Trump's 'Project Freedom' was a plan for merchant ships to bum rush the Strait. How's that working out?

Welcome back to our semi-regular feature: How Screwed Are We, the series that tries to answer questions like "How high can gas prices go?", "Are we heading into a global recession?", and "Can anyone explain to me why we are allowing one dementia-addled hallucinating blowhard to destroy every advantage the United States has gained for itself in the world, over the course of many decades, in an orgy of destruction that will make life considerably worse for us, our children, and our grandchildren long after this one idiot finally takes the express elevator ride to Hell?"

We don't have a lot to go on, information-wise, so as usual our best short-form answers are "nobody knows," "definitely yes," and "it remains one of life's great mysteries."

The big news this weekend is that Donald Trump declared the Iran Not Really A War to be over. Yay! Good news! There was a catch to it, however, in that the end of the not-a-war did not lead to any reduction of troops, any change in the U.S. naval blockade of Iranian-linked ships, any change in Iran's control of the rest of the traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, or in fact any change at all.

No, the supposed end of the Iran Not War was a paperwork issue: Facing the 60-day deadline on military operations imposed by the War Powers Resolution, the White House delivered a note to Congress asserting that since Trump had declared a "ceasefire," the 60-day counter doesn't count.

This is of course deeply stupid, to use the legal jargon for such a move. Nobody seriously thinks that a presidential declaration of we are on a break dissolves the 60-day limit to presidential military "excursions" not authorized by Congress, and especially not when acts of war (the forceful blockade of Iran-bound merchant traffic) are continuing on with no changes whatsoever.

But it doesn't actually matter that the Iran War is now officially doubly-illegal, with the passing of the 60-day deadline. The point of the letter was simply to provide an official Assertion of Some Bullshit that the most gleefully corrupt Congress the nation has ever had could point to as their own reason for allowing the illegality to continue. It didn't have to make sense. The White House lawyers could have written "By the power of Grimace, demigod of McDonalds, we declare the passage of time null and void" and House Speaker Mike Johnson would still have announced that the administration had done its duty and Congress could therefore remain inert and gelatin-like.

The details of congressional approval having been neatly ignored yet again, by Sunday Trump had turned his attention to the more immediately pressing crisis: With Hormuz traffic still almost completely non-existent, the world oil crisis (and fertilizer crisis, and industrial chemical crisis, and helium crisis) has now gone from theoretical to physical. Entire nations are running out of jet fuel. Gas prices are soaring. The White House had so far been muddling by with abstract assurances that everything will be fine—like clockwork, Trump pipes up with a new announcement of how everything has gotten even finer every Friday before markets close, goosing the market for a few hours before some new bad news comes down and reimposes reality.

That worked when oil shortages were, again, theoretical. Now that they're becoming all too real it's a harder sell, so by Sunday we got this:

If your reaction is "I ain't reading all that," good news: You don't have to. It's mostly gibberish. In theory it's Trump's announcement of a nebulous something called "Project Freedom" would was to begin this Monday morning and would entail, um, f--k if we know. Nobody knows. It's already started, and still nobody knows. It doesn't appear to be a promise to escort ships out of the Gulf: On the contrary, it appears that it is a unilateral declaration from Trump that ships stuck in the Gulf should all now Naruto-run through the Strait of Hormuz without escorts, and that Iran should let them because this is a "Humanitarian gesture," which is possibly the only phrase Donald Trump has encountered in his life less often than "groceries," and that if any of those merchant ships get fired on by Iran the United States Navy will consider itself super, super cross.

But we won't do anything, because the war is over! Except we might, because now that the 60 day limit has expired this counts as a whole new military action, right?

You may note, if you did subject yourself to reading Donald's extended rant above, that nothing about this plan frees up maritime shipping in the Persian Gulf. This is strictly a one-time deal: "Project Freedom" is a "process" to allow ships currently in the Gulf to escape, but it's a one-time offer. They won't be able to come back. It's not even terribly likely that the freed ships will find cargo elsewhere, since those other routes already have ships servicing them and the global economy is contracting at a rather brisk pace thanks to escalating fuel prices, which typically results in a sharp contraction of maritime trade.

But now you're up to date. The Monday morning plan was, according to Trump, is for ships to start sailing through the Strait of Hormuz on his say so, no matter what Iran has to say about it, and if crews get burned to death by airborne hellfire America will have its assistant's assistant's third assistant send their families a bouquet or a ham or something.

Fast forward to this morning, and here's how that's working out:

In a call with reporters just now, Adm. Brad Cooper of CENTCOM says Iran has opened fire on U.S. warships and commercial vessels today, but declines to say whether the ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran is over. U.S. forces returned fire and destroyed some Iranian small boats.

From CNN:

A tanker has reported being hit by projectiles seven nautical miles north of Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO) said Monday.

All crew were safe, and “no environmental impact” was reported, the UKMTO said. The origin of the projectiles is not known.

The UKMTO also said a cargo vessel reported a fire in its engine room while 36 nautical miles north of Dubai, with the cause of the fire unknown. All crew were “safe and accounted for,” it said.

In a separate report, UKMTO said it had received third-party information that a vessel was on fire 14 nautical miles west of Mina Saqr, also in the UAE, and asked nearby ships to keep a safe distance. The cause of that fire has not been verified, UKMTO said.

Iran has also fired numerous missiles at the United Arab Emirates, one of the nations that has been pushing the U.S. to go even further in its attacks; most have been intercepted, but at least one refinery appears to have been hit.

Trump also now claims the U.S. has "shot down," sigh, "seven small Boats" from Iran that may have fired on ships moving through the strait.

So the war is over, except that both sides are exchanging fire today. And shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz is free to move again—but only if each ship and their insurance company is willing to risk being fired upon for the sake of Trump's "what if you guys all rush through at once" strategic plan.

Maritime shippers are not, as it turns out, fans of the this plan, so while there's been attacks on isolated ships, most Gulf traffic remains parked. It doesn't appear the good people of the maritime insurance world are as gullible as Wall Street traders have proven to be.

What this means for the "ceasefire" is another unknown. Remember that the "ceasefire" itself happened solely because Donald Trump has been seeking to extricate himself from the war he himself initiated; he announced it unilaterally in the hope that Iran would relinquish their blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, thus saving oil markets and allowing him to wander off to storm Cuba or the like.

The new even more hardline Iranian government, however, appears to have come to the conclusion that the U.S. and Israel will simply keep bombing them forever, unless such intense economic pain can be inflicted that the rest of the world demands the two nations agree to a more encompassing long-term peace agreement. It is therefore in Iranian interests to keep the strait closed until they extract such concessions.

So then, let's get you all caught up.

Trump declared his original war "terminated" because wars don't count when you're on break.
Trump announced Project Everybody Bum Rush The Strait, a plan in which merchant fleets were supposed to brave Iranian fire while the U.S. Navy maybe did something about it or maybe didn't.
Iran responded with new attacks against both ships and ports as a forceful message to the U.S. and Gulf allies that no, just because Trump said a thing does not make it so.
There are now rumors of perhaps-"imminent" retaliatory strikes by Israel and the U.S., but in any event the "ceasefire" does not appear to still be a ceasefire.
It is anyone's guess what Congress, made up of garbage-brained fascists and crooks, will think about all of this—do you think they'll buy a new line from Trump insisting that the old not-war is over, and this counts as a brand new not-war?
Gas prices? Oh, you ain't seen nothing yet. $6 as national average now seems plausible; since there's nobody even slightly inclined to rein Trump in here, you might add another $2 on top of that too.
We're definitely entering a recession, the only question is how severe it will be. Much of that may depend on how quickly the world can wean itself off 20% of their original oil needs.
Yeah, I don't know what it would take for Congress to take control and call off Trump's little misadventure either. At this point I think the man could shout "I am the antichrist! The world will bow to the forces of Hell!" and he'd still get a standing ovation from Republican goons.

Stay tuned! Remember: no matter how bad this crisis is becoming, the one certainty in all of this is that Donald Trump will always, always find a way to make it much worse.