Well, it’s moot now, with Donald Trump this morning reversing his big announcement yesterday morning that the U.S. military would be taking over the Strait of Hormuz and demanding a 20 percent toll from ships that pass through it.
As it happens, I was just finishing up a post about how credulous the first-day coverage of his crackpot plan was. And now that I’ve been proven right, I still feel there’s some value in sharing what I found.
In a nutshell, my argument was that everyone – including American political journalists — knew that Trump’s “plan” was never going to happen.
It was a bluff from a mentally unstable man desperate to put the war he started behind him. It was completely unworkable and illegal. It would have put American servicemembers in harm’s way. No one would ever pay it.
It’s wasn’t going anywhere.
But you wouldn’t have known that from the coverage it got from our major news organizations. They treated it like a serious proposal. They gave it big headlines. They engaged in a lot of stenography.
“Trump Says Fighting With Iran Has Resumed as He Orders Blockade and Tolls,” the New York Times headlined. “Trump turns to blockade — and tolls — as U.S. and Iran battle over the Strait of Hormuz,” NBC News headlined. “US to take over Strait of Hormuz, charge 20 percent fee for cargo shipped through, Trump says,” headlined Politico.
Many news organizations paired the toll threat with Trump’s announcement ordering the resumption of the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports – an actual command that Centcom quickly acknowledged. (Centcom, notably, hasn’t said a peep about any further orders – because there aren’t any.)
One was real, the other was fantasy.
Now that said, if you pored through a number of different news sources yesterday, you could see hints of the real story. That’s because the reporters aren’t stupid. They knew the toll plan was bullshit, they were just too cowardly or lazy to tell you straight up.
If you add them all up, as I will below, you will see how clear it was that the plan was doomed – even though none of the stories, individually, reached that conclusion.
The New York Times, for instance, ran a sidebar by Yan Zhuang headlined: “What to Know About Trump’s Plan to Charge a Toll in the Strait of Hormuz.”
“How would a U.S. toll work?” she asked. “This isn’t exactly clear,” she wrote. “Mr. Trump did not elaborate on how the 20 percent fee would be calculated or how it would be collected.”
In fact, there was no evidence that anyone else in his administration knew anything about it.
“How would a toll affect shipping and markets?” she asked.
A 20 percent fee on the value of a vessel’s cargo could more than double the cost of shipping oil through the strait, experts said.
For a large tanker carrying two million barrels of oil, for example, the fee could add over $30 million in costs. Consumers would likely face higher prices as a result.
Because of the high cost, some analysts said they doubted whether the fee would come into force.
In a CNN explainer, Elisabeth Buchwald also asked and answered question about the plan, including “Who would foot the bill?”
She spoke to John McCown, a senior fellow at the Center for Maritime Strategy, who told her that the fee will likely be high enough that no party is willing to pay it:
As a general rule of thumb, shippers pay carriers 2%-3% of the value of their goods in fees, according to McCown, former CEO of shipping logistics company Trailer Bridge. A fee around 10 times the size would likely be entirely unaffordable to shippers, he said.
The Associated Press article by Ben Finley, Farnoush Amier, and Konstantin Toropin headlined “Why it’s so difficult for the US to fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz” described a number of serious problems with the plan. Notably, the authors wrote that “restoring oil tanker traffic in the vital Middle East shipping corridor to prewar flows likely will require a much bigger armada of U.S. warships if not tens of thousands of American troops on Iranian soil, experts say.”
Jason H. Campbell, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute and a former Pentagon official, told the reporters: “It’s very difficult to envision any scenario where you could satisfactorily secure the Strait of Hormuz absent ground forces.” Campbell said that would require tens of thousands of troops who would likely face insurgent attacks.
Relying on warships instead would require “a very large chunk of the U.S. fleet being dedicated to this on an open-ended basis,” Michael Eisenstadt, a former U.S. military analyst, told them.
In fact, Trump abandoned an earlier promise to protect the strait, Clayton Seigle, a nonresident scholar in energy security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told them. “Those naval escorts, U.S. warships, larger commitments like boots on the ground never came because I think that the rhetoric got a little ahead of our risk tolerance,” he said. “And when push came to shove, the United States was not ready to deploy its Navy, to deploy its other military forces in the capacity that would be needed to even have a shot at neutralizing those threats.”
Buried in a Wall Street Journal story that was mostly about the blockade being reinstated, Benoit Faucon, Rebecca Feng, and Jared Malsin noted the Iranian resistance to U.S. control of the strait. They quoted a spokesman for Iran’s armed forces, who said, “We will under no circumstances allow the United States to interfere in the management of the Strait of Hormuz.” The journalists conveyed “the likelihood of a continued standoff over control of the strait.”
Like I said, it’s all moot now. It took Trump all of 25 hours to chicken out — to go from posting this….
The U.S.A. will be, from this point forward, known as “THE GUARDIAN OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT,” but as such, and as a matter of FAIRNESS, will be reimbursed, at the rate of 20% on all cargo shipped, for any and all costs necessary to do the job of providing safety and security to this very volatile section of the World. The process and formation will begin immediately
… to posting this:
Based on highly productive conversations with Middle East leadership, I have decided to replace the 20% United States Reimbursement Fee with Trade and Investment Deals that the various Gulf States will be making into the United States.
American journalist would have done everyone a favor – including their own news organizations – if they had said what they knew to be true instead of quoting Trump saying things they knew to be bullshit.
But because of their cowardice and laziness, we had another insane 24-hour news cycle of everyone chasing after whatever Trump said last, no matter how absurd it was. As I wrote in June they should “Stop putting whatever Trump says about Iran in the headlines.”
Will they ever learn?
In the meantime, I urge the journalists who wrote about this yesterday to write something for tomorrow about how Trump cooked up this ridiculous idea and blurted it out, and why, and why he changed his mind so quickly.
They should use this sequence of events to tell the American public the other thing they all know to be true, but are too cowardly and lazy to write about: That Trump is deranged; that he is mentally unfit for duty.
As for why he changed his mind, presumably, someone he trusts told him his plan was crazy and unworkable. Too bad journalists hadn’t done the same.