No Plan, No Exit

Political Analysis

Trump started a war he can’t finish and classified briefings confirm it

Trump started a war he doesn’t have a plan to finish, and a senator who sat through the classified briefing just told us exactly how bad it is.

Chris Murphy came out of the White House’s secret “Operation Epic Fury” briefing last week and posted a thread that should be required reading for everyone. He said he couldn’t share classified information, but that we deserved to know the war plans were “incoherent and incomplete.” That’s a senator who just sat in the room saying, essentially: they have no idea what they’re doing.

Let me break down the four things Murphy says are going sideways, because the news cycle is moving so fast it’s easy to miss that we’re potentially looking at a global economic catastrophe.

The first problem is the Strait of Hormuz, and it’s the one that could hit your wallet before this month is out. About 20% of the world’s oil passes through a waterway that’s only 20 miles wide at its narrowest point. Iran has effectively closed it. Not with warships, not with a navy that could be blown up and done with, but with thousands of cheap drones, explosive speedboats disguised as fishing boats, and mines.

Iran’s naval commander has stated publicly that any ship wanting to pass needs Iran’s permission first, or it gets hit.

Three commercial ships were struck last week alone, including a Thai bulk carrier that was set on fire. Oil prices have spiked to their highest level in nearly four years.

Here’s the part that should make you furious: this was predictable. Murphy says every president has always known Iran would shut down the Strait if the US took military action, and that we’ve always known we have no realistic way to reopen it. Our own intelligence estimates said this would happen. Trump knew, and did it anyway. The US Energy Secretary actually announced a tanker had been safely escorted through, which briefly moved the markets, and then had to delete the post because they were wrong.

The second problem is drones, and this one is a lesson from Ukraine that apparently nobody in the White House bothered to learn. You can shoot down ballistic missiles. Intercepting thousands of cheap, mass-produced drones is a completely different problem.

Bahrain alone reported intercepting 114 missiles and 190 drones in the first two weeks of the conflict. Gulf states are burning through their interceptor stockpiles, which means the longer this goes, the more exposed oil infrastructure becomes. Iran has already hit oil storage facilities at Oman’s port of Salalah, a facility that ships were actually redirecting to in order to avoid the Strait. They hit the workaround. They also hit Saudi Arabia’s Ras Tanura refinery, one of the largest oil processing facilities in the world. Murphy asked what happens when the US stops bombing and Iran just restarts production of drones and missiles. The administration’s answer, apparently, was: more bombing. Murphy’s word for that was “endless war.”

The third problem is that it’s spreading. Iran’s proxy groups are treating this as an open invitation. Hezbollah resumed missile and drone fire on Israel, Israel launched a ground incursion into Lebanon, and Lebanon has reported over 700,000 people displaced.

Iraqi groups have been targeting US forces. A French soldier was killed in a drone strike in Iraqi Kurdistan. The Houthis in Yemen have been quiet so far, which is almost more ominous than if they were already shooting, because it means that shoe hasn’t dropped yet and it threatens Red Sea shipping when it does.

Qatar had to suspend liquefied natural gas production after an Iranian drone strike on its facilities. The Gulf as a whole has been hit in ways it hasn’t seen since the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s.

The fourth problem, and the one that makes all the others worse, is that there’s no exit.

Murphy put it plainly: Iran and its proxy network can sustain this kind of chaos indefinitely. A full ground invasion would cost thousands of American lives and make Iraq look like a warm-up act.

Declaring victory and leaving lets whatever is left of Iranian leadership rebuild and come back angrier, with better infrastructure, under a new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, who just gave his first public statement saying the attacks on US military positions will continue until American forces leave the region.

Trump, for his part, told Axios this week that the war will end “anytime I want it to end.” Which is either the most delusional thing a sitting president has ever said, or a man trying very hard to convince himself he’s still in control of something.

Over 1,850 people have died since this started on February 28. At least 1,330 of them are Iranian civilians. A US missile strike killed over 100 schoolchildren in what appears to have been a targeting error. The first American combat death was a 20-year-old from Iowa named Declan Coady, killed in a drone strike in Kuwait.

The war is two weeks old.

Sources