Michael P. Bornemann

Food for thought. Trump, Hormuz and the End of the Free Ride For half a century, Western strategists have known that the Strait of Hormuz is the acute point where energy, sea power and political will intersect. That knowledge is not in dispute. What is new in this war with Iran is that the United States, under Donald Trump, has chosen not to rush to “solve” the problem. In Hegelian terms, he is refusing an easy synthesis in order to force the underlying contradiction to the surface. The old thesis was simple: the US guarantees open sea lanes in the Gulf, and everyone else structures their economies and politics around that free insurance. Europe and the UK embraced ambitious green policies, ran down hard‑power capabilities and lectured Washington on multilateral virtue, secure in the assumption that American carriers would always appear off Hormuz. The political class behaved as if the American security guarantee were a law of nature, not a contingent choice. Their conduct today is closer to Chamberlain than Churchill: temporising, issuing statements, hoping the storm will pass without a fundamental reordering of their responsibilities. Trump’s antithesis is to withhold the automatic guarantee at the moment of maximum stress. Militarily, the US can break Iran’s residual ability to contest the Strait; that is not the binding constraint. The point is to delay that act. By allowing a closure or semi‑closure to bite, Trump ensures that the immediate pain is concentrated in exactly the jurisdictions that have most conspicuously free‑ridden on US power: the EU and the UK. Their industries, consumers and energy‑transition assumptions are exposed. In that context, his reported blunt message to European and British leaders, you need the oil out of the Strait more than we do; why don’t you go and take it? Is not a throwaway line. It is the verbalisation of the antithesis. It openly reverses the traditional presumption that America will carry the burden while its allies emote from the sidelines. In this dialectic, the prize is not simply the reopening of a chokepoint. The prize is a reordered system in which the United States effectively arbitrages and controls the global flow of oil. A world in which US‑aligned production in the Americas plus a discretionary capability to secure,or not secure, Hormuz places Washington at the centre of the hydrocarbon chessboard. For that strategic end, a rapid restoration of the old status quo would be counterproductive. A quick, surgical “fix” of Hormuz would short‑circuit the dialectic. If Trump rapidly crushed Iran’s remaining coastal capabilities, swept the mines and escorted tankers back through the Strait, Europe and the UK would heave a sigh of relief and return to business as usual: underfunded militaries, maximalist green posturing and performative disdain for US power, all underwritten by that same power. The contradiction between their dependence and their posture would remain latent. By declining to supply the synthesis on demand, and by explicitly telling London and Brussels to “go and take it” themselves, Trump forces a reckoning. European and British leaders must confront the fact that their energy systems, their industrial bases and their geopolitical sermons all rest on an American hard‑power foundation they neither finance nor politically respect. The longer the contradiction is allowed to unfold, the stronger the eventual synthesis can be: a new order in which access to secure flows, Hormuz, Venezuela and beyond, is explicitly conditional on real contributions, not assumed as a right. In that sense, the delay in “taking” the Strait, and the challenge issued to US allies to do it themselves, is not indecision. It is the negative moment Hegel insisted was necessary for history to move. Only by withholding the old guarantee, and by saying so out loud to those who depended on it, can Trump hope to end the free ride.

As explained below, TACO is the worst case, and Trump knows it. But this has already become more of a political war at home than a military one abroad. Tehran understands that. America can have the strongest military in the world, but without public backing for the president, it is strategically hollow. Sadly, Trump, the golfer from Mar-a-Lago, never prepared his base for this, or for higher-for-longer oil. Instead, he makes a point of insulting allies from London to Tokyo. Nor did he read his Clausewitz. He does not understand the fog of war. He acted like a king, not a democratically elected president who must build alliances before, not in the middle of, a war, at home and abroad. Now the fog of war collides with his midterms. Instead, he got high on MOBs and B-2s, and on “grabbing the oil”. Meanwhile, Hegseth “kills” more generals, and with them institutional knowledge and professionalism at home, than in Iran. That is not winning. Nor is it the promised “Asia pivot” that armchair geopolitical experts sold for two years. If anything, it plays into Beijing’s hands. The US military and the Israel Defense Forces may still bail him out. But at this stage that would be luck, and luck tends to reward the prepared. Not this. As Johann Wolfgang von Goethe put it, “es ist das Fällige was zufällt”, a precise wordplay on chance and inevitability. Trump will not have read him either. Clausewitz, Goethe, NATO, European “trash”, right? Yet the US Navy lacks sufficient operational mine countermeasure capacity, while NATO allies and Japan do. This war does not need more B-2s. It may need, among other things, naval convoys to reopen the Strait, which requires a coalition of the willing. A bit of diplomacy would assemble that quickly. Should Trump walk away from unfinished business, bilateral agreements between blocs and Iran may restore some traffic without convoys, and in the process declare the petrodollar system history and gold an even bigger winner. But I doubt this will get us back to 100%. Alternatively, the US, and with it the world, may have to relearn old tanker-war lessons the hard way. Give it a few weeks and the US military may destroy every target it can find, yet still lose the war, and the peace that follows. I hope not, but the political blame game in Washington is already in full swing. That is the setup. Markets remain unprepared for higher-for-longer oil globally, and for fuel shortages coming in April.