1979 Redux: The Carterization of Donald Trump

The long habit of underestimating revolutionary Iran has proved fatal to American presidencies.

Jimmy Carter was hobbled when young guerrillas and revolutionaries quite illegally took U.S. Embassy personnel hostage on Nov. 4, 1979, and kept 52 of them imprisoned under brutal conditions for over a year. His attempt to free them with a risky aerial mission inside Iran literally crashed and burned at Tabas when American helicopters ran into a heavy sandstorm, an incident about which the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps are still taunting the U.S. this spring.

The high gasoline prices and increased inflation and shortages in consumer goods provoked by the Islamic Revolution in Iran and then by the Iraqi invasion of Iran on Sept. 22, 1980, contributed to Carter’s defeat by Ronald Reagan in that November’s election. Americans will overlook a lot, but high prices at the pump are not among the forgivable offenses. Worse, Carter’s dilemma made the U.S. superpower look weak. For a year, Carter seemed like a prisoner in his own White House Rose Garden, unable to secure the release of the American hostages.

The American public’s attention was focused laser-like on the hostage crisis. ABC News began a late-night show to compete with the traditional comedy and interview fare over at NBC at 11:30 p.m. “Nightline,” hosted by Ted Koppel, began each night by noting how many days the hostages had been held. In his 1991 book, “October Surprise,” former National Security Council staffer Gary Sick alleged that the Reagan election team opened a back channel to the revolutionaries in Iran, suggesting that they not release the hostages until Reagan’s inauguration. Certainly, it was that day on which the hostages were flown home.

Trump is now caught in bind similar to the one in which Carter found himself inextricably entangled. The hostages today are not U. S. Embassy personnel, since there have never again been any in Tehran after 1981. The hostage today is the world’s energy supply.

Here is the average cost of a gallon of gasoline rounded up to the nearest cent across the U.S. this year by month:

January $2.81
February $2.90
March $3.64
April $4.10

That is a Carter-era gasoline price graph.

That is a national average. Here in Michigan, the price has hit $5 a gallon. Of course it is higher in California, which imports its petroleum from Asia and so is paying Asian prices. I drive electric and have solar panels, so I’m not feeling it. But the average commuter or trucker sure as heck is.

Trump and the Republicans hope that prices will plummet by this fall’s midterm elections once the Hormuz crisis is resolved. But at the moment there isn’t any sign of it being resolved in time to avoid severe economic repercussions. Trump reportedly has told aides to dig in for a long blockade of Iran at Hormuz. He is said not to want to allow Iran to feel that it has had any wins from the war.

But that is how you get an armistice after a war. It is by having negotiators convince both sides that they are not being humiliated by the terms. Humiliating Germany after World War I just produced World War II.

Iran can hold out under blockade much longer than Trump thinks. He is still being misled by Benjamin Netanyahu-proxy think tanks like the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which are mouthpieces of the Israeli prime minister’s far-right Likud Party. These are the same outfits that helped convince the president that Iran would fold in only a few days after the U.S. and Israeli attacks began Feb. 28. Now they’re telling him again that Iran can’t last more than another few days. Most analysts say it can handily last two months under blockade, and perhaps six months, and that if it wants to hunker down and just bear the pain, it might never give in. The world’s economies cannot, however, wait two to six months for the biggest energy crisis in the history of the world to be resolved.

If the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz continues into late May, the impact on the world and on the U.S. will be horrific, possibly tipping the globe and the U.S. into a recession. Oil analysts are predicting that petroleum will stay above $100 a barrel for a year.

Trump keeps trying to reassure and jawbone down the oil market so as to keep securities soaring, but many analysts see this pie-in-the-sky strategy as dangerous for the future. If people knew the tsunami of high energy prices coming, they could start upping production at wells that cost a little more to produce from. But no one will take the risk of pumping oil that costs $60 to get out of the ground if the price is going to fall soon, as Trump hints, to about that level. If the producers don’t ramp up production now, though, there will be a crunch when the true magnitude of the crisis becomes evident in a few months.

Instead of a fine calibration of Iranian behavior to produce an easing of energy prices and of growing inflation by the fall in preparation for the midterms, Trump may be imprisoned in his own Rose Garden, helpless before a new round of Iranian hostage-taking, as a Blue Tsunami swells to take down large numbers of Republican House and Senate candidates.