Trump revealed his objective in Iran — 40 years ago
Much has been said over the past few weeks about what motivated Donald Trump to go to war with Iran. Since he has given more than half a dozen different explanations, and sometimes in the same day, there’s no way of knowing for sure. With few restraints on his ambitions in his second term, the president has seemingly become convinced of his own omnipotence.
He has also thrown in his lot with Israel and certain Gulf states for ideological and financial reasons. (In the case of Israel, there are also theological considerations at play.) But Trump has another motive that he’s never tried to hide. In fact, he’s been saying it explicitly for the better part of 40 years: “We should take the oil.”
Like his devotion to tariffs, Trump latched onto the notion when he was first creating his image as a brilliant businessman with political opinions that, for some reason, journalists thought the public would be interested in hearing.
Like his devotion to tariffs, Trump latched onto the notion when he was first creating his image as a brilliant businessman with political opinions that, for some reason, journalists thought the public would be interested in hearing. They were all shallow, guy-at-the-end-of-the-bar observations that generally reflected very little knowledge of the complexity of the issues and the potential ramifications. One of them was the idea that the United States should seize the world’s oil for itself.
Trump himself has been circulating a 1987 interview he did with Barbara Walters. He had given a speech before a rotary club in New Hampshire in which he posed the question, “Why couldn’t we go in and take over some of [Iran’s] oil?” When Walters asked how he thought such a thing could be done — “Would you send in the Marines, start a war?” — he replied, “Let ‘em have Iran, you take their oil.” And when she pressed him further, he made a recommendation. “The next time Iran attacks this country, go in and grab one of their big oil installations and keep it.”
He offered the same argument during an interview with CNN’s Candy Crowley in 2011. After Trump claimed the U.S. could determine the oil prices set by OPEC — “We need one thing: brain power,” he explained — he used Libya as an example in an exchange with Crowley that’s worth looking at in full:
Trump: You know, if somebody said, ‘What would be your theory or what would you do in terms of Libya,’ I’d do one thing, Trump said. Either I go in and take the oil or I don’t go in at all. We can’t be the policeman for the world.
Crowley: You’d just take their oil?
Trump: Absolutely. I’d take the oil. I’d give them plenty so they can live very happily. I would take the oil. You know, in the old days —
Crowley: Well, wait. We can’t go —
Trump: Candy — Candy, in the old days, when you have a war and you win, that nation’s yours. [America] is a laughingstock throughout the world. It’s being ripped off by every country.
That same year he released another of his ghostwritten books called “Time to Get Tough,” which had, you guessed it, a chapter called “Take The Oil.”
Over the years Trump has said the same thing about Syria and Venezuela, while touting the fact that the United States itself has recently once again achieved oil and gas independence. His threats to annex Canada and Mexico are at least partially informed by the fact that they are oil rich nations as well. (Interestingly, he has not been quite as aggressive about seizing the fields of oil powerhouses Russia and Saudi Arabia.) Just last week the president told the Financial Times, “to be honest with you, my favorite thing is to take the oil in Iran, but some stupid people back in the U.S. say: ‘Why are you doing that?’ But they’re stupid people.”
To the extent he has ever had any ideology other than “strength” and “tariffs,” Donald Trump has believed that the U.S. should use the global energy supply as leverage to dominate the rest of the planet. It sounds like something a James Bond — or cartoon — villain would come up with, but there it is.
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Trump, though, isn’t the only problem here. As Iran created nearly five decades of hostility following the 1979-81 hostage crisis and threatened Israel and other nations in the Middle East, much of conservative Washington became enamored with the idea that with the U.S. as the world’s largest oil and gas producer, it would be immune from the disruption of global energy supplies. More recently, many Republicans have assumed that since the markets were only temporarily rocked by Trump’s Venezuelan operation and the U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities in June 2025, they could be managed. This was a huge mistake.
As Brahma Chellaney pointed out in The Hill, “this logic rested on a profound miscalculation that energy systems are linear, predictable and ultimately subordinate to American power. They are not.” The consequences of Trump and Netanyahu’s war of choice in Iran, he pointed out, have been enormous.
“Energy is not just another commodity,” Chellaney wrote. “It is the foundation of modern economic life. When energy prices rise sharply, food prices follow. Natural gas is essential for fertilizer production, while oil powers agricultural machinery, irrigation and transport. The result is a cascading effect: an energy shock becomes a food shock and, for many societies, a political shock, hitting the most vulnerable countries hardest.”
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Trump’s idea was that if the U.S could simply “take the oil” of Venezuela and Iran — which alone account for a significant percentage of the world’s oil reserves — without disrupting the global economy, the U.S. could dominate the world by leveraging the global energy markets. It has not worked.
The result of this miscalculation may very well be catastrophic. As the consequences of his actions become increasingly clear, Donald Trump seems to be losing his grip. Just as his decades-long belief in the efficacy of coercive tariffs have proven to be illusory, so has his naive theory about seizing the oil. Iran is not rolling over as the president assumed it would, and the economic fallout that every previous administration understood was likely from such an undertaking is already happening.
“Just take the oil” was an insane idea to begin with, and it’s why you don’t make that guy at the end of the bar the president of the most powerful country in the world. And maybe it’s also why the media shouldn’t elevate loud-mouthed hype artists like Trump in the first place.
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