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I was never much convinced of the ‘Trump is playing 4-D chess!’ narrative – at least, not in his first term. Let’s be honest, Donald Trump was mostly out of his depth in Washington from 2016–20. Mostly because even a lifetime in the cut-throat dens of New York’s business elite didn’t prepare him for the swamp of venality that is Washington DC. So, Trump spent most of his first term tripping up on cypress roots and stepping on snakes.
But, as the late Scott Adams pinged it early on, Trump is a learn-by-doing kind of guy. Over those first four years he also pressed a lot of buttons and pulled a lot of levers and gradually figured out how the machine works. The four years from 2020–24 were even more crucial. Trump emerged from that dark period wiser and more ruthless than ever.
The equal-and-opposite mistake the Trump-deranged make is to judge the president by outward appearances. Well, these are the people who were fooled by the fake sincerity of a slimy used-car-salesman like Obama, after all. So, they see Trump’s bloviating, huckstering exterior and think they have the measure of the man.
That is a fatal mistake. Just ask the last few Ayatollahs.
This brings us to the big question: Iran – is Trump just blundering around or is he really playing 4-D chess, this time?
The headlines scream disaster. Because they always do. Iran ceasefire talks collapse! Donald Trump announces a full US blockade of Iranian ports and effectively seals the Strait of Hormuz. Oil prices spike, allies grumble and the usual suspects declare Trump’s Middle East policy in ruins. But what if that’s exactly what he wanted?
New Zealanders watching from afar might be forgiven for seeing this as just another chaotic chapter in American foreign policy. Yet dig beneath the surface, as conservative commentator Tim Pool has done, and a not-entirely bonkers game-theory scenario emerges. Far from a blunder, the “failed” ceasefire and subsequent blockade look like a calculated move to choke off rival energy supplies, force the world onto American oil and cement US economic supremacy for a generation. It’s not 4D chess: it’s cold, hard geopolitical realism. The sort of global-political poker geopolitical realists used to play, until the globalists switched to Old Maid.
Let’s recap the surface facts. Trump’s team held marathon talks in Islamabad with Iranian representatives. They agreed on plenty, until the one non-negotiable issue: Iran’s nuclear program. At this point, an Obama or Biden wouldn’t have just folded, he’d have offered a few billion in cold, hard cash as a marker. This is, quite literally, what Obama did. Strangely, for all its denials of seeking nuclear weapons, Tehran refused to budge on the issue of its weapons programme. No doubt because they’re all-too-used to Western leaders who are gullible quislings.
So, within hours Trump declared the US Navy would blockade any vessel entering or leaving Iranian waters. Mines laid in the strait? US forces will clear them. Ships paying illegal tolls to Iran? Interdicted. The message was unmistakable: the world’s most critical oil chokepoint stays shut until Tehran folds. Trump effectively threatened to blockade Iran’s blockade. Suddenly, the sandal was on the other foot.
Naturally, legacy media and anti-Trump voices (which is, to say, the legacy media) call this escalation proof of failure. They point out the strait was open before the conflict and accuse Trump of manufacturing a crisis. But pause for a second. If the goal was genuinely an open strait, why double down on a blockade the moment talks falter? Why not de-escalate?
Here’s where the game-theory lens makes sense. Trump didn’t stumble into this. He prepared the board months earlier. In January his administration seized control of Venezuela, the country with the planet’s largest proven oil reserves. North America already sat on massive domestic supplies and Canadian tar sands (in fact, Trump made the US energy independent for the first time in nearly half a century in his first term). Suddenly the US and its immediate neighbours controlled a commanding share of non-Middle Eastern crude.
Then Iran shuts the strait, removing roughly 20 per cent of global supply and crippling China (50 per cent dependent on Middle East oil), Japan (75 per cent), India (60 per cent) and Europe. Asian buyers have already abandoned Middle Eastern tankers and lined up 28 supertankers for US crude in May alone. Normal monthly bookings? Just five. US Gulf exports hit a record 4.9 million barrels per day in April.
The numbers don’t lie.
If Trump’s agenda really is America-first, he’s just kicked a spectacular goal in that direction and delivered a much-needed blow to the precious ‘rules-based order’ of the globalist elite.
Saudi Arabia quietly walked away from the 50-year petrodollar deal two years ago. That was the first crack in the post-WWII liberal economic order that forced the world to buy oil in US dollars. Now Trump has delivered the hammer blow, under the guise of nuclear security and ‘responding’ to Iranian intransigence. The result? The same countries holding America’s $39 trillion debt (Japan, China, South Korea, Europe) now desperately need American energy and fertiliser. They cannot dump treasuries or pivot to gold without starving their own economies. Debt becomes leverage. Dependence becomes control.
Critics will scoff that this is cope. They’ll insist Trump is a reckless buffoon whose poll numbers among working-class voters are tanking as petrol prices climb. Fair enough: short-term pain is real. Gas in rural America is already north of USD$4, diesel at $6. But step back and view the chessboard dispassionately. White (the US) captures Venezuela’s oil fields. White then manoeuvres to close the world’s largest oil export route. White announces it will enforce that closure itself. Black (Iran, China, the old Middle East order) plays into the trap. The outcome: record US oil sales, rivals economically hobbled and the dollar’s dominance reinforced through resource control rather than financial fiat alone.
Of course, risks remain. Prolonged high oil prices hurt consumers everywhere, including in New Zealand. A miscalculation could spiral. Iran still has proxies and asymmetric options. But the early returns suggest the plan is working exactly as a high-level strategist would intend. The world is already voting with its tankers.
Conservatives have long argued that energy is the ultimate geopolitical currency. Trump appears to be proving it: not by accident, but by design. While the left obsesses over optics and ‘diplomatic failure’, the real story is unfolding in shipping manifests and export records. The strait may stay closed longer than anyone expected. And that, ironically, may be the entire point.
This isn’t conspiracy. It’s strategy. Trump, JD Vance, Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth and the national-security team are not first-order thinkers who got suckered by Israel or stumbled into war. They watched Vladimir Putin turn a grinding conflict into Russian self-sufficiency and said, ‘We can do it better: on a hemispheric scale.’ Add Greenland’s rare earths, Panama Canal control, Mexican manufacturing and Canadian resources and the picture sharpens: a self-sufficient North American fortress while the rest of the world burns.
It may be hard for the rest of the West to swallow, but that’s the price we pay for selling our economic independence to China. Trump’s reciprocal tariffs pale into comparison to the unilateral economic damage China inflicted on Australia, with its temper-tantrums at being called out over Covid.
But neither the left-elite, nor Big Business, learned a single thing from that brutal lesson. They went, cap-in-hand, right back to the communist dictators in Beijing. Maybe they’ll learn this time, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
Whether you love Trump or loathe him, the data is hard to dismiss. The ceasefire ‘failed’. The blockade is on. And American oil is winning. Sometimes the most elegant moves look like mistakes: until the game is over.
