For weeks, Iran has been making ship travel through the Strait of Hormuz nearly impossible. This is a problem because somewhere around 20% of global oil and liquefied natural gas ships through the Strait. Naturally, this caused oil and gas prices to sharply rise, as well as the prices of everything else that is affected by higher gas prices to rise.

During this time, despite President Donald Trump beating his chest about American dominance and Iran's destruction, the United States has looked feeble and unable to do anything about the closure of the Strait short of making massive concessions to Iran. Trump has gone so far as to falsely claim it will not affect the US and whine that other nations should figure it out.

A few weeks ago, unable to wrest control of the Strait from Iran, Trump decided a US blockade of Iranian ports would somehow solve things. That worked as well as many expected. On Monday, the ceasefire between the US and Iran ran into trouble when the nations again attacked each other. In the wake of this, the US announced Monday a new plan called "Project Freedom." Apparently, the US would use military assets like naval ships to facilitate the resumption of shipping traffic through the Strait. How this would work was unclear. Would it function like some sort of WWII convoy? What would the US do if Iran directly attacked its naval ships?

Well, it does not matter. A day later, Project Freedom is no more. This was just hours after US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the US military action against Iran was finished and Project Freedom would be the primary mission now. As seems to be typical for momentous US policy decisions these days, Trump half-ass explained the reversal through a vague social media post.

Of course, Iran is gloating that Trump pulled another TACO (i.e., Trump Always Chickens Out) and backed down.

So what does all of this tell us? Clearly, the people making the decisions for the US do not know what to do to get traffic moving through the Strait without making significant and politically damaging concessions to Iran. Prior to launching this war with Iran, the decision-makers did not know enough about the situation and Iran and/or did not properly plan at all. The decision-makers simply did not seem to think Iran would hold the Strait hostage. The idea that a foreign nation's leadership team would exercise every option at its disposal when faced with an existential threat from a foreign attack somehow caught them off guard.

Trump and the country's credibility is shot. Trump has blustered endlessly about the US's supremacy, Iran's inability to wage war or defend itself, potentially ending Iranian civilization if the Strait was not reopened, that the US is going to get Iran to agree to some favorable agreement, and so on. Yet, the Strait remains essentially closed.

Nations around the world are running out of oil. Gas prices are skyrocketing. Inflation seems poised to run wild. And the best we get is daily dramatic shifts in vague plans on how to solve this. Trump and his team spent a day repeatedly touting a massive new operation to facilitate traffic through the Strait, just to completely abandon the plan the next day on the basis that the two nations might reach an agreement? Clearly, the US has little leverage at this point, or the Strait would be open, or at least Trump would have a clearly discernible plan for getting it reopened that he was sticking to.

As usual, in attacking Iran, Trump seems to have persuaded himself that some extreme action he was predisposed to take was the correct one, and disregarded or avoided all rational advice to the contrary. Now, he is left scrambling to find a way to keep the world economy from tumbling off of a cliff without looking like a weak, ignorant moron by giving a supposedly defeated Iran a better set of circumstances than it had before the war began.