This is an adapted excerpt from the March 10 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”
We are now in the second week of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu’s war with Iran — a war of choice, launched with constantly shifting rationales and mired in obfuscation and lies.
This week, Trump ran into the fundamental strategic contradiction of this war. He wants war with Iran, a big military victory and regime change. He also wants very low gas prices.
The problem for the president is, you can only have — at most — one of the two, and possibly neither. That has left this administration in something of a bind.
Over the weekend, the price of a barrel of oil spiked to almost $120. So, naturally, Trump went into spin mode, trying to manage the market.
On Saturday, Israel struck 30 Iranian fuel depots, creating an environmental and political catastrophe. The scenes throughout the country were downright apocalyptic, with major fires breaking out across the capital city of Tehran.
An anonymous Trump staffer took to Axios to vent about the operation, which officials said the U.S. had advance knowledge of. “The president doesn’t like the attack,” the staffer said. “He wants to save the oil. He doesn’t want to burn it. And it reminds people of higher gas prices.”
Over the weekend the price of a barrel of oil spiked to almost $120. So, naturally, Trump went into spin mode, trying to manage the market. He called CBS News during the day on Monday to say, “I think the war is very complete, pretty much” — clearly an attempt to calm the panic on Wall Street.
Then, after the markets closed, he walked it back. “We’ve already won in many ways, but we haven’t won enough,” the president said Monday during a speech at the Republican Members Issues Conference. “We go forward more determined than ever to achieve ultimate victory that will end this long-running danger once and for all. Forty-seven years. It should have been done a long time ago.”
Meanwhile, the flow of commerce through the Strait of Hormuz has effectively stopped. Iran has shut it down and attacked ships that try to travel through the key choke point in the Gulf.
But, according to Trump, that situation would be solved if everyone just grew a spine. During a conversation with Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade, the president reportedly said: “These ships should go through the Strait of Hormuz and show some guys there’s nothing to be afraid of. They have no Navy, we sunk all their ships.”
However, when speaking in public, Trump backed down, as he so often does. “You have to keep the straits flowing,” the president told reporters on Monday. “With all of that, it affects other countries much more than it does the United States. Doesn’t really affect us. We have so much oil. We have tremendous oil and gas, much more than we need.”
On Sunday, Trump’s secretary of energy, Chris Wright, whose purview has very little to do with oil prices, told CBS News that the U.S. Navy may be escorting vessels through the strait to “defang” the Iranian military’s “ability to threaten these ships.”
To be clear, that would be a huge deal.
Think about it for a second. Those ships are in range of Iranian missiles. Is the proposal to ask American service members to risk their lives to escort ships bringing tankers full of oil to another country? Should our troops die for lower oil prices?
On Tuesday, in a post on social media, Wright said the U.S. had already escorted a ship. The markets responded positively and the price of oil dropped, but then Wright deleted the post. It turns out that the secretary’s post was not true.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the U.S. Navy hasn’t “escorted a tanker or a vessel at this time,” adding, “Though, of course, that’s an option the president has said he will absolutely utilize if and when necessary at the appropriate time.”
So I guess we are back where we started on that front, with reports on Tuesday of possible Iranian mine deployment in the strait and angry Trump posts warning them not to.
We are almost two weeks into this war, which has spread to more than a dozen countries and left seven U.S. service members dead, along with more than 1,200 Iranians, 570 Lebanese and 13 Israelis.
Right now, there is no clear way out of the conflict, and, of course, Iran has very little reason to trust this president.
“Right now, as we speak, you can put a map of the region in front of you, and you will not be able to find a finger-pointing space where escalation is not happening,” a spokesperson for Qatar’s foreign ministry said.
Trump allies like Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina — a guy who, by his own admission, helped goad the president into this war — are now publicly advocating that it expand to other parts of the Middle East.
In remarks on Tuesday, a spokesperson for Qatar’s foreign ministry took the U.S. to task for already sparking a regional conflict.
“Right now, as we speak, you can put a map of the region in front of you, and you will not be able to find a finger-pointing space where escalation is not happening,” Majed Al-Ansari told reporters.
“We have said from Day 1, left unchecked, the escalation that started in 2023 would lead to a regional war,” he continued. “What we are seeing right now is a regional war that still can be contained. But we — the trajectory we are going through right now is a very dangerous trajectory for the region.”
Considering that, the concept of the Gulf Cooperation Council countries joining the U.S in this fight feels … let’s just say rather unlikely at this point.
Allison Detzel contributed.
Chris Hayes hosts “All In with Chris Hayes” at 8 p.m. ET Tuesday through Friday on MS NOW. He is the editor-at-large at The Nation. A former fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, Hayes was a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation. His latest book is “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource” (Penguin Press).