Why I, a sensible centrist, believe the European alliance must swallow its pride and launch a massive naval occupation of the Middle East to safeguard my quarterly dividends.
Over a rather tense plate of endives at the Aspen Institute last weekend, a prominent European diplomat asked me a question that has been echoing through the corridors of power from Brussels to Georgetown: what exactly is Donald Trump’s strategy for Iran?
I chuckled, took a sip of a perfectly passable 2014 Sancerre, and gave him the only honest answer a seasoned foreign policy realist can give. He does not have one. The President’s approach to the Middle East is a chaotic tapestry of late-night social media tantrums, contradictory executive orders, and whatever hawkish fever dreams his transient cast of advisors managed to whisper into his ear between golf rounds. This is not a controversial assessment; it is simply the banal reality we must all accept, much like the changing of the seasons or the slight decline in service at the Davos Marriott.
But frankly, the resulting European squeamishness has gone entirely too far. Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel, and the rest of the NATO leadership seem to believe that because the United States is currently helmed by a capricious reality television host, they are somehow absolved of their sacred, historic duty to vaporize Iranian fast-attack craft on behalf of my energy sector holdings.
This is a deeply immature way to run a military alliance. The Strait of Hormuz is not merely a narrow waterway between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. It is the very bedrock of the postwar liberal order, by which I mean it is the primary transit route for the heavy sour crude that keeps my Vanguard energy portfolio comfortably outperforming the S&P 500.
When I sat down with a German naval attaché last month at the Munich Security Conference—we were discussing the enduring legacy of the Marshall Plan over a delightful charcuterie board—he expressed deep reservations about deploying NATO assets to clean up a geopolitical mess entirely of Donald Trump's making. He muttered something about the tragic abandonment of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the erosion of American diplomatic credibility, and the profound dangers of unprovoked military escalation in a volatile region.
I placed my prosciutto down and looked him squarely in the eye. I appreciate your commitment to multilateral diplomacy, I told him, but my quarterly dividends from Chevron are currently exposed to a three percent volatility risk, and I simply do not have the patience for your moral posturing.
It is time for the adults in the room to swallow their pride. NATO was founded on the principle of collective defense. And while the North Atlantic Treaty may technically specify an armed attack against a member state in Europe or North America, surely we can all agree that a threat to the uninhibited maritime transport of twenty million barrels of petroleum a day is a direct assault on the rules-based international system that pays for my children’s equestrian lessons.
Yes, it is true that Donald Trump insulted the mayor of London, threatened to pull out of the alliance entirely, and routinely refers to our most steadfast allies as freeloaders. I grant that this is mildly annoying for the heads of state who have to endure his handshakes. But are we really going to let a little thing like the total collapse of Western democratic solidarity stand in the way of a perfectly good gunboat diplomacy operation?
The British Royal Navy has a fleet of Type 45 destroyers sitting around doing absolutely nothing of value. The French have the Charles de Gaulle carrier strike group. These are magnificent engines of naval supremacy, fully capable of escorting Very Large Crude Carriers through heavily mined chokepoints and ensuring that global supply chains remain blissfully uninterrupted. It is a profound waste of taxpayer money to keep them moored in port just to make a passive-aggressive point about the American president's lack of decorum.
It is incredibly selfish of the European allies to withhold their frigates just because the American executive branch routinely threatens them on television. Have they given any thought at all to the anxiety this paralysis causes the shareholders of Royal Dutch Shell?
During the Obama years, one could at least rely on a certain quiet professionalism when it came to drone-striking perceived threats to the global supply chain. There was a comforting decorum to it. When an American president ordered a naval deployment to secure the flow of oil, he did so with a somber, multi-layered speech about international norms, not an all-caps tirade about his domestic political enemies. We all miss the aesthetics of a functioning empire. I miss them terribly.
But we must play the hand we are dealt. The fact that the current American commander-in-chief is deeply embarrassing at cocktail parties does not negate the fundamental reality that Iran sits adjacent to the most important nautical chokepoint on Earth. If the United States military is currently suffering from a severe case of executive dysfunction, then the burden of protecting international shipping lanes falls squarely on the shoulders of nations that actually have functional governments.
I urge NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg to convene an emergency session in Brussels immediately. The alliance must draft a resolution authorizing the immediate deployment of a massive, multinational armada to the Gulf of Oman. The mandate should be simple, clear, and robust: protect the tankers, shoot anything that moves aggressively toward a commercial vessel, and do not, under any circumstances, check Twitter to see what the President of the United States thinks about it.
True geopolitical leadership requires looking past the offensive personalities of the moment to safeguard the timeless, enduring imperatives of global capital. I look forward to NATO doing the right thing, so that I might finally enjoy the rest of my summer in Martha’s Vineyard without the exhausting burden of checking the spot price of Brent Crude every fifteen minutes.