None of These People I Insulted Want To Die For Me in The Strait of Hormuz?

The Trump people, on top of everything else, do not know ball. PLUS: U.S. military AI usage killed an Iraqi student in 2024

Edited by Sam Thielman

THE BOYS AT AMERICAN PRESTIGE unlocked my Iran interview, so now you can listen to me talk about the intricacies of sustaining this sea power-heavy war. As I mentioned on Friday, to prepare for the podcast, I spoke last week with sources who possess a great deal of naval experience. One of them, before I could even ask, had the coalescing debate over demining the Strait of Hormuz on their mind. 

This person wanted to make it clear that the U.S. was not about to do any demining of the Strait, even on the doubtful premise that Iran has mined it. The Navy's few remaining minesweepers are far from the Gulf—they're in Japan—and the shittiest, least-survivable hull in the fleet, the Littoral Combat Ship, would be called upon to, well, get blown up. That's because the Navy doesn't want to do demining. It wants other navies to do the demining mission, and has for a long time. 

Back when Jim Mattis was in charge of U.S. Central Command, he developed a plan to force open a mine-layed Strait of Hormuz. That plan was heavy on stopping the mining before it happened—which has the vulnerability of putting ships in range of Iranian missiles—and then relying on "boutique capabilities such as those of Britain’s Royal Navy mine hunters," as the Washington Examiner's Tom Rogan wrote in 2018. When the Trump administration takes umbrage at the (pretty undeniable) suggestion that it was unprepared for Iran to close the Strait, and responds that the military planned for such a potential, chances are this plan or its successors are what they mean, if they're not totally bullshitting, which admittedly is a possibility. 

Anyway, my understanding is that it's the North Sea navies that really specialize in minesweeping. That's the Danes, Norwegians, Swedes, Dutch and, as Rogan mentioned, the Brits. (The North Sea was heavily mined during the 20th Century, including by the United States.) And while mines are unlikely to be the major operational threat when forcing the Strait open—more important are the Iranian missiles that would barrage enemy ships in a very narrow waterway—the broader issue is that the U.S., as the regnant hegemon, expects allied forces to take on an extremely dangerous mission that it does not want. "I’m demanding that these countries come in and protect their own territory, because it is their own territory," Trump said, with typical weirdness, yesterday.

Their unsurprising answer is: nah. "We will not be drawn into the wider war," said the UK's Keir Starmer, showing at least one difference between himself and Tony Blair. Even with Trump once again invoking the perennial specter of NATO's irrelevance, German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul responded, "I don’t see that NATO has made any decision in this direction or could assume responsibility for the strait of Hormuz." 

Thirty years ago, while basking in the dawn of U.S. hyperpower, imperial policymakers liked to say that "superpowers don't do windows"—that is, the unglamorous, menial tasks of hegemony, which ought to be performed by client states. We are a long way from that now. The Iraq War (and then the Afghanistan surge) showed that even at the height of U.S. unipolarity, there were serious political limits to the participation of partner militaries in unpopular American wars of choice. Now, at the historical end of U.S. unipolarity, there simply was never going to be any appetite to save the Americans from their own mistakes. 

That reticence would confront any administration reckless enough to engage in an unprovoked aggression against what remains a formidable regional power. But this is the Trump administration we're talking about. Last year, the Trump administration levied massive tariffs on its traditional allies, basically as imperial tribute. Not two months ago, Trump threatened Europe over Greenland, and in doing so clarified his position that Europeans ought to be vassals of the United States. Marco Rubio—this time to European applause—placed Europe within a claimed American sphere of influence. Some of those European countries at first issued statements of support for the U.S. against Iran, particularly when the Iranians held the Gulf at risk, despite Mark Carney's fire at Davos about exiting the U.S. security umbrella. But the last thing insulted states are going to do is send their own navies into the line of fire on behalf of a contemptuous and aggressive patron. This is real basic shit.

I am not saying there should be a better, more competent unprovoked aggression against Iran. The war is unjustifiable, even were it winnable, which it does not look to be. I am saying that the Trump people were unwilling to do the basic work of preparing for the foreseeable consequences of their actions, work typically performed by belligerents who know how to, like, win. I am saying that not only is their agenda loathsome, they do not know ball.

It's shocking—even if, after taking a deep breath, it is not surprising—to see the Bush administration's Iraq War surpassed as the most reckless and destructive war of my lifetime. The CIA is already telling reporters that Iran is not its fuckup. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is making impotent, credibility-free declarations about how Iranian oil tankers are traversing the Strait because the U.S. is letting them, not because the Iranians have leveraged the vulnerability of global energy supplies to put Washington on the horns of a dilemma. Trump is threatening to delay his trip to Beijing as if it will be Beijing that suffers. They're flailing and it's obvious. 

Two weeks into the war and this is the bottom line: The Strait of Hormuz now is the objective. Trump has lost control of a conflagration he and Benjamin Netanyahu ignited, to the point where the closure of the Strait, with its global economic implications, has now overtaken all the boastful goals of regime change or destroying the Iranian missile arsenal. The Iranians, frankly, know ball, certainly a lot better than their adversaries do. They're making the smart decision to throttle closure of the Strait to shipping aligned with the U.S. and Israel, clearly with the aim of isolating them. India—which Trump had tariffed for buying oil from Russia, only to have to issue it a waiver because of his Iran debacle—is now in talks with Iran to get safe Hormuz passage. So are France and Italy. So much for vassalship. 

If this panic over a closed, economically-crucial waterway sounds familiar, it should. This is what the Iran-aligned Houthis did to the Bab al-Mandeb, where the Red Sea meets the Gulf of Aden, as a way of pressuring Israel to end the Gaza genocide. Joe Biden, who sure thought he knew ball, opted instead for assembling a fig-leaf naval coalition to force the Houthis to back down. Instead, the U.S. fought what it never expected to be its most sustained naval campaign since the Second World War—and the Houthis won it. The very same admiral who lost that war is now running this one!

And now that Trump has bombed Kharg Island, crucial for Iranian oil exports, the Iranians might well get the Houthis to tap back in and close the Bab el-Mandeb. We should never overlook the human cost of the war—nearly 1500 killed by the U.S. and Israel in two weeks!—but on top of the growing butchers' bill, we haven't seen the end of the economic destruction this war will cause. For all Trump's bleating, no one is coming to save the United States from itself. Ball-knowers, even the evil ones, would have planned for all this long ago. It sure seems like the Iranians did! 

AIRWARS' NAMIR SHABIBI has published a crucial investigation revealing that Abdul-Rahman al-Rawi, a 20-year old Iraqi student, was the first known civilian killed by the U.S. military's use of artificial intelligence. They even obtained the condolence letter that a U.S. one-star wrote to his family. "Yet when we went back to the U.S. military for comment, they tried to deny it was AI-powered—saying they had 'no way of knowing' if AI was involved in targeting for the strike," Airwars details, long after CENTCOM confirmed that Project Maven, the AI-military integrator, was involved in the bombing. 

The military didn't kill him under Trump. It killed him under Biden in 2024, after Biden's administration, just like the Republicans, embraced the need for the U.S. to Win The AI War. Remember Abdul-Rahman's name, because he was the first to die as the cost of that war, and he won't be the last.

THE ANTIFA TERRORISM trial succeeded, for now. Expect the Justice Department to accelerate bullshit terrorism charges against those who protest ICE. 

THE GUARDIAN'S SAM LEVIN has new reporting about ICE for the first time confirming its use of ELITE, a Palantir mapping tool of those with "an immigration nexus." It's helping ICE meet its detention quotas, which ICE has previously denied having. "In the hearing, an ICE agent identified as JB testified that his team was given a verbal order to target eight arrests a day," Levin reports. "JB said he did not know how Elite 'leads' were generated, saying the app 'pulls from all kinds of sources.'" And ICE denies having databases. (Maybe they're just loaning Palantir's?)

OH WHAT A SURPRISE, Kash Patel is in favor of Section 702 now that he's in charge of warrantlessly sifting through its massive collection of Americans' international communications. Section 702 can be abolished next month—just by Congress doing nothing, its favorite thing to do. I write this every time that becomes an option, and each time I hope it'll be my last. Make sure you read the 2021 NSA inspector general compliance report on 702 and Americans' privacy that Nick Schwellenbach of POGO obtained.