The real reason Trump is trapped in Iran

Friends,Yesterday, Trump said that he’d do whatever is necessary to ease the oil crisis. He also assured America that the crisis “will be over soon.”BS.The problem isn’t just that Iran has blocked the Strait of Hormuz. It’s also that Iran, Israel, and the United States have all inflicted — and continue to inflict — serious damage to the oil and gas infrastructure of the Middle East. This damage will take months if not years to repair.At one point on Thursday oil prices jumped to $119 a barrel before falling back to around $111 a barrel — all but guaranteeing that the price of gas at the pump will continue to rise, as will the prices of many other products and services indirectly affected by oil prices.What we are now witnessing is one of the grossest military and political blunders in modern history.It’s not hard to understand why Trump is trapped in Iran. He doesn’t listen to anyone outside his small circle of sycophants who tell him what he wants to hear.But there’s something else. Iran has adopted an asymmetric war strategy that’s working.I’m indebted to Marty Manley for uncovering a fascinating historical fact that sheds light on what Iran is doing. During the Korean War, U.S. Air Force Colonel John Boyd came up with a theory of competitive decision-making that shaped American military doctrine for a generation. He called it the OODA loop: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act.Boyd found that victory doesn’t go to the side with more firepower. It goes to the side that cycles through the OODA loop faster — observing what’s changing, orienting to its meaning, deciding what to do, and acting before its adversary does.Get inside your opponent’s loop, Boyd reasoned, and you don’t just outpace him. You break his ability to form a coherent picture of the war he’s fighting.Manley observes that Iran has adopted Boyd’s approach. Iran hasn’t needed to match American firepower; it’s needed only to generate economic and political problems for Washington that outrun Washington’s ability to orient, decide, and act.Iran has gotten inside Trump’s OODA loop because Iran has responded to U.S. airstrikes by widening the war horizontally — attacking tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, launching drones and missiles at Gulf state oil and gas infrastructure, provoking the U.S. and Israel to destroy even more of that infrastructure, hitting Amazon data centers in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain (causing regional outages for banking, e-commerce, and cloud services), and squeezing other choke points that the global economy depends on.Iran’s leaders — veterans of asymmetric wars in Iraq and Syria — are applying the same asymmetric logic to Trump’s war. Inexpensive drones, short-range missiles, and sea mines can have the same effect that IEDs had in Iraq — only with far greater strategic impact, because they disrupt global supply chains.What has Washington done? Dropped more bombs and launched more missiles.On Wednesday Israel struck at the crown jewel of Iran’s energy industry — the giant South Pars gas field that Iran shares with Qatar and is by far the largest in the world. (Israel says Trump gave the attack his blessing; Trump says he didn’t.) Iran quickly retaliated with an attack on Qatar’s Ras Laffan Industrial City, the world’s largest liquefied natural gas facility.The attacks have sent the global oil benchmark soaring and prompted a mad scramble in Washington. Trump threatens “to blow up the entirety” of Iran’s South Pars gas holdings if Iran attacks Qatar again. His treasury secretary says the U.S. will consider lifting sanctions on millions of barrels of Iranian oil.Since he and Israel began bombing Iran, Trump’s strategy has been entirely reactive. Iran is generating problems for Washington faster than Washington can contain them — a clear sign that Iran is inside Trump’s OODA loop.Trump and Israel assumed that overwhelming airpower would either compel Iran to surrender or trigger regime change. But neither has happened. The regime seems more entrenched and bellicose than ever.As Iran continues to block the Strait of Hormuz and attacks its Gulf neighbors’ oil and gas infrastructure, the cost-benefit ratio continues to shift against Trump: Economic and political pressures are mounting on Washington faster than they are on Tehran.Sure, Iran is hurting — but, as Manley argues, Iran can sustain its counteroffensive more easily and longer than the U.S. can sustain economic damage to Iran. An Iranian Shahed drone made of styrofoam and powered by a motorcycle engine, for example, costs orders of magnitude less than the precision missiles sent to intercept it or the economic havoc it causes when it ignites a tanker, data center, or desalination plant.In addition, the longer Trump’s OODA loop stays broken, the more bad consequences occur that no one in the Trump regime anticipated.