What Has the World Received in Return for U.S. Efforts?
Summing it up as to what our current president is doing to make the United States and the rest of the world safer and economically better. Nothing, just worse,
“Double Standard at the Top, When One Tremor Ripples Across the Globe, & The Quiet Crisis in America’s Living Rooms,” Kareem Takes on the News
Summary:
The widening war in Iran and the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz have delivered a severe economic shock to households and businesses across the globe.
The Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly a fifth to a quarter of the world’s seaborne oil trade passes, has come to a near halt since U.S. and Israeli missile strikes began against Iran. Oil prices surged from under $70 a barrel in February 2026 to a peak of nearly $120, before settling around $90-$92. The average U.S. gasoline price rose to $3.48 a gallon from just under $3 within a week. David Goldwyn, a former U.S. diplomat and Energy Department official, called the Strait closure “the emergency scenario everyone feared,” saying,
“This really is the big one.”
The disruption extends well beyond oil. Up to one-third of global fertilizer exports transit the Strait, threatening food prices and agricultural supply chains from the U.S. Midwest to sub-Saharan Africa. Shipping companies Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd have suspended Mideast routes. The IMF’s managing director, Kristalina Georgieva, stated that every 10% increase in oil prices, if sustained, will push global inflation up by 0.4% and reduce worldwide economic output by as much as 0.2%. The crisis adds pressure to pre-existing stresses from the Ukraine war, Trump’s tariff policies, and fragile developing-economy debt burdens.
My Take:
Nine presidents stood in front of Congress and promised the same thing: Energy Independence.
Nixon said it. Then Ford, then Carter, then Reagan, both Bushes, then Clinton, and finally Obama.
Daniel Yergin counted them, and honestly, the number feels like one of those stats you hear in a post‑game interview that makes you shake your head. Fifty years of running the same play and acting shocked when it doesn’t work. In basketball, if a play fails nine straight times, you don’t run it a tenth, you change the offense. In politics, we just change the podium.
And then we get phrases like “the big one.” That sounds dramatic, like a movie trailer for a crisis, but it explains nothing. Real explanation takes effort. A 97 percent collapse in daily ship transits through the Strait of Hormuz isn’t just a headline. It’s a near‑total shutdown of a 21‑mile‑wide waterway that normally moves 20 million barrels of oil a day. That’s in bold because it’s the kind of number that should make people sit up straight. But instead of breaking it down, we talk about “the big one.” We did it in 2008. We did it during COVID. “The big one” becomes a shortcut for panic. And panic without understanding is just dressed-up anxiety.
Most Americans hear “oil crisis” and think about gas prices because gas prices are visible. You see the number on the sign. You feel it in your wallet. But the Gulf also produces nearly half the world’s sulfur, a third of its urea, and a quarter of globally traded ammonia. That means fertilizer shocks and pharmaceutical shortages are happening at the same time. Six weeks from now, someone will walk into a pharmacy and hear, “Sorry, we’re out of that medication,” and never connect it to a bottleneck thousands of miles away.
Meanwhile, the ripple effects are already hitting places most Americans never think about. Sudan gets more than half its seaborne fertilizer from the Persian Gulf. Pakistan relies on the region for 40 percent of its energy. Kenyan tea exporters are watching goods rot. Each of these stories gets a single sentence in economic coverage before the narrative snaps back to oil futures and Fed policy. That’s not a failure of journalism so much as a reflection of the media system we’ve built, one that prices suffering by how close it is to us.
And through all this, nobody in power seems eager to answer the simplest question: what does winning look like? MIT Nobel laureate Simon Johnson said it plainly when he noted that the situation is “all about President Trump” and that it’s unclear when he plans to declare victory. When a Nobel Prize winner has to publicly guess at the administration’s endgame, it tells you clarity wasn’t part of the decision-making process. Gas prices are up 16 percent in a week. Fertilizer is up 43 percent. Tanker freight costs are up as much as 72 percent. The people absorbing those costs weren’t in the room when the decisions were made.
What gets me isn’t just that we’ve been here before, it’s that we keep pretending we haven’t. Carter put solar panels on the White House in 1979. Reagan took them down in 1986 and eliminated the tax credits that supported renewable energy. Energy expert Amy Myers Jaffe has argued that if the U.S. had stayed the course after the 1973 crisis, “we’d be in a much better place.” Instead, we got five decades of speeches and a global economy that can be brought to its knees by a narrow stretch of water we ourselves helped to close.
As I’ve previously said, you can argue about fouls or coaching decisions, but the numbers staring back at you are the truth that you live with, like it or not. Politics isn’t like that. The scoreboard is deliberately hard to read, and the people who benefit most from that confusion are often the ones making the worst calls, or rolling in new loot by betting on war. When leaders keep promising the same fix for fifty years and the same crisis keeps knocking us down, it’s not bad luck. It’s a refusal to learn.
If anything, Trump has made the world less safe and has hurt the global economy.
“Oil Shock Sends Tremors Through World Economy: ‘This Really Is the Big One’” (The New York Times)