Blood Work - THIS WEEK IN VIOLENCE: The Jean Claude Van Damme Military Academy for Attention Deficit Presidents

2026, Week 38

This week, Bloomberg published a weighty report on the cost of the US blockade on Iran—itself an outgrowth of the war which nobody wanted. We’re sharing a hefty excerpt from that report, along with some of our thoughts on where this all originated, and how predictable it was.

As US President Donald Trump tries to force Iran into submission, a naval blockade is proving to be his tool of choice. But the operation is testing the limits of the American military, exhausting personnel and weakening Washington’s position elsewhere in the world.

Sailors on the USS Abraham Lincoln, who recently pulled into port in Thailand for the first time in nine months, said they had suffered through maintenance failures and spiraling morale. Some reported a black market for toiletries and a 40-day internet outage that cut them off from their families.

The elite 82nd Airborne Division, meant to respond to crises anywhere in the world at a moment’s notice, is on track for a 12-month deployment in the Middle East without seeing any action, according to a person familiar with the matter.

So far, at least 28 Navy ships have rotated through the latest blockade, which began on July 14, racking up an estimated bill of more than $2 billion in ship operating costs. Since the naval buildup began in January, those costs have topped $7.1 billion, according to a Bloomberg Economics analysis of the blockade’s naval operations. That price tag does not include all the US assets being used to escort tankers through the Strait of Hormuz.

At this point, the fleet blocking Iranian commerce involves about 22 ships, which stop and redirect any Iranian-linked vessel trying to pass through the Strait. Along with a price tag of roughly $32.5 million a day, the blockade represents more than 30% of the US Navy’s warships, some of which have been at sea for almost as long as the Lincoln.

Just to keep the 5,000-person crew of a single aircraft carrier going, the Navy has to provide about 3,600 calories each day per person — more than 5 tons of food a week, plus aircraft fuel and other supplies — without the use of key regional bases wrecked by Iranian missile attacks.

In the last week, Houthi forces captured key coastal areas in Yemen, putting ships in the Red Sea under threat. Separate attacks disabled Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline — a key means of getting oil out of the region while avoiding the Strait of Hormuz.

Even so, the administration says it can keep up the blockade as long as it wants, with Trump insisting that Iran is eager to make a deal and that he alone will decide if the US will actually engage.

But the drain and strain on military resources show each day comes with a steep cost, not only in dollars but in America’s ability to project power elsewhere in the world.

On Tuesday, the Congressional Budget Office put the total cost of the war as of Aug. 1 at roughly $38 billion. The non-partisan agency estimates that if the intensity of the conflict remains “relatively low,” the bill will run between $2 and $3 billion per month.

A separate Pentagon report published Monday said Iranian strikes had destroyed or damaged dozens of US aircraft and hundreds of buildings at US bases in the region.

“We can continue to move things into the Middle East and can do things for probably as long as we need to,” said retired General Joseph Votel, who led US Central Command from 2016 to 2019. “There’s a cost associated with that. People are going to be deployed a long time and I think the bigger concern for me would be the impact that it’s having on other priorities.”

The US Department of Defense said it “plans for a wide range of operational scenarios to execute Presidential and Secretary‑level direction and to ensure mission success in any operational environment.”

White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said the US military “maintains the force posture necessary to achieve any desired objective set by the Commander-in-Chief. As Operation Epic Fury demonstrated, America’s military might is stronger than it’s ever been.”

For a military as gargantuan as America’s, those priorities span the globe — but China looms largest. For decades, the US has poured resources into Asia, with a focus on deterring China from attacks on the self-ruled island of Taiwan and limiting Beijing’s influence in the region.

Opportunity costs are steep: Deploying the 82nd Airborne in the region leaves fewer options for commanders and planners elsewhere.

The US Seventh Fleet, which comprises a carrier strike group and dozens of other warships, including attack submarines, is based in Japan and Guam. Many of those vessels have now been sent to the Gulf region.

Pulling weapons and ships from other parts of the world reduces the number of long deployments needed to maintain the blockade. The Lincoln had conducted the longest mission since the Vietnam War by the time it pulled into the Thai port with visible signs of rust and algae. But that shrinks the resources available for commanders in those other areas.

And it’s expensive. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Daryl Caudle said last month that his service could be in an $8 billion hole this year, telling reporters he would need to shift funding from a facilities maintenance account to address it.

Already, comptroller documents show billions being “reprogrammed” from areas such as research and development to operations and maintenance. At least one Asia-based joint exercise was canceled.

The US has poured billions of dollars into developing advanced weapons for a potential conflict with China. Now the Iran war has consumed a huge chunk of these high-tech arms, particularly long-range strike weapons and air-defense missiles.

The CBO report released Tuesday said the US had probably used as much as two-thirds of its inventory of missile defense interceptors since June 2025.

“The shortfall would become especially problematic if a conflict arose with an opponent whose arsenal included large numbers of ballistic and cruise missiles,” the CBO said.

The war may have permanently reduced the number of Gulf bases the Navy can use for resupply as well. Naval Support Activity Bahrain, the largest US Navy base in the region and home to the Fifth Fleet, suffered major damage from Iranian strikes. It is unusable now, and repairing it would cost hundreds of millions of dollars — a situation that led directly to the supply problems that caused the deteriorating conditions aboard the Lincoln.

On top of that, long deployments scramble maintenance schedules that are mapped out many years in advance, according to people familiar with the matter. [...] 11 US aircraft carriers in particular spend as much as a quarter of their service lives in maintenance.

With just a few shipyards in the US able to perform those overhauls, maintaining the schedule is a key part of keeping the fleet ready, the people said.

[...]

The blockade’s impact on Iran’s $300 billion economy — alongside an increasing pile of sanctions — is difficult to quantify. But inflation has already soared more than 80%, and the lack of oil shipments is estimated to cost Tehran hundreds of millions of dollars each month.

Iran doesn’t appear to be working around the US blockade in a meaningful way when it comes to crude oil shipments, the nation’s top foreign-currency earner.

Satellite images of Kharg Island in the northern Persian Gulf, the nation’s main export hub, show hardly any tankers moored there since the cordon began, and there are no signs of Tehran’s tankers leaving the Persian Gulf en route to global markets.

Before the war, Iran was transporting about 2 million barrels a day to global markets, almost 2% of global supply, with the Strait of Hormuz carrying about 20% of the world’s supply.

Now the restrictions impose costs on the rest of the world, too, in the form of higher oil and fuel prices — already elevated by limited shipping traffic through the narrow passageway.

On June 16, 2015, Donald Trump marked the beginning of his political career (or this phase of it, at least) when he descended the golden escalator at Trump Tower and gave his infamous ‘Mexican rapists’ speech.

A few months later, the insurgent Trump vied with GOP stalwarts and Tea Party renegades like Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz—strangely similar in character for all their ostensible factional distinction—for the Republican Party nomination.

Less than a month after throwing his hat into the ring, CNN’s Anderson Cooper pressed Trump on his foreign policy outlook. Specifically, Cooper asked about his strategy for the conflict in the Middle East. 

At that time, power vacuums in both post-war Iraq and and the escalating civil war in neighbouring Syria had created fertile soil for the growth of non-state political factions. Islamic State (ISIS), then at the apex of its power, then controlled large swathes of territory across northern Syria and Iraq.

Breaking with both his neoconservative rivals and his eventual Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton, Trump vowed to deal with the terror group “firmly and strongly,” taking measures so severe that ISIS leadership would not even be around to negotiate for peace.

Cooper: What sort of things, though? I mean—

Trump: I would take away their wealth. I would take away the oil.

C: Wouldn’t you be destroying the wealth of Iraq?

T: No, no, let me—there is no Iraq. There is no Iraq. The leaders are corrupt.

C: Iraqis might differ with you—

T: Excuse me; there are no Iraqis. They’re broken up into so many different factions.

C: You don’t think bombing Iraqi oil fields which are now in control of ISIS—that bombing Iraqi oil fields is going to anger huge numbers of people from Iraq?

T: I would bomb the hell out of those oil fields. I wouldn’t send many troops because you wouldn’t need them by the time I got finished. I’d bomb the hell out of the oil fields. I’d then get Exxon. I’d then get these great oil companies to go on—they would rebuild them so fast your head would spin.

C: But you’d have to have US troops—

T: Excuse me. You ever see how fast they put up rigs? These guys are unbelievable. So I’d go to Exxon Mobil; I’d go to the top 5 oil companies, they’d be in there, they’d finished so fast.

C: Wouldn’t you need US troops to protect the oil?

T: Well, yes. You’d put a ring around them. You’d put a ring. You’ve just taken all of the wealth away. This is what should be done. But no politician’s gonna do that.

The promise to restore American dominance over the region through promises (threats) of overwhelming, unrelenting aerial violence became a leitmotif of Trump’s insurgency. As with many other of his campaign pillars, both Trump and his supporters reveled in the schoolboy glee with which he gradually turned up the vulgarity of his pitches.

A few months later, in November, during a campaign rally at Fort Dodge, Iowa, Trump upped the ante again:

"They have some in Syria, some in Iraq. I would bomb the shit out of 'em. I would just bomb those suckers. That's right. I'd blow up the pipes. ... I'd blow up every single inch. There would be nothing left. And you know what, you'll get Exxon to come in there and in two months, you ever see these guys, how good they are, the great oil companies? They’ll rebuild that sucker, brand new — it'll be beautiful."

Given that these were the years of Barack Obama’s drone war, in which former strategies of occupation and detention had been substituted with a campaign of indefinite aerial assassination—mowing the lawn of global terrorism—one could forgive Trump for believing power could be won through air power alone.

The most generous reading might be that Trump had fallen for the same sleight-of-hand that most onlookers had. The gradual reduction in US troop presence in Iraq, and increase in the use of drones, was a marked tactical shift in the final years of the Iraq war, but it concealed a less-acknowledged shift in strategy.

The Iraq War had been launched with a purported objective of overthrowing Saddam Hussein, implementing a liberal democratic political system in Iraq, and effectively rebuilding the country as an unofficial 51st state in the Middle East. 

The transition to an aerial campaign of targeted assassinations was a tacit admission that this theory of victory no longer held (if it ever did); that the US, in its position as occupier, was incapable of quelling insurgent forces on the ground; and that trying to decapitate the Hydra into a holding pattern was the best plan of action for the time being.

With Trump’s election in 2016, more restrained approaches to overseas intervention went out the window, as Trump promised to give US taxpayers, whom Trump has always perceived first and foremost as punters, the bloodsport they paid the ticket price for.

The actions didn’t necessarily need to be bloody; just spectacular. Trump’s reneging on the US-Iran JCPOA a few months into his first term was a prime example of his tendency to gauge actions on the heat they generate as opposed to light. Virtually every one of the headline foreign policy ‘successes’ of his first term were flashy assassinations and so-called ‘decapitation’ strikes which played well in the media, but said little about what the US was doing in the region, what it was for, and where this was all ultimately going.

Everything that needed to be known about Trump’s actual (as opposed to rhetorical) foreign policy outlook was demonstrated in that first term. Regarding established US practices and postures concerning China, Israel, Syria and the Western Hemisphere, he largely either continued business as usual, or simply tried to speed-run toward long-term objectives, as demonstrated by the Abraham Accords.

Otherwise, he was his characteristically loutish and incurious self. Forged within, molded by, and entirely motivated by spectacle, he convinced himself, and so insisted, that big explosions and reckless actions were equivalent to accomplishment of actual objectives. 

Trump is a man whose ontology is mediated by the television; a sort of ‘if it bleeds, it leads’ attitude applied to object permanence. The assassination of IRGC Commander Qassem Soleimani, the killing of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi; these were ejaculations of violence which made a lot of things happen on the television. Ergo, they were notching wins for the United States. If something else were winning, the television would have been talking about that other thing. (There are no losers on television. Except when they are. But those people aren’t around Trump. QED.)

In his second term, both Trump and the team with which he surrounded himself radicalised. The lust for orgiastic destruction which he regularly expressed in his first term, but which his bumbling team were too incompetent to realise, found ample expression in Elon Musk’s ruthless dismantling of the state under the guise of DOGE; the demonisation of Haitians, Somalis, and migrants & refugees writ large by himself, his vice president, and the Department of Homeland Security; the Department of War’s aimless and illegal bombing of boats in the Caribbean and East Pacific; the mafia-esque knocking over of the government of Venezuela, replaced with a pliant puppet from the same party as the country’s erstwhile tyrannical, illegitimate leader; and the war-that-isn’t-a-war against Iran, soon to enter its eighth month.

That last action, however, is proving to be the undoing of Trump’s entire political project, which relied upon an ironclad refusal of contact with political reality, a refusal in which both his party and the US media have been largely complicit.

Riding high on the success of the Maduro raid and what he perceived as Israel’s ‘successes’ in Gaza (remember, loud noises, big explosions), the Trump administration allowed themselves to be tricked into believing that all that was required to topple the Iranian government was another bang, sufficiently loud and necessarily brief. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen, and every action by Trump since then has been a desperate attempt to claim a flawless victory which was not duly granted on February 28, 2026.

Trump’s failure in Iran can be summarised by an aphorism which has become well-worn during this conflict: The enemy also gets a vote. Bamboozled by the illusion of American power of total, unilateral action without consequence produced by the same War on Iraq that he famously called a “big fat mistake,” and spurred by lacklustre responses to his own adventurism, Trump went for another big ratings getter, and ended up producing what will surely go down in history as the greatest US foreign policy blunder of the twenty-first century, possibly ever.

What is more pressing—or impressive, depending on what mood you’re in—is how comprehensive Trump’s blunder has proven to be. Before Trump launched his war, Iran and its regional allies were believed to be in their weakest position yet, Hezbollah vanquished in southern Lebanon, Ansar Allah a persistent but contained concern in the southern Arabian peninsula, and the Iranian government teetering on the brink of collapse.

Six months later, operating largely in a defensive (and desperate) posture, Iran has reasserted its position in the pecking order of the Middle East, exposed the folly of its neighbours normalising relations with Israel in pursuit of a peaceful life, and imposed (or should we say exposed?) the massive potential costs of hosting US military bases on their soil.

On that note, Iran’s strikes on US bases across the Middle East have made a mockery of the US security umbrella, which held that ongoing American military presence in the Middle East was the only basis for business-as-usual. Instead, that swollen footprint served as the basis for the launching of a hubristic war of choice that no American has the stomach to pursue, devastating economic flows in the region and inviting barrages of drone and missile strikes that would otherwise have lain idle.

Most devastating of all, however, is the way this war has revealed the fallacious logic of the US’s military arsenal, in which larger, flashier and more expensive is better, and that it necessarily followed that vast expenditures would wrap around the globe. 

For decades, the presence of US military infrastructure, personnel and weaponry around the world produced the impression of an impervious and undefeatable Leviathan whom any smaller power would be a fool to challenge. Now, six months into a war against one of its longest-standing adversaries—one which has already been crippled by decades of brutal sanctions imposed by that same hegemon—the US is martialing all of its resources to merely try and hold out and survive a domestic midterm election.

When does this end? This is the kind of question for which it is difficult to prognosticate. As stated, Trump is a simple creature, impressed by big bangs and flashing lights. Having expended these options for nought, he is now seemingly shovelling all of his weapons into the waters around the Middle East in the hopes that, like a Dragon Ball Z character, this concentration of forces will eventually empower the US military to go Super Saiyan Mode.

It is unlikely that this approach will be well received, by America’s already war-weary allies in the Gulf; nor by governments in Europe and Asia who are suffering gruelling cost-of-living crises as a consequence (not to mention the US’ own population); nor by allies in East Asia like South Korea and Taiwan, who are now seeing their security concerns downgraded as materiel is transferred out of their region for little purpose other than to help Trump save face.

A few years back, I worked in a warehouse for a large retailer. It was maybe six months into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. A coworker who knew I was ‘into’ this stuff asked me, “What do you reckon Gregk? China takes Taiwan?” I asked what he meant, and he explained that it was all kicking off, and so this was a good time for China to make moves of their own. 

I explained that if I were China, I wouldn’t be doing anything. I would be simply watching, and taking notes, about how serious the US is about its commitments, how long it can hold out, at what point in a conflict it begins to lose interest, where its emergent weak points are, and so on. 

As more and more conflicts have erupted across the globe, many have remarked on China’s apparent reticence to intervene. But military inaction does not mean that China is doing nothing. On the contrary, they are probably doing a lot of observing, and reporting.

Americans would do well to ask themselves what China is writing down right now. And they would do better to ask the following: Are the notes about Trump, the man, or are they about something much larger?