The president started a war, is losing the war, and is telling Americans to eat $4.22 gas until after the midterm elections because that is when the political pain of his war becomes his problem instead of yours.
Oil crossed $100 a barrel Wednesday for the first time since July. Gas jumped seven and a third cents in a single day — the biggest daily spike since May. The national average is $4.22. Goldman Sachs is projecting $120. In Adams County, that means diesel for the tractor, propane for the shop, and the fuel to haul a load to the sale barn in Stevens Point all just got more expensive, directly, this week, because of a war the president chose to start and will not choose to end. The pain at the pump did not begin this week — as the Iran war at six months reporting made plain, the price has been climbing for weeks while the administration insisted the war was almost over.
Here is what the president told reporters Wednesday at Joint Base Andrews, on his way to a Republican midterm convention in Texas: the war is going to end “immediately” after the election, because Iran “can’t hold out any longer,” and after that, “oil prices are going to be tumbling downward.” He said Iran’s leaders are “desperate to try and affect the election” with high oil prices and want Americans to elect “a nice weak group of people” who will “leave them alone and let them have their nuclear weapon.”
Read that as written, not as wish. The president is telling you the war he started will continue until the political damage it is doing to his party is no longer relevant to him. The war ends when his poll numbers stop mattering, not when the mission is accomplished, not when the terms are met, not when the damage is repaired. After the election. When the Senate races are settled. When you have already voted on what his war did to your gas bill.
This is the structure of the nationalist shell game. The war was launched in late February by U.S. and Israeli forces against Iran — by any honest account of how the conflict began. A memorandum of understanding to end it was signed in June with a sixty-day window for peace talks. Sixty days passed. No deal. In the past week, U.S. Central Command destroyed five Iranian oil tankers after Iranian forces attacked a U.S. warship; Iran reported striking U.S. destroyers and commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz. Yesterday the president said the war ends “immediately after the election” — a prediction he has made multiple times already on a timeline he has already failed to meet.
You do not get to launch a war that closes the world’s most important oil chokepoint, drive the price of every barrel through the hundred-dollar mark, and then tell the people paying the bill that the price will come down after they have voted for your party in the midterms. That is not negotiation. That is not strategy. That is the president of the United States telling you he has priced your gas into a campaign calendar.
The Strait of Hormuz matters here in a way it does not on cable news. Every barrel of crude oil that passes through the Strait sits at the top of the price chain for the diesel that runs the generator at the co-op, the fuel the school buses burn on County Z, the propane that heats the shop in January. When the Strait is contested — when five tankers are sunk in a week and both sides are exchanging strikes — the price settles at whatever the war demands. And the war demands the price stay high, because the president said out loud that the price will come down when the war ends, and the war ends when the midterms are over.
The administration’s defense is that the United States is “holding the line” against Iranian aggression and nuclear ambitions. But the record on who attacked whom is not in dispute. American and Israeli forces struck Iran in late February. Iran was not at war with the United States in January. The peace deal that was signed in June — the president’s own deal — was a commitment to negotiate a conflict the president started, and it expired without progress. A week ago, the military destroyed five Iranian oil tankers. And now the president says the war ends after the election because Iran “can’t hold out any longer,” as if the point of the war were Iranian capitulation rather than American access to Persian Gulf oil at a price the president considers politically manageable.
Wendell Berry has written about what it means when a community’s economy is run by people who do not live in the community — that the decisions that shape your life are made at a distance by people who do not bear the cost. The president is not asking you to share the sacrifice of his war. He is asking you to bear the sacrifice of his war while he decides whether the sacrifice is politically convenient enough to stop. The $4.22 is your cost. The $100 barrel is his decision. The ceasefire is his campaign promise. He is telling you exactly who pays and exactly when he plans to stop making you pay, and the answer to both questions is the same: after the election, when your vote is no longer useful to him.
This is not what strength looks like. Strength is not starting a war you cannot end. Strength is not losing a peace deal you yourself signed. Strength is not telling reporters at the airport that gas prices will come down after the midterms while gas prices are climbing today. Strength is not presenting a hundred-dollar barrel of oil and four-dollar-twenty-two gas as the cost of your patience and your party’s electoral prospects.
The two places on earth where oil prices are felt first are the Persian Gulf and the pump. One is where the war is fought. The other is where you pay. The president has decided the distance between the two is about seven weeks — from now to the first Tuesday in November — and that during those seven weeks, you will continue to pay because stopping the war before the midterms would admit the war is hurting him, and he would rather the war hurt you than hurt him. The pattern is the same one the July reporting on the war’s political cost tracked: the president treats the cost of his war as a campaign variable, not as a national emergency.
From the shop floor in Adams County, Wisconsin, the arithmetic is simple. The president started a war. The war closed the Strait of Hormuz. The price of oil went to a hundred dollars. The price of gas went to $4.22. The president says the war ends after the election because Iran can’t hold out. But Iran has been holding out for more than six months, and the president has not held out for the sixty-day window of his own peace deal without letting it lapse without a deal.
What is left is a man on his way to a midterm convention telling reporters that the war he started will continue at his convenience, that the gas prices his war produced will stay high until the votes are counted, and that the peace he could not negotiate in sixty days will arrive on November 3 when the Senate races are decided. The relief is not coming. The cost is. And the president has told you, plain, in the words he chose on the record at the airport, that your $4.22 is the price of his calendar.