Trashing American Allies Turns Out to Be Bad for National Security

[BlueWavePsych]

Life is more complicated than that, especially when you’re trying to make war on a state that can close a strategic waterway that is crucial to the world economy. The Trump administration seems to have neither anticipated nor planned properly for the closing of the Strait of Hormuz, through which much of the world’s oil is transported. Iran has begun firing at ships in the strait, dissuading commercial traffic from transiting it. Energy prices are almost certain to rise, but so are prices on other products—you need energy to transport goods to meet global market demand. The possibility that the war might destabilize the world economy either was not part of the Trump administration’s plans for this capricious, ill-advised, and arguably unconstitutional military venture, or was not taken seriously. American war planners seem to have not factored in that, despite being adversaries, the U.S. and Iran are interconnected in vital ways that waging war on Iran would disrupt.

Nor did they foresee the effect on American alliances. Israel joined the attack on Iran, but other U.S. allies in the Gulf who did not are nonetheless facing attacks from the Iranian military, and reportedly reconsidering the wisdom of their dependence on the United States. On Monday, Trump told reporters that Iran wasn’t “supposed to go after all these other countries in the Middle East.” He said, “They hit Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait,” and “nobody expected that. We were shocked.”

Trumpian ideology sees interconnection as a form of tyranny—even if those who adhere to it benefit from others’ labor and money. “My attitude is we don’t need anybody,” Trump announced after none of America’s allies offered to help open the strait. “We’re the strongest nation in the world.”

This fantasy of complete independence is a long-standing part of American culture. Thomas Jefferson, himself a relatively soft-handed gentleman farmer who left the hard labor to the people he had enslaved, extolled the virtues of the yeoman farmer. The political scientist Richard Hofstadter described this mythic figure as “the incarnation of the simple, honest, independent, healthy, happy human being.” The irony, Hofstadter noted, was that it was really rich, educated men such as Jefferson who romanticized this extremely difficult lifestyle. The typical yeoman farmer wanted to be integrated into the market so that he could sell his crops at a profit and escape his hardscrabble circumstances. That romantic “self-sufficiency” was in fact “usually forced upon him by a lack of transportation or markets, or by the necessity to save cash.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/03/trump-independence-allies-support/686432/

http://archive.ph/aMx4o

[riversedge]

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Trashing American Allies Turns Out to Be Bad for National Security
www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

— (@oceancalm.bsky.social) 2026-03-21T15:17:25.492Z