US President Donald Trump this week said the Strait of Hormuz is in “great shape” and tried to convince Americans that rising oil prices are actually a good thing.
Reality, and the global economy, beg to differ.
With each passing day of the war, almost at the halfway point of what he projected to be a four-week conflict, it is becoming increasingly clear that things are far more complicated than Mr Trump had envisioned.
One of the reasons successive US presidents baulked at bombing Iran was the likelihood that military action would cause a shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway between Oman and Iran that serves as the primary conduit for oil produced by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, Iraq, Bahrain and Iran itself.
Sure enough, the strait is now shut. Few shipping companies are brave or desperate enough to risk sending their vessels through it. They would be sitting ducks for the Iranian military and the US Navy is in no position to act as an escort service while its combat operations continue at a high tempo.
Underscoring the danger, three ships were struck on Wednesday and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps warned it could stop “even one litre of oil” from being shipped from the Middle East.
On Thursday, Britain's Defence Secretary John Healey told reporters that Iran has probably begun placing sea mines in the strait, a tactic guaranteed to shut down shipping. Iran's Foreign Minister, Abbas Araghchi, has denied this is occurring.
And Tehran released a message attributed to its new supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, who said the Strait of Hormuz should remain closed.
All of this has pushed oil up past $100 a barrel despite a record release of global oil reserves, and drivers are already paying more at the pump. In the US, prices are now their highest since August 2022, with a gallon of regular petrol now averaging $3.60, or 95 cents a litre. It amounts to a 20 per cent increase from a month ago, and in some states the increase is even sharper.
So how does Mr Trump, the businessman who for years made lowering energy and petrol prices a centrepiece of his political messages, view all this?
“The straits are in great shape,” he told reporters on Wednesday. “We’ve knocked out all of their boats. They have some missiles, but not very many. I think we’re in very good … we’re in very good shape.”
On Thursday, he took to social media to say that rising oil prices are actually terrific. The US “is the largest oil producer in the world, by far, so when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money".
It's not clear to whom the “we” in that sentence is referring. Rising oil prices have knock-on effects for the broader economy, pushing up inflation, hampering growth and ultimately slowing hiring.
Historians will puzzle over the timing of the Iran war for years to come. Mr Trump has said Tehran posed an imminent threat to the US, but his administration hasn't provided any evidence to support this.
Perhaps he thought knocking out Iran's regime would be relatively straightforward for the US, looking to Venezuela as a precedent. But his assumptions have so far been shattered. Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth on Tuesday suggested that the US hadn't fully anticipated how Iran's clerical regime would respond in the war.
It must all be confounding for Mr Trump, who is used to reality bending to his will. If he thought destroying the Iranian regime would be easy, with no repercussions for oil prices or the global economy, he is having a rare reality check.
The timing bodes poorly for him and his Republican colleagues. It is hard to imagine the war can be wrapped up within his initial four-week timeframe, and every day it drags on it acts as an albatross on the global economy.
Midterm elections are coming in November. It may seem a long way off but as America should have learnt by now, Middle East conflicts tend to be measured in years, not weeks.
