Game of Chicken

With negotiations at a standstill, the war in Iran is now down to a game of chicken.

The current course is catastrophic for both sides — but on different time frames.

Here’s the situation: Iran is blocking shipments it opposes from passing through the all-important Strait of Hormuz while allowing shipments it favors. The U.S. is vowing to stop shipments Iran favors and allows to pass.

The result is the strait remains shut, pain all around. The world gets little oil from the Gulf, from which a fifth of all crude used to flow. Iran gets no oil revenue, choking off the regime’s biggest source of cash.

The question now is who blinks first, Donald Trump or Iran’s leaders. It mostly boils down to which side is better at holding off domestic pressure.

For Trump, that consists of convincing American voters — especially Republican and independent voters — the pain of much higher prices is worth the potential gain of bringing the Iranian regime to its knees, whenever that might happen.

For Iran’s ever-more-hardline leadership, it means maintaining the regime’s repression machine against its own population despite dwindling resources.

Share

Unfortunately for Trump and the Iranian people, in the short term — weeks, months, perhaps a year or more — the advantage lies squarely with the Iranian leadership. There has been no appreciable open dissent since the start of the war. As long as the regime retains total control over even shrinking revenues, it can continue funding its own base, including its brutal and effective surveillance and security services.

Despite the beating it’s taken, Iran’s military can still also restart, even escalate, the war instantly by targeting energy infrastructure in the Arab Gulf states, especially the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.

That would send global oil prices soaring again by hampering oil production in the region for years. The U.S. and Gulf states would have trouble responding without far riskier escalations like wholesale bombing of civilian infrastructure in Iran or capturing and holding Iranian territory with ground troops.

The longer it goes on, though, the harder it gets for Iran’s regime.

Over several months to several years, a successful blockade on Iranian oil exports could well bring unilateral regime concessions or its negotiators back to the table with a new flexibility. To be sure, they won’t have forgotten their basic goals of preserving the potential to rebuild their nuclear program while getting sanctions removed. But they’ll increasingly see the advantages of a tactical retreat as their ability to hold on to power wanes.

The problem for the U.S. strategy — which amounts to oil for all or oil for none — is it threatens to dramatically raise oil prices on everyone in the world pretty much right now. That very much includes American voters.

Republican politicians in the U.S. who desperately need support from independent voters in midterm elections a few short months away are already agitated. Those voters are deeply upset by a war Trump didn’t bother to explain to them, much less seek their approval to wage.

Indeed, even some Trump supporters have opposed the war or have vocally soured on it as it drags on. Trump’s MAGA voters are hard enough to lure to the polls when Trump is not himself running; they’re now even less likely to turn out.

If oil prices soar higher as shipments dry up, gasoline prices push towards $5 a gallon and air fares skyrocket further during the summer vacation season in America, Republicans could face a choice of turning on Trump or going down in his name.

Trump’s inner circle got a taste of humble pie over the weekend when their Hungarian hero Victor Orbán was trounced in elections. This despite Trump extolling Orbán’s reelection bid on social media and Vice President J.D. Vance traveling to Hungary to stump with him in the closing days of the campaign.

That hasn’t stopped the president from rolling the dice again to see if he can’t get the Iranian regime to accept his logic.

He may have to stay in the game for some time for that to happen.

Trump’s past forays into the gambling business have not ended well. He’ll need a helluva lucky streak for this one to go better.