What did Donald Trump do today?

He panicked about the single most obvious consequence of starting a war with Iran.

Today, with oil prices already spiking on the threat of disrupted shipments from the Middle East, Trump posted this to his private microblogging site:

Effective IMMEDIATELY, I have ordered the United States Development Finance Corporation (DFC) to provide, at a very reasonable price, political risk insurance and guarantees for the Financial Security of ALL Maritime Trade, especially Energy, traveling through the Gulf. This will be available to all Shipping Lines. If necessary, the United States Navy will begin escorting tankers through the Strait of Hormuz, as soon as possible. No matter what, the United States will ensure the FREE FLOW of ENERGY to the WORLD. The United States' ECONOMIC and MILITARY MIGHT is the GREATEST ON EARTH - More actions to come. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP 

The reason that Trump is belatedly reacting this way is that about 20% of the entire world's oil supply is shipped through the Strait of Hormuz, and Iran is more than capable of closing it to shipping by targeting tankers with relatively small missiles that Iran has in abundance.

 

Whether Trump's supposed promises of cheap insurance or naval escorts will convince anyone to try to bring slow tankers through the Strait won't be known until Iran actually tries to close it. (Transit through the Strait has already effectively stopped, for the moment.) Regardless, there are obvious problems with Trump's guarantee plan. "Reasonable" insurance still costs money, and a tanker that is damaged or destroyed is still a devastating expense to shippers, even if they're eventually made whole. Naval escorts are effective against naval threats, but much less so against land-based missile attacks, which can be launched from almost anywhere, and there are far more oil tankers than there are escorts. 

Trump is personally financially beholden to several of the monarchical oil states that ship through the Strait of Hormuz, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. 

In other words, Trump is proposing to gamble taxpayer money and the lives of American servicemembers to offset some of the risks faced by oil companies due to a conflict he started, in the hopes of bringing oil prices down from shock levels to something merely uncomfortable, and to prevent damage to the economies of petrostates who have paid hundreds of millions or billions of dollars for his attention. 

Even as Trump scrambles to move oil out of the Persian Gulf, there's another bottleneck developing: hundreds of thousands of Americans stranded in countries that the United States is now saying are too dangerous to remain in. Worse, there are only a trickle of commercial flights available, because air routes have been shut down due to the threat of attacks. Normally, emergency evacuations of civilians would be coordinated by the State Department via charter flights and military aircraft, but no such plans are evident, and Americans are being told to fend for themselves. 

Trump tried to explain this away today, too, claiming that the reason his administration didn't make plans in advance for such an obvious necessity was that "it happened very quickly." Trump was insisting just yesterday that the attacks took place at the moment of his choosing.

Why does this matter?

• American foreign policy, military deployments, and energy policy should be dictated by Americans' needs, not the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. 

• None of this would happen if the Trump administration had even the basic concepts of a plan beyond hoping that Iran's government would simply collapse.