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Hormuz Meets the Ghosts of Douhet and Ho Chi Minh

Bad policy comes back to bite you.

My outline:

Transcript of the video:

Negotiations are among my favorite examples of constraints in action. Right now we have a live negotiation in the Straits of Hormuz, and it's interesting to figure out who actually holds the cards in this negotiation.

I'd like to go back and remember some figures out of history that are actually surprisingly relevant here. One of them is an Italian general named Giulio Duhet. Then there's Ho Chi Minh from Vietnam, Mohammed Mossadegh, Robert McNamara, and Mohammad Ali. What do all of them all of them have in common?

Let's let's go first to Duhet, who wrote a book in 1921 when bombers first showed up. The first Military planes were fighters, then when they started dropping grenades and bombs, then they started attaching the bombs, and all of a sudden they started having large aircraft that could actually carry payloads and dropping bombs.

Duhet saw this and realized, first of all, that a big 3D airspace is easy to penetrate. It's almost impossible to protect. So he said the air forces will always get through. Then he said air superiority, having a better air force that owns the space is going to be key, and probably you need a separate air force. Check, check. Those are good ideas.

And then he said Air forces and strategic bombing are going to eliminate war. We're not going to need wars anymore because we're going to be able to bomb people and they will rise up and overthrow their governments. And guess what? He was really wrong about this one.

Problem is, the other things all stuck, but this one stuck too. And over and over and over again. We have gone and bombed people thinking that they would rise up. In the Vietnam War, the U. S. dropped 7. 5 million tons of ordinance on Vietnam (and Laos and Cambodia) during the course of the Vietnam War. That is over 3x all of the bombs dropped in World War II by all parties, which was 2. 1 million tons. That's crazy. That's crazy.

But did the North Vietnamese people at the time rise up and say, we give up, we're gonna overthrow Ho Chi Minh? No, they they actually huddled together and became more resilient and played Rope a Dope, which is a reason I'm mentioning Ali: Muhammad Ali. And I'll get back to Rope a Dope in a second.

So the people don't rise. This in fact is called the Duhat Myth, and it is evergreen because when Trump decides to take uh Bibi Netanyahu's advice and go ahead and join forces and try to bomb the hell out of Iran and knock out all their facilities and so forth. He's counting on this effect that never materializes. He ought to know better, his military ought to know better, apparently they don't.

We also tried to demoralize the Japanese people during World War II. You may remember that we firebombed some 50 plus cities to more than 70% destruction, some cities to 90-95% of all buildings destroyed. And Robert McNamara helped Curtis LeMay map those raids. And uh in the documentary The Fog of War uh before he died. McNamara said, hey, you know, LeMay said, if we had lost World War II, we probably would have been put in jail for war crimes. And and I agree, said he.

So McNamara knew that that bombing the population was actually a war crime, and Japan didn't rise up and give up because we firebombed all their cities. They huddled down and and said, boy, these people are evil from somewhere else. What does appear to work is a Rope a Dope strategy.

Rope a Dope was the name that Muhammad Ali gave training himself to take blows. He would just hunch against the ropes and let Frasier and others knock themselves silly to the point where they had exhausted most of their muscles. Then he would come back in and win fights because he was not as young as he once was, so he could take a beating.

Guess what Vietnam did? Vietnam figured out they could take a beating and that's what they did. They they hunkered down and thought, well, we can outlast the Americans. And they had to. They had almost no other assets to work with.

A beautiful negotiation story that's an example of this. It's one of my favorite negotiation stories anywhere. In 1973, after Operation Linebacker, which was our second major monster bombing campaign against Vietnam, peace negotiations started in Paris. Delegations showed up and the US team went and checked into their hotel. The North Vietnamese delegation rented a house, like a six-bedroom house.

They then occupied the house, and famously for the next five months or so the negotiations were about the size and shape of the negotiating table, and who was going to get to sit where. The Vietnamese knew they could take the punches, they could take as long as they wanted, because they were watching American media and how America was melting on the streets because of the unfairness of the Vietnam War, the injustices that that were just clear in the in the Vietnam War. So it's it's one of my favorite Rope a Dope stories, anywhere.

You can also say that Ukraine is doing this with Russia, except Ukraine is also excelling in drone warfare and a series of other things that mean that they have become pretty much stronger than Russia. Russia just has more resources and more people, so it can absorb more damage. But I don't think Russia is playing a Rope a Dope strategy. Russia is rapidly running out of resources.

One of the problems with Hormuz is that it's a choke point. You'd think it's an obvious choke point, but apparently that didn't sort of rise to consciousness for Trump and his advisors. It's similar to the Latin American debt crisis way back in the seventies or eighties, where a whole bunch of banks had made a lot of loans into Latin America. They had gone in and made business loans, small business loans, big business loans, retail loans, other loans, which they thought was a balanced and healthy portfolio of loans into South America — until the countries weren't able to repay. Until the countries needed to constrain their foreign exchange losses, and they they basically restricted foreign exchange, turning all those loans into a couple really big loans that were defaulting. And all of a sudden the banks were in trouble. Everybody was in trouble.

Those were unexpected choke points. Anybody who is looking at country risk and has read Perkins' book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man and has realized how much debt American businesses were piling on Latin American countries might have seen that coming, but there's all kinds of dynamics there that are that are really kind of crazy.

So in Hormuz, modern warfare makes protecting the Straits of Hormuz incredibly difficult. Between mines in the ocean, but also drones and missiles and all kinds of craft that are hard to find and stop and that are easy to produce, inexpensive to produce in very large numbers. That's just a mess. Unless you have somebody's cooperation on the other side, unless Iran decides to cooperate or has a regime change and the new regime is friendly, that's going to be very hard.

And unfortunately, the economic effects of shutting down Hormuz are enormous. 20% of the world's oil travels through there at any one time, 50% of the world's petroleum heading toward things like fertilizer products and so forth. The food system is being dented and damaged. I'm no fan of putting petroleum products on on food for pesticides and fertilizers, but we do it a lot. And damaging that supply chain is going to hurt us down the road even more than it already has.

Then finally, a lot of these wars ware completely avoidable. The situation in Iran is avoidable. The situation in the Vietnam War was completely avoidable. In fact, Ho Chi Minh, the very famous leader of North Vietnam, who died in 69, he approached Woodrow Wilson at the end of World War I sending a letter saying, hey, President Wilson, I have here a draft constitution for Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Please help me get rid of our French occupiers. Well, the French were our allies, so we didn't even reply to Ho Chi Minh. Guess what? End of World War II, Ho Chi Minh writes Truman roughly the same thing.

I was in Ho Chi Minh City once and went to the Museum of the American War and found under glass a document that I think is the Constitution that Ho Chi Minh was working on. Truman did not like Ho Chi Minh. FDR was a Ho Chi Minh fan, except FDR died just before the war ended. So we he writes Truman, Truman doesn't reply. There's a whole bunch of other things like that.

In the Vietnam War, instead what happens is the US comes in and tells the French, hey, hold my beer, we'll take your place. We tap in and get our asses kicked. Despite our best efforts and our most expensive technology and all the military and all the things we know happened in the Vietnam War. So it was unnecessary to fight.

Then the CIA overthrew Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 in Operation Ajax. He had been elected by popular vote in Iran. The sin he committed against us, I guess, was that he nationalized the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which is the precursor to British Petroleum or BP. But he thought that the oil assets in Iran maybe ought to belong to Iranians. We didn't think so, so we overthrew him. We've done this in lots of different places. We were cozy with the British at this point, so we did it sort of with them and for them. But as you know, From OPEC later and a whole bunch of other ventures that we have plenty of oil companies ourselves.

So we overthrew the democratically elected Mossadegh and we put in his place the Shah of Iran. It was the Iranian revolution in 79 that overthrew the Shah and put in the incredibly conservative and brutal regime that we're trying to topple right now, that has caused endless problems.

By the way, small footnote: Our needless taking out of Iraq back in the day and not managing to stabilize it as a functional democracy, took away Iran's biggest opponent in the region and basically freed Iran's resources up. Iran and Iraq were hammering at each other for years. I mean brutal, brutal fighting. We helped basically Iran bubble to the surface because we took away their biggest rival.

Maybe the last point I want to make here is that US foreign policy is remarkably stupid remarkably often. We do very dumb things and then we're amnesic about them. We like forget that they happened or or we're uncomfortable with going back and looking at history.

There's been a huge backlash against apologizing for things that we did to Native Americans, to Black Americans to other people. "Oh no, no, we shouldn't do that." Really, when you ignore history, when you don't try to process it, it always comes back and bites you in the ass. And it seems like it's been doing that over and over and over. We don't get a lot wiser.

Right now, the Straits of Hormuz are still closed, despite attempts at negotiation, despite bombing runs, despite who knows what else is going on back there. And I don't hold a lot of hope because from the lessons of the Vietnamese delegation in the Paris Peace Accords, Iran can sit and wait, and the waiting will hurt them. But it's gonna hurt everybody else a whole lot more. A whole lot more. And that's where we are right now.

Fact-checking myself (for after you’ve watched the video):

Ho Chi Minh didn’t write Wilson directly after World War I, but rather presented a petition to the peace negotiations at Versailles. Still, his message didn’t get through.

The 7.5mT of ordnance dropped wasn’t all on Vietnam, but also on Laos and Cambodia, in total an area the size of Texas.

The “battle of the tables” happened in 1968-1969 during the Johnson Administration, after the Tet Offensive. Kissinger wasn’t yet in charge. Here’s a great post about it all.

Douhet didn’t write that strategic bombing would end wars, but rather shorten them.

There are also two arguable exceptions that might prove Douhet’s thesis: NATO’s bombing of Kosovo and the US’s dropping atomic weapons on Japan. In both cases, regimes toppled after intense aerial bombing. But in both cases, it wasn’t because the population rose up to overthrow them, which is Douhet’s claim. So I’ll stand on the myth 🤣

And my closing is a bit of an offhand rant about the US’s repeated foreign policy blunders, rather than a restatement of what went wrong here, and why we keep repeating those particular mistakes. I could have landed this better.

This article is cross-posted on Substack here, and LinkedIn here. It's also here in my Brain.

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