Trump Backs Down Again After Blustery Raid of Little Consequence
Hostilities between Iran and the US resumed once more after the downing of a $50M US Apache helicopter in the Strait of Hormuz, allegedly by way of Iranian ‘drone’. But the dust-up was quelled just as quickly, as Trump predictably chickened out from excessively angering Iran and causing it to wreak economic havoc on the fragile region, and world for that matter.
Trump’s intention was clearly to:
Save face for the downing of the chopper
Use a small bit of “kinetic leverage” to see if he can frighten Iran into moving faster toward a deal favorable to the US
The chopper itself, it must be noted, was downed because it was participating in the “stealth missions” to “secretly” slip some oil out of the strait. Trump bleated about this triumph just yesterday in a totally fabulated story about “100 million barrels of oil” getting through:
Note that no where does he mention whose oil this even was—because it certainly is not Iranian oil that the US profits from. It’s oil from US-aligned Arab states whose destination is mostly China. But facilitating the transfer of any such oil is a major “win” for Trump simply because it stabilizes markets and keeps his campaign from crashing and burning due to skyrocketing prices and economic collapse.
Even heavily pro-American commentators were hip to this fact:
Trump intentionally mystifies the process because he wants people to believe the US is somehow already taking Iranian oil and profiting from it, akin to the canard he used in Venezuela. After all, just yesterday he boasted that the US would keep “50% of Iranian oil” after the war’s end.
But Trump has never before lied so brazenly and openly, detached so completely from reality as he is doing now. The reason is that his disastrous failures are mounting to the point where he’s forced to dangerously tilt to dig himself out. His low-impulse control has made him unable to deal with Iran’s iron strategic patience, and is leading to the US burying itself in an increasingly deeper hole.
Just listen to how unhinged and detached from reality he sounds in the latest soundbite, wherein he espouses the view that Iran is “so defeated” that merely a few US soldiers could march into the country and take total charge of it right now:
But in a separate interview on the same day, Trump seemed to signal the complete opposite, stating that he’d love to take Kharg Island and steal Iran’s oil, but that Americans “wouldn’t have the stomach for it”:
The stomach for what, precisely, one might ask? It’s not that Americans wouldn’t have the stomach for a lightning fast successful operation—no one ever complains about those. No, implicit in his intentionally vague statement appears to be the understanding that the US would suffer high losses in such an operation, and that the public would revolt against this.
Soon after Trump’s meager attacks on Iran, Trump appeared to TACO out again and fraudulently claim another deal was “close to being signed” which Iran vehemently denied.
BREAKING: Iran directly rejects Trump’s new claim that he reached an agreement to “cancel tonight’s strikes” on Iran as “baseless,” saying no agreement has been approved at all, and all of Trump’s words should be disregarded like all his previous “38 times” deal-imminent announcements over two months, per Tasnim.
A senior Israeli official also tells Channel 12 they are “not aware of any agreement being reached,” per N12.
One of the going theories for why the US so suddenly backed out of prolonging strikes was that in its response, Iran immediately deleted one of the US’s last remaining powerful early warning radars in the region.
A suspected Iranian ballistic missile slammed into the defenseless AR-327 radar site in Bahrain at 26.0380222, 50.5420750 geolocation. Look carefully below at the red-highlighted rectangle matching the long distance shot of the burning installation to a stock photo of the exact mountain:
For those who missed it, look closer at the yellow circle showing the edge of the radome as compared to the map:
During all this time, the Iranian air force reportedly continued to function in full, with a video even emerging allegedly showing an Iranian F-14 Tomcat landing in one of Iran’s Isfahan airbases.
This is all from an airforce Trump had sworn was “completely destroyed”, along with the Iranian Navy, which had just staged a massive show of force of an unprecedented ~80+ fast attack boats in formation patrolling the Strait of Hormuz a day or two ago:
You know, the same strait CENTCOM just claimed was totally “open”—with a “strait” face, no pun intended:
Who believes that one?
By the way, the attack on US’s Bahrain radar installation was just the only one that was relatively verified via the geolocation photos. Iran had claimed it hit many other sensitive sites, including F-35 and F-16 storage sites, which even a prominent anti-Iranian war analyst appeared to confirm:
Now, despite the US’s military humiliation there still remain two competing ways of viewing the ensuing results of this conflict. The first is that the current global-economic disruptions are heading toward worst-ever scenarios, according to doomsaying experts:
The second is that despite the “bungled” nature of Trump’s reckless policy cartwheels in regard to Venezuela and Iran, the US has still somehow emerged as a seeming “winner” when it comes to energy dominance:
HOUSTON, June 11 (Reuters) - The United States has become the world’s largest oil exporter, upending a decades-old order long dominated by Saudi Arabia and Russia, a shift that tightens American companies’ grip on energy markets as Washington’s war with Iran reshapes global energy trade.
America’s ascendancy to the top spot marks a stunning reversal for a country that was dependent on Middle Eastern oil for decades and suffered from an oil embargo imposed by some OPEC members in 1973 to retaliate against U.S. support for Israel.
What to many looks like “madness”—the wayward Ukraine war policies, et al—appears in retrospect to perhaps have had some “method” to it, after all.
Of course, much of this had been long in the making, since the shale booms of early 2010s, and is not just a consequence of Trump’s putatively ‘genius’ actions of late. But all of Trump’s schizo foreign policy initiatives do seem to have one binding ligature—from Greenland to Venezuela to Iran, to Ukraine and the North and South China Sea—the control of global energy choke points; a plan now being duly facilitated by the US’s happy European vassals who continue to move forward with plans on detaining—or outright sabotaging—Russian “shadow fleet” oil tankers.
The question is, how much of this is merely illusory short term gain in exchange for long-term strategic losses via second and third-order consequences? After all, becoming leading oil exporter at the expense of the people who underwrote your petrodollar is not necessarily a strategically sound long-term maneuver. In becoming number one, the US also had to significantly draw down its SPR (Strategic Petroleum Reserve), which now sits at historically low levels:
“June 5, 2026, the SPR dropped to 349.2 million barrels, levels not seen since 1983.”
That’s not to mention that US’s desperate draw downs of the SPR and export of oil seemed to do little to bring down pump prices domestically, but is sure making a killing for big oil companies, as always.
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We are still waiting for Mexico to pay for the border wall that Trump never finished. Nobody believes anything he says.
Based on my research, the Apache incident may not have happened at all. It could be a completely made-up story, especially considering that the story first appeared on NYT, while neither Iran nor CENTCOM announced it (strange, isn't it?):
- https://geopolitiq.substack.com/p/black-hawk-down-no-apache-down-in?r=25fc37
- https://geopolitiq.substack.com/p/new-us-iran-skirmishes?r=25fc37
The latest developments suggest that Trump has now applied the Israeli model of "fake ceasefire" in Gaza and Lebanon to Iran, i.e. saying that there is a "ceasefire", but violating it whenever he wants: https://geopolitiq.substack.com/p/trump-has-applied-the-israeli-model?r=25fc37