Yet another commodity guy@tleilax___
Trump is casually proposing one of the biggest strategic own-goals imaginable: NATO more or less done, and any country that wants Persian Gulf crude can go secure it for itself. That is a spectacularly reckless thing for an American president to say. It is a half-drunken invitation to roll the clock back toward the old colonial game, where every great power armed itself around resource access and shipping lanes.
The whole reason the U.S.-led order worked is that Washington took the military question off the table for its allies. Europe and East Asia could think about trade, industry, growth, supply chains, and cheap energy. They did not need to wake up every morning thinking about convoy protection, choke points, naval escorts, forward bases, and who might try to cut their oil line. That was the deal, and for all its flaws it was an unbelievably powerful one.
Put that burden back on every importing state and you do not get some elegant new realism. You get the old imperial logic creeping back in. The barrel is no longer just a barrel. It comes with freight risk, insurance risk, naval risk, basing risk, and eventually war risk. The whole achievement of the postwar order was that America suppressed a lot of that rivalry by sitting on top of the system and making the security decisions for the wider alliance.
The Gulf is particularly ugly terrain for this kind of thinking. The infrastructure is concentrated, the sea lanes are narrow, and much of the population depends on fragile physical systems like desalination. Once states decide energy security is too important to leave to markets, they start looking at places like this in very hard terms. Somewhere in Paris, one of the old colonial ghosts is probably already unfolding a map of the Gulf and reminiscing about protectorates in embarrassingly enthusiastic detail.
History is full of great powers making exactly this kind of mistake. The cleanest analogy is Germany after Bismarck. Bismarck built a diplomatic architecture that kept Germany secure and prevented hostile coalitions from forming. Kaiser Wilhelm II inherited that system, got impatient with its constraints, started freelancing, and slowly turned a position of strength into encirclement. He did not lose Germany in one move. He set in motion a process that made Germany less secure with every passing year.
There is also an interwar British echo here. Britain remained enormously important, but it no longer wanted to fully bear the burden of policing the wider order it depended on. That did not produce a neat handoff. It produced opportunism, rearmament, and eventually a much nastier bill. And if you want the broadest analogy, it is the breakdown of the old European concert system: once the central restraining architecture weakens, states go back to fleets, blocs, balancing, and military planning around economic survival.
What is so deranged about this is that it weakens the U.S. first. America’s edge was never just the size of the Navy. It was that nearly every major industrial power operated inside an American security architecture. Tear that up and over time you get fewer reliable bases, fewer aligned allies, larger independent militaries, more hedging against Washington, and much more room for China and every ambitious regional power. That is how dominant positions are squandered in history: not all at once, but by dismantling the very order that made you dominant in the first place.
