Trump seems to believe that a constant stream of bluster and bravado gives him leverage, but in practice, it does the opposite. It signals uncertainty, and adversaries notice.
Not long ago, President Trump stood before the cameras and declared victory. The memorandum of understanding he’d just signed with Iran, he claimed, “achieves everything we set out to accomplish.”
The Gulf war would end. Oil tankers would glide safely through the Strait of Hormuz again. Peace, he implied, was simply a matter of putting his name on a piece of paper. Less than a month later, that memorandum is worth about as much as the paper it’s printed on.
Fighting has resumed. Missiles are flying again. And the Strait that Trump promised to reopen is more jammed than ever. This isn’t some tragic twist of fate that arrived despite the deal. It’s arriving because of the deal, or rather, because of how flimsy that deal always was.
The unravelling has been fast and ugly. Iran fired the opening shots on July 7th, striking three ships in the Strait. The two countries have traded blows ever since. On July 13th, Iranian missiles slammed into two tankers registered to the United Arab Emirates as they tried to pass through Hormuz, killing a sailor.
Washington answered with strikes on Iranian military targets throughout last week. Tehran answered back with missiles and drones aimed at several Arab states. This is not a ceasefire with hiccups. This is a war that never really stopped, dressed up for a few weeks in the language of diplomacy. And the consequences aren’t staying contained to the region.
One of the most economically vital chokepoints on Earth, a Strait through which a staggering share of the world’s seaborne oil passes, has been largely paralysed since the fighting began, with only sporadic attempts to evacuate ships caught in the crossfire. Oil prices, which dipped briefly when the original ceasefire was announced, have been climbing steadily ever since as the two sides keep trading fire. Every business that ships goods, every driver filling a tank, every economy still nursing inflation wounds from the last few years, now sit hostage to a conflict that was supposedly resolved. The problem isn’t just the war, it’s the whiplash.
Even by the standards of a messy war, Trump’s handling of this one has been erratic to the point of self-sabotage, something that should worry Americans and their allies the most.
One day he’s praising Iran’s leadership as reasonable partners ready to make a deal, the next he’s calling them “scum.” One week he announces, out of nowhere, that the U.S. will effectively take control of the Strait of Hormuz and charge every ship passing through a 20 percent fee. This was a proposal so impractical it barely survived a news cycle before he quietly walked it back, replacing it with vague talk of trade and investment deals with Gulf states. By any measure, this isn’t a strategy. It’s an improvisation broadcast live, in real time, to the very adversary he’s trying to outmanoeuvre. Every reversal, every rescinded threat, every “victory” declared and then un-declared, hands Tehran a useful advantage: the American position is not fixed and doesn’t need to be taken too seriously, because it will almost certainly change again by morning.
Great powers don’t usually negotiate by thinking out loud in public and hoping it works out. They negotiate through discipline; quiet, consistent pressure that a rival cannot exploit. Trump seems to believe that a constant stream of bluster and bravado gives him leverage, but in practice, it does the opposite. It signals uncertainty, and adversaries, especially ones like Iran’s regime that have spent decades reading American resolve, or the lack of it, notice.
Strip away the daily noise and what’s left looks like a war launched on a gamble: the assumption that Iran’s leadership was teetering on the edge of collapse and would fold quickly under pressure. As the world knows, that assumption hasn’t held up. The regime is still standing, still fighting, and now locked into a cycle of retaliation with no clear off-ramp in sight. Efforts by outside mediators to revive the peace talks have stalled since Trump, appearing at a NATO summit in Ankara, declared the memorandum “over.”
That declaration did more
Not long ago, President Trump stood before the cameras and declared victory. The memorandum of understanding he’d just signed with Iran, he claimed, “achieves everything we set out to accomplish.” The Gulf war would end. Oil tankers would glide safely through the Strait of Hormuz again. Peace, he implied, was simply a matter of putting his name on a piece of paper. Less than a month later, that memorandum is worth about as much as the paper it’s printed on. Fighting has resumed. Missiles are flying again. And the Strait that Trump promised to reopen is more jammed than ever. This isn’t some tragic twist of fate that arrived despite the deal. It’s arriving because of the deal, or rather, because of how flimsy that deal always was.
The unravelling has been fast and ugly. Iran fired the opening shots on July 7th, striking three ships in the Strait. The two countries have traded blows ever since. On July 13th, Iranian missiles slammed into two tankers registered to the United Arab Emirates as they tried to pass through Hormuz, killing a sailor. Washington answered with strikes on Iranian military targets throughout last week. Tehran answered back with missiles and drones aimed at several Arab states. This is not a ceasefire with hiccups. This is a war that never really stopped, dressed up for a few weeks in the language of diplomacy. And the consequences aren’t staying contained to the region.
One of the most economically vital chokepoints on Earth, a Strait through which a staggering share of the world’s seaborne oil passes, has been largely paralysed since the fighting began, with only sporadic attempts to evacuate ships caught in the crossfire. Oil prices, which dipped briefly when the original ceasefire was announced, have been climbing steadily ever since as the two sides keep trading fire. Every business that ships goods, every driver filling a tank, every economy still nursing inflation wounds from the last few years, now sit hostage to a conflict that was supposedly resolved. The problem isn’t just the war, it’s the whiplash.
Even by the standards of a messy war, Trump’s handling of this one has been erratic to the point of self-sabotage, something that should worry Americans and their allies the most. One day he’s praising Iran’s leadership as reasonable partners ready to make a deal, the next he’s calling them “scum.” One week he announces, out of nowhere, that the U.S. will effectively take control of the Strait of Hormuz and charge every ship passing through a 20 percent fee. This was a proposal so impractical it barely survived a news cycle before he quietly walked it back, replacing it with vague talk of trade and investment deals with Gulf states. By any measure, this isn’t a strategy. It’s an improvisation broadcast live, in real time, to the very adversary he’s trying to outmanoeuvre. Every reversal, every rescinded threat, every “victory” declared and then un-declared, hands Tehran a useful advantage: the American position is not fixed and doesn’t need to be taken too seriously, because it will almost certainly change again by morning.
Great powers don’t usually negotiate by thinking out loud in public and hoping it works out. They negotiate through discipline; quiet, consistent pressure that a rival cannot exploit. Trump seems to believe that a constant stream of bluster and bravado gives him leverage, but in practice, it does the opposite. It signals uncertainty, and adversaries, especially ones like Iran’s regime that have spent decades reading American resolve, or the lack of it, notice.
Strip away the daily noise and what’s left looks like a war launched on a gamble: the assumption that Iran’s leadership was teetering on the edge of collapse and would fold quickly under pressure. As the world knows, that assumption hasn’t held up. The regime is still standing, still fighting, and now locked into a cycle of retaliation with no clear off-ramp in sight. Efforts by outside mediators to revive the peace talks have stalled since Trump, appearing at a NATO summit in Ankara, declared the memorandum “over.” That declaration did more than end a diplomatic process, it removed whatever restraint the fragile agreement had briefly imposed on both sides. Since then, there’s been no serious sign of a path back to the table, and a growing sense across the Middle East that this war has no swift ending anywhere on the horizon.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has formally notified Congress that the United States has re-entered a state of war, starting a 60-day clock during which the military can operate without further congressional approval. Whatever one thinks of the legal justification, the practical reality is that the country is now committed, at least for two months, to a conflict that its own president insisted was already finished. In fact, it’s poised to get worse.
As if one blockaded Strait wasn’t enough, there are troubling signs that Iran wants a second one. Reports last week suggest Tehran is quietly working with the Houthi rebels in Yemen to prepare a shutdown of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, the narrow passage between the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean that roughly a tenth of all global maritime trade depends on. The idea, according to sources describing Iran’s thinking, is to seize the other side of the Red Sea the same way Tehran has effectively controlled Hormuz, thus doubling the economic pressure on the West and on Trump personally. The Houthis appear to be playing a patient, long game rather than rushing into it. They’re reportedly extending their reach toward the Horn of Africa and coordinating with al-Shabab in Somalia, sharing drone technology so that the two groups can eventually threaten both shores of the Strait simultaneously. For now, they seem to be holding this card in reserve. One source put it bluntly: “it isn’t smart for Iran to play every card at the start of a fight”. The Houthis have also been studying how Iran survived the leadership strikes that gutted its own command structure, and are reportedly naming layers of backup successors, including a family member designated to replace the Houthi leader if he’s killed.
It’s worth being clear-eyed about what this would actually mean. The two Straits have never been shut down simultaneously, and doing so would be an extraordinary escalation. But the Houthis have already proved during the Gaza war that they can choke off Red Sea shipping for months, even against a U.S.-led naval coalition built specifically to stop them. If Bab el-Mandeb goes the way of Hormuz, ships would face a week-long detour around the tip of Africa, and the costs in fuel, delay, and everything that rides on global shipping would ripple through economies that are already absorbing the shock from the first chokepoint.
There’s a complicated issue here, and it matters: the Houthis are partners to Iran, not puppets. They have their own war with Saudi Arabia and their own regional ambitions, which is exactly why Saudi Arabia struck the airport runway in Sana’a this week in order to block an Iranian plane from landing. It’s also why the Houthis answered with missiles towards southern Saudi Arabia, cracking a truce that had mostly been held since 2022, which followed a war that killed an estimated 377,000 people. That means even if Washington finds a way to manage Iran directly, a second front could still ignite on its own timetable and for its own regional reasons, whether or not it serves Tehran’s script.
None of this, of course, is an argument for abandoning American interests in the Gulf, or for pretending Iran’s aggression against commercial shipping doesn’t demand a response. Ships have been attacked and sailors have died. That can’t go unanswered. But there’s a difference between resolve and noise. The United States has overwhelming military and economic power in this equation, and it doesn’t need daily Truth Social posts to prove it. What it needs is a policy that doesn’t change direction every 48 hours, a negotiating position that isn’t undercut by the next day’s contradiction, and a president willing to let quiet strength do the talking instead of narrating his own indecision to the world. Right now, global shipping lanes are clogged and oil markets are jittery.
The war, which will cost America well in excess of $100 billion and which was supposedly wrapped up in a tidy memorandum, is grinding into its second month with no resolution. At some point Donald Trump has to stop bragging that the war is over and start doing the harder work of actually ending it.
*John Dobson is a former British diplomat, who also worked in UK Prime Minister John Major’s office between 1995 and 1998. He is currently a visiting fellow at the University of Plymouth.
