President Trump told Maria Bartiromo this week that Europe is now apparently drafting plans to help open the Strait of Hormuz without American assistance, which Trump described as sad given that the strait is already opening and American ships are enforcing the blockade successfully. His contempt for European allies who declined to participate in the campaign while continuing to expect American security subsidies through NATO was on full display.
Justin Logan, director of defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to offer a dissenting perspective on several aspects of the campaign’s logic while agreeing with Trump’s underlying critique of the transatlantic burden-sharing arrangement.
Logan’s piece describing Trump’s NATO threats as stupid but potentially useful generated its headline intentionally, he acknowledged. His argument is that the stupid part involves expecting European allies to clean up a conflict they were not consulted on and that they lacked the capability to participate in even if they had wanted to. The potentially useful part is the decades-long and entirely legitimate complaint that the United States spends conservatively one hundred billion dollars a year subsidizing the defense of an economic bloc roughly the size of the American economy, which he called a sucker’s bet that American policymakers have been giving away for too long. If Trump’s pressure on NATO rattles European capitals into increasing their own defense spending, it accomplishes something genuinely valuable regardless of the Iran context.
On the question of whether Trump was genuinely surprised by Iran’s attempts to close the strait and attack Gulf neighbors, Logan said he agreed entirely with Proft’s skepticism. People who have spent decades in war-gaming exercises involving Iran know exactly what Iran’s blunt instruments are. What Logan found puzzling was Trump’s public insistence that these Iranian responses surprised the administration, when in fact the Ayatollah had explicitly warned a month before the campaign began that Iran would set the entire region on fire if attacked. He said pleading surprise at expected Iranian behavior reflects a strange fragility in the administration’s public messaging that does not match the obvious operational preparation that preceded the campaign.
His more substantive concern is that the administration has been sending mixed messages about what it actually wants as a political end state. At different moments, Trump and his team have said the goal is supporting an Iranian popular uprising, degrading Iran’s ballistic missile program and nuclear capacity sufficiently to declare victory, and securing a deal. But when Logan looks at the terms the administration is presenting to the Iranians, including no uranium enrichment, surrender of the existing stockpile, and permanent opening of the strait without Iranian oversight or fees, he said the honest characterization is not a deal but a demand for total capitulation. He acknowledged Proft’s counter-framing: you surrender and you live, that is the deal. But Logan’s concern is that an Iranian regime confronting those terms has every rational incentive to refuse, because accepting them would mean the end of the Islamic Republic as a meaningful political entity, which is why the mullahs would calculate that even the prospect of resumed military punishment is preferable to signing their own death warrant.
The more troubling scenario Logan outlined is a competitive suffering contest in which both sides try to outlast the other. Iran’s economy is cratering at nearly fifty percent inflation, oil exports are blocked, the currency is in effective hyperinflation, and no significant external military support appears to be materializing. But all Iran technically has to do is survive and say no. If the American objective requires Iranian surrender and the Iranians refuse to surrender, the United States is eventually required to either escalate further to extract the enriched uranium and permanently open the strait by force, or accept something short of its stated demands. The cost of the former, Logan said, has not been honestly presented to the American public, and the debate about whether to incur it was never actually had before the campaign began in late February.
He drew a comparison to the Venezuela operation, which he said Trump may have been mentally replicating. The Venezuela mission was a discrete and relatively bounded objective, seizing Nicolas Maduro and giving his successor a chance to take over, rather than a full regime change war in a country four times the size of Iraq. Iran is a fundamentally different scale of problem, and Logan said the administration should be candid about that difference rather than suggesting the end state will resolve itself cleanly.
On the gas price question and domestic political sustainability, Logan said he expects prices to remain elevated for the rest of the year, which introduces the political dimension that the Powell and Weinberger doctrines were designed to address: if you are going to incur significant costs, you need the American people on board before the shooting starts. He said that debate did not happen, and the Iranians are likely calculating that American domestic pressure from elevated energy prices will eventually force a softer position from the Trump administration than its public demands suggest.
Proft closed by noting that the Cato Institute had been called out unfavorably by Trump on social media after a colleague published data showing that legal immigration had declined more than illegal immigration during the Trump administration, which Trump then posted on Truth Social while simultaneously taking a shot at Cato. Logan took it in stride, observing that for a think tank, any publicity from a president sharing your data probably has to count as a win regardless of the accompanying editorial commentary.