Trickster in a Stranglehold

Trump has few cards as Iran is winning the Battle of Hormuz by slowly chocking out the global economy while their powerful missile arsenal is expelling US military power from the Persian Gulf.

Stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz

One month in and the United States finds itself fighting two incompatible wars in Iran. The first war is economic: defending the global flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz. The second is kinetic: bombing Iranian military assets, attempting to interdict weapons shipments, preparing for a potential ground invasion. The first war requires keeping oil moving. The second war, by its nature, stops it. The US cannot win both. It may not be able to win either.

Iran sits in an exceedingly powerful position because it has collapsed these two wars into a single strategy. Tehran placed a tollbooth on the Strait of Hormuz, allowing its own tankers and those of its allies to pass free while the rest of the world’s cargo either pays or is blocked. By modulating the grip of that stranglehold, Iran fights a limited guerrilla war against the global economy while holding the strategic defensive. Iranian victory requires only that they maintain the ability to step out of hiding, hit tankers that attempt to run the strait, and vanish. They have the drones and missiles--fired from multiple distances, from multiple platforms--to make that threat credible.

Capitalism’s deepest axiom is that commodities must flow, that all barriers must be overcome. Through the Strait of Hormuz pass the densest forms of energy first—crude oil in vast, slow-moving volumes, followed by refined fuels that keep engines, aircraft, and armies in motion. Then comes liquefied natural gas, supercooled and pressurized, feeding power grids an ocean away. Behind it move the quieter enablers of survival: fertilizers that sustain global harvests, the chemical substrate of future food supply. And at the far, almost invisible edge, helium—weightless, irreplaceable—drifting outward to cool MRI machines, stabilize semiconductor fabrication, and sustain the most delicate instruments of advanced economies. To clot such a maritime artery is to induce a stroke in global prosperity, a cascading failure that begins with energy, spreads through food, and reaches into the nervous system of modern technological life.

Bombing Iran deeper into poverty will not break the stranglehold. Iran has endured sanctions for forty-seven years, a long apprenticeship in scarcity. As Bob Dylan once put it, “when you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.” Centuries ago, Ibn Khaldun traced this dynamic in his account of asabiyyah: cohesion grows strongest in harsh conditions, where survival binds a society together, while abundance slowly dissolves that bond.

Had the US really wanted to destroy and corrode Iran, they should have helped them get rich. Wealth invites comfort, comfort invites fragmentation, and fragmentation invites dependence. Across Europe, East Asia, and the Gulf, American-aligned states reveal the long arc of this process--prosperous, stable, and totally useless and dependent vassals in a system they no longer have the will nor wherewithal to defend.

Physically eradicating well-entrenched Iranian guerrillas enforcing the Hormuz blockade would be an immense challenge for US invasion forces. Bases and staging areas within a thousand kilometres of Iran would operate under constant threat of withering counterfire, compressing timelines and constraining freedom of action.

Across the region, the strategic environment is tightening: U.S. positions in Iraq, Kuwait, and the Gulf face mounting pressure, while Hezbollah exterminates invading Israeli occupation armour in Lebanon as the Houthis extend the battlespace toward the Bab el-Mandeb, the southern gateway to the Red Sea. The geography of the conflict is expanding even as the operational space for a US invasion contracts, leaving the question of how such a campaign would be staged increasingly difficult to answer.

Image by Matt Bracken

Worse still, every move the Americans make is being watched and reported in real time by Russian and Chinese ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance). There will be no surprises as US special forces approach Iran, Iraq, Yemen or even Lebanon thanks to the watchful eyes of Russian and Chinese intelligence agencies. Not to mention that as Iran looks increasingly likely to prevail, Russian and Chinese arms shipments will only increase in both quantity and quality.

Boeing E-3 Sentry AWACS destroyed in Saudi Arabia. Iran would have had assistance for Russia and China on this precision attack that perfectly targeted the sensitive radar unit.

The contradiction between economic and kinetic war is already visible in American policy. The US lifted sanctions on Iranian oil—a necessary move to keep at least some commodities flowing through the strait and therefore tamping down the price of oil. But this provides Iran with larger cash flows than before the war. The US is funding its enemy while preparing to fight it. This is what fighting two incompatible wars looks like.

As the ground war approaches, Washington can constrict Iran’s revenue by interdicting its tankers, a step that would be relatively straightforward to execute. The economic consequences would ripple outward immediately, amplifying an already rising tide of global contraction. Restricting Iranian fossil fuel exports addresses one side of the equation; restoring open passage through the strait presents a far more complex challenge. Replacing Tehran’s tollbooth with a hard barrier risks hardening the closure itself, as missiles, mines, and persistent harassment transform the waterway into a denied zone. Oil flows would contract further, driving prices upward and transmitting shock across energy-dependent economies.

Tehran faces its own modulation. It sustains a grinding campaign against US and Israeli air defenses while holding in reserve the capacity to widen the economic choke. Escalation toward a full closure would intensify the global economic crisis and increase pressure for a rapid settlement, potentially before US/Israeli interceptor stocks are exhausted and before Iran’s leverage fully matures. The pace and scale of disruption therefore become instruments of strategy, adjusted to preserve bargaining power over time. Trump talking the markets down while Iran leaves an opening for at least a trickle of commodity flows allows the war to ripen.

Trick or Retreat

Truth must naturally perish in war. Between fact and fabrication lies a liminal field where perception ricochets and certainty dissolves. In such terrain, a leader fluent in distortion--a trickster--may appear well suited to command: a master of rhetorical mirrors, seeking to disorient the enemy through falsehood and reshape the field of the real.

Yet deception runs in two directions. One turns outward, toward adversaries, keeping them off balance. The other turns inward, shielding the self from unwelcome truths. The figure of the trickster stands at this crossroads.

The trickster’s power is shape-shifting, the refusal to hold a fixed form. Trump’s schizophrenic twists and reversals—today negotiating with imaginary Iranians, tomorrow decapitating its leadership, yesterday ending the war with a deal, next week launching a land invasion--are the behaviour of a trickster who has lost the distinction between strategic deception and internal disorientation. He can no longer choose which mask to wear because there is no stable self left to do the choosing. A form of internal schizophrenia fragments simultaneously as his narcissism rebuilds the fragments into whichever assemblage seems most useful in the moment. The trickster becomes not a strategy but a symptom. The trickster is playing him as much as he is playing the trickster.

In its higher form, deception requires a stable core. The classic trickster manipulates appearances while remaining anchored in reality; illusion serves strategy. Without that inner anchor, the distinction erodes. Fabrication ceases to be a tool and becomes a refuge. What follows resembles a child’s evasion of shame more than a strategist’s manipulation. Such shame-induced falsehoods rarely mislead the enemy. They bind instead the speaker and his audience to a make-believe world of their own convenience.

From Trojan Horse to Hormuz Tankers

The Trojan Horse endures as the archetype of successful deception—a single, unprecedented act: a gift that concealed destruction, made plausible by a world the Trojans recognized: the absent fleet, the ritual offering, the convincing witness. Its power lay in its singularity.

The United States has been wheeling this same horse before Iran for decades, offering negotiations that end in drone strikes, talks that culminate in decapitation, a diplomatic process that turns out to be cover for something else. The pattern is so familiar that Iran’s refusal to take the latest offer seriously is less a strategic choice than a conditioned reflex. They have learned to count the Greeks before opening the gates.

On the other hand, Trump’s Hormuz Tankers grift is an example of self-delusion. Claiming that Iran paid him a generous “tribute” of ten tankers, later exaggerated to twenty, is a case of a trickster reversing his craftiness to dampen the internal shame of a looming defeat.

Deception obeys a law of diminishing returns. Each success educates the external adversary. By the second Trojan horse, the gates remain shut. Suspicion becomes the default; every gesture invites scrutiny. When the trickster’s pattern is recognized, the illusion loses force and becomes a signal—a sign that something else is underway.

The decisive failure comes when the deceiver does not perceive this shift. He repeats the gesture, convinced of its power, while the audience has already turned its attention elsewhere. At that point, deception no longer operates outward. It folds inward. The lies told to others become a ritual of self-soothing for the shame engulfed self.

Strait Outta Options

To actually reopen the strait, the US would need to launch a massive land invasion to wrest control of the coastline from Iranian forces. Regaining that ground, if it is even possible, would take years of counterinsurgency work and would demand anywhere from several hundred thousands of troops up to a million. By the time any of this is remotely underway, the global economy would be in a deep depression. Capitalism has a powerful veto over any such prolonged adventure. Trump’s presidency would come crashing down long before the first beachhead was secured—the bond market, that quiet executioner, would display its awesome power well in advance.

Iran does not need to win the war. It only needs to make winning too expensive for anyone else to try.

Despite Trump’s uncanny ability to move markets with a single post, Brent crude has remained stubbornly above $100 a barrel. His market whisperer act has limits. The price of oil is no longer listening.

After 10,000 airstrikes on Iranian territory, the regime still hits US bases and aviation in the region with deadly force, and continues to pummel Israel and the Gulf Arabs. The precision with which Iran has targeted US radar installations has astonished even its critics. A degraded enemy does not fight like this.

President Trump’s latest missive continues his imaginary negotiations and over-the-top threats to obliterate Iran. What is implied here is that US military officials have advised against any land invasions, although that conclusion is only as firm as Trump’s next tweet. But any move on his part to execute these threats will result in the annihilation of the Gulf Arab states, as their power stations, oil refineries and wells, and desalination plants will end up just as destroyed as Iran’s, setting in motion the worst global economic crisis since the 1930’s.

One counter argument would be that the Iranian regime is too unpopular to stay cohesive enough to impose a strategic defeat on the United States. That any day now it will collapse like a house of cards. Yet the growing specter of Iran defeating the greatest military power in world history works in the opposite direction and has already drawn former critics to line up behind the regime. Victory, it has been said, has a hundred fathers while defeat is an orphan.

You can already see this shift in the language of national security insiders who once made their careers fighting America’s wars. Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater, now speaks of Iran with something approaching professional and even racial respect:

The Iranians have been learning, they’ve certainly been paying attention to modern drone warfare, and have implemented FPV’s down to the squad level, I mean you see videos of the Israelis in southern Lebanon, losing tanks, losing armoured personal carriers to the same FPV’s that the Russians have been using to great effect in Ukraine.

Again, it’s a fight against Iran—they are not Arabs—they’re Aryans, they are highly intelligent, highly skilled war-fighters and they will not be the pushovers by comparison that you saw with the Iraqi Army.

Clever Iranian propaganda video featuring diverse victims of American aggression, including Native Americans, Japanese at Hiroshima, Vietnamese and the girls of Epstein Island

The grudging admiration is not limited to former special operators. Even Iran's AI propaganda campaign has found its audience: Lego figures mocking American officials, repeated references to Epstein Island, the Statue of Liberty reimagined with the head of the pagan god Baal. The message is designed for Western eyes, and it is landing.

If this conflict does indeed turn into a strategic defeat for the US, its orange orphan will be not go down easily. This practiced trickster is as elusive as mercury and will forever try to slip away from the weight of consequence his impulsive decision will have wrought.