Man Who Spat on Allies For a Year Demands the World Clean Up His Catastrophe

Liberation Day was April 2, 2025. Trump stood in the Rose Garden and announced that America had been ripped off for fifty years by allies who’d bled with us in every war since 1945. He spent the next eleven months making sure every country understood that he personified the worst estimation anyone ever had about America: arrogant beyond comprehension, cowardly until perhaps forced to do the right thing, and ignorantly short-sighted by greed.

The world responded with a mix of contempt and abeyance, real and performed. While China just kicked his ass.

So what’s the final verdict on Liberation Day as the anniversary hurtles toward us?

On Truth Social yesterday, Trump wrote that nations “especially those affected by Iran’s attempted closure” of the Strait of Hormuz would be sending warships “in conjunction with the United States of America, to keep the Strait open and safe,” naming China, France, Japan, South Korea, and the United Kingdom among those he hoped would contribute. Not a single one gave any immediate indication they would. Iran’s foreign minister responded by describing Trump as “begging.”

Liberation Day, meet Interdependence Day.

The man who declared independence from the global order, spent a year tariffing and humiliating those same nations, bombed a country mid-negotiation TWICE, and is now asking them to clean up the resulting catastrophe. A catastrophe so foreseeable, so strategically incoherent, so reckless that George W. Bush — the man who invaded Iraq on a hunch and a PowerPoint — was too cautious to be tricked into it.

The Omani foreign minister had reported significant progress in the February nuclear talks, with Iran willing to make concessions. Trump said he was “not thrilled” with the talks.The bombs fell thirty-six hours later. The envoys handling those negotiations — Kushner and Witkoff — reportedly did not understand what Oman was telling them. At the same time, the Times was reporting that Kushner was soliciting private investment in his own fund from the same Gulf governments he was supposedly negotiating with on America’s behalf. The men who missed the off-ramp were either too compromised to understand what they were being handed, or too reckless to care. Or they just saw a chance to do something they—and their backers—always wanted to do and didn’t care who they killed doing it.

Trump’s own Joint Chiefs warned him before the first strike that an attack could prompt Iran to close the Strait of Hormuz. He did it anyway.

His blinkered psychology is his only strategy. The injured narcissist can’t process long-term costs. He responds to the perceived wound — the humiliation, the sense of persecution, the compulsion to dominate whatever made him feel small. Every accommodation Iran made, Trump treated as an invitation to demand more. That’s not diplomacy. It’s the psychology of the bully who mistakes restraint for fear — and it’s exactly what the men around him were counting on.

My theory: Trump’s narcissism is a Trojan Horse. The men inside it have clearer agendas, fewer domestic constraints, and thirty years more patience. Netanyahu handed Trump a war Israel has wanted since at least 2007, one Netanyahu needed personally to stay out of court and in power — and Netanyahu is a tactical “genius” who never underestimates what a fourth phase could be worth. The reporting from journalist Neri Zilber on March 9 is instructive: they’re now on phase three, systematically working down a target list — air defenses, missile systems, the Iranian Navy, and now essentially all regime infrastructure. Whether there’s a fourth phase, and whether anyone has actually thought through what regime change looks like on the other side — that’s an open question. Netanyahu’s silence on that question is all the answer we need. Putin, meanwhile, is watching the Hormuz chokehold deliver the oil price shock that relieves the central strain on his war machine, while American support for Ukraine quietly dries up, and Putin will soon be cashing oil checks from the US again.

Both men got what they needed by feeding one man’s need for a headline that gave him the love his parents never could. The result is a war nobody can define, nobody can end, and nobody in the White House can even agree we’re even in.

University of Chicago political scientist Robert Pape has a name for where this goes: the Escalation Trap. The stronger state that starts a war keeps climbing the escalation ladder — convinced that one more step will force the other side to yield — and instead locks itself into an entrenched conflict that is harder to stop than anyone expected. Vietnam began with limited deployments. The Russia-Ukraine war was supposed to be over in a week. Each expanded far beyond the original plan. Pape’s lesson on Hormuz is blunt: the shipping lanes are two nautical miles wide. Tankers and naval escorts are sitting ducks for Iran’s drones and mines. Geography favors Iran in any war to open the Strait. Doubling down will likely only make it worse.

The lack of feasible options makes absurdities like Trump’s cries for an Interdependence Day inevitable.

He said on March 6 that there are “no time limits.” Hegseth said it has “only just begun.” Trump then told CBS the war is “very complete” and would end “very soon.” Israel’s defense minister retorted that the operation will continue “without any time limit, as long as required.” Meanwhile, the facts on the ground: oil prices have leapt more than 40 percent since the first strike. The US embassy in Baghdad was hit twice. At least seven American service members are dead after a refueling aircraft went down in western Iraq, along with five other US fatalities we know about. Iranian strikes on energy infrastructure across the UAE. The IRGC announced that the Strait is closed and that any ship that tries to pass, “the heroes of the Revolutionary Guard will set those ships ablaze.”

“It doesn’t seem like they had a plan for the Strait of Hormuz to be closed,” one analyst told Al Jazeera. It seems, he said, like a desperate move to calm markets. That’s Day 15. Retaliation cycles are widening. The most dangerous phase of a war, Pape notes, is where we are headed. The middle.

One week ago, Trump posted that the UK could keep its aircraft carriers home: “We don’t need people that join wars after we’ve already won.” The UK is now on his coalition wish list.

“This should have always been a team effort, and now it will be,” Trump wrote yesterday, as if the team had simply failed to show up — and not as if he spent a year calling them thieves and threatening their people’s sustenance.

Our allies and adversaries may help anyway. Not because of Trump. Because the consequences of a permanently closed Hormuz are catastrophic for everyone, and the nations he spent a year humiliating are capable of distinguishing between their interests and their fury in a way he has never managed. But they should think hard before they do. The shipping lanes are two miles wide. Iran’s drones and mines don’t distinguish between American destroyers and allied frigates.

If you wanted to construct a contrived inciting incident for World War III, this could be the sort of scenario Tom Clancy or Joseph Heller might conjure.

Any nation that sends ships into the strait to clean up this war is also telling every adversary watching exactly what it costs to be America’s partner when America’s partner is Trump. That’s not a reason to stay home. It’s a reason to show some kind of strength, which is unfortunately the only language Trump’s narcissism speaks.

This should be where the lesson is obvious to everyone, even Trump. This should be the moment dominance for sport meets the Escalation Trap. The man who built his identity on leverage discovers what it costs when you’ve spent it all. But it won’t be. It’ll become grievance — more evidence the world is against him, more fuel, more justification for whatever malice comes next.

If there’s a true Liberation Day that allows us to revel in the truth of Interdependence Day, it will only come after we neuter Trump and eventually remove him and the forces that made him possible from power.

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