President Donald Trump is trying to win his war in Iran using geopolitical tactics not employed since World War I, according to a foreign policy expert.
“Mr. Trump, however, operates from an older playbook” than the one used in the prevailing geopolitical order, “one in which tariffs, embargoes and the application of economic power were far more common,” Josh Lipsky, chairman of international economics at the Atlantic Council and senior director of the council’s GeoEconomics Center, wrote for The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday. These tools include using the U.S. International Development Finance Corp. to insure ships crossing the Strait of Hormuz and threatening Spain with an absolute trade embargo “based on the government’s refusal to allow U.S. aircraft to use Spanish bases as a staging location for attacks” by relying on the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. Lipsky suggested the administration is also considering using the Defense Production Act “to direct the private sector for national-defense purposes,” which Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth threatened to cite when ordering Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei to disregard AI guardrails.
“In many ways, it’s a throwback to how wars used to be waged,” Lipsky wrote. “During World War I, the U.K. used its dominance of global insurance markets to complement its naval power and control imports to Germany on everything from food to fertilizer.”
He added, “In World War II, the U.S. launched financial warfare against the Nazis long before entering the war in 1941. From secret efforts to derail the German economy to ensuring U.S. and Western banks wouldn’t do business with their German counterparts, the predecessors to today’s financial sanctions were born.”
In addition to using unorthodox techniques to prosecute his war, Trump’s invasion of Iran is also unusual for another reason: It seems to have deferred largely to a different government, the Israeli government’s, priorities.
“The American military is now telling the New York Times that, far from collapsing, the Iranian regime is adapting to the Israeli–American onslaught and finding our weaknesses,” conservative commentator Jonathan V. Last wrote for The Bulwark on Wednesday. Describing how both America and Israel expected the mullahs to collapse shortly after the attack, even though our national intelligence knew for years that they were prepared for precisely this type of attack, he asked “how is it possible that the people in charge of running America’s war—by which I mean the commander-in-chief and his secretary of defense—could have misunderestimated Iran so completely?”
Similar to Last, influential conservative podcaster Joe Rogan said on the Tuesday episode of his podcast “The Joe Rogan Experience” that he knows many Trump supporters who feel “betrayed”by Trump’s invasion of Iran.
“Well, it just seems so insane, based on what he ran on. I mean, this is why a lot of people feel betrayed, right?” Rogan said. “He ran on, ‘No more wars,’ ‘End these stupid, senseless wars,’ and then we have one that we can’t even really clearly define why we did it.”
