The Strait of Hormuz Was on Page 8‑L

 

As I think about this unmitigated disaster that is Donald Trump’s illegal war of choice with Iran, one thing above all others keeps stunning me: the administration’s complete unpreparedness for Iran’s obvious, long‑telegraphed strategy of shutting down a large portion of the world’s petroleum supply by closing the Strait of Hormuz.

There have been many theories as to why this administration of self‑styled ubermensch failed to anticipate such a basic countermove — a failure that doomed Operation: Epic Fury from the start — but the most convincing explanation is what chess grandmaster Siegbert Tarrasch once termed amaurosis scacchistica, i.e., chess blindness. The administration was so supremely confident in its own strategy that it simply could not perceive the threat directly in front of it.

In the June 2 New Zork Times article entitled War Games and Warnings on Strait of Hormuz Went Unheeded by Trump, Michael Crowley wrote:

One simple explanation is that Mr. Trump may have expected Iran’s government to fall before it could close the strait. Some Trump officials also believed — mistakenly — that Iran could not close the waterway without sacrificing its own oil exports and would not commit “economic suicide,” as one called it.

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“It’s economic suicide for them if they do it,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Fox Business last June. “And we retain options to deal with that.”

But Mr. Rubio’s “economic suicide” scenario also hung on another mistaken assumption: that Iran could not halt most traffic through the strait without giving up its own oil exports.

This kind of strategic hubris is not uncommon in warfare, especially in crisis conflicts where an unexpected foe must be confronted with little time for research or planning. But that was decidedly not the case here. Iran is a well‑studied adversary of forty‑seven years — a figure Trump himself is fond of repeating — and this war was not stumbled into but chosen with forethought and (minimal) preparation. In other words, while history offers understandable examples of geopolitical chess blindness, this was most assuredly not one of them.

And I can prove it.

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This is the scenario book from the 1990 edition of the tabletop wargame Gulf Strike. Published by Victory Games — a sadly defunct titan of the amateur wargaming world — Gulf Strike was widely regarded as one of the most comprehensively authoritative simulations available to civilians covering hypothetical Cold War conflicts in the Persian Gulf. As someone who has always loved wargames, both on and off the personal computer, I spent countless hours with this cumbersome beast in my late teens. And if Gulf Strike taught me one thing above all else, it was the simple, strategically obvious lesson that Iran would shut down tanker traffic in the Gulf at the very start of hostilities.

On pages 8‑L and 8‑R (wargamers do love their eccentric pagination 😄), Iran’s expected tactics are laid out with clinical bluntness: coastal Silkworm anti-ship missiles, speedboat attacks, and naval minelaying—three of which designer Mark Herman wryly notes Iran has shown “no compunction in using.” Also notable are references to suicide attacks and submarine warfare, two elements not yet injected into the current conflict (a caveat to take with caution, given the habitual dishonesty of Hegseth’s so‑called Department of War). Unsurprisingly, drone warfare—now a pivotal force from Ukraine to the Persian Gulf—was little more than speculative fiction in the 1990s, leaving it completely absent from the ruleset.

In short, these pages from an armchair general's wargame spell out in stark, black‑and‑white type that Iran’s most obvious strategic option in any Gulf conflict is to shut down tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. Gulf Strike treated this as a baseline assumption — as did every political scientist, naval analyst, and geopolitical strategist before or since. Again, the New Zork Times:

But Iran’s response has been neither crazy nor surprising, say numerous former U.S. officials who spent hours war-gaming Tehran’s likely response to a major U.S. attack.

For years, the U.S. government has conducted war games dealing with potential conflicts with Iran, including ones at the Pentagon attended by dozens of military officials and policymakers. Over and over, participants say, they concluded that Iran would respond to a major American attack by closing the strait of Hormuz.

“Every single time, the first thing we focused on was the strait — without exception,” said Dennis B. Ross, a senior national security official in the Obama White House. “We assumed that if you go to war with Iran, this was their counterpoint.”

So why was this administration so blind to a clear and present danger that even a teenager like me understood perfectly well?

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Here, I need to digress to my college years. Unlike many, I didn’t go to college to learn a profession; I went to indulge my love of learning. As a result, I wandered through a wild assortment of courses that spanned the gamut from political science to geology (I somehow amassed enough credits in both criminal justice and geology that I could have declared them as minors!). Despite sampling such a wide range of disciplines, I only ever dropped a single course. Do you know what it was? Business 101. Why? Because it was the only class where I felt I was learning nothing worth knowing.

There’s a reason a business degree is not traditionally considered part of the “humanities.” As the name suggests, the humanities — history, philosophy, literature, and their kin — focus on what it means to be human. From my experience in that business class, I immediately understood why business doesn’t qualify. Not to sound like a Marxist, but there was nothing human about it. The curriculum felt strangely synthetic, as if monetary transactions could be separated from human interaction. Worse, the texts strained to sound scientific — I distinctly remember a fair wage being described as “equitable remuneration” — yet the class lacked any of the excitement I found in the hard math or science courses, where knowledge for its own sake was celebrated. To borrow from Roger Waters, in that business course, knowledge only made sense “when expressed in dollars and cents.”

This understanding, I believe, exposes why this administration of oligarchs has, time and again, so badly misread its Iranian foe. As Rubio’s “economic suicide” comment made painfully clear, this is a White House that can only analyze through the lens of financial gain, whether or not such a lens makes sense in the prevailing context. And so we are watching an administration apply a provincial, transactional worldview to a theocracy whose motivations are rooted in martyrdom, sovereignty, and religious identity — essentially anything but the tidy, gain/loss economic calculus this regime of self‑dealing Scrooges lives by. Small wonder, then, that they are routinely perplexed and unprepared for Iran’s response. (You would expect Rubio — a man with degrees in both political science and law — to know better. But I suspect his mental faculties have been thoroughly warped by the years spent in the company of such foolish money‑changers as Luttnick, Bessant, and, of course, Trump himself.)

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Whatever the actual reason for the spectacular mismanagement of this regional conflict, one thing remains clear: this is an administration that stumbled into a war showing less acumen than that of a boy playing at war with cardboard soldiers. Such a realization is a stunning rebuke, an indictment of ignorance that may well carry a heavy penalty not just for those in this regime but for the rest of us as well.  Where this leads, not just regionally but for America's global standing, I will not know until Minerva's owl takes flight.  But I do know this: when a government doesn’t read — let alone understand — the rulebook, misreads the map, and tosses the dice with reckless abandon while suffering from chess blindness, the rest of us end up living with the consequences long after the counters have been swept away.

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