Mohommad Nazeer Paktyawal served alongside US special forces in eastern Afghanistan starting around 2005, patrolling the Pakistan border so American soldiers could come home alive. After the Taliban took over in 2021, he did what the US told him to do: he fled to America with his family. Last Friday, ICE arrested him outside his Dallas-area apartment. He was dead within 24 hours. He was 41. He had six children, the youngest an American citizen at 18 months old.
Mohommad Nazeer Paktyawal in uniform. Source: CNN/AfghanEvac
DHS lied, claiming he “provided no record of his military service” upon entry. AfghanEvac provided a certificate of service proving otherwise. DHS spokesperson Lauren Bis used the occasion of his death to attack Afghan evacuees as “unvetted”, which is a claim CNN politely notes is misleading, since all were screened by intelligence, law enforcement, and counterterrorism professionals, sometimes more than once.
The administration’s position is now clear: the people who risked their lives for American operations are retroactively reclassified as threats the moment it becomes politically convenient.
No wonder their current Iran war is failing so obviously.
We won
We’re winning
Send help
Paktyawal is the 12th detainee to die in ICE custody this year. His brother called him a hero. “He was here,” he said, “and he just got killed in less than 24 hours.”
The Trump trap cycle of “protection” completes itself:
Pardon the mockery in the title but I couldn’t help it after reading this Al Jazeera article:
The US-Israeli strategy against Iran is working. Here is why: Every aspect of Iran’s ability to project regional power is being successfully degraded.
So many things are wrong in it, I don’t know where to begin.
Here’s one example:
The closure of the Strait of Hormuz is dominating the critical commentary. US Senator Chris Murphy has called it evidence that President Donald Trump misjudged Iran’s capacity to retaliate. CNN has described it as proof that the administration has lost control of the war’s escalation.
The economic pain is real: Oil prices have surged, a record 400 million barrels of oil will be released from global reserves, and Gulf states are facing drone and missile strikes on their energy infrastructure.
But this framing inverts the strategic logic. Closing the strait was always Iran’s most visible retaliatory card, and always a wasting asset. About 90 percent of Iran’s own oil exports pass through Kharg Island and then the strait.
China, Tehran’s largest remaining economic partner, cannot receive Iranian crude while the strait is shut. Every day the blockade continues, Iran severs its own economic lifeline and alienates the one major power that has consistently shielded it at the United Nations. The closure does not just hurt the global economy; it accelerates Iran’s isolation.
Wait, wait, what?
That’s a glaring error.
Iran has been shipping oil to China through sanctions-evasion networks for years. They have dark fleet tankers, ship-to-ship transfers, relabeling through Malaysia and the UAE, pipeline routes through Central Asia…an entire shadow infrastructure exists precisely because it was designed to operate outside normal shipping channels.
China was taking 13% of its seaborne crude from Iran before the war started, and that trade survived years of US sanctions specifically because it doesn’t depend on the conventional Hormuz-to-Malacca route operating normally.
See what I’m talking about?
Beyond that, claims that closing the strait “severs Iran’s own economic lifeline” treats Kharg Island exports as though they’re the only mechanism. But Iran has been diversifying export routes for exactly this contingency. The Jask terminal on the Gulf of Oman was built to bypass the strait, piping crude from inland to a port east of Hormuz. It went operational in 2021. This isn’t even news.
And at the macro level, the argument inverts the dependency. China built its strategic petroleum reserves to 104 days of coverage before the war, projected to 140-180 by year end. They prepared for exactly this disruption. Iran doesn’t need to ship through the strait to maintain the relationship with Beijing that matters, it needs to survive long enough for the diplomatic settlement that gives China leverage over reconstruction. Which is exactly what’s happening.
The “wasting asset” framing assumes Iran is as dependent on the strait as the Gulf Arab states are. And it isn’t. It has alternatives and they don’t. The strait closure hurts Saudi Arabia and the UAE far more than it hurts Iran, which is why those states are intercepting Iranian drones rather than negotiating for Iranian shipping rights. They need the strait open more than Iran does.
Here’s another example.
Call it strategic disarmament. This is closer to the approach of the Allies to Germany’s industrial war-making capacity in 1944-1945 than to the US war on Iraq in 2003. The analogy is imperfect: Strategic disarmament without occupation requires a verification and enforcement architecture that no one has yet proposed, but the operational logic is the same.
No one is proposing to occupy Tehran.
The entire premise of 1945 was total unconditional surrender and occupation for 50 years. You can’t invoke that total occupation and then say no one is proposing it. That’s an analyst who saw the problem, named it, and chose not to follow their own thread because the destination was unpublishable.
Invasion and occupation is not a minor detail. It’s the entire detail, otherwise you destabilized the region and created a dangerous vacuum leading to genocide. What kind of winning is that?
All in all, this article is so awful I can’t imagine how it made it through editing.
Maybe it’s to serve as a warning to others who don’t know history.
Sitting at my desk in San Francisco, sometime around 2016, I got an email from a master sergeant. A recording of a firefight. And then a phone call. Play it, he said. So I played it. Gunfire. Chaos. Then a voice: Grenade.
Play it again, he said. Listen.
I played it again. The voice wasn’t scared. It was factual. Grenade. Like hearing “pastrami on rye” at a deli counter. The same calm. The same precision. The same total awareness of what’s happening and what matters right now.
That’s fire discipline. That’s what Delta is world famous for. Sprint and fire at maximum efficiency, nothing wasted. The decisive calm that comes from knowing exactly how many rounds and what each one needs to do. Every shot placed. Every word functional. Nothing lost to bravado or panic, nothing spent on performance.
Play it again, he said. What’s really happening in this fight? What works? What’s blunder? Do you hear it?
I’ve been thinking about that “grenade” for two weeks. Because the sound coming out of Operation Epic Fury, and the war crime theatre of Hegseth, is the exact opposite of that voice. It’s all fluff. All blunder. Do you know what the Pentagon sounds like right now? 1950 Korea. And China is listening to the same tape.
…during the 2016 campaign, Trump repeatedly declared that Douglas MacArthur was his “favorite general.” At rallies, Trump would invoke MacArthur’s name almost as though he were in direct communication with his ghost. […] MacArthur had been outwitted and outflanked by a guerrilla army with no air force, crude logistics, and primitive communications, an army with no tanks and precious little artillery. As David Halberstam put it, MacArthur had “lost face not just before the entire world, but before his own troops, and perhaps most important of all, before himself.” All of this happened because MacArthur was almost criminally out of touch with reality.
And so here we are.
The Deterrence Illusion
The “China is deterred” narrative runs something like this: the US popped Venezuela in January with overwhelming ratios, like blackouts for 3 million people to arrest one guy. Then the US blockaded a weak Cuba, as it has no sea defenses, and then Trump launched a surprise attack on Iran while his own negotiations were actively ongoing, decapitated the supreme leader, and declared total air superiority within 72 hours, boasting “not a fair fight”.
Beijing must be so scared now.
Yet this analysis assumes China’s baseline expectation was about Iranian air defenses working. Nobody thought they would. Certainly not Venezuela. Certainly not North Korea, which has spent decades putting everything that matters under granite for exactly this reason. Certainly not China, whose military planners have been studying US strike capabilities since long before Desert Storm.
What China actually witnessed in American hamfisted pray-and-spray salvoes wasn’t just “America bomb things, America make fire and noise, America so nasty.”
The Peers report on the My Lai Massacre found that Captain Medina had instructed his men to “burn the houses, kill the livestock, and destroy the crops and foodstuffs.”
They knew that. What they got was specifics about weakness: F-35 and F-22 electronic signatures under combat conditions, operational tempo sustainability, jamming profiles, cyber-kinetic integration patterns, kill chain logistics from ISR to strike. That’s the structured data leak you never get from exercises or satellite imagery. As technologist Amir Husain put it in the Jerusalem Post, the American rush into unilateral war is “a dataset goldmine for China” for building automated detection and threat classification models.
The US demonstrates the opposite of deterrence. It held an unnecessary live-fire exhibition with free admission to telegraph its entire playbook, revealing the entire spectrum of Trump’s options and thoughts.
MacArthur’s Ghost
Those who say China should fear American willingness to fight clearly forget Douglas MacArthur wasn’t fired for being unwilling to fight. He was fired for being so willing he nearly started a nuclear war with China. Truman understood that willingness without discipline is what the Greeks long ago classified as the most self-defeating capability a military can possess. It’s like running into a minefield.
The historic parallel maps cleanly for China, not least of all because among the regressive all-show-no-go white supremacists that Trump calls out as his role models, MacArthur is right up there. The thunder and lightning had worked once for MacArthur, so he thought escalate, go bigger, roll right up to the Chinese border. He pushed to the Yalu drunk on the Inchon success, without a clue. Then 300,000 PLA troops crossed the Yalu and pushed him back to roughly where he started. That willingness was the vulnerability. It showed Beijing exactly when and how to intervene.
The same mindset that made MacArthur unable to read Chinese capabilities in 1950 is operating in the analysts who think China is “deterred” by watching the US flatten Iran. They don’t see China as the disciplined party, because their framework doesn’t allow it. The French Generals turned off their radios while the Germans rolled tanks through the Ardennes. MacArthur’s intelligence staff stopped reporting Chinese troop movements because he’d made clear he didn’t want to hear it.
…Arthur MacArthur … brought to the archipelago the genocidal mentality that accompanied their warfare against Native Americans in the American West. Filipinos were branded “n—ers” by U.S. troops, though another racist epithet, “gugus,” was also widely used for them. When Filipinos resorted to guerrilla warfare, they were dehumanized … to legitimize all sorts of atrocities against them. The war of subjugation was carried out without restraints with General Smith ordering his troops to convert Samar into a “howling wilderness” by killing any male over 10 years old.
Source: Evening Journal, New York, May 5, 1902. A vulture replaces the bald eagle above the caption: “Criminals Because They Were Born Ten Years Before We Took the Philippines”.
Chinese political scientist Zheng Yongnian told the South China Morning Post that “America’s war-making capability depends solely on its will to deploy such power.” The deterrence pundits read that as a compliment, when it’s actually a cynical vulnerability assessment. A power that acts on will rather than calculation can be drawn into commitments that exhaust it into extreme embarrassment.
”I tried to stop it, but I don’t own the licensing rights.” [Stallone told movie critic Siskel that during the holidays, he had been asked to give away a “truckload” of Rambo toys to sick children in the hospital.] ”I told ’em, ‘Get this … the hell out of my driveway and burn it. Don’t give it away,’ It’s not for kids. The movie was not supposed to be for little kids, and I wouldn’t let my own children play with those toys.”
Mao understood this about MacArthur in 1950. Montgomery understood this about Rommel in 1942. The more willing, the further he extended, the more exposed he became, the weaker. China, like Britain, waited for the overreach, then moved.
Trump overwhelmed Venezuela as it sat quietly, Trump launched a blockade of empty waters around Cuba, and Trump tricked Iran into believing negotiation wasn’t a lie. None of that projects strength. Now he appears as just a tail on the Israeli dog, if not the flea, pulled into the largest invasion of Lebanon since 2006. With what to show for it? Emptied stockpiles and wreckage, requests going to everyone to help him get out. Taiwanese analyst Cheng-Yu Wu assessed that the PLA learned Trump’s administration “will do whatever it takes to achieve its own national interests, whether or not there are negotiations.”
Some analysts really think they can frame that dictatorship signal as deterrence. A drill sergeant would call it a fighter closing his eyes, throwing wild haymakers and claiming whatever he hit is losing. Both descriptions can be true. Only one of them is meaningful to a trained opponent.
Fire Discipline
That voice on the recording knew something everyone is supposed to learn before stepping down range. Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes wasn’t academic poetry. It’s always been scarce resource management. The NRA was founded by Union Generals who said 1,000 rounds per kill was unsustainable to defend American Blacks against the KKK. Every round you fire at nothing is a round you don’t have when it matters.
The US is emptying interceptors against cheap Iranian drones. Burning Tomahawks on targets that were already assumed destroyed, or worse, killing nearly 200 little girls at school. America is expending precision munitions far faster than the industrial base will replace them. And doing all of it on camera for everyone’s intelligence collection, let alone China.
The Heritage Foundation warned before the Iran war started that SM-3, SM-6, PAC-3 MSE, and THAAD interceptors would be exhausted within days of sustained PLA salvoes. Aggregate US vertical launch system inventories were insufficient for even one full fleet reload. CENTCOM officials thus warned of a “Winchester” scenario: complete ammunition depletion.
Now look at what draft-dodging Trump ordered since February 28. The US burned over 2,000 precision munitions against more than 3,000 targets, only to announce repeatedly it’s not done yet. Allies have fired hundreds of interceptors. THAAD components have been redeployed from South Korea. The Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group was pulled from East Asia. Patriot interceptors, which Lockheed produces at about 620 a year, were depleted in the hundreds over the first 36 hours alone. We’re still debating who shot down the three F-15E in one night so efficiently without a trace, evaporating the mythology of American Air superiority.
And on the other side of the ledger: China has barred the export of rare earth elements for military use, which means the exact materials required to build the missiles the US is burning through. China is watching the US deplete stocks it can’t rapidly replenish because China controls the supply chain for those replacements.
The Asymmetry
Compare the two sides and see what America has been doing to itself, unprovoked.
United States
China
Munitions
Depleting
Accumulating
Intelligence
Broadcasting
Collecting
Carrier groups
Redeployed to Gulf
Positioned in Pacific
Strategic reserves
Drawing down
Building up (104 days coverage, projected 140-180 by year end)
Industrial base
Years behind demand
Expanding offensive capacity
Rare earths
Import-dependent
Export ban in place
Diplomatic posture
Overcommitted on four fronts
Restrained, summit-focused
That’s not passivity on China’s part. That’s basic discipline. China is doing what any wise fighter does when the opponent is dancing and swinging wildly to amp up the audience: cover and wait, read the rhythm, count the punches, feel the decline, watch for the opening.
Nixon’s Tar Baby
Foreign Policy drew a parallel to 1964, when the Peking Review described US interventions in the Congo as Washington’s “second South Vietnam”, about keeping American assets tied down far from China’s borders. But that reference is far too diplomatic. The actual historical pattern is worse, and it has a name Americans should be embarrassed about.
Kissinger and Nixon adopted NSSM 39 in 1969 called the “Tar Baby” option. Their policy was strengthening ties with racist white-minority governments in Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa to deny Blacks power. The premise was that apartheid was an unpleasant but permanent reality, and Washington should accommodate it pragmatically and prolong white nationalism. Its own internal review later concluded that its only real result was to mire the United States deeper on the side of obvious oppressors. The name told you the outcome of the strategy. You punch the tar baby and you get stuck.
The destabilization model ran in parallel. Congo’s leader Lumumba was assassinated in 1961. The CIA sent poison to its station chief; when that fizzled, Lumumba was deposed in a CIA-backed coup and shot by Congolese assassins. UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld was shot down by U.S.-backed mercenaries, as he flew in to negotiate a ceasefire. Mobutu seized power with US help and misruled the country for three decades. Congo never recovered. Similarly Mondlane, a professor in America positioned to become leader of Mozambique, was assassinated in 1969.
Same trajectory.
Stuart Reid has put it precisely: for the Congolese people, the events of 1960-61 represented the opening chapter of a long horror story. For the US government, they provided a playbook for future interventions.
The playbook: assassinate leaders, destabilize the country, back the regional oppressor as the “stable” partner, let the region deteriorate, use the chaos to justify permanent intervention. The people who live there never recover. The strategic partner gets a free hand. And the great-power competitor watches you get stuck to the tar baby.
Apartheid South Africa formalized this as doctrine. P.W. Botha’s “Total Strategy” required a buffer of deliberately failed states on their border. They used the ugly term cordon sanitaire. The logic was self-sealing: a thriving Black-governed neighbor would quickly falsify the racist claims that only whites were capable of self-rule, so the Black neighbor had to be destroyed. South Africa armed RENAMO to terrorize Mozambican civilians, backed UNITA through decades of Angolan civil war that killed half a million people, and used proxy forces to turn a drought into a famine that killed over 100,000. The manufactured chaos confirmed the racist ideology that manufactured it.
Substitute “Palestinians” or “Iranians” and the sentence requires no other edits. Gaza flattened. Lebanon invaded. Iran decapitated with no successor structure. A stable, self-governing neighbor is an existential ideological threat to an ethno-supremacist state. The vacuum is the feature. In the latest news from Israel troops call non-Jews dogs and stop their vehicles to shoot people in the head at close range.
The US knows this model so intimately because it ran the active version against the Soviets. In 1979, Brzezinski’s explicit goal in Afghanistan was, in the words of Defense Department official Walter Slocombe, “sucking the Soviets into a Vietnam quagmire.”
It worked.
The Soviets bled for a decade and many argue the stickiness was what accelerated power collapse. Now the question is whether China needs to engineer anything at all, or whether the US has been punching into a tar baby scenario on its own initiative while Beijing simply watches.
Kissinger dismissed the cost of millions killed as “the unhappiness of a bunch of Africans and the self-righteous indignation of a few minor NATO allies.” That contempt is the through-line. The people destroyed by the policy don’t register as costs. They’re externalities. Then as now.
The Missing Synthesis
I bring all this up because the gap I keep seeing in the pundit class is that almost nobody is synthesizing all the threads simultaneously: the munitions math, the intelligence exposure, the fire discipline asymmetry, and the destabilization pattern that ties them together.
The Heritage guys get stockpile numbers. The intelligence community people get collection problems. The strategists get the overextension risks. But nobody puts the full picture together, perhaps because the conclusion is too uncomfortable? Trump is systematically degrading American capacity to fight the war it actually needs to deter, while running the same Nixon playbook that failed across southern Africa for three decades.
Oh, I remember the problem now. Nobody studies African history.
Khamenei was decapitated February 28. The Assembly of Experts was bombed while meeting to elect a successor. No governance structure is left. And within days, Israel launches its largest ground invasion of Lebanon since 2006, explicitly modeled on the genocide in Gaza. No really, an Israeli official told Axios: “We are going to do what we did in Gaza.” Already 800,000 Lebanese civilians are displaced. Nearly 800 killed. The imperfect ceasefire was at least something, until the US removed the one actor whose deterrent capability was constraining Israeli expansion.
Iran was a threat, but Israel reframed it into the leash. Remove the leash and the immediate result is genocide expanded into Lebanon, conducted openly, described in those terms by the people conducting it. The regional partner gets a free hand.
Korean War Arithmetic
One of the hallmarks of 1950s military failure was the US flattened every standing structure in North Korea. Ran out of targets, just as Trump says today. The war ended in a stalemate on roughly the same line it started. The shock and awe, air superiority, technological dominance, more bombs dropped faster than ever before, worked for a minute as domestic propaganda and not at all as strategy.
Same pattern now. Trump declared Iran had no navy, no air force, no radar and “just about everything’s been knocked out” within days. And then? Two weeks later, Iranian drones are still destroying billion-dollar radar systems and THAAD subsystems on video. American soldiers are dead. Domestically manufactured surface-to-air missiles are shooting down $32 million Reaper drones. Civilian trucks are launching ballistic missiles produced en masse.
The grind is on. Zero ground gained. No articulated end state. And every day it continues, China’s relative advantage in the Pacific grows, again not because China is doing anything at all, but because the US is spinning like a drunk doing everything, everywhere, all at once, to itself.
North Korea drew the simple conclusion from American air power decades ago: you can’t stop the bombs, you can make the bombs irrelevant. Eritrea knows exactly the formula too, as it used the same rubric to defeat the largest standing army in the world. China, full of ardent historians, has been watching that model. Hardening, dispersal, redundancy, underground facilities, quantity over quality in offensive systems. The Iran war is leaking all the exact parameters needed to calibrate against.
The analysts celebrating American willingness are celebrating their MacArthur heritage for all the wrong reasons. Drunken, stupid overreach hasn’t become a virtue just because the explosions look good with social media tricks. The tar baby was a disaster, in the way everyone learns the most powerful tiger in the world never escaped La Brea.
Play the tape again. Listen. Grenade. Calm. Factual. Disciplined. That’s the voice China recognizes, and right now the US sounds nothing like it.
Trump promised to end the Ukraine war on day one. He promised to stop America’s forever wars. He is now sixteen days into a war with Iran that has no exit strategy, no surrender, no deal, and no end in sight — while the Ukraine war grinds on with fresh Russian money from sanctions he just lifted.
The conventional explanation is incompetence. He didn’t understand what he was promising. He didn’t plan for Hormuz. He didn’t anticipate Iran’s drones. The problem with the incompetence theory is that it doesn’t explain why every failure produces new power.
There’s a simpler explanation. This is how a protection racket works. The economics are straightforward: the worse things are made by the protector, the more valuable their protection becomes. A mob boss doesn’t profit from peace on the block. He profits from being the threat, creating crisis that ideally he controls. If the threat goes away, so does the revenue. If the threat escalates, the price goes up.
Getty Images 4/24/1955-Saigon, South Vietnam: “Troops of American backed Premier Ngo Diem and the rebel Binh Xuyen sect fought a brief street battle with machine guns. A nationalist soldier stands guard over a suspect after the fighting had died down. At least three persons were killed and eight wounded in the short clash. The fighting took place on the opposite side of the European residential district from the boulevard Gallien, meanwhile the general anarchy increased as gangs of thugs roamed the streets of Saigon kidnapping civilians and extorting ransoms.”
Trump started a war with Iran on February 28. After two weeks of Trump saying he’s “ahead of schedule” Iran hasn’t surrendered, nearly 200 little girls died when their school was bombed, the Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed, a thousand oil tankers are stranded, Brent crude is past $105, and the president has shifted from begging to demanding that countries who had no role in starting the conflict send warships to clean it up, or lose their security guarantees from him. Every day the crisis deepens, he expects his leverage grows. Every failure he produces he expects new coercive power. The worse it gets, the more he believes everyone needs him, and the more he expects they’ll concede.
The Sequence
Drop NATO. Drop Ukraine. Drop Pacific defense. Drop intelligence and break-up five-eyes. Declare the end of diplomacy. Start a Middle-East war unilaterally. Iran closes Hormuz. Oil spikes past $100. Use the energy crisis to invoke the Defense Production Act — a Cold War national security law — to override California state environmental law and a federal consent decree, on behalf of Texas Oil (Sable Offshore Corp.), the Houston-based company that lobbied the White House to do exactly this. Sable spent $300,000 on federal lobbying in 2025, including paying Holland & Knight to lobby on “project authorizations for offshore oil and gas development.” Before 2025, the company reported no federal lobbying at all. It literally paid the government to force it to restart its pipeline.
The DOJ opinion enabling the DPA preemption was dated March 3 — three days into the war. The correspondence between Sable and the administration started before the first strike on Iran. The crisis didn’t create the opportunity. The opportunity was waiting for its crisis.
The Hormuz disruption: 20,000,000 barrels per day.
Sable’s output capacity: 50,000 barrels per day.
That’s 0.25% of the problem, a complete waste of energy with horrible downsides, being driven hard to spin up a domestic crisis on top of foreign ones. Solving the energy crisis was never the point. Overriding California was. Overriding the environment was.
The Protection Racket
Simultaneously, the administration issued a 30-day waiver lifting sanctions on Russian oil stranded at sea. Zelenskyy warned that this single easing could give Russia $10 billion for its war against Ukraine. German Chancellor Merz called it wrong. The European Council president called it “very concerning, as it impacts European security.” The Kremlin welcomed the move and pressed Washington to go further.
Then came the begging, followed by a demand. Trump called on China, France, Japan, South Korea, the UK, and “others” to send warships to reopen Hormuz for him because he can’t figure it out. He told the Financial Times that if allies don’t help, it will be “very bad for the future of NATO”, as though he hadn’t just told NATO it had no value to him. A week earlier, he had told Britain not to bother sending ships because he’d already won.
The response has been uniformly noncommittal. South Korea “takes note.” Japan’s ruling party policy chief told NHK the legal threshold for military deployment is “very high” — the pacifist constitution essentially prohibits it without invoking a 2015 security law that has never been used. Australia flatly refused. France said it would consider escort missions only when “circumstances permit.” No country has committed a single vessel.
But the demand itself is the instrument.
A month ago, the question of whether Japan should send warships into the Persian Gulf was unthinkable. America had its own minesweepers in Bahrain. Now all those minesweepers are decommissioned by America, so pleading for help from Japan is on the table. Now PM Takaichi walks into the White House on Thursday with 70% of Japan’s oil imports held hostage by a crisis she didn’t create, facing a direct ask she can’t easily refuse. South Korea’s careful diplomatic non-answer is already a concession — the frame has shifted from “of course not you bumbling idiot” to “under review.”
The Ledger
The pattern is consistent across every theater. Remove the protections, create the predictable crisis, then demand the vulnerable do the actual work themselves and reward Trump.
What Trump removed
Who it hurt
What he then demanded
Lifted Russian oil sanctions ($10B windfall for Moscow’s war chest)
Ukraine, EU
Asked Ukraine for drone defense tech after dismissing their offer in August 2025. Asked EU allies for Hormuz warships while enriching the country invading their neighbor.
Redeployed THAAD and Patriot missile systems from South Korea to Middle East
South Korea, Japan
Asked both to send warships to the Strait of Hormuz — the same theater draining their own defense coverage. North Korea immediately launched 10+ ballistic missiles to test the gap.
Moved carriers and air defense from the Pacific (Abraham Lincoln from Indo-Pacific; one-third of naval surface fleet to Middle East)
Taiwan, Philippines, Japan
Told Asia to help secure Hormuz. Elbridge Colby claims the US is “laser-focused on the First Island Chain” while stripping it of assets. China detected 26 aircraft near Taiwan in a single day.
Moved air defense systems from Europe to the Middle East
NATO, Eastern Europe
Threatened “very bad future” for NATO if allies don’t help with Hormuz. Germany already out of its own air defense missiles. Can no longer transfer any to Ukraine.
Burned through 25%+ of THAAD stockpile, years of Tomahawk supply, 1,000+ Patriot interceptors
Everyone — allies who depend on US deterrence globally
Told Lockheed to “quadruple production” with no funded timeline. Meanwhile, Patriot inventories were at 25% of required levels before the war started.
Dismissed Ukraine’s drone interception proposal at White House meeting, August 2025
Ukraine, US forces in Gulf
Reversed course in the first week of war. US officials now call it one of their “biggest tactical mistakes.” Seven American service members killed by the drones they were offered a defense against.
Zelenskyy’s position captures the dynamic precisely: after Trump lifted sanctions against Russia and repeatedly backed Russian aggression, the Ukraine is now providing experts to Qatar, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and a US military base in Jordan for defending the Americans who couldn’t help Ukraine. Perhaps it is in hopes of earning back what was taken. Zelenskyy told reporters he wanted to sign a $35-50 billion drone deal. Trump told Fox News the US doesn’t need Ukraine’s help, while everyone on the ground knew Ukraine’s help was essential to American defense. Zelenskyy responded:
All our institutions received these requests, and we responded to them.
South Korea’s president admitted publicly that while Seoul opposes the withdrawal of US air defense assets, “it is also a reality that we cannot fully enforce our position.” North Korea fired 10+ ballistic missiles within days of Trump’s mindless THAAD redeployment. The message received in Pyongyang was the same message received everywhere else: America is obsessed with an Israeli mission to destabilize the Middle East, unable to disentangle itself from expanding war crimes.
Escalation as Strategy
The conventional political analysis assumes unpopularity is a cost. A leader who starts a war that closes Hormuz, spikes gas past $3.70, and produces no Iranian surrender should be paying a political price. But that analysis depends on accountability mechanisms functioning — elections that respond to disapproval, institutions that check overreach, allies that withdraw cooperation.
What’s actually happening is the opposite, as I’ve explained on this blog before in terms of Hitler rising to power as a function of his rapid decline in popularity.
Hitler was very, very unpopular. It’s how he amassed power. Trump also is very, very unpopular. And it’s working for him too. Stop waiting for approval ratings to matter to people who want to be hated. They already don’t.
Every day Hormuz stays closed, oil goes higher, the leverage over Japan and South Korea deepens, the DPA pretext for overriding state law gets stronger, and the argument for lifting Russian sanctions becomes more “reasonable.” The worse the crisis, the more everyone needs him to fix it, which means the more they’ll concede to get the fix.
Iran’s IRGC navy commander captured the absurdity cleanly:
Americans falsely claimed the destruction of Iran’s navy. Then they falsely claimed the escorting of oil tankers. Now they’re even asking others for backup forces.
Iran won’t unconditionally surrender. The Strait won’t magically open. Oil will keep climbing. And at every new price point, there’s a new demand waiting. A new state law to override. A new sanction to lift. A new ally to squeeze. The failure generates the power to extract the next concession.
The Sorting Function
Hatred doesn’t constrain this. It sorts.
People who object leave government, leave the military, leave proximity to power. What remains is the apparatus of the people who will execute. Hegseth didn’t get the Defense Secretary job despite being unqualified, despite advocating for war crimes and denouncing laws. He got it because being unqualified means he has no independent institutional base, no professional reputation to protect, no reason to exist outside the principal’s patronage. The competent people who would have objected to bombing Iran without a Hormuz contingency aren’t in the room. That’s a design specification for becoming as hated as possible, just like in the Vietnam War.
…the Peers Commission was involved in an even bigger cover-up: It exonerated the commander of US forces in Vietnam, Gen. William Westmoreland, from any responsibility for My Lai, despite the fact that the policy Westmoreland conveyed to his subordinates was to treat civilians who remained in long-term Vietnamese Communist, or Viet Cong (VC), base areas like My Lai as enemy combatants. […] The directive actually allowed the creation of free-fire zones in hamlets and villages under long-term Viet Cong control such as My Lai, in which the civilian population would have no protection whatsoever.
Externally it works the same way. Every ally that refuses to send warships clarifies the relationship. You’re either inside the protection racket or outside it. There’s no neutral position. Germany’s foreign minister was asked about Trump’s call for warships:
Will we soon be an active part of this conflict? No.
That clarity is itself a data point the administration will use. The next time Berlin needs something, the answer to the Hormuz question will be on the ledger.
Debt-Trap Security
The structural parallel is debt-trap diplomacy, except the currency is security dependence rather than infrastructure loans. Create the deficit, then collect.
India negotiated directly with Tehran and got two tankers through the Strait. China’s oil is flowing from Iran without interruption — Tehran is only blocking shipments from countries affiliated with the United States and its allies. The countries most dependent on American security guarantees are the ones most trapped by the crisis America created. The countries with independent diplomatic relationships are finding their own way through.
The flywheel only breaks when someone converts hatred into organized material resistance. Polling numbers, editorial condemnation, allied dismay… all just noise. The Trump sycophantic administration is fine with horrible no good noise, it makes the protection racket insiders feel closer.
What it can’t absorb is the thing none of its targets have yet produced: a coordinated refusal to participate in a system where the arsonist exists for the thrill of seeing all the fire trucks respond and fail.
The racket doesn’t just extract concessions from allies. It burns through people.
Source: Epstein Files
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
