Scholar warns Trump is repeating Churchill's worst mistake

U.S. President Donald Trump delivers remarks to members of the Republican Party, at Trump National Doral Miami in Miami, Florida, U.S., March 9, 2026. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

US President Donald Trump is acting like the late UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill in his prosecution of the Iran war, observed a distinguished scholar on Tuesday — but not in a good way.

“Success in President Trump’s war on Iran now appears partly to depend on whether Washington can reopen the Strait of Hormuz, stave off global economic decline and avoid another endless war,” wrote Asli Aydintasbas, a fellow at the nonpartisan Brookings Institution and director of the institution’s Turkey project, in an editorial for The New York Times. “Turkish history offers both a warning and a way forward about how to deal with this vital waterway, which Iran has effectively closed, sharply reducing the flow of oil through the Persian Gulf. Specifically, the lessons concern the Dardanelles, the narrow strait linking the Aegean Sea to the Sea of Marmara and, beyond it, the Bosporus and the Black Sea.”

Aydintasbas added that Trump should note what happened when Churchill — then in the military instead of politics — launched a disastrous attack against Turkey (then the Ottoman Empire) through the Dardanelles during World War I.

“The Gallipoli campaign, as it was named for the peninsula that runs along the strait, of 1915-16 was Winston Churchill’s brainchild as first lord of the Admiralty,” Aydintasbas wrote. “The Ottomans had entered the war on Germany’s side and seemed weak. Britain’s idea was to free up passage in the strait, knock the Ottomans out of the war, and reopen supply routes to Russia. Instead, the campaign became one of the war’s bloodiest disasters for the Allies, killing more than 130,000 men — roughly 44,000 Allied troops and at least 86,000 Ottoman soldiers — and costing Churchill his post.”

To avoid a similar fate in protecting the Strait of Hormuz, Aydintasbas urged Trump to “test Iran’s appetite for tying a cease-fire to a multilateral framework that guarantees freedom of passage. At its core, a Hormuz convention would need to do what Montreux did: give Iran something it values in exchange for legally binding, verifiable commitments to permit commercial passage.”

Aydintasbas concluded, “A durable peace in the Gulf is unlikely to come from pretending Iran has no residual capacity to threaten the strait. Nor can the international community accept a situation in which Tehran turns a global artery into a weapon. A deal would have to recognize the security concerns of Iran and the other Gulf states, such as Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, and be tied to a broader cease-fire.”

When AlterNet asked the White House earlier this month about economists who challenged a Trump adviser’s claim that the Strait of Hormuz’s closure would ultimately lower gas prices, this journalist was told critics of that adviser (Peter Navarro, senior counselor for trade and manufacturing) are “idiots.”

"These ‘economists’ are idiots,” White House spokesman Kush Desai told AlterNet at the time. “Peter Navarro is an American Patriot whose loyalty to the President and the American people is unimpeachable.”

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