Hormuz: Another Endless War Begins

Donald Trump does not like diplomats. He despises them, seeing them as out of touch. He fights them because he sees in them the fifth column of the “deep state” that would stand in the way of his America: the America of MAGA, the America First America.

Since taking office 18 months ago, Trump has appointed 101 ambassadors. Only nine are career diplomats. All the others are loyalists, generous donors or faithful Trumpist activists. And these appointments are still far from fully effective: barely 40% of U.S. embassies around the world have seen their ambassador arrive, and only 20% in Africa.

In Washington, Marco Rubio, both Secretary of State (foreign minister) and National Security Advisor, prefers his office at the White House, where everything happens and everything is decided, to the seventh floor of the State Department, from which no fewer than 3,000 diplomats have been fired…

Trump manages world affairs by relying, in his own words, on his “instinct,” and on close friends or members of his family: Jared Kushner, Steve Witkoff, Tom Barrack, wealthy businessmen who are completely ignorant of the extremely complex issues — Ukraine or the Gulf — that they are supposed to handle. As Nick Burns, one of the most respected diplomats in the United States and abroad, recently confided, “in the room where everything is decided, there is never a professional diplomat.”

The result: the astonishing drafting of the famous 14-point “memorandum” between Iran and the United States, which Trump signed on June 17 in Versailles, and under which Tehran secured an end to American strikes and the release of $23 billion in exchange for reopening the Strait of Hormuz free of charge “for 60 days only,” while the nuclear issues were postponed to some distant, unspecified date…

It was only a month later that Trump began to understand the trap he had set for himself. The Revolutionary Guards began striking ships that refused to cross the strait not along the northern coast, Iran’s coast, but along the Omani coast to the south, protected by the U.S. Navy. Enraged, Trump then called the Iranians “scum” and resumed the bombing, to which the Iranians have responded by striking their Arab neighbors: Qatar, the Emirates, Bahrain and even Jordan… The question of the toll remains, and behind it the question of the future status of the strait.

Although in June, before the Gulf allies, Rubio had publicly condemned any attempt to tax navigation through the straits as absolutely contrary to international maritime law, Trump, for his part, boasted last Monday that he would impose a 20% toll on the value of cargoes, to “reimburse America for its protection of the strait.” But faced with the outcry from the Arab monarchies, the major shipping companies and the International Maritime Organization, Trump was forced to back down the very next day.

Last Tuesday, while announcing the blockade of Iranian ports and ships from 4 p.m. onward, he also announced that the toll would be replaced by Arab investments of equivalent value in the United States… The Iranians, for their part, are laughing. Foreign Minister Araghchi congratulated Trump for taking up the idea of a toll, but “20% is a little expensive,” he added. “We will be fairer”…

And so America is once again embarking on a new endless war, the very kind of war Trump denounced during his campaign. A war that neither the Americans want — 70% are against it — nor the Senate, which has just postponed the vote on the Pentagon budget, seeing it as a maneuver to secure approval for the war, nor the military, who fear seeing their stocks of sophisticated weapons depleted while China grows stronger every day.

A war waged without a strategy, without seasoned diplomats and with the most complete amateurism can only lead to disaster.

It is a pity that Emmanuel Macron thought it wise to imitate the Trumpist model by destroying the Quai d’Orsay and deciding everything, all by himself, with a handful of courtiers in his “diplomatic unit”… We have seen the results in Africa and the Middle East, in particular…

Pierre Lellouche
July 16, 2026