Two weeks into this war and it is clearer than ever that Donald Trump miscalculated. It did not seem to occur to him that bombing Iran would raise gasoline prices in the United States, even though it is a net exporter of petroleum. If he was warned that Iran might close the Strait of Hormuz, he ignored it.
Nor does he seem to have considered the possibility that an oil supply crisis would strengthen Vladimir Putin – indeed, that it might throw him a lifeline just as Russia’s economic burden of sustaining the war in Ukraine was becoming intolerable.
