Trump Erupts in Fury Over His War Failures—and Exposes a Big Weakness

Judging by Donald Trump’s outbursts of late, he can’t seem to decide whether reopening the Strait of Hormuz is easy or hard. He also can’t seem to decide whether he needs international allies to help with this urgent task or not. Iran’s blockade on oil shipments exiting the strait—done in response to Trump’s attack—is causing worsening global consequences daily. So it would be useful for Trump to settle these arguments in his own mind already.

But Trump’s incoherence on the Strait of Hormuz actually reveals something else, as well: a massive political weakness.

Just look at this wildly unhinged eruption from Trump on Friday:

Without the U.S.A., NATO IS A PAPER TIGER! They didn’t want to join the fight to stop a Nuclear Powered Iran. Now that fight is Militarily WON, with very little danger for them, they complain about the high oil prices they are forced to pay, but don’t want to help open the Strait of Hormuz, a simple military maneuver that is the single reason for the high oil prices. So easy for them to do, with so little risk. COWARDS, and we will REMEMBER!

So reopening the strait is very “simple,” yet Trump can’t seem to accomplish this; indeed, he’s reportedly considering sending in ground troops to do so. Trump is also raging at our NATO allies for refusing to help. But why does he need this help if this is so “easy” and we’ve already “won”?

The hidden answer to this riddle is as follows: Trump knows that reopening the strait is highly challenging and that the political perils to him—and the GOP in the midterms—of dramatically ramping up military efforts to reopen it are great. He wants our allies to help so that they shoulder some of this political risk—and share in taking blame for the failure to reopen it or for whatever military disasters result.

As a substantive matter, Trump’s argument here is absurd. This reopening isn’t easy. It’s a legitimately difficult problem because its geography privileges Iran by making it possible for small vessels to inflict outsize damage and casualties. As Tom Nichols notes, advisers informed Trump of all this in advance, but he assumed our strength would overwhelm such boring complexities, and he never developed a plan B.

What’s more, Trump’s fury at allies over this is deranged. He has spent the last year shredding our alliances in every conceivable way. He has unleashed endless threats to invade places like Greenland and slapped tariffs on allies with no discernible motive other than malignant nationalist belligerence.

Yet now Trump wants to stamp the word multilateral on any effort to militarily reopen the strait, after insisting that the United States could easily defeat Iran all on its own. Suddenly, Trump does need our international alliances, after all.

Trump’s bigger argument is that generally the U.S. has sacrificed a great deal for the NATO alliance, so our allies should return the favor now. But the NATO alliance’s core principle is collective defense in the event of an actual attack on a member, whereas here, Trump attacked Iran even though officials privately said it didn’t remotely pose the threat Trump claimed.

“It’s a mutual defense pact,” international relations professor Nicholas Grossman told me, speaking about NATO. “There’s no obligation to join in a member state’s offensive actions.” As Grossman has also noted, our allies have already demonstrated reciprocation by helping defend the U.S. in the Afghanistan War after the September 11 attacks.

Besides, Trump himself has confirmed that he didn’t consult with any of our allies before launching his attack. Germany has responded to Trump’s demand by saying, “This is not our war,” and France has responded by declaring, “We are not party to the conflict.” This is not only true, it’s a state of affairs Trump created himself.

So Trump is in a bind. He’ll take the blame for global damage from closure of the strait—including the higher prices on gas and other products walloping American consumers. But reopening it might impose military costs that also pose a big political problem for him. This conundrum flows from hardheaded geographic fundamentals that magnify Iran’s ability to inflict disproportionate damage with a badly degraded military. But as Bill Kristol details, no one around Trump appears able to coax him to reason through these fundamentals.

There’s also a deeper political vulnerability here worth pondering.

Trump’s outbursts suggest that he wants voters to blame NATO for failing to help us reopen the strait, and thus decide NATO is no longer worth belonging to. He also wants voters to blame our allies’ supposed shirking of their obligations for our own weakening commitment to NATO and our potential exit from it. But this will be a tough sell.

Our discourse baselessly ascribes popularity to Trump’s right-populist-coded moves—from tariffs to deportations to disdain for globalization and multilateral institutions—as if these tap some deeper yearning on the part of the true American Volk. Yet in the last year, majorities have rejected his tariffs and deportations and, importantly, seem to be rejecting his basic arguments for a more closed society.

As Brian Beutler points out, many voters have basic intuitions rooted in real-life experience about the goodness of things like immigration and trade, and have come to grasp that on these issues, Trump is a fundamentally destructive force. The same likely applies to multilateral institutions: Polling shows that large majorities view NATO positively and, importantly, that they also think the U.S. benefits from membership in it.

So it seems plausible that Trump is reminding a great many Americans why multilateral cooperation and interdependence are affirmative national goods. They get that Trump has been malevolently screwing over our allies—remember, most voters despise his tariffs. They grasp that he is a reprobate user who treats friends like shit and thinks he can then bully them into coming to his rescue—into cleaning up his messes. All signs suggest they’re rejecting the hypernationalist, militaristic, kleptocratic, imperialist posture toward the world that Trump is forcing on us. They think our alliances are generally to our benefit and that Trump doesn’t act as a faithful steward of them. Instead, he’s wrecking them out of incompetence and malice.

So it’s doubtful that voters will blame our NATO allies for our own faltering commitment to it. It’s also unlikely that they’ll blame NATO for failing to bail us out of the disaster Trump has created for us. They’ll blame him for it. Which, ultimately, is why Trump is in such a half-cocked fury—he knows he’s on the hook for this fiasco, and he knows there’s no easy or obvious way out of it.