Now, on the third week of an active shooting war with Iran, Trump has run headlong into something his entire operating philosophy was never designed to handle: a 21-mile-wide chokepoint at the mouth of the Persian Gulf that has no CEO to bully, no bondholder to threaten, and no shareholders to absorb the loss. The Strait of Hormuz carries roughly 20% to 25% of the world’s oil supply every single day. It cannot be restructured. It cannot be taken into bankruptcy. And right now, it is effectively closed.
But Iran, unlike Atlantic City bondholders, held a card Trump hadn’t fully priced in. When Trump launched a widely anticipated, yet still seemingly under-rehearsed attack on Iran, alongside Israel, Iranian forces began mining the strait, firing anti-ship missiles at commercial tankers, and deploying drones against vessels traversing the narrow waterway. U.S. Central Command sank 16 Iranian mine-laying vessels in an attempt to clear the passage. It wasn’t enough. Shipping activity through the strait ground nearly to a halt. As of Monday, Iran said traffic was going through the strait—just not for any U.S. allies.
Confronted with an adversary immune to his usual leverage, Trump defaulted to the strategy he knows best: offload the cost onto someone else. On March 15, Trump told reporters he had “demanded” that roughly seven countries join a coalition to police the waterway, warning that any nation that refused would face a “bad future” with the United States.
It was a classic Trump move—the transactional ultimatum, the threat wrapped in a favor. But the response was a portrait of the limits of his brand of coercion. NATO allies rejected the demand outright. China, which continues importing Iranian oil, reacted with studied indifference. Trump suggested he might cancel a summit with Beijing over it; Beijing did not appear alarmed. The dealmaker had issued his terms. The world declined to countersign.
For four decades, Trump found someone else to hold the bag when his bets went bad. Standing at the edge of the Persian Gulf, with oil markets convulsing, allies shrugging, and Iranian drones still buzzing over shipping lanes, he is learning what every creditor, contractor, and counterpart he ever stiffed already knew: Eventually, the deal comes due.
