Antiwar.com’s Week in Review for August 21st, 2026

Fox News reporter Trey Yingst said he asked the president about the talks between Oman and Iran, and Trump replied, ” If Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the shit out of them.”

Back in May, Trump threatened to “blow up” Oman if the country reached a deal with Iran that would involve joint control with Iran of the Strait of Hormuz, which Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent followed with a threat to “aggressively” target Muscat with sanctions if it was involved in a tolling system for the strait.

Iran has said it reached an understanding with Oman on the Strait of Hormuz, but that it didn’t mean the waterway would be fully opened until the US ends the blockade of Iranian ports and fulfills other commitments it agreed to under the US-Iran Memorandum of Understanding, which officially expired on Monday.

“No one has given the Islamic Republic of Iran a greater opportunity to make a Deal than me. TRAGICALLY, for them, they have failed to take it. Therefore, today, I am announcing the MOST CRUSHING ECONOMIC OPERATION EVER TAKEN AGAINST ANY COUNTRY! This will be Economic Warfare and Isolation on an unprecedented scale,” the president wrote on Truth Social.

“Today, I am also announcing that ANY country that allows its financial institutions, businesses, airports, or government entities to provide any type of lifeline to Iran will itself face TREMENDOUS Economic Consequences. Oil smuggling, swap lines, cash transfers, exchange houses, ship registries, front companies — It all needs to stop NOW. You know who you are. This will be an ECONOMIC D-DAY,” Trump added.

It’s unclear what the potential new sanctions will entail, but going after countries that do business with Iran could mean targeting China, which has the ability to apply countermeasures to the US.

Two apartment buildings share a single parking lot. Management from both Building A and Building B are engaged in negotiations over how the parking lot will be organized, painted, maintained, and paid for.

Across the street is a restaurant. The restaurant’s customers primarily come from Building A, and internal studies have shown that Building B’s tenants overwhelmingly patronize the restaurant’s competition. Therefore, the restaurant is seeking to sway the parking lot negotiations to make it easier for Building A’s tenants to get to their shop, and harder for Building B’s tenants to get to the competitor.

Through back-channel discussions, the restaurant learns that Building A may be conceding to many of Building B’s requests for how the parking lot should be organized. Worried that this will help their competition, the restaurant announces on social media that if Building A doesn’t get their act together and negotiate more aggressively, they will “bomb the sh*t out of them.”

The US president framed the increase in gas prices as necessary to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, though there was no evidence either before the June 2025 war or the current conflict that Tehran was attempting to develop a nuclear bomb.

“So, for you to pay a tiny little bit more for your gasoline, just remember you’re doing it so that a very evil country cannot have a — really, it’s the number one state sponsor of terror in the world — we don’t want them to have a nuclear weapon,” the president said on Friday during a rally on Long Island.

“When you have to pay a little bit more, you’re at $4. It’s okay. I’ll never apologize. I did the right thing … you just have to remember that what we’re doing is a great service for the world. Not only for ourselves, but for the world. And we’re really doing a great job,” he added.

In fact, what began as another furious “shock and awe” military offensive designed to quickly and fatally degrade Iran’s nuclear program, missile forces, leadership, and regional power projection capability has instead produced:

Even more importantly, this misbegotten war has handed Tehran a durable pretext for restricting maritime traffic through and around its territorial waters and the Strait of Hormuz (SOH). That is, with virtually inexhaustible supplies of homemade missiles, drones and other tools of sabotage, Iran has been handed what amounts to a global economic Kill Switch.

Yes, Washington’s naval blockade can reduce Iranian oil exports to a trickle, as shown in the table below. But the inverse is also true. Iran’s residual capacity to inflict damage on ships transiting the SOH, in combination with the resulting soaring insurance premiums, has also reduced non-Iranian export shipments through the SOH to barely 25% of steady state pre-war levels:

Trump’s reason for supposedly, and in unspecified ways, downsizing the annual “Ulchi Freedom Shield” exercise is that South Korea has been insufficiently supportive of his  war against Iran. That doesn’t seem like a very good reason … but there ARE good reasons, and it’s a tiny move in the correct direction of drawing down US military entanglement on the Korean Peninsula.

The history, in brief:

After World War 2, Korea — which had been occupied by the Japanese — was split into two states. In the north, a Soviet/Chinese-backed communist regime under Kim Il Sung held power, while the south  was ruled by a US-backed  fascist regime under Syngman Rhee. Each side wanted to invade, conquer, annex, and absorb the other’s territory, but the US held Rhee back from doing so and Kim beat him to the punch.

The resulting war technically goes on to this very day, although it’s been in a tense state of ceasefire since 1953. More than 35,000 American troops, hundreds of thousands of South Korean, North Korean, Chinese, and Soviet soldiers, and millions of civilians died to reach that stalemate.

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