The U.S. is now more than $40 trillion in debt. How long can we sustain this war? It won’t be up to the president if he loses the 2026 election which now seems likely.
"On Thursday, President Trump threatened Iran with an “economic D-Day” if they didn’t make a diplomatic agreement on his terms. On Friday, President Trump declared the Strait of Hormuz to be American territory. What does all that mean?
"Not much. The Strait could be the coastal waters of Iran, the UAE, or Oman. But it’s not: it’s supposed to be an international waterway and Iran wants to control it.
"Mr. Trump’s Hormuz declaration is the easy part. It’s meaningless unless U.S. forces impose our national will on the Iranians and reopen the Strait, free of any Iranian interference. Anything less would be a U.S. capitulation. That seems more and more likely because the war is at a stalemate.
"Mr. Trump finds himself in a situation reminiscent of his dispute with Denmark over Greenland and his renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. The Danes aren’t anything like the Iranians but they had no interest in turning Greenland over to the U.S., even if we bought it. Denmark is a NATO ally, and Mr. Trump’s attempts to push them around didn’t work.
"Neither did his attempt to rename the Gulf of Mexico. While U.S. federal agencies and a few among the news media agreed to relabel the Gulf, no one else does. There are billions of maps and globes around the world that still show the Gulf of Mexico.
"But now, with Mr. Trump’s asserting ownership of the Strait, how are we to force Iran to accept that? There is no way to do so short of resuming the bombing campaign and seeing it through to conclusion. Think about it.
"If the Strait is U.S. territory, we have the right to possess it, to run shipping through it and to assert U.S. authority over it. Iran won’t tolerate that so we are clearly — for a second reason — at war with Tehran. It was right for Mr. Trump to take us to war with Iran to overcome its nuclear ambitions but has the Strait become so valuable that we should go to war over it? It obviously hasn’t." . . . More...
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