Guardian of the Strait of Forever

President Trump's Endless Eighties Revival

Donald Trump grew up and started his career in New York City construction and real estate, two industries that are, as we say, organized crime-adjacent. It’s no surprise, then, that he continually reapplies the lessons of small-time Queens grifters to geopolitics—most recently with his announcement that the United States, not the Iranians, will be levying a 20 percent tariff on goods passing through the Strait of Hormuz:

This is, quite literally, a protection racket. Before Trump’s war in February 2026, passage through the Strait was free; the security issues—Iranian aggression—that make U.S. Navy protection for vessels transiting the strait are thus of Trump’s own design. Nice little freedom of the seas you got there; shame if something were to happen to it.

I could go into the fact that freedom of navigation has been a core U.S. foreign policy objective since the 18th century, or that the United States once fought a war with Britain over the issue, or that it has consistently sought to justify its hegemony by reference to providing security of the commons—like the seas. Well, that’s all over; the declaratory policy of the United States is now that taxing seaborne trade is perfectly legal and perfectly cool.

(Donald the dove!)

I could equally point out that the United States has already been playing the role of a security guarantor and has been profiting by that role—there’s a reason why GCC countries invest in U.S. assets, for instance, and U.S. bases in the region are not in the main paid for by American taxpayers. (Indeed, over the past several months, U.S. partners and allies have borne immense costs of a war they asked the White House not to pursue.)

So, of course, it’s a disaster—the sort of unpredictability and ignorance that is dealing self-inflicted injuries on the United States at an accelerating pace.

What’s remarkable to me is that this is not the first time Trump has proposed literally this policy. Back in August 17, 1989, in a speech to a group of travel agents reported by the Tampa Bay Times, Trump proposed exactly this:

The relevant passage is here:

The speech is reportedly a hardliner’s dream. Trump rejected then-President George H.W. Bush’s vision of a “kinder, gentler nation” as a recipe for national disaster. Instead, he urged a tough approach that bypassed traditional paradigms in pursuit of unilateral, neomercantilist goals. Comparing this speech with his second inaugural address reveals a striking degree of continuity and suggests that Trump’s views, although radical, possess, at least, the value of consistency. He prescribed dealing with U.S. trade imbalances with Europe and Japan by implementing huge import duties—tariffs—to force concessions: “First you say to Japan, ‘You come to us. We don’t go to you.’ Then you say, ‘Get your a-- over here or we’re going to drop a 20 percent tax on all your products.’”

The news report lauded Trump’s “acerbic patter of a street-smart Queens native”. And it landed ill with an executive, but well with the security guard.

There are a few interpretive rules that perform well with Trump. Is an action traditionally masculine? Will it play well on television? And, less obvious but no less true, how does it slot into President Trump’s boundless nostalgia for his policy proposals from the 1980s? It’s his fan-fiction; we’re just living in it.

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^[1] Philip D Stern, “Foreign Policy, Courtesy Trump,” St. Petersburg Times, August 17, 1989.