Strait Gangsterism

By Kevin D. Williamson

Wednesday, July 15, 2026

 

Iran is being swept by a wave of nationalism, while the United States is being swept by a wave of explosive diarrhea—do you ever get the feeling that Hegelian capital-H History is laughing at you?  

 

In a war with a filthy little junta in Tehran, Donald Trump has managed to make the United States of America the bad guy. If you are looking for a quick-and-easy definition of shmuck, there you go. Of course, it doesn’t help that it is an illegal and immoral war being waged by an incompetent game show host.  

 

What did it take to get Iran’s former dissidents to line up shoulder-to-shoulder with the ayatollahs who have been murdering and torturing them? A former opponent of the ruling cabal in Tehran—one who had been tear-gassed and beaten so badly that “he couldn’t move for days” during the 2022 protests—tells the Wall Street Journal: “They said that a civilization was going to be destroyed, not a regime.” You’ll remember that post, no doubt. I guess the Iranians haven’t heard whatever the Persian is for “take him seriously, not literally.” It is a pity that Lindsey Graham, the Rudy Giuliani of the Senate, is no longer around to explain it to the long-suffering Iranian people, who surely would have benefited from the wisdom of his experience and the constancy of his judgment.

 

The Trump administration has been fought to an effective standstill by Tehran, which pulled off the remarkable feat of gaining a strategic asset—effective control of the Strait of Hormuz—as a result of a war in which it has not won a single engagement. The U.S. is now trying to recover from that descent into geopolitical buffoonery. Trump may declare total victory twice a week, but in the real world the likeliest outcome is one that is economically and strategically worse for the United States than the status quo ante bellum.

 

Yes, the U.S. military has destroyed the Iranian navy. I have spent a fair bit of time at the ports of Los Angeles, New York, and Houston, and do you know what I have never seen at any of them? A lookout posted with a spyglass pointed toward the horizon keeping his eyes peeled for the Iranian navy, a former maritime nonentity that probably could not have survived an engagement with the Cajun Navy or even a couple of Bubbas in jon boats looking for that 5-pound bass. I’m sure we could kick the stuffing out of the Mongolian navy, too, and give massive noogies to all seven of its sailors.

 

The first big engagement of the U.S. Marine Corps was chastising those infamous Barbary pirates—“to the shores of Tripoli!” and all that. That was then. Under the Trump administration, we’re the pirates: Trump proposed, and then rescinded his proposal of, a 20 percent pizzo on traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. From the world’s policeman to the world’s taxman—terrific progress, there.

 

The new idea is that our gulf allies (and “allies”) will offset the cost of the apparently open-ended U.S. mission in the strait by entering into various private business deals with U.S. partners—i.e., we have a new maritime “forever war” in which the costs will fall upon the U.S. taxpayer while profits are to be collected by cronies, family, and political allies of Donald Trump. This is, as the poet put it, straight gangsterism.

 

The United States is being fought to something worse than a draw by a third-rate power that cannot adequately supply its own capital city with water and electricity. The world is noticing—it may even get bad enough that Americans start to notice, too. One half suspects that Trump’s expected Thursday announcement of an even wider and deeper attempt to intervene in the upcoming midterm elections is simply the reality show grotesque’s familiar gambit of trying to provoke a supplanting synthetic controversy into existence in order to distract the audience from the much more serious business—the humiliation and de facto defeat of the United States—transpiring abroad.

 

Under the giveh-heel of tyranny or the Florsheim-heel of tyranny—tyranny is tyranny. But credit the ayatollahs with this much: They believe in something. Trump is just a guy who used to dabble in softcore pornography and beauty pageants and has now worked his way up to trying to run the world’s largest protection racket, dragging the reputation of the United States into the sewer that is his natural habitat.

 

What do we have to show for it? Well-earned gloating in Tehran, high fuel prices at home, and persistently high inflation. More than a baker’s dozen of dead Americans, too—so far. And if that sounds like a familiar story from the 1970s, consider that U.S. economic growth in the Carter years was significantly stronger than current U.S. performance in the most recent data.

 

One is tempted here to defame, by implication, the wits of nits.