Even if the current President was known for his strategic global thinking and ability to keep quiet about the “real goals,” other explanations seem more likely.
Anybody who's ever looked at a map can see that Iran surrounds a strategic chokepoint for the world's most important natural resource.
It is almost like there is a book called AI Superpowers from 2018 that Kai-Fu Lee tells you exactly how all this is going to go.
Why would I read a book though when I can just repeat the nonsense from my social media feed?
It is hurting China. Their economy has slowed to a crawl as a result of stalled oil and has delayed any real gains they had by at least a couple of years.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/15/business/china-economy-gd...
Do you think Trump makes all of these decisions? Like all presidents, he has many advisors around him.
China’s factory outputs are in fact increasing. So is their export. You wouldn’t see this if they are energy constrained. China’s problems are weak consumption and deflation. It started way before this year and has very little to do with Iran.
For example, part of the dynamic was, according to the NYT (though they may have been fed bad intel), that Ahmadinejad was apparently working with Mossad and could've been a partner for a new leadership team in Iran. Who saw that coming?
It also brings to mind Kennedy. He campaigned hard on, in part, the "missile gap" with the USSR. Gets into office, gets read into the real intel, realizes the "missile gap" was essentially a MIC psyop of strategic 'leaks' to the media and that the US was in fact far ahead of the USSR in strategic arms. Kennedy was furious -- but due to it all being classified, could say nothing in public. But it did start a pattern of mistrust that lasted his presidency between him and the MIC. That all didn't come to light later.
Later, like the Ukraine/Starlink thing. The media jumped all over Elon for allegedly holding back Ukraine and shutting off their terminals close to the front lines. More recently it turns out that was the US government, they were afraid Ukraines rapid progress might tempt Russia to deploy tactical nukes. Elon was innocent.
Theres layers upon layers of things we don't see and won't know for decades after the fact. And as Hillary showed with her email server, digital records are more ephemeral these days, so there will be a lot of things we simply never know.
Ironically, part of the story behind the email server was that State Dept IT was so bad that provisioning a new email server was a months-long request.
So naturally, shadow IT became prevalent.