The Arsonist Calls the Fire Department — and Bills Them for It

Trump lit the Middle East on fire. Now he’s asking the world to put it out.

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There is a peculiar logic at work in the Trump administration’s approach to the Iran war — one that would be almost admirable in its audacity if it were not so catastrophically dangerous. Having spent the better part of a decade methodically dismantling every diplomatic architecture that constrained Iran’s nuclear ambitions, having bombed Tehran’s facilities while negotiators were still exchanging talking points in Muscat and Rome, and having now watched the Strait of Hormuz transform from a vital artery of global commerce into a theater of conflict, President Trump has arrived at what his advisors apparently consider a masterstroke of strategic communication: Go to the strait and just take it, protect it, use it for yourselves.

In other words: Washington lit the fire, and the world is being handed the bucket.

This is not foreign policy. This is not even dealmaking in any recognizable sense of the word. It is the geopolitical equivalent of a property developer who demolishes a building in a dense neighborhood, watches the debris damage the surrounding structures, and then informs the neighbors that the cleanup is their problem because he personally does not use that street.

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The Architecture of Self-Inflicted Catastrophe

Let us be honest about the sequence of events, because the current administration has demonstrated a remarkable talent for memory loss when it comes to causation.

In 2018, Trump withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — the imperfect but functional agreement that had placed verifiable limits on Iran’s nuclear program. The stated rationale was that the deal was a “bad deal,” the product of naive Obama-era diplomacy, insufficiently punishing and terminally credulous. What followed was not, as promised, a better deal. What followed was seven years of maximum pressure, escalating enrichment, hardened Iranian resolve, and the systematic elimination of every diplomatic off-ramp that might have made the present catastrophe avoidable.

By the time the June 2025 strikes — what the Pentagon branded “Operation Midnight Hammer” — destroyed Iran’s major enrichment facilities, Tehran’s breakout timeline had already compressed to weeks. The strikes did not eliminate the program. They eliminated the inspectors’ access to it. The International Atomic Energy Agency, as of this writing, cannot confirm where Iran’s highly enriched uranium stockpiles are located. The administration that claimed to have “totally obliterated” the Iranian nuclear threat has instead produced a nuclear program that is invisible, dispersed, and, if anything, more determined than before.

The Venezuela template was always a regional exception, not a universal playbook. Applying it to Iran was less a strategy than a wish — and in foreign policy, as in markets, wishes have a poor track record against structural realities.

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The Transactional Delusion

There is a deeper intellectual failure here that deserves examination, because it will outlast this particular crisis and inform the next one.

The Trump foreign policy worldview rests on a foundational premise: that international relations are, at their core, transactional. That every adversary has a price, that every conflict has a deal structure, and that the reason previous administrations failed was not structural complexity but insufficient toughness and insufficient cunning. In this framework, Iran was simply a counterpart who needed to feel enough pain before arriving at the table in a suitably chastened posture.

The notion that to make foreign policy work, all you need are astute and tough businessmen who approach adversaries the way they approach corporate counterparts is misleading, especially when the issues at stake involve war, peace and survival. No one has ever died defending the Trump brand. People have died, and will continue to die, defending the Persian Gulf, the right to enrich uranium, and the sovereignty of a civilization that predates the United States by roughly two and a half millennia.

What the administration never grasped, what it appears constitutionally incapable of grasping, is that Iran’s nuclear program is not a bargaining chip. It is an existential insurance policy, one whose perceived necessity was dramatically reinforced the moment American bombers appeared over Isfahan. You cannot bomb a country into submission while simultaneously demanding it negotiate from weakness. The contradiction is not just tactical — it is strategic.

The Strait and the Shrug

And so we arrive at this week’s remarkable spectacle: an American president, five weeks into a war his administration precipitated, informing the world’s major economies — Europe, Japan, South Korea, India — that the Strait of Hormuz is their problem.

Trump said the U.S. did not use the strait and called on countries that rely on it for fuel to take responsibility for protecting it. “Go to the strait and just take it, protect it, use it for yourselves,” Trump said.

One searches history for a comparable moment and finds few precedents. A hegemon that instigated a conflict publicly abdicating responsibility for its consequences, in real time, while the consequences are still unfolding. It has the intellectual coherence of a man who kicks over a chessboard and then complains that no one is playing.

The irony, rich enough to age in barrels, is that this is a president who came to office promising to restore American greatness, to reassert American power, to make allies pay their fair share. He has achieved a version of this. America’s allies are indeed being asked to pay — to pay for a war they did not want, to manage a crisis they did not create, to protect a waterway that Washington has now casually disclaimed.

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Quagmires Have a Logic of Their Own

I wrote a book in 1992 called Quagmire: America in the Middle East. I would be lying if I claimed any satisfaction in its continued relevance. The quagmire dynamic is depressingly consistent across administrations, across ideologies, across decades: America intervenes, America escalates, America discovers that the Middle East is more complicated than the pre-war briefings suggested, and America then spends years searching for an exit that does not exist — because exits must be built through the same diplomacy that was abandoned before the first bomb fell.

Trump has long favored what aides call “one-and-done” operations. He has launched them in Yemen, Syria, and Somalia. The Iran war is, by its nature, incapable of being one-and-done. Iran is not a stateless militia. It is a nation of 90 million people with a sophisticated military, asymmetric capabilities across the region, and the institutional memory of every American betrayal since 1953. It does not forget. It does not capitulate. And it does not, as this administration apparently expected, simply absorb a strike on its nuclear facilities and send a polite note of surrender to Steve Witkoff’s hotel room in Muscat.

How this war ends is as uncertain as the reasons for starting it.

A Final Note on Responsibility

The world will, in some fashion, respond to Trump’s invitation to manage the Hormuz crisis. It has little choice. The global economy does not have the luxury of principled abstention when fourteen million barrels of oil per day are at risk. European navies will likely mobilize. Asian economies will scramble for alternative supply routes. The diplomatic machinery of nations that were never consulted before the first strike will labor to produce a ceasefire that Washington should have secured before Operation Midnight Hammer was ever green-lit.

And when that happens — when European diplomats have negotiated the off-ramp, when Asian economies have absorbed the oil shock, when the international community has once again cleaned up after an American foreign policy adventure — the administration will claim credit for the outcome, declare victory, and move on to the next deal.

That is, after all, the art of it.