Somewhere East of Suez

In the game of historical analogies, the mugging of Iran and the resulting shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz are a rerun of the 1956 Suez crisis, when the colonial masters in Britain and France teamed up with Israel to crush Egypt and keep the Suez Canal out of the hands of an Islamic madman (in that case, Gamal Abdel Nasser).

What broke the colonial dreams at Suez in 1956 was the refusal of the Dwight Eisenhower administration to go along with Israel, Britain, and France, just as for the moment in Iran, NATO’s lack of interest in a splendid little war is pulling the plug on Donald Trump’s quest for Persian Lebensraum.

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For game theorists, the Suez Crisis has some verses that rhyme, although I think the better analogy for Trump’s political self-destruction in Iran is the 1915 landing at the Gallipoli peninsula.

According to that magic formula, British and French warships were to rush the Dardanelles (the straits leading from the Aegean toward the Black Sea), seize Constantinople, and then roll up from the east the Central Powers of Austro-Hungary and the Kaiser’s Germany.

In part, Gallipoli was the brainchild of Britain’s First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill (although it had other proponents, including Lord Kitchener), and to many in the British high command, it had some of the same allure that bombing Iran now has for Donald Trump’s addled mind.

Initially, Gallipoli was to have been a low-cost end run, accomplished with some rusty battleships, that would alter the stalemate of World War I and reorder the geopolitics of the Near East.

With Britain and France astride Hellespont, the Ottomans would be reduced to some wandering tribe (maybe near Angora?) while Western Civilization would have reclaimed Constantinople and secured all the key waterways between London and India.

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I realize that in Iran today it would be a mistake to ascribe any strategic considerations to Trump’s foreign-policy-by-temper-tantrum and tariff backhanders, but for the sake of argument let’s assume that the goal behind the Blitzkrieg (beyond allowing Trump to control the dispersement account of Iran’s oil exports) is to create a united front between Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf States (without any threats on its flanks from Houthi rebels or Shiite assassins).

And if you want to go further (given that Trump remains firmly in Putin’s sphere of influence), you could add that the Iranian assault (as at Gallipoli in 1915) has been timed to bail out a faltering Russia and to put pressure on newer central European powers (i.e., NATO, which Trump despises).

So how did things work out for the Allies at Gallipoli? Since Donald Trump, on a visit to Hawaii, had to have explained to him the rudiments of what happened at Pearl Harbor in 1941, I don’t think that the answers to the Gallipoli question can be found in the Oval Office (now reduced to a gilded bucket shop). But here’s a brief answer.

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In March 1915—as with Trump’s folly at Hormuz—the Allied attack on the Dardanelles straits failed for want of mine sweepers (boats that are equally missing today in Pete Hegseth’s Game Boy navy).

Turkish defenders cut loose enough mines to sink three Allied battleships, and then artillery in the hills overlooking the straits kept other Allied warships from breaking into the Bosphorus.

Given such a deadlock (very similar to today’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz), the Allies decided to launch an amphibious assault on the Gallipoli peninsula—landing French, British, Australian, New Zealand, Indian, and Newfoundland troops at such forlorn death traps as Cape Helles and ANZAC Cove.

I am sure the supremely incompetent General Dan “Razin” Caine has already carried into Trump’s office the bande dessinée (comic books) to make the point that American ground troops will be needed on Qeshm island to secure the Strait of Hormuz (although something tells me that 2,500 marines might not be sufficient to capture an island that is 580 square miles, let alone a country three times the size of Iraq with a population of 90 million).

At Gallipoli, the Allies deployed some 500,000 troops, although they hardly managed to get off the landing beaches, and ten months laterza—after suffering hundreds of thousands of casualties—retreated to their boats.

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Of course, it is probably a mistake to attribute to Donald Trump anything approaching coherence in foreign policy, especially in the Middle East (where there are too many countries and too many tribes for him to keep everything straight).

All he really can do is concentrate on what interests him the most, which is to divide the world into those countries giving him golf courses and cash, and those (like Iran) that don’t look very promising for a Trump five-star resort. (Charlie don’t surf, and mullahs don’t golf.)

Some might like to imagine Trump as a mercantilist for whom the world divides nicely into captive commodity markets, but those trade theories are way over his head. Besides, it’s not really how Trump thinks about the world.

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All that interests Trump is converting public office into private gain (all that crypto-currency, Trump Media shares, the Venezuela oil account, and Saudi and Qatari hot money flowing into Eric’s and Jared’s private-equity accounts, etc.).

When that doesn’t work (as is now the case in Iran, which decided against ceding its oil revenues to the Trump mob), at least the president can fall back on a political crisis to leverage his image onto every front page around the world.

For most world citizens, the Iran war is an unnecessary catastrophe, although for the increasingly psychotic Trump (who lives in that whispering reality of his own invention—one long conversation with himself) Iran is just another chance to own the tabloid headlines.