Five months ago this Tuesday, President Donald Trump and his Israeli partners launched their sudden, devastating surprise attack against Iran.Within the first few minutes, most of Iran’s top political and military leadership had been killed in the waves of missile strikes that constituted our official declaration of war.At the time, few observers believed that Iran could survive that massive onslaught. In recent years, our own annual military spending had been more than one hundred times greater than that of Iran, while the renowned Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld had once rather boastfully declared that his own country’s armed forces were the second or the third strongest in the world. Caught by surprise and faced with such overwhelming enemy power, Iran seemed certain to crumble, suffering a rapid defeat.However, contrary to all those expectations, the Iranians absorbed those heavy blows and held up. Drawing upon their huge concealed arsenal of ballistic missiles and powerful drones, they began inflicting serious damage upon some of our local bases, destroying several of our most important strategic radar installations, very difficult and expensive to replace.Most importantly, the Iranians closed the Strait of Hormuz to unfriendly cargo traffic just as they had always threatened to do if attacked. Trump had disregarded that possibility, assuming that the Iranian government would surrender within a few days and reopen the Strait. But when that didn’t happen, he grew frantic over the global economic consequences of the potential loss of 20% of the world’s oil supply and equal or larger shares of the world’s LNG, fertilizer, and other vital commodities.Is America Winning or Losing the War with Iran?Ron Unz • The Unz Review • March 9, 2026 • 6,600 WordsAs Trump considered his military options for forcibly reopening that crucial waterway, he discovered that none of them were viable. Over the previous decade, we had invested more than two trillion dollars in our navy, with one of its most important missions being maintaining the security of the Persian Gulf waters, but it proved totally useless at that task. Trump deployed many thousands of Marines and airborne troops to the region, but he was told that a ground assault had very little chance of dislodging Iranian control and would only result in heavy American casualties.So the weeks of intense warfare that followed were almost entirely confined to air operations. America and Israel together launched more than 20,000 strikes at Iranian targets and successfully assassinated numerous additional Iranian leaders. But the Iranians remained unbowed and they fired back with their own missiles and drones, providing no indication that they were close to defeat. Indeed, their munitions appeared inexhaustible, while America’s own supplies were substantially depleted by the second week of April:We had spent years or even decades accumulating our enormously expensive arsenal of “boutique” weapons, only to have now expended a large fraction of those munitions during just a few weeks of combat against Iran, combat that failed to achieve any of our stated military objectives. A recent CSIS report fully confirmed this situation, indicating that in many categories we had exhausted at least one-third to one-half of our entire global stockpiles, which would take years to be replenished.With the war dragging on, Trump began urgently seeking some notable military success. In early April he ordered his first and only ground operation, a major airborne commando raid involving more than 100 special forces troops that many believed was aimed at seizing Iran’s enriched nuclear materials. But if so, it proved a total fiasco, with the wreckage of almost a dozen American aircraft and helicopters strewn across a temporary airfield located near Isfahan and the Natanz nuclear site.The financial cost of that failed effort may have been as high as $2 billion, while Prof. John Mearsheimer grimly noted that we lost more aircraft in that one incident than we had in any single day since the end of the Vietnam War more than a half-century ago.The Iranians mocked the American debacle with one of their very popular LEGO animations.In 48 hours,You learned the truth:Everything for Epstein’s pleasureSoldiers thrown in the trash.! pic.twitter.com/KNUJ5RIBOi— Explosive Media (@ExplosiveMediaa) April 6, 2026Seething at his humiliation and increasingly desperate, Trump began issuing bloodcurdling threats against Iran, even declaring that he would permanently annihilate the entire Iranian civilization, an obvious suggestion of nuclear strikes.But the Iranians remained steadfast and merely released another LEGO animation. They emphasized that if their civilian infrastructure were destroyed, they would fiercely retaliate by doing the same to the Gulf Arab states that facilitated such American attacks.Latest Iran Lego Movie: TACO TuesdayHow to defeat a hegemon pic.twitter.com/9cETBkSDJt— Carl Zha (@CarlZha) April 8, 2026So it was Trump who blinked, announcing a ceasefire and peace negotiations based upon Iran’s stated ten point list of demands.However, Trump immediately reneged on that promise so contrary to initial expectations, matters dragged on for months. On dozens of occasions, Trump declared that an agreement was almost at hand to reopen the Strait, but his words always proved false.Eventually our top oil company executives began urgently warning Trump that the world economy was headed off a cliff unless the Strait were immediately reopened.Earlier today, a new article from The Washington Post highlights how oil executives have moved from politely knocking on the door of President Trump… to taking an axe to the door frame.“Some inventories could be wiped out within weeks, the executives have warned, coinciding…— Brett Erickson (@BrettErickson28) June 11, 2026Faced with such a calamity, Trump finally acceded to all the Iranian demands and signed a preliminary agreement in mid-June that amounted to a near-total American surrender. He justified his capitulation by declaring that the looming energy shortage left him no other choice.President Trump said the Iran agreement helped avert a global energy crisis:“We run out of reserves in about four weeks.”“We would really run out, and there’ll be a time when you wouldn’t be able to get it.”Trump said that without a deal and the reopening of the… pic.twitter.com/OEqzq7Ws4H— Drop Site (@DropSiteNews) June 17, 2026Under the terms of that signed document, a final peace agreement would be negotiated during the sixty days that followed. Meanwhile, the Iranians temporarily reopened the Strait, allowing the hundreds of trapped oil tankers and other cargo vessels to finally depart.So it appeared that the war would soon be over.Has President Donald Trump Finally Capitulated to the Iranians?Ron Unz • The Unz Review • June 22, 2026 • 6,400 WordsUnfortunately, that turned out not to be the case. The Israelis refused to leave Lebanon as the Americans had promised they would. Under ferocious attack from members of the Israel lobby and other war-hawks, Trump and his administration almost immediately began backing away from most of the other commitments they had made in the signed document.The agreement had placed Iran in charge of arranging safe passage through the Strait during the sixty days of negotiations. But America urged cargo vessels to ignore any such requirements and the angry Iranians began firing on those that refused to follow their instructions. Trump struck Iranian targets in retaliation, and the Iranians fired missiles and drones in response.Thus, just three weeks after the agreement had been signed, it had already become a dead letter, with Trump declaring an end to the ceasefire and the Iranians once again closing the Strait. The American war against Iran had fully resumed.The Resumption of the Iran War and Oil SuppliesRon Unz • The Unz Review • July 13, 2026 • 3,700 WordsOne of the major reasons that Trump may have felt so comfortable in restarting the war was that the widely quoted prices for oil had fallen back down to the same low levels they had previously seen just before the conflict began. More than four months of war and blockade had left prices virtually unchanged.Such complete stability of prices must have surely helped convince Trump that there would be few adverse market consequences to his full resumption of the war. Indeed, just after he began bombing and blockading Iran once again, he declared at a press conference that he expected oil prices to fall because the world had “an oil glut.”These relatively moderate oil prices seemed to make little logical sense. After all, some 1.3 billion barrels of oil had been lost and global stockpiles had reached their lowest levels in many decades. So unchanged oil prices seemed an obvious violation of the basic law of supply and demand.In my article last week, I argued at length that the most likely explanation of this paradox was deliberate market manipulation, probably by Trump Administration officials and their close allies. The low and widely quoted “paper prices” for oil served to mask the far higher prices that were actually being paid for physical barrels of crude. But since Trump probably remained unaware of this crucial distinction, he reacted with misplaced self-confidence.The Iran War and the Manipulation of Oil MarketsRon Unz • The Unz Review • July 20, 2026 • 8,500 WordsEven aside from the severe potential impact upon oil supplies, there seemed little logic in America’s renewed war.Prof. Mearsheimer emphasized in his interviews that if a massive previous bombing campaign that lasted forty days had completely failed to defeat the Iranians, why would a new bombing campaign do any better? Two months of an American blockade of Iranian ports had proven just as ineffective, so why would reestablishing that blockade be successful? Trump and his government seemed totally oblivious to the reality of the serious American defeat they had already suffered.Video LinkFurthermore, we were now obviously restarting the war from a far weaker initial position. During our earlier campaign, we had exhausted a large fraction of all our advanced munitions, and therefore had much less to use in this second round of combat.Although Trump had regularly declared that he had destroyed nearly all of Iran’s weapons, our intelligence agencies actually believed that the Iranians still possessed the bulk of their missiles and drones. Indeed, some knowledgeable Iranians even claimed that their rapid production cycle meant that their current arsenal was just as large as it had been before the war originally began.Even more importantly, during the months since our late February attack, the world had burned through many hundreds of millions of barrels of its stockpiled oil, so global supplies were now much tighter. As a result, the impact of the renewed cut-off of Persian Gulf oil would be much more immediate and severe.In fact, during his interviews Mearsheimer even revealed that he had privately told his friends he thought the Iranians had been making a mistake by signing the agreement when they did. Instead, every week that went by would have increased their bargaining leverage as their stranglehold over the world economy steadily tightened.So with America having now failed to honor almost any of its commitments, the Iranian hardliners who had rejected the agreement had been proven correct and they would surely demand terms even more heavily skewed towards their own country. For example, the Americans would probably be forced to take unilateral actions before the Iranians responded with any of their own.For all of these reasons, Mearsheimer viewed Trump’s decision to restart the war as totally irrational. His verdict was strongly seconded by conservative attorney Robert Barnes, who had known Trump for many years and seemed to possess outstanding personal sources in the current Trump Administration.As Barnes explained in his many remarkably candid interviews, Trump had apparently suffered very severe cognitive decline over the last year or so, and now seemed to be delusional much of the time. During a period of relative mental acuity, he had recognized his predicament and signed the agreement, but he soon lapsed into delusion once again and refused to abide by its terms.Video LinkAccording to Barnes, Trump spent most of his time watching the talking heads on FoxNews, who constantly declared that the Iranians were close to defeat and that a renewed military campaign would cause the collapse of their regime. With the notable exception of Vice President JD Vance, all the top Trump officials were cowards, who only told the president what he wanted to hear. So the combination of those two factors had helped persuade Trump to restart his failed war.Read the Whole ArticleThe post America Faces ‘Tank Bottom’ on Oil and on Munitions appeared first on LewRockwell.