could not possibly have resisted the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain.

From there, the bombing of Germany itself was soon enabled by the war’s greatest British invention: the “cavity magnetron” that made airborne radars effective. Herman Göring, the monstrous but highly intelligent head of the Luftwaffe, quickly recognized it as a decisive technological advance, one condemning German bombers to defeat. That is when he stopped opposing the very first “stand-off” weapons: the V1 and V2 missiles, launched from the Continent, the first fiendishly difficult to stop and the second unstoppable without surface-to-air missiles.

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Yet unlike Britain in the Forties, Iran today has no effective radar detection or tracking network. Its badly outdated radars are easily deceived by the advanced electronic countermeasures installed in every US combat aircraft. Otherwise, they are simply destroyed by anti-radiation missiles or blinded with barrage jamming.

Moreover, even if US aircraft arriving to bomb Iran were somehow detected and tracked, the Islamic Republic has no effective way of shooting them down. Its combat aircraft are badly outdated, encompassing, among other things, some ancient Chinese fighters; French Mirages flown from Iraq on the eve of the 1991 war; and a number of highly celebrated but in fact grotesque homemade modifications of the US F-5, which entered service half a century ago. Iran does, perhaps, still have a few once-powerful F-14 Tomcats — but none of these aircraft could survive an encounter with the US Air Force’s powerful F-15 fighter-bombers.

Nor can Iran’s forces shoot down US aircraft with surface-to-air missiles. Its few extremely old US-made Hawk anti-aircraft missiles are thoroughly outdated, and their wiring is seemingly very palatable to rats. Iran also has some Russian anti-aircraft missiles, acquired recently but dating back to Soviet times. They were well-engineered during the Cold War and would potentially be very capable even now — if, that is, they had not long since been left behind by US and Israeli electronic countermeasures. This crippling shortcoming also applies to Iranian attempts to update Soviet-era anti-aircraft missiles, and to efforts to develop homegrown alternatives. That leaves so-called “MANPADS”: small, shoulder-launched missiles, and which can sometimes work at extremely short range.

Though they are greatly celebrated by the regime as colossal technological achievements, Iran’s anti-aircraft missiles, and the rest of its air defenses, are so ineffectual that despite flying several thousand sorties over the country, including right over Tehran, the US has lost only two aircraft, both to Russian-made MANPADS. The Israeli air force, for its part, has lost no manned aircraft whatsoever. It did admittedly lose a Hermes 900 unmanned reconnaissance drone — promptly recovered and publicly displayed in Tehran amid self-congratulatory festivities from the Revolutionary Guards, which only revealed their inability to defend the country against the attacks they had provoked.

The broad meaning of all these details is easily summarized: because of Iran’s backward air defenses, there was no real need to use scarce and expensive “stand-off” weapons to target the country. Normal gravity bombs with cheap guidance kits would have been sufficient to do the job — with the notable exception of Ayatollah Khamenei’s deep-underground command headquarters. For that, Israel relied on the world’s most advanced air-launched weapon, its own Blue Sparrow, which flies straight up through the atmosphere before descending to its target with extreme precision and tremendous kinetic force.

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Nor, of course, are the implications here limited to Iran and the Gulf. Having needlessly used so many stand-off missiles to target Iran, US inventories are worryingly low in the event of the “Chinese contingency”: the invasion of Taiwan that Xi Jinping, unlike his predecessors, refuses to rule out. Any Chinese assault might start with subversion, with the activation of Chinese agents in Taiwan’s armed forces, but amphibious landings would have to follow — against which Tomahawk missiles would be the prime US weapon, alongside local anti-ship missiles.

But having examined all these technical details, we nonetheless arrive at something else entirely, a much more intractable problem than any munitions shortage could ever be: a fundamental change in the entire American attitude to war, which I described as “post-heroic” as far back as the Nineties when its first signs emerged.

This amounts to a truly drastic shift. What started with a proper striving to limit the casualties of war by every means possible — starting with prudent statecraft to avoid war in the first place, and extending to prudent tactics — has now devolved into the current predicament: whereby the US must spend billions on extremely elaborate stand-off missiles so as to further reduce risks to its pilots, which were already very low to begin with, against the vainglorious and incompetent Iranian enemy.

The risks of flying over Iran are evidently so low that they are almost comparable to the everyday risks that ordinary passengers face on some lesser Third World airlines, some of which I could not avoid using on a regular basis to reach my Amazonian ranch (not without some trepidation, amid habitual delays, frequent cancellations, and several very hard landings, only one of which ended in a veritable crash).

Nor is the drastic decline in the tolerance of combat risks by the Pentagon chiefs — and even more by the White House — limited to the US Air Force. From the start of the current round of fighting, at least 4,000 82nd Airborne troops, and some 6,000 Marines, arrived at American bases in the Gulf. They could have physically secured the desert islands and islets in the Persian Gulf all the way through the Straits of Hormuz, preventing expedient mine-laying and rocket attacks by Revolutionary Guards. They represent the Islamic Republic’s only remaining threats to the traffic of oil tankers, liquified natural-gas vessels and fertilizer bulk-carriers that affect the world economy, because every one of Iran’s warships and submarines were sunk when the conflict began.

In the event, the White House was so frightened by the possibility of even minimal combat casualties that it made no attempt to keep the Gulf secure and the Straits open, thus allowing Iran to claim victory even to this day. To an extent, then, we should be thankful for the Air Force’s reliance on expensive stand-off weapons: at least it prevented the White House from imposing some abrupt and unilateral ceasefire, merely because a handful of pilots were lost.

It might be tempting to attribute America’s drastic post-heroic turn, in which it was preceded long ago by almost all its Nato allies, to Donald Trump’s dismal performance as a war leader.

To begin with, he refused to explain why the war had to be fought, even in a few grammatical phrases read before the TV cameras. From there, he abruptly accepted a ceasefire justified by a very dubious “memorandum of understanding”, concocted by his war-averse and frankly isolationist vice president; his son-in-law; his favorite wheeler-dealer Steve Witkoff; and Pakistan’s practiced deceivers, who rightly view Americans as easy marks, having obtained billions in aid to allow US trucks to reach Afghanistan while at the same time supporting the Taliban.

Then Trump abruptly reverted to fighting, again without any explanation. Again, that would have required the immense sacrifice of reading four or five grammatical phases before the TV cameras. But, most unfortunately, America’s “post-heroic” turn cannot be blamed on the easiest target; if it were really all Trump’s fault, I could not have predicted that historic transformation in a series of lengthy Foreign Affairs articles decades ago.

After excluding any straightforward political explanations, and ruling out a sudden upsurge of pacifism — that perfectly coherent humanistic creed which has never prevented a single war — I was left with biology: specifically the fall in female fertility, which had already declined to 2.2 in 1994 and is now down to 1.57, well below the 2.1 replacement level.

That, in turn, means that very few families now have more than one boy, or girl for that matter, making each one too precious to sacrifice. In case anyone is in a hurry to move on to other things, viewing the refusal to fight wars as a solution rather than a problem, there is that other effect of the baby shortage: the biological decrepitude of the entire nation as it relentlessly ages. That, it goes without saying, is a challenge that no amount of Tomahawks can correct, and which our rulers absolutely refuse to address.

But with the Trump versus the Mullahs show, nothing is guaranteed. Earlier this month, the International Maritime Organization affirmed the right to freedom of navigation for shipping. But it did so in a very IMO way — formally and a bit pointlessly — prompting Sal Mercogliano, a professor of maritime history, to respond: “Doesn’t do crap. You have to impose freedom of navigation with military force.” In the meantime, the situation for the seafarers who remain in the Strait is perilous — mines, drones, shallow waters — with militias and pirates among the dangers for those who choose to take a different route.

The blunt truth is that no nation has enough seapower to police the ocean. Back in 2010, I went to sea for five weeks on the container ship Maersk Kendal. It was research for my book about international shipping, Ninety Percent of Everything — so named as 90% of, well, everything you own arrives to you on a ship just like it. The mostly Filipino seafarers would greet me each morning with “SSDD, Miss Rose”. Same shit, different day. Now they will probably say, “Different shit, every day.” But even then, they were contending with Somali piracy, which was in full flow. China, the US and a combined EU taskforce had ships patrolling the ocean, but as one admiral told me, the ocean is so huge, it was like having a single police car for all of Western Europe. 

When Kendal passed through the Indian Ocean, I was uncomfortably aware that 544 seafarers were being held hostage not far away, just off Somalia. Everyone knew where they were: it’s tricky to hide a ship in the age of satellites and drones. I wondered at the time whether 544 bus drivers or 544 airline pilots being held hostage would get as little attention. But that was naive. The sea is different. You can do things at sea that you can’t do on land. By 2012, Somali piracy had been tamed. At shipping conferences you will hear that this was done by “best management practices” — zig-zagging and such — but that is nonsense. It was because ships started carrying armed guards. 

This is the shocking thing about these multimillion pound ships with their multimillion pound loads of oil and containers. They are unarmed. In 2010, the only protection we had on Maersk Kendal was a dummy on the poop deck — as if the Somali skiffs would turn back if they thought there were 22 people on board, not 21 — and a crew member standing on the bridge wings with binoculars. 

In Hormuz, ships have no protection either. They are easy prey. With the Western navies preoccupied, the Somalis have opportunistically reappeared in the Arabian Sea and western Indian Ocean and now hold hostage four ships and 67 seafarers. The pirates have issued a £3 million demand for the release of MT Honour 25 and released a chilling photo of the crew sitting on the floor of the bridge, with masked pirates and AK-47s as a backdrop.

When Honour 25 was first taken hostage, one of its crew managed to send a voice note to his family in Karachi, Pakistan. His son Muzammil Ahmed Ansari told Al Jazeera what his father, 53-year-old Mehmood, had managed to say. “He said, ‘We are hijacked, reach out to the company, to people, to the government.’ He said there were pirates on the ship, all armed. He panicked, but he said, ‘Don’t worry, ask the government to deal with it.’”

That was in May. Mehmood is still a hostage. Chirag Bahri, who was held hostage by Somali pirates for nearly eight months in 2010, is not surprised Somali pirates have surged. “They are criminals and they want easy money.” With Trump’s catastrophic war against Iran taking all the attention, pirates have taken advantage of the distraction. 

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If that weren’t enough, the Houthis, a Yemeni militia, popped up again after months of peace, threatening Saudi Arabia-linked ships that pass through the Red Sea. They don’t even have to actually attack: the threat is enough. Already container giants such as the French firm CMA-CGM have told ships to seek shelter, and have canceled transits through Suez. Suddenly if you’re a group or a state with a grievance, maritime chokepoints are a fashionable lever to pull. The Ukrainians are now attacking what they call Russia-linked ships in the Black Sea, although many ships do not carry Russians. 

The broader picture is that the Gulf is static and hardly anything is moving. Now the Suez Canal is risky again, as is Bab-el-Mandeb strait, the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. These all make up the main highways of cargo movements. Where are ships supposed to go? The long way round, probably. It hasn’t yet come to that, but when the Houthis last issued shipping threats, ships began to travel around Africa instead. It’s longer — by 10 to 14 days — and more expensive, but the premiums that insurance companies insist on increasing in war wouldn’t apply and your ship could probably arrive at its destination with both crew and cargo intact. 

Meanwhile it’s the seafarers — the truck drivers of the sea — who suffer most. On 11 July, marine engineer Herambh Karmarkar, a 30-year-old man from Pune, wrote to his family in India: “Our ship has safely crossed.” His ship, the Cyprus-flagged CFS Galaxy, was making its way out of the Strait using the Oman route: this way hugs the Omani coastline and is supposedly protected by the US, though it is very difficult to find out what this protection actually consists of. Herambh was wrong. Hours later, Iranians attacked his ship, probably to terrify other ships into taking the northern route near Iran, and paying for the privilege. Herambh was killed.

A glance at the Recent Incidents section on the UK Maritime Operations Centre (UKMTO) website confirms this sort of thing is now routine: Attack 8 August. Attack 7 August. Another attack 5 August. The UKMTO is careful to report when all crew are safe, but still, the media usually report that ships are being attacked. What if we rephrased it? Civilians are being attacked. Ships do not drive themselves, and although a couple of ships have recently been abandoned, about 6,000 seafarers — who are, remember, civilians — are still stuck on their stationary ships, because stopped ships still need maintenance. And they are targets. 

How many seafarers have already been killed in this war? Currently the estimate is 17 non-Iranians. Iranians, meanwhile, say they have lost 44 men, including 16 fishermen. If the category of seafarers were to include naval personnel, the number is much higher: when the US nuclear submarine USS Charlotte torpedoed the Iranian frigate IRIS Dena in early March, 104 sailors were killed, according to Iran. 

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But we expect naval personnel to die in a war. That’s what they signed up for. There is no such commitment in merchant seafarer contracts. Of course merchant seafarers can fight: during the First and Second World Wars, the merchant navy lost more personnel than the Royal Navy, proportionately, and showed astonishing bravery. But in the modern world, merchant seafarers are civilians, and they should get protection. The broader picture, though, is that the proportion of civilian deaths in conflict has been rising for decades. In 2024 alone, according to the UN Human Rights Office, civilian conflict deaths rose 40% globally. So perhaps the deaths of the men who are bringing you your gasoline and cornflakes should be acceptable. You would think so, given how long it took the media to start noticing that ships attacked by drones and missiles had people on them. 

The latest surge in violence means most transit attempts have stopped. Figures from the maritime intelligence agency Windward AI show 11 inbound transits and seven outbound, a tiny fraction of the pre-war 140 or so transits a day. However, there are now credible reports of companies offering huge financial incentives for crews willing to undertake a transit. Before the latest attacks, the Sinkor Group, the world’s largest operator of supertankers, offered seafarers six months’ salary for one round trip. Other companies are adding 60 days’ salary to what should be a 30-day round trip. 

So has Hormuz changed shipping? Shipping faces constant crises and usually bounces back. But it is hard to see that happening now. For a start, dark transits are way more common than they were before this war began. Russian ships were always good at going dark: this means switching off their AIS (automatic information system), or flying a false flag or inputting false data about their cargo or destination. Now everyone is at it. Since the Houthis decided to threaten Saudi Arabian ships, Saudi ships carrying oil from Yanbu, the port at the end of the Saudi oil pipeline, have gone missing from ship tracking sites: eight turned back, reported Lloyds List, but 11 went dark.

This won’t affect consumers, necessarily — the oil will still be transported, and so will the iPhones and Lego bricks and Toyotas and sugar. But it will affect life at sea. Not everyone at sea is a criminal, but there is no better place to be a criminal than at sea.

But the Strait of Hormuz crisis is something else entirely. The Strait is still blockaded, meaning that about 20,000 seafarers are stranded on more than 1,600 vessels. I am one of those seafarers: a senior officer currently on board a loaded supertanker. We have been stuck in the Persian Gulf since 28 February.

Since then, we have endured nearly 50 days of military planes passing by, of drones flying and being shot down. Sometimes debris hits a fellow tanker. We’ve heard explosions near and far, and sighted fires in the distance. Sighted from afar, those fires might be on the shore or on offshore platforms; it’s hard to tell. But on one occasion, there was no ambiguity. On 31 March, when the Al Salmi oil tanker was hit by an Iranian drone while at anchor in Dubai, we were close enough to see the fire unfold in real time.

It was a privileged view, in a sense, but a disturbing one. Because supertankers are designed to carry crude oil, on-board fires are extremely dangerous. I couldn’t ignore the fact that what happened to the Al Salmi could have happened to us. Watching it burn felt like looking into a mirror.

But work must go on, even when we’re at anchor. We’ve had to continue our routine jobs, such as navigational watches — the bridge is manned 24 hours a day, even at anchor — machinery maintenance, and cleaning. One of the few things that’s changed is the amount of maintenance we do on deck. In the interest of safety, we are largely limiting the area we cover to the part of the deck closest to the accommodation area, so that nobody gets stranded outdoors should danger arise. Those of us who carry out these on-deck duties do so in pairs while carrying an ultra-high frequency radio.

We will probably remain at anchor, carrying out these duties, for a long time. We have provisions and fuel, both provided by the shipping company we’re working for. As for drinking water, we have desalination equipment on board the ship, so we’re not going thirsty. We know of other crews who don’t have even those basics. The idea of crossing the Strait of Hormuz, where we would risk being attacked ourselves, is much scarier than continuing to wait.

But waiting has its own downsides. We are frightened, and we are busy, yet we are also bored. Long voyages are always liable to get boring, but when a ship is at anchor, the boredom — for some subconscious reason — becomes more intense. I’m reading a lot, watching TV when our satellite internet allows, and following the news. My crewmates sometimes fish or work out. But it’s not enough; the crew is tired and mentally unwell.

The reactions to the stress of this situation vary, and by now I’ve seen everything: from inappropriate jokes and needless arguing to grown men crying and a full-blown panic attack. All the crew are facing their own demons while sitting here, waiting. And for every crew member here, there is a group of people on shore facing their own worries, frustrations and fears of having their loved ones stuck here. I know my family has been worrying about me.

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Since we’re in a warzone, my crewmates and I are on double pay. Even so, we are fighting hard to sign off and be relieved by other seafarers. We were not given a choice to be stranded here. Those who replace us, if they decide to come, will have made that choice. We all have the right to refuse to sail, but as long as the Strait of Hormuz remains closed to mainstream companies, there is really no commercial pressure to get the vessel to sail and therefore no reason for our employer to relieve us. That makes the vessel effectively a prison.

The last time anything like this happened was the Covid pandemic, when seafarers were kept on board for months with no access to shore. At least back then there was no risk of drone attacks. But it was still a difficult time for us, and it seems that nothing has really changed. We are still treated partly as hostages, partly as mythically resilient beings, the backbone of the world, who will endure everything for the sake of bringing the cargo to shore.

But we are humans: we are fragile, we have families, and we are dependent on others – in our case the shore personnel who top up our supplies and are supposed to keep us safe. An office worker ends their day, closes the computer and leaves work to go home. We want to do the same, either at the end of our contracts or if we are put in a situation so dangerous, and so far beyond our control, that we don’t wish to continue.

To help us cope with the situation, our employer has provided mental health resources, helplines and live chats, all of which can provide momentary relief. But therapy relies on knowing someone, on trust building between the patient and the doctor, whereas these helplines are like speaking to a stranger. I doubt that, once our contracts are up, we’ll be given much help. I fear that a lot of what we have experienced here will take months or years to wash away.

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I have to remind myself that, up till now, I’ve almost always enjoyed my job. It’s challenging, it pays well, it gives you a lot of time off – about four to six months each year. It’s an office with an amazing view, and it’s a chance to see other countries and to connect with people from other cultures. After all the time I’ve spent nurturing this career, I want to reach the top, to become a captain.

But this is the first time that I’ve had to seriously re-examine my choice of becoming a seafarer. It feels as if my company has no empathy, or even shame, because it is keeping its employees on board against their will in a situation that could actually kill us. I don’t want to stop being a seafarer, but if things go on like this I’ll have to: partly for the sake of my safety, but mostly for the sake of my dignity.

Naturally, I’m following the news non-stop. Our supertanker is a small part of a surreal moment in history. We’re not on shore in Iran or Lebanon, where war is a constant reality, but we’re in a position a little like the eye of the hurricane.

But this hurricane is man-made. I dislike Trump immensely; I also dislike Iran’s regime immensely. I tend to see this war as an unwanted attack from a bully country, while still at the negotiation table, with very little understanding of the consequences of its actions. There are no right sides in this war, all have done terrible things, and in the end, no one will win.

As for me and my crewmates, what we need above all else is clarity: a plan from our employer as to when we will be relieved. Not knowing, silence, is a terrible poison to have on board a ship. Now that a ceasefire is in place, I feel that we have a window of opportunity in which to get people out and in. Our fear is that if the Strait remains closed, and attacks resume on airports and other infrastructure, then we will be stuck here much longer than the weeks that have already elapsed.

Since then, the White House jawboned the oil price down further with claims that the Iranians were talking and a ceasefire was on the table. Yet for all the chatter, the basic picture hasn’t changed: the war continues, the Strait of Hormuz remains effectively closed and oil prices are 50% higher than they were when the year began. While Iran has said that it will allow the ships of non-hostile countries to pass through the Strait in return for a few million dollars, it hasn’t made clear which those countries are — meaning it retains effective control over the flow of oil and goods from the region.

If the ceasefire talk turns out to be just talk then the oil price is likely to surge once more. But even before that, each day the Strait remains under Iran’s control and the bombing continues, the world economy gets pushed ever closer to the abyss. For each day that this situation persists, it will take several more days — and possibly weeks — for the world economy to fully reopen, because damage is getting locked in that will take proportionately longer to repair. 

Some estimates suggest that even if Trump’s more optimistic pronouncements are right and war ends today, it will take at least four months to return to normal. Gas plants that are destroyed now will take months or more to fully restore. Supply chains that have been disrupted, and shipping backlogs that have accumulated, could take up to a year to clear, while undersupplied energy markets will also take months to be restocked. 

The longer the war goes on, the worse all this gets. And with the US sending more troops to the region, Iran and Israel still trading fire, and now Lebanon in flames too, there is little sign of an end to the fighting. Even the American proposal, already rejected by Iran, is supposedly just for a 30-day pause while a final agreement is hammered out. And for all the effort in Washington this week to ease the anxiety in markets, so far there’s been little evidence of an increase in transit across the Strait: as of Tuesday, the number of ships passing through each day was still less than 5% of the pre-war average. Whatever the mood music in the markets, then, the physical shortages continue accumulating daily which suggests that should a ceasefire not materialize, the rise in prices could be brutal.

Given these shortages, inflation is headed upwards. Futures traders don’t currently expect oil prices to return to where they were at the start of 2026 for several years. In part, that’s because there’s little expectation of a return to the status quo ante in the Strait of Hormuz, even with peace. Iran has shown it can control the Strait, and absent the installation of a friendly regime in Tehran, traders will likely attach a risk premium to an export tap that can now be shut off at any time.

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Moreover, the pain of higher prices spreads beyond energy to other products and services whose supply is affected by the war. In particular, food prices are going to rise because of a fertilizer shortage from the Gulf, which will hit just as the northern planting season begins. That will inevitably reduce this year’s crop yields. Though the pain will be most acute in countries like Sudan and Somalia, which rely heavily on fertilizer from the Gulf and where food insecurity is already a problem, it will be felt everywhere. In Britain, the National Farmers’ Union is predicting we may start to see increased prices on cucumbers and tomatoes as soon as next month. Aluminum prices are also rising, which could feed into the cost of a range of manufactured goods, from cars to beer cans. And the shortages building up via wartime backlogs will put upward pressure on prices for a while, as happened after the pandemic.

Reflecting this, interest rates on government debt have risen sharply. In part, this reflects a growing expectation that central banks will hold off cutting interest rates, and indeed may even raise them, to ward off inflation. But in part too it probably reflects a growing hesitancy about lending to governments whose fiscal accounts show no sign of coming under control. The US national debt, already approaching $40 trillion — about 124% of GDP — suddenly looks set to get $200 billion bigger as the Pentagon seeks a top-up of its rapidly-depleting weapons stockpile.

Rising interest rates, in turn, will force budget cuts elsewhere, not just for governments, but for cash-strapped consumers and businesses. One alternative, of course, is more borrowing. But that could potentially produce a vicious upwards spiral in interest rates. The resulting decline in investment could then be exacerbated by a contraction of global liquidity. Why? Because the Gulf states, which have been investing a lot of their surpluses abroad, may now have to close their purses to foreigners to focus on rebuilding at home.

Stock markets are anticipating all this, with indexes down across most of the world (though interestingly, many developing countries are still holding up). In the US, where over half the population invests in the stock market, this could create a negative wealth effect that restrains consumption at the top end of the income spectrum, tipping the economy further toward recession. On the prediction markets, the odds of the economy falling into recession, rising by the day, have now reached one in three.

Sluggish or falling stock prices could also generate strains in some of the more opaque corners of the market, such as private equity, where the lack of exit options for firms has led investors to start demanding back their money — only to be rebuffed. It’s therefore possible that the worst is yet to come for asset markets.

This raises another worrying possibility. It may emerge that Donald Trump’s improv theater of war —  which has already raised uncomfortable questions about whether its purpose is to move markets for the advantage of insiders — doesn’t reflect anything other than the whims of the president and his short-termist entourage. The madman theory of international negotiations, once associated with Richard Nixon, presumes a rational actor who persuades others of his folly to extract concessions; what it doesn’t anticipate is a genuine madman, or merely someone who doesn’t have a complete handle on his policy briefs.

So far investors, and some political analysts, have opted to believe that there is a method behind Trump’s apparent madness — for instance that the closure of the Strait of Hormuz actually serves his strategy of establishing global energy dominance at the expense of China. Of course, this thesis doesn’t really square with the fact that the shares of Chinese battery makers have risen more than those of US oil firms since the war began, while volatility in oil and gas markets seems likely to accelerate the world’s transition away from fossil fuels, an outcome that would be beneficial to China.

If, then, investors begin to doubt that the President has an actual plan and is merely fumbling his way toward improvised, temporary and sub-optimal solutions, a new risk premium may get attached to US securities. This could lower their value yet further on world markets. Investors dare not entertain that possibility yet. Should that ever change, though, the turn in US markets could be sharper than expected.

But even assuming that Trump is a rational, calculating operator, a fundamental problem remains: the two sides to this negotiation appear to be approaching risk in entirely different ways. Trump’s approach to negotiation and combat is based on arithmetic. It assumes that whoever has the resources to do the most damage has the upper hand — and will therefore win. 

However, humans only sometimes make decisions in this way. More often, they use calculus, or indeed no mathematical reasoning at all. For many people, there really are things you can’t put a price on. For the Iranian regime, submitting to Trump’s latest demands — for instance suspending their ballistic missile program — would amount to the end of the Islamic Republic. Little wonder, then, that they’d sooner die than give in. And if there are opportunists in the ranks of the Revolutionary Guards, willing to be bought off in some Venezuela-style putsch, disloyalty doesn’t seem common in the high command. Again, that’s hardly surprising: as a group, the Guards are deeply ideological and committed to the regime’s survival at all costs. 

Despite Donald Trump’s cratering poll numbers, one thing that can be said is that Americans who voted for him knew what they were getting. He might have said he would stay out of forever wars, but the way he makes and implements decisions was always well known. If he somehow pulls a rabbit of triumph out of the Middle Eastern hat, his followers will be vindicated in their judgment. If he fails, they have to take their share of the blame.

As for Iran, even if an agreement is cobbled together in the short-term, the Islamic Republic looks set to persist with what Israel calls the “Samson strategy” — even if that means bringing the house down with everyone in it. If that makes them the true madmen, it’s at least madness based on rational calculation. The US’s pain threshold is likely to be met earlier than that — and the only question is whether Trump postpones that surrender until the damage done to the world economy makes a rebound this year impossible.

The horrific game of chicken being played in the Middle East will only end either when Iran goes over the cliff — or when the US slams the brakes. The first doesn’t appear imminent and the second is impossible to predict. In the meantime, we therefore seem stuck in an escalation loop which will only end when the damage becomes very severe. Until then, the war drags on, and the world edges closer to the abyss. 

As the war enters its second month, we find ourselves at a moment of maximum uncertainty. The Strait of Hormuz is besieged by missile launchers. The oil price has surged. America’s Nato allies are balking at Trump’s demands for help. Trump has announced a five-day postponement of strikes on Iranian power plants, claiming that Iran and the US are now in peace talks — only for a senior Iranian official to deny that such talks are taking place. All the while, domestic pressure is mounting on Trump: his allies want him to finish the job or get out.

Will Trump double down to achieve a complete and unquestionable victory, perhaps through a territorial takeover of the Strait of Hormuz? Or will he claim the action he’s already taken as a total win, blame his allies for failing to secure the peace, and walk away? Will the global economy ride out the chaos — or should we expect recessions?

With these questions in mind, the Swift Centre has consulted its forecasters on what is likely to happen next.

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1. Will the US send in the army?

If President Trump wants to secure a clear victory, the most urgent question facing the Pentagon is whether aerial dominance is sufficient. If not, then does the US commit significant troops — not just special forces, but a brigade — to secure critical strategic territory? A ground war would be highly unpopular with most Americans — but it might be the only way to destroy the remnants of Iran’s nuclear program or control the critical supply chain through the Strait of Hormuz.

To analyze the prospects of a ground war, the Swift Centre professional forecasters were asked about the likelihood that the US will deploy more than 1,000 troops into Iran before May 31st 2026 — providing a median forecast of 30%.

The forecasts were made before Trump claimed that peace negotiations were underway, but they take into account the President’s volatility. Of particular significance is Trump’s statement, when asked about the prospects of a ground war, that “nothing is off the table”.  

As one forecaster observed: 

“The simple fact that the door was not closed was a meaningful turning point. Previous presidencies (including 45th) had not hesitated to rule it out even if that meant losing some strategic advantage.”

That the 11th and 31st Marine Expeditionary Units (MEUs) are en route to the region has added weight to this possibility. These units, though relatively small, are designed for the kind of targeted territorial seizures now being discussed in Washington. Forecasters are particularly focused on the crown jewel of Iran’s oil export infrastructure: Kharg Island.

“[The deployment of 1,000 troops on Iranian soil] is most likely to happen if the US tries to seize Kharg Island or secure the Strait of Hormuz… Strikingly, a thousands-strong Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) has been dispatched from Japan to the Middle East. It will arrive in the region well before May 31.”

Some suggest Trump has held an obsession with the island for decades, citing a 1988 interview where he claimed “One bullet shot at one of our men or ships, and I’d do a number on Kharg Island. I’d go in and take it”.

But a large commitment of American troops would entail significant risks — and the taking of territory would not necessarily bring the US closer to achieving its goals. As a more skeptical forecaster put it:

“It is very difficult to determine what military objective would be simultaneously risk tolerant for political leaders and effective in changing the political will, economic conditions, or combat conditions to warrant using them to attempt to take any territory.”

Ultimately, President Trump needs to weigh his priorities for this conflict in the context against the political risks in an election year. One forecaster put it bluntly:

“Does he have the guts to send over a thousand soldiers though?… That’s bound to bring a high number of coffins back home, and this is not going to look good six months before the midterms”.

2. For how long will the Strait of Hormuz be at a standstill?

The Strait of Hormuz, being the world’s most critical economic choke point, is being held hostage by Iran. The IRGC has calculated, correctly, that if it can hold up the shipping, it can cause worldwide economic havoc, thus creating leverage for itself.

So far, the strategy seems to have been effective. The International Energy Agency has already stated that this war is causing the largest ever disruption to oil markets and that oil flows will take months to recover after the war ends. If Trump seems more interested in peace talks, it is probably at least in part because he fears that Iran can inflict economic pain on the US and its allies.

We therefore asked our forecasters how long it would take for the Strait of Hormuz to return to a “normal” flow of traffic following a US withdrawal or indefinite cessation of military action. Our yardstick for “normal” was the point when the seven-day average of ship arrivals reaches 60 per day, as reported by IMF Portwatch.

The result was a median forecast of three weeks. On paper, a three-week lag sounds manageable. However, the distribution of our forecasts reveals a worrying long tail. The forecasters believe there is a 90% chance the Strait will be back to normal within eight weeks — but that leaves a 10% chance that the disruption could last even longer than two months. The physical and legal friction of war cannot be wished away by a presidential decree or a declaration of victory. As one forecaster noted:

“The requirements are: 1) Demining the area, 2) insurers and carriers agreeing to resume transit and ships physically getting back to the Gulf, and 3) about seven days of high enough traffic to build the moving average”.

In other words, there is no switch enabling the world to go from zero to “normal” in only a few days.

Beyond the logistics, there is a deeper risk: that the cessation of military action does not equate to a restoration of the status quo. Forecasters are weighing the possibility that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), having survived the initial US onslaught, permanently weaponizes the Strait. One forecaster noted:

“If the IRGC survives, which is the most likely scenario… They will instead see it as an opportunity for leverage on their enemies and will act to control their access. With that in mind, I think they will set it up as a toll gate, charge ships for the privilege, and be selective as to who they let pass.”

The longer the war goes on, the greater the risk to infrastructure that would be required to get the supply chain back to normal levels. A forecaster who felt the most likely scenario was a fast reopening warned that it could take up to 12 weeks, noting the possibility of the Strait being heavily mined. The same forecaster warned that it would be in the Iranian regime’s interests to slow down the reopening.

A toll gate would be a nightmare scenario for global trade. It would place a tax on the West while favoring Iran’s allies, like China and India, whose ships have already begun to trickle through the Strait again. For Trump, this creates a secondary dilemma: walk away and allow the value of the Strait to be extracted by Iran, or stay and commit to the very type of “forever war” he has spent his political career railing against.

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3. Will the war cause a recession in the West?

The ripples of the Iran conflict are already washing against the shores of the world’s largest economic blocs. European economies, having failed to make a quick recovery from the Covid pandemic, were already struggling with the effects of the war in Ukraine, and are vulnerable to the fallout from the war in Iran — not least because the EU has failed to secure its own energy supply. A key question, then, is: will the US or the EU fall into a recession in 2026?.

The Swift Centre’s current aggregate forecast places the likelihood of such a recession at 35%. While this might not yet be a coin-flip, it represents a dramatic elevation above the historical base rate — estimated at around 10-15% for these regions. The key factor here is energy. As one forecaster noted:

“Europe didn’t need for the Strait to be closed in order to already have issues, so I’m pretty concerned”.

The forecasters note a stark gap in vulnerability between the two economic blocs. While the US can look to its own domestic petrochemical resources to smooth out price shocks, Europe remains perilously exposed to the flow of gas and oil from the Persian Gulf. 

“The EU bloc is more vulnerable than the US with growth being anemic anyway and [its] dependency on oil from the Gulf region being higher.”

In part, the economic danger is represented by the price at the pump, which is often the focus of the mainstream news. But other risks include potential shortages of critical industrial materials such as aluminum, fertilizer and helium. Swift Centre forecasters note a troubling cocktail: the war in Iran is coming at a time when the private credit market in the US is in trouble; when there are significant structural constraints on European industrial growth; and when Trump’s own tariff policies are causing inflationary pressure on the American economy.

If the “toll gate” scenario in the Strait becomes a reality, then, the temporary shock of war could transform into a structural economic drain. One forecaster cautioned that “if Hormuz strait remains functionally closed for months… the risk rises dramatically”. The EU, facing a potential multi-year natural gas shortage, will be hoping for a quick resolution, but time is running out.

Nevertheless, there is hope. Some forecasters are more bullish on the economic resilience of the EU and US. They note that consumer demand, which remains healthy, is a reliable predictor of whether the US faces recession, and that if the US stays out of recession, then the EU generally does the same. “The US has experienced gas prices this high many times,” one forecaster wrote, “and there are many tools that can be used to manage or lower gas prices.” Perhaps Trump’s hand is stronger than his claims of peace talks would suggest.

Indeed, there’s plenty of evidence that the second oil crisis is already here.

On Oct. 17, 1973, the Arab members of OPEC announced a 5% monthly production cut after Washington airlifted weapons to Israel during the Yom Kippur War. Next came a full embargo against the United States and the Netherlands(the latter boasted one of Europe’s most pro-Israel governments at the time and was used as a staging ground for US support to the Jewish state).

The price of crude surged to $11 a barrel, up from $3, in a matter of weeks. American gasoline prices jumped 40% by November. Lines formed at filling stations. The Western world was in crisis. The US economy tipped into stagflation and remained there for the rest of the decade. By the end of the 1970s, then-President Jimmy Carter gave a speech diagnosing a national “malaise” and a “crisis of confidence.” He also urged his countrymen to wear sweaters in lieu of burning fuel to warm themselves.

The embargo lasted five months. The damage lasted a decade. Japan, which imported almost all its oil, restructured its entire industrial base around electronics and fuel efficiency. That pivot made Japan’s economy more innovative, the envy of the world for the next 20 years. The crisis also created the International Energy Agency and the first serious strategic-petroleum-reserve frameworks that still exist today: after what the global economy went through that decade, countries wanted to deal with the issue collectively, coordinating in preparation of the next embargo.

But there is a crucial difference between then and now. In 1973, the disruption resulted from a political decision by producers to turn off the tap. Supply could theoretically have been restored the minute politics changed.

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What we confront now, as a consequence of Trump’s Iran war, is more complicated: chokepoint closure, damaged infrastructure, insurance markets in disarray, fields shutting in (temporarily closed). And the scale is simply not comparable. Around 20 million barrels a day move through the Strait of Hormuz, roughly 20% of global consumption and nearly a third of all seaborne oil trade. The 1973 embargo, damaging as it was, didn’t come close to these conditions. This is a supply disruption brought about by Iran in response to Tehran being attacked by two nuclear powers, and its ramifications won’t soon be contained, much less reversed.

The Strait of Hormuz is 21 nautical miles wide at its narrowest. That makes room for two shipping lanes, each two miles across. Around 100 vessels a day transited the strait in normal times, 60% to 70% of them tankers or liquid-natural-gas carriers. Saudi Arabia moves 38% of the crude that transits the strait, Iraq another 22%, and the United Arab Emirates 13%. The top five exporters between them account for 93% of all the crude that goes through that passage.

Saudi Arabia and the UAE have constructed pipelines for just this type of contingency. Together, they can route about 2.6 million barrels a day around the strait, approximately a third of Gulf export volumes. Iraq and Kuwait have no such option, however. And Qatar, which supplies roughly a fifth of the world’s LNG, has no alternative route to market, either. This is a structural problem that sheer capacity alone can’t overcome.

Since Feb. 28, commercial shipping through the strait has nearly ground to a halt. Tanker traffic dropped 70% in the first days and then fell to near zero as jacked-up insurance premiums rendered the economics impossible. Most of the vessels still moving are from the Iranian dark fleet. Washington has been reluctant to target them, wary of what Tehran would do to Gulf energy infrastructure in retaliation. Protection-and-indemnity war-risk coverage was suspended as of March 5. The Trump administration floated the idea of sovereign-level tanker insurance, but Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent quickly walked back the brainstorm. That would have put US taxpayers on the hook for damaged cargo, while the US Navy has made it clear that it lacks the ability to offer protective escorts in the near future.

In short, without insurance, ships don’t move.

Iraq’s three main southern oilfields have seen production collapse by 70%, falling to roughly 1.3 million barrels per day, down from 4.3 million. Onshore storage is filling because there is nowhere to send the crude. Fields that shut in don’t simply restart if and when a ceasefire is announced. Reservoir pressure, infrastructure condition, damaged terminals — all factor in, to the world economy’s detriment.

The timeline for restoration is weeks at best and months in the most realistic cases. Even today, the market is pricing a clean restart. Yet that assumption has very little basis in how the Middle East actually operates.

Brent, a key oil benchmark, is now trading north of $106 a barrel. That is the number that gets attention, but it is everything that this number triggers that needs to be examined.

Liquefied petroleum gas and naphtha (liquid hydrocarbon used in the petrochemicals industry) move through the Persian Gulf in enormous volumes, and almost nobody outside the energy sector thinks about them. Naphtha is what petrochemical plants, heavily concentrated in Northeast Asia, run on. Those plants make plastics, fertilizers, packaging, and the agricultural chemicals that go into growing the food we consume. When naphtha supply is disrupted, the effects don’t show up at the pump. They show up six to twelve weeks later in the price of a bag of flour, a bottle of cooking oil, a box of cereal.

We watched this in slow motion after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. Russian and Ukrainian wheat, corn, sunflower oil, and fertilizer were never formally sanctioned. But the disruption to trade finance, shipping insurance, and port logistics was enough to send food prices into a commodity super-cycle that hit Egypt, Lebanon, Pakistan, and Bangladesh harder than anywhere else. Governments already stretched by their Covid fiscal response had nothing left to absorb the extra shock. The Third Gulf War threatens a repeat — on a much wider scale.

Then there’s LNG. Qatar has declared force majeure on LNG exports, freeing itself from delivery obligations, after drone strikes hit its export infrastructure. Qatar accounts for roughly a fifth of global LNG supply. The IEA estimates a full Hormuz closure would pull more than 300 million cubic meters per day out of the global gas market, about twice what Nord Stream carried at its peak. There is no spare liquefaction capacity sitting idle somewhere that can cover that. Australia, the United States, and West Africa are all running near full capacity. Asia and Europe will end up competing for the same cargoes, bidding up prices that eventually land on ordinary consumers.

A ceasefire in the next 30 to 60 days, followed by a slow normalization of shipping, probably keeps Brent somewhere between $110 and $130 and takes at least half a point off global GDP.  That is the optimistic scenario, and it requires things to go well politically in a region where things have a habit of going, well, boom.

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Beyond 90 days, the picture darkens considerably. Shut-in fields, damaged port infrastructure, an insurance market that can’t simply switch back on, storage constraints that have permanently altered production profiles in some fields. Iran’s own military spokesperson has already warned publicly to get ready for oil at $200 a barrel. Analysts at Rystad Energy have Brent at $135 by June if the war runs for four months. Markets are not pricing that yet. They were not pricing a pandemic in February 2020, either.

The IEA, founded in the wake of the 1973 crisis, has now coordinated the largest emergency stockpile release in its 50-year history: 400 million barrels across more than 30 countries, with the United States contributing 172 million barrels from its Strategic Petroleum Reserve. It is an extraordinary intervention. It is also, as analysts at Bernstein noted, only about 15% of the daily supply lost due to the Hormuz closure. The barrels also take 60 to 90 days to meaningfully reach the market. It buys time but doesn’t fundamentally deal with the problems outlined above.

The United States isn’t insulated from these price shocks. The Trump administration has been fighting to tame inflation, and that fight gets considerably harder if oil stays above $100 a barrel for any length of time. Trumpian spokesmen gloat about domestic production, serenely unaware that oil and gas are fungible global commodities: a chokepoint several thousand miles away will drive up prices everywhere else — that is, unless Washington is prepared to contemplate an export ban.

The picture is still bleaker elsewhere. As consumers, China, India, Japan, and South Korea together account for around 75% of the crude that transits the Persian Gulf. China alone sources more than half of its 11-million-barrels-a-day import requirement from the Middle East. For those countries, this is literally the lifeblood of their economic development.

And as it was in 1973, the people who absorb the worst of it will not be the ones with the hedges and the trading desks. They will be in Cairo buying cooking oil, or in Karachi watching the price of flour move out of reach. They will be working-class Trump voters on low incomes who need to fill up their tanks to get to work. Half a century on from the first oil crisis, a narrow passage can still bring the global economy to its knees.

Yet when Asian markets opened later in the night, the search for oil and gas resumed and prices came back off their lows. With traffic through the Strait of Hormuz still at a virtual standstill — and the Islamic Republic warning “the end of the war is in Iran’s hands” — the President is learning that it’s easier to start wars than finish them. Trump may now have to confront an unpleasant dilemma: either stand down US forces and allow a murderous regime its victory parade, or save face and risk derailing the world economy. 

Yet despite chatter to the contrary, such a downturn wouldn’t reprise the Seventies. Then, an oil-price spike triggered by a Middle East war caused inflation to skyrocket. Now, the impacts will be considerably more muted, for several reasons. 

First off, the world economy is much less carbon-intensive than it was back then. On average, it takes half the energy to produce a dollar of output than it did when the Yom Kippur War began, with the productivity gains most pronounced in Western economies where the shift from manufacturing to services and more efficient technologies have greatly reduced dependence on imported energy. Second, the US has gone from being dependent on the Middle East for its energy to being a net exporter of oil and gas: making it less vulnerable to external shocks. Third, many countries are well into an energy transition towards renewable energy, and so are more able to withstand a surge in oil and gas prices.

All the same, while the world is more resilient to an energy shock than it was 50 years ago, in other ways it is actually more vulnerable to the impact of an oil shock right now. To begin with, the interruption of oil flow is bigger than it was then, with one prominent industry analyst arguing that the supply removed from the market has been twice the size of any previous shock. That’s unsurprising: this time, the entire Gulf supply has been cut, representing 30% of the world’s output.

This price shock hits the world economy at a delicate time. All three of the world’s biggest economies are already showing signs of weakness. China just downgraded its growth target, recognizing that its economy is slowing, and that boosting domestic consumption will be harder and more time-consuming than hoped. Europe, for its part, is still in a funk and is being hit hard by the price rises — especially when it’s so dependent on oil and gas imports.

As for America, there are already signs that its economy has also been softening. As last week’s employment report revealed, the job market is in bad shape – 90,000 jobs lost last month and revisions to previous reports that reveal the economy hasn’t created any new jobs since last spring. Meanwhile, the GDP report for the final quarter of 2025 came in much weaker than expected, and while most economists have anticipated a bounceback once new tax cuts kick in, higher oil prices would neutralize their effects. 

While the oil shock will be less severe in the US than in Europe, meanwhile, it will nonetheless encourage inflation if oil prices stay on their current path. Even though futures markets indicate traders expect oil prices to start falling soon, they also expect them to finish the year some 25% higher than was expected just a few months ago. In other words, even in the optimistic scenario, higher prices may be here for a while.

Nor is oil the only inflationary challenge here. Because such a large share of the world’s fertilizer supply comes from the Gulf, prices here have shot up too. This will feed straight through to food prices — and because the northern hemisphere has already begun its spring planting season, these increases are already informing production costs. Farmers could adjust by using less fertilizer, particularly in developing countries, but given the tight correlation between fertilizer input and crop yield, this pretty much guarantees production shortfalls and so higher food prices later in the year.

For their part, aluminum prices have shot up too, with shipping costs rising by about a fifth. If the war lasts for more than a few weeks, supply chains may take months to re-establish, and backlogs will persist for a while, just as they did after the Covid  lockdowns. Aluminum, for example, is widely used in construction and in the production of cars, consumer electronics and packaging. Its increased cost will ripple quickly through the economy.

All this is happening as inflationary pressures rise across the US economy. Last month’s Producer Price Index came in much hotter than expected, suggesting inflation was looming. That’s as a recent report from the Institute for Supply Management found that manufacturers are expecting substantial price increases this year. At worst, then, this oil shock will raise inflation; at best, inflation won’t come down, possibly for the rest of the year. 

Either way, it will now be harder for the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates, which will provide a headwind to the stock market. Wall Street has traded sideways for four months, and is now down slightly since the start of the war. So far there’s been little sign of panic, and stocks are far from bearish. Even so, that may not offer much solace to investors. With the job market now so weak, and American consumers having run down their savings, the so-called “k-shaped” economy has been kept afloat by rich Americans spending their stock market gains.

Any interruption could therefore slow consumption in the top half of the economy, contributing to a wider slowdown. But it could also store up some even bigger problems. In particular, private equity firms were looking to a positive 2026 to finally unclog the pipeline of IPOs they need to generate the cash for shareholders. A weak stock market may affect their cash flow negatively, which could in turn force their owners, including big institutional investors like pension funds, to sell other shares to generate income. Already, we’re seeing strains in the credit part of the private equity industry, where Goldman Sachs is now pitching funds that will short corporate loans, pointing to what could be a difficult year.

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All told, the US economy, like most of the world, can ill afford a protracted shock. And while global markets won’t follow the plotlines drawn in the Seventies, they’re still at risk of decelerating if Trump’s war doesn’t end soon. 

For the moment, we must see where oil prices go. If they keep falling through the week, it may suggest that traders genuinely see an end to the war. But if they keep rising, or even stay where they are, the global economy faces a grim 2026.

To be sure, a global downturn wouldn’t necessarily mean a global recession; many economies would continue growing, albeit more slowly than before. But for developed economies, the risk of outright recessions would be high. And, given the debt burdens already accumulated by Western governments, their space for fiscal stimulus could be constrained, meaning any recession could prove quite stubborn.

In short, we must hope for peace — and soon. Unfortunately, those prosecuting this war don’t appear to have a clear idea of how to end it. Part of Trump’s challenge now is that even if he cuts and runs, the Gulf will remain volatile, which could prevent normal traffic. Israel, for its part, may continue its strikes even if the Americans step back. Without a definitive defeat for Iran, the Islamic Republic may opt to keep the Strait closed in order to secure better peace terms.

Worse for Trump personally, meanwhile, is that he’d lined up several investment commitments from regional governments, which were to benefit both the US economy and his own family. With Gulf governments understandably distracted, these plans may be put on hold.  Already, governments which had pledged hundreds of billions of dollars of US investment and offered to fund Trump’s Gaza Board of Peace are reconsidering their plans. So even if Trump wants to believe he’s exempt from the old Pottery Barn Rule — if you break it, you own it — he may now be stuck with a hell of a bill: whatever he does next.