A Chevron in downtown Portland proclaims that the price for regular gasoline is $5.89 per gallon. The costs for diesel and higher octanes are all above $6 per gallon.
In the middle of February, the average price for a gallon of gas here was $3.68. That’s a jump of more than $2 per gallon in less than two months.
Chalk the increase up to President Donald Trump’s foolish war against Iran.
The president and his brain trust have received considerable criticism for not anticipating and planning for Iran shutting down the Strait of Hormuz and the disruptions to the economy such a shutdown would cause.
The criticism is fair. We will feel the effects of Trump’s lack of forethought regarding the Strait of Hormuz at the pump for a long time.
But the harsh appraisals of the president’s approach to what is likely to be a disruptive and self-destructive foray into nation-building in the Middle East are too limited in scope.
Not devising a contingency plan for the Strait of Hormuz is a tactical failure.
Not having any real understanding of the people and culture with whom we are fighting is a much, much deeper failure.
The president now is signaling that he would like this war that he started to be over soon. He entered into it thinking in terms of weeks—months at most. He began this war thinking it would be a short-term engagement, another opportunity for him to flex America’s military muscle and watch the rest of the world bow down in fear and admiration.
That is in keeping with Trump’s approach to business and life. He is and always has been a quick-buck capitalist, a hustler eager to cash out and move on to the next mark. He rarely, if ever, thinks beyond the next move.
The signs, though, suggest that the Iranians are digging in for a long fight. They are calculating that they can outlast a U.S. president who had a short attention span even when he was in the best of health and the prime of life.
Now that Trump is old, tired, easily frustrated and even more easily distracted, Iran’s leaders think that they can win simply by enduring.
And—to be fair—they probably would be approaching the fighting this way even if this president were at the top of his game or they were facing another U.S. leader who had ventured into battle so carelessly.
That is because the Iranians think about war differently than we do.
In a part of the world where strife has been a constant over millennia, the leaders of nations such as Iran don’t think of conflicts in terms of weeks, months or even years.
Rather, they think and prepare in terms of decades, even centuries.
The president thinks he can end this war by “bombing our little hearts out.” He believes that continuing to pound the Iranians with constant, destructive and deadly explosions will compel their leaders to surrender.
But it’s possible—even likely—that the Iranians don’t think in terms as conventional as those. Given that the central message of a series of Iranian supreme leaders has been a rejection of those aspects of modernity and capitalism that they feel corrupt the human spirit, bombing them back to an earlier era only underscores that message.
That’s why the signs are that the harsher the punishment the United States hands out, the more the Iranian resolve to fight on is strengthened.
And even if the bombing does corrode the Iranian spirit, it only would encourage the most radicalized members of that nation to seek out ways to alter the nature of the fight.
Part of the reason that smaller and resentful nations settled on terrorism as both a tactic and a strategy was that they were smart enough to realize that they couldn’t win conventional, large-scale conflicts.
So, they decided to fight in smaller-scale and more intimate ways, taking the battle into the homes and hearths of the people with whom they were at war.
These are only a few of the things that Donald Trump and his team of sycophants didn’t consider, much less grapple with, before they plunged us into this war.
We will be paying for their arrogance and ignorance for a long time to come.
And not just at the pump.
