“Project Freedom” has all the trappings of a classic episode of the Trump Show, the reality series that the rest of the world does not just have to watch, but live through and survive. It has a dramatic plot twist, it is bathed in a self-projected beatific light, and the trailer looked far more promising that the reality.
Trump spent a long weekend in Florida banging the war drum. Iran had not “paid a big enough price” for its past misdeeds, he wrote in an online post before spending Friday afternoon revving up a cheering crowd at America’s largest retirement community.
“You know we’re in a war because I think you would agree we cannot let lunatics have a nuclear weapon. Do you agree?” he asked, and the elderly Maga crowd yelled its assent.
By Sunday afternoon, however, when Trump sat down to write on his Truth Social site once more, his mood had whiplashed. The president reverted to Nobel peace prize mode, promising a humanitarian gesture for the ages, freeing the ships and crews marooned in the Gulf by the Iran war. He was prepared to do this not just for the US and the Middle East but on behalf of the “country of Iran” in particular.
In this new take on the Gulf impasse, US and Iranian representatives were having “very positive discussions” – a turnaround from Trump’s outright rejection of Tehran’s latest peace proposal just hours before.
This was another Trump Show motif, surprisingly good news just hours before the markets opened. His post brought down the oil price significantly, albeit temporarily, bringing profits to those who bet the right way. Recent reports confirmed that Trump’s volatility has been making lots of money for those placing multimillion-dollar trades just before presidential announcements.
There is surely more to this than gaming the market. It is no secret that Trump has been getting restive in the no-war, no-peace limbo of the month-old ceasefire and the indefinite closure of the strait of Hormuz, with all the economic disruption that comes with it.
On the global trading floors, he has already earned the nickname Taco (Trump Always Chickens Out). Last week, a trader told Javier Blas, a Bloomberg columnist, that Trump had become known as Nacho (Not A Chance Hormuz Opens).
Though he has sometimes affected nonchalance at the situation, it is no secret Trump has bouts of furious impatience. He has been desperate to change the narrative. What has hung in the balance so far is whether he would break the status quo by peace or war.
The US has been rebuilding its forces over the course of the ceasefire. It now has three aircraft carriers in the region and refuelling tankers filling the air over the Middle East. On Thursday, Trump was briefed on his options by his military leaders.
According to Axios, one of those options was the forcible opening of the strait through the might of the US navy, guns blazing if necessary. That seemed to be a real possibility, but at the last moment, Trump reportedly veered away from this high-stakes bet and hedged.
Project Freedom offers guidance to commercial vessels in navigating the strait, not the protection of a naval escort. It is largely a rebranding of a coordination operation that was already under way, called the Maritime Freedom Construct, which promoted a route hugging the southern side of the Hormuz strait. Trump, characteristically, gave it a catchier title.
By turning it into a presidential initiative, however, he has considerably raised the stakes. The regime in Tehran, not known for its humanitarian instincts, was never going to go along with the idea of a good deed done on its behalf. For the Revolutionary Guards, this is all about who controls the strait, and they are clearly prepared to take risks to hold on to the main point of leverage. The first report of a commercial vessel coming under fire from “unknown projectiles” came hours after Trump’s Truth Social announcement, and on Monday afternoon a South Korean-operated cargo vessel reported an explosion and fire aboard.
Project Freedom could, then, be a fast track to a resumption of hostilities, a prospect for which the US has been preparing anyway. It has the advantage of framing the circumstances of a return to fighting in such a way that Iran is seen as the aggressor.
The other way out of the impasse is a return to the negotiating table, and ultimately a compromise over Iran’s nuclear programme, like the one that had been under discussion at the time Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu launched the war on 28 February.
The main obstacle to a deal now is the belief on each side that the other will be the first to crack. Iran is indeed hurting badly. One million Iranians have lost their jobs since the war began, and many more are not being paid; while food inflation is running at over 100%.
The regime, however, believes that there are enough holes in the US blockade, with some ships slipping through and land-based export routes being eked out, to just about keep going. Iran has been through much worse and it is nothing new for Tehran’s defiance on the world stage to come at the expense of the population.
The Revolutionary Guards and Iran’s other surviving decision-makers are betting it will be Trump who blinks first. They may be surprised he has not done so already. He is notably preoccupied with the ups and downs of the markets and knows that a bad result for the Republicans in November’s congressional elections would seriously weaken his presidency.
For the time being at least (and the US president could change direction again in the flash of a Truth Social post), Trump is sticking to his demand that Iran surrenders its nuclear programme once and for all as a prime condition for ending the war for good.
More generally he has shown signs as the year has progressed of caring less about popularity polls and more on the impact he leaves on the world, even if that impact is measured in bomb craters. A disturbing profile in the Atlantic magazine last week quoted sources in Trump’s inner circle as saying he has eased off comparing himself in private to the likes of Washington and Lincoln (which was alarming enough) and now sees his peer group as Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and Napoleon.
“He’s been talking recently about how he is the most powerful person to ever live,” one confidant said. “He wants to be remembered as the one who did things that other people couldn’t do, because of his sheer power and force of will.”
One more mindset like that on the world stage is an episode of the Trump Show that nobody wants to see. At least some of history’s emperors had someone at their ear to remind them of their human frailties. There is no one left in the White House to do that for Trump.