The reality of this war is smacking Trump in the face.
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President Trump launched off on this war with basically no international support and took a swaggering and cocky attitude to the need for any support or assistance as recently as a week ago. Now he’s doing something between demanding and begging other powers to get involved in our behalf, as David Kurtz noted in today’s Morning Memo. There’s additional context to this that is important. Only a tiny number of powers can do anything about the situation in the strait. They are almost all either European powers that Trump has spent years shitting on, or they are adversary powers like China or perhaps Russia. The whole situation is crashingly absurd.
The idea that there’s going to be some multinational escort force probably isn’t something that anyone is serious about. It’s a ploy to calm oil futures markets until the White House can figure out what it’s doing, figure out a way to “win,” or extricate itself from what increasingly looks like a perfect storm of open-ended military involvement and economic cataclysm.