Two weeks ago I began to draft an article titled “A Yuan-Only Toll Booth in Hormuz Is America’s Death Knell”. I then made the mistake of not writing for two weeks, so of course, nearly everything I had begun to prepare for that piece has now been rendered outdated by the pace of the news cycle and the seemingly directionless writhing of US policy.
I had hoped, two weeks ago, to share some reflections on what Iran’s newly instated Hormuz toll would mean for the world, what it would mean for the US, and how it could have been entirely avoided if the States and Israel were not so blindly committed to bloodshed in the pursuit of their political aims.
Since then, between empty US ultimatums, ceasefires, and the abominable threats made by the US president that “a whole civilization will die” if his desperate demands were not met, the MAGA coalition has shed many of its most vocal supporters, and an increasingly isolated and unpredictable Donald Trump continues to brandish his sabre. What began as an operation to ostensibly save the people of Iran has become a promise to erase them entirely.
The human toll is already immense, and the threat to elevate it has pushed even the most hardline Trump bootlickers to wash their hands of him. Even Alex Jones, a man who famously accused the parents of school shooting victims of faking the deaths of their children, has declared that Trump’s most recent violent outburst is a step too far. It seems that even within his own administration, the only person left still foaming at the mouth alongside Trump as they stand on the brink of oblivion is Pete Hegseth. Whilst Trump’s decision-making appears centred on a kind of rosy-eyed nostalgia that aims to ‘restore’ America to the position of a respected (see also: feared) superpower, even if it means obliterating entire civilisations, Hegseth’s intellectually-stunted crusader ideology and his ruthless fetish for blood suggest that, for him, the death of over 90 million Muslims might be a goal in and of itself rather than a means to an end.
“A Yuan-Only Toll Booth in Hormuz Is America’s Death Knell” intended to investigate a question that I would not be alone in asking: is Trump’s war on Iran the final nail in America’s coffin? Whilst much of the evidence I hoped to examine is now a few weeks old, the question remains pertinent. Before the US began its campaign against Iran, passage through the Strait of Hormuz – one of the world’s most vital transit chokepoints – was nominally free. Two weeks ago, news began to emerge that Iran intended to now charge a toll for vessels passing through the Strait. Not only this, but it had also been reported that some vessels were paying this toll in Chinese yuan, a significant blow to the US dollar, which for the past half decade has been the de facto currency of most global trade.
The conceit of that article would have been this: if a year of Trump’s short-sighted policymaking could be compared to 365 days of the US shooting itself in the feet, his most recent violent outburst will eventually amount to the US totally obliterating itself from the waist down.
The conceit of this article is somewhat different. In light of recent events, Trump is not only threatening to amputate the legs of the country he promised to ‘make great’ by leaping atop an economic landmine, he is now hovering his fist over a literally nuclear option and threatening to bring Iran, the US, and perhaps the entire world down with him.
Throughout both his terms, The President’s response to many a dire and dangerous situation has been to double down. He does not believe in subtlety, he believes in strength. When tariffs fail he raises them, when threats fail he repeats them. The only thing consistently capable of getting Trump to rethink his position is tremors in the stock market; time and time again he has walked back his so-called ultimatums when his bottom line has trended towards red. Of course, it’s not the economic health of the American people that concerns him, but the health of the investment portfolios held by himself, his family, and friends.
If it’s damage to the DOW that reins Trump in, it’s his insecurities that propel him forward. Trump appears to be a subscriber to the Great Man theory of history, and more delusionally still, appears to consider himself one of these Great Men. From the start his rallying cry has been that he will restore America to a lost position of greatness. He believes that liberalism, ‘wokeness’, and postmodernism have stripped America of its claws and degraded and embarrassed a once powerful nation. The reality is that these developments have degraded and embarrassed him. The MAGA world view is one of insecurity; it centres on the false belief that America is a nation that has been emasculated, a nation that has spent too long kowtowing to the demands of others – these ‘demands’ being the incredibly flimsy and illusory guidelines of international law, which America have ignored since their inception anyway. In short, Donald Trump has never intended to remind the world that America is great, but to remind the world that it is a threat.
Trump’s response to Iran’s blockade of Hormuz is symptomatic of that world view. Once convinced that this war would be over before it started, the US President is now realising that he has waded into waters too deep to swim in, and he has painfully and plainly publicly embarrassed himself. The response to this dire and dangerous situation? Double down. First with threats of annihilation, and now with a masterstroke worthy of any 5D chessboard: blockade the blockade.
It seems almost superfluous to say that such a blockade (which aims to bar ships leaving Iranian ports from sailing into the Arabian Sea) is illegal under international law; the US simply doesn’t care. But what will no doubt bother the commander-in-chief is that the blockade doesn’t seem to be working: multiple ‘barred’ ships have already skirted through the blockade.
The greatest risk of such a blockade, far greater than any economic considerations, is how the US intends to enforce it. Is this more pure posturing, or is the US Navy really ready and willing to fire upon merchant vessels that attempt to leave from Iranian ports?
At the outset of the US blockade, the world was left to wonder: what happens if a vessel from China or India, nations to whom a collective 50% of the oil passing through Hormuz once travelled, attempts to sail by? Will the US Navy sink a boat of civilians because the president has blustered himself into a position he is too embarrassed to climb down from? Are even the most bloodthirsty hawks in the US military willing to strike civilian targets from some of the world’s largest nuclear powers, just to help their president save face?
Well, it seems once again, mercifully, this might be another of the president’s empty threats: whilst some Chinese ships have turned back, others have passed clear through the blockade. Overall, the US blockade seems to have barely dented traffic.
Regardless, this latest US escalation remains short-sighted and needlessly inflammatory. Bluff or not, it is another stride toward the brink.
Maybe it’s this escalation that has encouraged a number of Republican talking heads to publicly cut ties with the president. If this stream of rats plunging from the sinking ship can tell us anything, perhaps it is that the US is ready to throw Trump to the wayside. It is evident that his mental acuity is in sharp decline, and those willing to elect a man pushing 80 to run their country might be finding the prospect less attractive as he becomes increasingly unstable and unpredictable.
But the pitfall of this perspective is in holding up Trump as something uniquely evil. He is a symptom of a sickness that is not even unique to the US. He has served as a mouthpiece for some of the worst undercurrents of American society, but he has never been alone. By now painting him as some sort of ringleader gone rogue, the worst parasites swimming through these undercurrents hope to have themselves absolved of their sins. That they have only now found the ‘courage’ to break ranks is not a testimony to their moral fortitude, but to their spinelessness. They now hope to avoid apology and accountability by arguing “we were always right, but now the president has gone mad,” rather than daring to admit that this outcome is what they have been marching towards for the past decade. Perhaps they don’t even have the wisdom themselves to notice that this is, always has been, the logical conclusion of their provocations. An insane, unstable Trump allows them to save face; to criticise the man rather than their evidently failed project.
Whilst the people who elevated the US president to his current position of near total power watch as he dismantles the country they claim to love, to tear apart its economy, to spurn and offend its allies, and to solidify in horrific spectacle its reputation as the most careless, violent, and brutal empire in the modern world, the rest of us are left wondering if the ship is about to go down with its captain. It is hard to imagine that there is any leader that could reverse the damage Trump has done.
The president’s behaviour is evidently the wild thrashing of a dying beast, a cornered, frustrated, and terrified creature which can no longer see a way out, but is it symptomatic of the USA’s position en masse? Can we only expect more of the same unpredictability as what was once the world’s most powerful nation slips into frail irrelevance?
After the UK effectively defanged itself with its failed intervention in the Suez in 1956, it became clear to the world that what was once a global hegemon was no longer capable of enforcing its demands or shaping global politics. Since then, it seemed happy spending its waning years as the lapdog of greater powers, before finally dragging itself into embarrassing obscurity. The parallels are hard to ignore.
Trump’s self-destruction is surely now a question of when, not if – but will the nation he leads respond to his end by changing course, or will it follow the lead of its mad king and double down one last time?
Who will this rabid dog gore in its final, frantic moments?
Thank you for reading.
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Telling Time 
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