Trump Faces A Hobson’s Choice in Iran

The President believes he can escalate his way out of war, but we already know how this ends.

Having launched a preemptive war with Iran without a plan to win it, Trump now faces, as University of Chicago Professor Robert A. Pape observed, a classic Hobson’s choice.

A Hobson’s choice is an illusory one, named after the 17th-century stable owner Thomas Hobson, who required customers to take the horse nearest the door or none at all.

At the onset of the war with Iran, the U.S. struck preemptively, wiping out most of Iran’s leadership and even killing its leader, Ayatollah Khamenei. It then followed up with a devastating bombardment that destroyed Iran’s air defenses, missile capability and navy.

Trump probably figured that such an overwhelming attack would force Iran to surrender and give up its nuclear materials.

But after the initial smoke cleared, the White House discovered that the hardliners remained in control, now led by another Ayatollah Khamenei. He is the son—and an even more extreme version—of the former leader. The unarmed Iranian populace, having already been slaughtered by the tens of thousands during recent civil unrest, did not rise up against the regime as the White House had urged.

Iran has now responded—predictably, but you wouldn’t know it from the White House’s lack of planning—by closing the Strait of Hormuz. This is the narrow waterway through which some 20 percent of the world’s oil supply normally flows. Iran is continuing to fire its missiles and deploy its drones to attack regional targets. And Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militia, has begun attacks from its base in Lebanon into Israel, resulting in a massive response by Israel and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of civilians fleeing the war zone.

Iran’s actions are what’s known as a “horizontal” escalation, meaning a widening of the war to involve more parties and more pain for all.

Now comes the Hobson’s choice: Trump can double down on the war by escalating U.S. attacks and committing us to even greater military involvement. Or he can cut our losses sooner and admit political defeat.

This is a true Hobson’s choice because the “choice” to double down today will inevitably still lead to a withdrawal later, but at even greater economic and political cost.

So, guess what Trump has “chosen” to do?

Double down, trouble up

Trump has elected to escalate the war in Iran over the coming weeks. He’s sending 2,500 Marines to the Strait of Hormuz to signal a change of posture in the region. Some military experts wonder why those Marines weren’t ready to go already, and why we allowed Iran to close the Strait in the first place. That’s of course a byproduct of overconfidence in the initial success of the attack.

Trump is now also threatening to destroy Iran’s main oil terminal on Kharg Island. The U.S. already destroyed most of the island’s military defenses, so the oil terminal is a sitting duck if the U.S. wants to blow it up. But if it does, Iran would likely retaliate against oil facilities in neighboring Arab states.

It would also antagonize China just ahead of the big summit between China and the U.S. China is Iran’s biggest oil customer, so even while the Strait is closed to other traffic, Iranian oil continues to move through it and toward China. An attack on that oil supply could be viewed as an attack upon China’s economic lifeblood.

Trump is now even considering military escorts through the Strait of Hormuz for shipping vessels. But experts are warning that this won’t actually result in much of the traffic being restored—perhaps as little as 10 percent. And there are so many ships needing to transit the Strait that the U.S. does not have the capacity to provide meaningful security for any but a small percentage of them. That may explain why Trump has now implored other nations, which he neglected to consult or involve in advance of the precipitous attack, to provide military assistance. Such help is not forthcoming.

The military escorts may prove hazardous and deadly, particularly given how little maneuvering there is at some of the more narrow choke points that measure just 10 miles across. Further, Iran has decided to mine the Strait using small, hard to detect vessels. In another example of poor military planning, the only U.S. minesweepers in the region were decommissioned and sent back to the U.S. in 2025. The U.S. is now using “littoral combat ships” for the first time to remove mines laid by Iran in the Strait.

The U.S. is continuing its bombardment campaign of military targets (as well as, tragically, some civilian ones) throughout Iran. This is having the time-honored effect of causing the regime to harden its resolve, particularly as the general populace sours on the idea of the U.S. as savior as it bombs girls’ schools and critical civilian infrastructure.

The Pentagon knows, or should know, that aerial campaigns don’t historically lead to regime change. So unless Trump is willing to commit large numbers of U.S. troops on the ground to attempt to control the country, or at least raid and destroy its remaining nuclear grade material, the next few weeks of escalation aren’t likely to produce Iran’s “unconditional surrender”—something Trump demanded just four days ago as a precondition to his ending the war.

The likely effect of a massive U.S. escalation and continued war in the region seems clear. Oil prices are now significantly higher than before the war and would remain so, meaning higher prices at the pump and higher food prices as fertilizer costs for farmers soar, just as they did after the Ukraine war began in 2022.

The shockwave from the sudden drop in oil supply is already reverberating across the global economy, meaning consumer prices that spike from the initial squeeze aren’t likely to fall back down, even if oil futures do. National economies that rely on Middle East oil, including powerhouses like Taiwan that produce most of the world’s semiconductors, are already flashing red warning signals in an echo of the problematic chip shortages during the pandemic.

The longer the war drags on, the worse the pinch and the global economic pain will be. Voters will revolt, and that will mean Trump really only has one choice in the end.

“Mission Accomplished!”

The only true choice Trump has is to withdraw U.S. forces from the region, whether he does it sooner or much later. Like George H.W. Bush, Trump can declare the war has achieved its goals (“We won!”) and order U.S. forces to begin moving out of the region. The sooner he does, the lower the damage will be to the world and the U.S. economy, and the fewer senseless deaths and severe injuries among our brave service members, who are now being sent into danger without a clear mission.

Trump’s problem, and therefore ours too, is his own pride and ego. As the disastrous ICE surge in Minneapolis demonstrated, Trump seems unable to accept a humiliating political loss until the true political cost becomes too high to bear.

To try to shift the narrative, Trump announced—multiple times already—that we’ve already won the war. But that’s silly and simply not true. If we had, the Strait of Hormuz would be open, oil prices would have fallen back to normal levels, we wouldn’t still be dropping bombs across that country, and Iranian drones would not be attacking and destroying regional targets.

In another sign of a future retreat, Trump’s aides keep changing the war’s “objectives” to answer inevitable criticism that Trump left the job undone. Secretary of State Marco Rubio went before cameras six days ago declaring that the war’s objectives were now threefold: 1) destroy Iran’s ability to launch missiles by destroying both the missiles and their launchers; 2) destroy the factories that make these missiles; and 3) destroy Iran’s navy. There was suddenly no mention of Iran’s nuclear capabilities or of regime change. Nor was there mention of its deadly drone capabilities, which now present the biggest threat to shipping and bases in the area.

For its part, Iran isn’t interested in ending the war without international security guarantees and reparations. And it wants to make things tough for Trump politically. The way to do this has been clear from the get-go: control the Strait of Hormuz and choke off 20 percent of the world’s oil, driving up prices and creating voter dissatisfaction. This is the same conundrum we saw President Biden struggle with after the start of the war in Ukraine, only he wasn’t the one who started the war. That the Trump White House did, while ignoring its own experts and not actually believing Iran would close the Strait, is a miscalculation of staggering proportions.

With U.S. consumers facing price increases on food on top of the prospect of $4 gas, Trump understands that he really has no choice but to pull us out of the war well before November’s midterms. He ought to just cut his losses and buy the horse nearest the stable exit. Instead, he has set us down a bloodier and more costly path, all in the hope that Iran will somehow unconditionally surrender just as its plan to ratchet up the political costs for Trump is working as anticipated. That’s not going to happen.

Trump is about to learn that it’s far easier to start a war than to end one, and that if you have to end one, it’s best to pull the cord before we fall any farther.