War has changed. Massive, expensive, what former Defense official Dr. Jerry McGinn called ‘exquisite’ military hardware can be taken out by relatively cheap drones. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is demonstrating this new reality, because despite Russia’s military might Ukraine is not buckling under, and instead is taking the war to the Russians with their superior knowledge and use of drone technology. All the hardware the United States has been throwing against Iran has not crushed Iran’s will to survive. Instead, the Iranians have learned that the Strait of Hormuz is a weapon of blackmail, and they have learned how to use it. Now they are using their allies to expand the threat to other key commercial bottlenecks.
It makes me wonder, looking at the world situation, just how much Trump is actually enjoying the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. If you follow the money, Trump and Iran could be thought of as intentionally manipulating the oil market by controlling the Strait. If the price of oil per barrel goes up worldwide but American oil refiners don’t actually face increased costs, then they make more profit themselves. And so does Donald Trump. Just saying.
In fact, American oil companies reported their greatest profits ever during the second quarter of 2026, just after Trump’s war of choice began. According to The Guardian, the biggest companies in the world made about $700,000 profit per minute. But oil is a dirty and finite commodity. Human beings are moving away from fossil fuel dependence. Trump knows the inevitable. So do the oil tycoons. Trump has pushed back against alternative sources of energy against all logic. Why? Because there is a great opportunity to cash in big before the industry collapses. There’s money to be made, and Trump and those who control him don’t care about the consequences as long as they get theirs first. And if one of those consequences is bankrupting America by fighting a war nobody asked for with a dwindling supply of obsolete weapons, it will encourage the military-industrial complex to go into high gear. As is his wont, Trump is doubling down on wrong thinking.
It comes down to this. Trump wants a military budget of one and a half trillion dollars for the next fiscal year. He wants more high-end missiles and the delivery system to deploy them. He needs to replace all the ones his military has shot off over the past few months and will have to keep on shooting off for the foreseeable future. In today’s changing world, it’s a colossal waste of money. On 9-11, 2001, nineteen zealots and about $500,000 crippled the world for a time. The new reality is filled with people who know how to fly under the radar and strike hard, and no stockpile of Tomahawk or Patriot missiles can stop them. It’s wrong thinking to believe that money and munitions can solve our problems. We need intelligence, which today seems to be seriously lacking anywhere in our government.
