If you were so inclined, you could draw a parallel between Donald Trump’s efforts, in 2025, to strong arm the Chinese into trade concessions and his attempt, a year later, to force the Iranians into an unconditional surrender.

In both cases, the other side played their trump card (no pun intended), back-footing the administration and ultimately compelling The White House to abandon its maximalist position.

Beijing’s “secret” weapon was China’s near monopoly on rare earths processing. Tehran’s was the IRGC’s capacity to effectively close the world’s most important maritime energy chokepoint.

But here’s the thing: If you have a trump card, you generally don’t want to play it. Because once you do, you raise awareness around the conditions which allowed you to get it in the first place. That, in turn, creates a sense of urgency among your strategic competitors, who’ll move quickly (or as quickly as possible anyway) to strip you of the leverage they now know you have.

Depending on the nature of your trump card, you may be able to play it and retain the associated leverage for a prolonged period, but one way or the other, to play a trump card is to start the clock.

When China played the rare earths card in 2025, the US and its allies got more serious about mitigating the concentration risk associated with China’s dominant position in refining. Now, in 2026, Iran’s neighbors in the Gulf are getting serious about finding ways to circumvent the Strait of Hormuz.

My point here isn’t to relitigate the “who won?” debate around the war. Regular readers know my position on that. For anyone who missed it, I cordially invite you to read “So, Who Won?” at your leisure.

Rather, I want to emphasize on Tuesday, amid reports that a Qatari LNG tanker was hit with a projectile while attempting to exit the Strait near the Omani coast, that to the extent the chokepoint’s an asset for the IRGC, it’s now a wasting asset.

Whatever toll system the Iranians may eventually succeed in setting up or participating in, will not — I repeat, will not — be a material source of revenue for the Guards in perpetuity.

Admittedly, the veracity of that prediction turns almost entirely on the definition of “material.” But I think it’s fair to assess that what’ll count over the long-term isn’t whether the Gulf monarchies (to say nothing of an international community that’s very skeptical of a toll system) countenance the establishment of levies that accrue in part to the Guards, but whether Tehran’s behavior under de facto military rule is quiescent such that they’re left alone to sell their energy and transact in hard currency, unsanctioned and unfettered.

The notion — and this isn’t a straw man; I hear some version of it at least two or three times a week — that the Guards, having “won” the war with Trump, will be able to operate as a non-nuclear pariah state that survives by supplementing illicit oil revenue with yuan- (or, whatever, Bitcoin-) denominated proceeds from a protection racket in the Strait, is laughable.

Geography’s just geography, which is to say it plainly isn’t possible to reroute all energy exports such that they circumvent the Strait on anything like an expeditious timeline. I’m not suggesting that.

What I am suggesting, though, is that forcing Iran to play that particular trump card might’ve been Trump’s smartest “decision” over three months of war. And that’d be fitting: The smartest thing he did was the thing he didn’t mean to do.

Every, single time a vessel passing through that waterway gets hit by a missile or a drone, or harassed by an IRGC gunboat, the incident testifies to the existential imperative of finding other ways to get product out of the Gulf. Logistically challenging? Yes. Obviously. But necessity’s the mother of invention. And sundry royals are infinitely rich.

Bottom line: If the Strait was Iran’s secret weapon, it’ll be less effective going forward. There’s only one tried and true way to ensure regime durability via extortion. It also involves having a “secret weapon,” but unfortunately for the Guards, the world’s not going to let them obtain that particular trump card.

Meanwhile, Hunter Biden’s demonstrating something like Jedi-level mastery of social media snark since becoming a full-time internet troll in May. “I am officially nominating Donald J. Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize,” Biden wrote late last week. “No President in history has ended the same war so many times.”

He was referencing a CNN count of Trump’s claims about having put a definitive stop to the fighting. “Our Dear Leader has ended the war at least 38 times,” Biden went on. “And he is nowhere near finished ending it.”