Journalist David Wallace-Wells says Americans are going to be flabbergasted by just how thoroughly President Donald Trump’s blundering war in the Middle East is going to touch everything in our lives, and the lives of the world.
“[W]e spent much of the last decade telling ourselves that the era of globalization was over,” Wallace-Wells told a New York Times panel of writers in a recent podcast. “Covid-19 was supposedly pushing us toward more supply chain resilience. And here we find ourselves — as a planet, as a global economy — held hostage by one particular conflict in one particular part of the world. And I don’t think that anyone in the Trump administration adequately game-planned for that, which is a huge indictment of them.”
Wallace-Wells, who described Trump’s attack on Iran as an “everything war,” called the world’s resulting fertilizer troubles “most distressing,” with 70 percent of American farmers unable to afford fertilizer this planting season. But other nations without U.S. farmer’s adequate buffers are in even more trouble, possibly to the point of triggering “extreme hunger.” None of this, he said, was likely on “the Trump administration’s radar,” he suspects.
But further effects downstream are going to hit the U.S in some very unexpected places, he said.
From cantaloupes to condoms, there is hardly any modern amenity that will not take some kind of hit from Trump’s self-inflicted war on Iran and the subsequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz, he warned. Even though the U.S. has managed to increase its own production of sweet crude thanks to fracking and novel oil extraction methods, it is other nations that make the brunt of U.S. consumer goods, and other nations do not have U.S. oil resources.
“I mean, there’s almost no product that you look at and think that this is completely unaffected by the supply of any of the things that are tied up in the Strait of Hormuz. And that means that, to some degree, everything is going to get at least more expensive and maybe somewhat short of supply,” Wallace-Wells said. “Exactly how we manage that is an open question. But the experts are really ringing the alarm and telling us that quite a lot of stuff is going to be quite bad.”
“So, Donald Trump launched a war of choice, basically unprompted by, or unprovoked by — in my view — an adversary, and with very little understanding or appreciation for the fact that war is messy,” Wallace-Wells added. “And this war, in this place, against this adversary, would get especially messy.”
Former attorney and columnist David French warned Trump singlehandedly managed to risk plunging the “much of the world” into recession, “on a war of our choice that we did not consult with our allies on.”
“And right now [we] cannot turn around and look at those same allies and say, ‘Well, ultimately, you’ll thank us,’ … [W]e’ve got the instability from the war, but without the victory in the war,” said French.
