Trump is bombing Iranian cities and charging the world to ship oil.
Third consecutive night. Six cities. Bushehr, Chabahar, Jask, Konarak, Abu Musa, Bandar Abbas. Five-hour bombardment on Monday. U.S. Central Command says the strikes are designed to “further degrade Iran’s ability to attack commercial shipping.” The president directed them personally. A cease-fire that had been in place since late June is gone. The administration has been striking Iranian targets since early July, through the weekend, and each night the targets expand.
Now the administration has announced the naval blockade on Iranian ships would resume Tuesday afternoon and proposed a twenty percent fee on cargo value for every vessel passing through the Strait of Hormuz in exchange for American protection. The Strait of Hormuz. The chokepoint through which roughly a fifth of the world’s petroleum moves. The president is proposing to tax international commerce through a waterway that belongs to no one nation, enforced by the navy that just spent three nights bombing a sovereign country’s cities.
And the commercial ships are already being hit. Iranian missiles struck two UAE-flagged tankers Monday in Omani territorial waters. The Mombasa and the Bahia. One Indian national killed. Eight injured, six Indian, two Ukrainian. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard said it struck the U.S. Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, setting fuel storage ablaze and destroying radar systems. Bahrain’s interior ministry told residents to shelter. An American ally’s territory, now a target.
Now, I’m just a simple man who runs an auto shop in Georgia, but I’ll tell you what this looks like from where working people stand. The men who crew those tankers are not American politicians. They are Indian sailors and Ukrainian engineers doing a job that keeps the world’s oil moving. They did not choose this war. They are dying in it. And the administration that is bombing six Iranian cities and blockading a sovereign nation’s shipping has not, as of this writing, gone to Congress for an authorization to use military force.
Michael Walzer argued in Just and Unjust Wars that the principle of discrimination requires distinguishing between military objectives and the civilians and civilian infrastructure that surround them. Six cities. Not six military installations. Six population centers where people live and sleep. The administration says these sites degrade Iran’s ability to attack commercial shipping. That may be true of some of them. The question is whether bombing six population centers meets the moral threshold the law of armed conflict demands, and whether anyone in a position of authority is being asked to answer that question in public.
The pattern is the one Andrew Bacevich mapped in America’s War for the Greater Middle East: an unbroken arc of military engagement in the region that no single administration starts, none finishes, and none submits to democratic accountability. The 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force was stretched to cover operations its authors never imagined. Now there is no authorization for Iran. There is a presidential direction and a military operation and a collapsed cease-fire and a proposed toll on the world’s oil supply, and the constitutional requirement that Congress authorize the use of force has been treated as a suggestion that can be ignored when speed matters.
Eisenhower, in his farewell address of January 17, 1961, paragraph twenty-four, warned of the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. He said the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. Sixty-five years later, a president is conducting a multi-night bombing campaign against a sovereign nation, blockading international shipping, and proposing to charge the world for passage through a war zone. And the institutions that were supposed to check that power are doing what they have always done when it matters most: nothing.