COMMENTARY: By Lim Tean
Two American service members are dead. Another is missing. Four more were medically evacuated after Iranian ballistic missiles and drones struck a US base in Jordan on Friday night.
The American death toll in this war now stands at 16, with more than 430 wounded.
And none of it needed to happen.
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The off-ramp Trump threw away
Five weeks ago, Donald Trump had in his hands something no American president has held since 1979: a signed memorandum of understanding with the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The Islamabad Memorandum, mediated by Pakistan, gave him everything he claimed to want — a cessation of hostilities, the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, and a 60-day window to negotiate a comprehensive settlement.
“Ships of the World, start your engines,” he crowed on social media. “Let the oil flow!”
President Trump:
The Deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran is now complete. Congratulations to all! I hereby fully authorize the toll free opening of the Strait of Hormuz, and, simultaneously herewith, authorize the immediate removal of the United States Naval blockade. Ships… pic.twitter.com/hhZnbVm5tg
— World Source News (@Worldsource24) June 14, 2026
He could have walked away a peacemaker. He could have claimed — with some justification — that he had achieved his military objectives and brought Iran to the table. History hands few leaders such a clean exit from a war of their own making.
Instead, the criticisms got to him. The commentators who called the MOU a “capitulation”. The hawks who said he had let Tehran off the hook. The whispers that he had blinked.
A more disciplined statesman would have ignored the noise and banked the win. Trump could not. His ego demanded vindication, and so — seizing on alleged violations that both sides traded in equal measure — he declared the ceasefire “over” and unleashed eight consecutive days of bombardment on Iran.
Yesterday, Tehran formally suspended its commitments under the interim deal. The statement read out on Iranian state television called Trump’s signature “worthless and invalid.” Asked about it, Trump said he “couldn’t care less”.
He should care. Because the memorandum was the only off-ramp he had. And he has just burned it.
Napolean, Hitler, and the fatal arithmetic of ego
I have written before about what happens when leaders substitute ego for strategy. Napoleon crossed the Niemen in 1812, not because Russia threatened France, but because his pride could not tolerate a Tsar who defied the Continental System.
Six months later, the Grande Armée — the finest fighting force in Europe — had been reduced to a frozen remnant staggering back across the Berezina.
Hitler launched the Ardennes offensive in December 1944 against the unanimous advice of his generals, gambling his last armoured reserves on a fantasy of splitting the Allies. Within a month, the Wehrmacht had lost the men and machines it needed to defend Germany itself.
The pattern is always the same. The leader mistakes an adversary’s restraint for weakness. He confuses the opening phase of a war with its outcome. And he doubles down at precisely the moment when a wiser man would consolidate and withdraw.
Trump is now running the same script. After eight days of renewed bombardment, Iran has not capitulated. It has hit back — hard. Four separate Iranian missile attacks struck US bases in Jordan in the past week alone, wounding dozens and destroying helicopters, before Friday’s strike killed two soldiers.
Iranian drones and missiles have forced air defences into action across Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and Jordan simultaneously. This is not a defeated adversary. This is a state executing precisely the forward-defence doctrine it has spent 40 years building.
The arithmetic of attrition
Remember what happened in the first phase of this war. America’s stockpiles of interceptors and precision munitions were drawn down at a rate that alarmed the Pentagon’s own planners. Defending fixed bases against waves of cheap drones and ballistic missiles is the most expensive proposition in modern warfare: you exchange million-dollar interceptors for hundred-thousand-dollar projectiles, night after night.
Iran manufactures its weapons at home. America must ship its own across two oceans — through waters Iran is actively contesting.
The longer this drags on, the worse that arithmetic becomes. And it will drag on, because Iran’s strategy does not require it to defeat the United States. It requires only that it endure — bleeding American forces, closing the Strait of Hormuz to shipping, and letting war-risk premiums and blockade economics do the rest.
As someone who spent three decades in marine insurance and war risk, I can tell you: the market is already pricing what the White House will not admit. A fifth of the world’s seaborne crude ran through Hormuz. It is not flowing now.
The second checkpoint: Bab al-Mander
And now Tehran has placed its next card on the table. Reuters reports that Iran has instructed the Houthis to close the Bab al-Mandeb Strait — the gateway between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden — if Trump follows through on his threat to strike Iran’s power grid.
This is not posturing. Houthi missiles and drones are already deployed near the strait, awaiting an order that Revolutionary Guard representatives inside Yemen will control. The IRGC has stated its doctrine in a single sentence: the region’s energy exports will be “either for everyone or for no one”.
Understand what this means. With Hormuz shut, the Red Sea became the world’s escape valve — the Saudis have been rerouting crude across their east-west pipeline to Yanbu, and roughly seven percent of global oil output squeezed through the Bab al-Mandeb last month, alongside some 12 percent of all global trade bound for the Suez Canal. Close that strait, and both of the Middle East’s export arteries are severed simultaneously. A quarter of the world’s energy supply — blocked at both ends.
There is no third route. There is no pipeline capacity that can absorb it. Ali Akbar Velayati put it plainly: the Resistance has the capability to lock both waterways.
The global economy is already careening towards crisis on the closure of one chokepoint. The closure of two is not a crisis. It is a convulsion — fuel rationing, freight rates at wartime levels, insurance markets in seizure, inflation surging through every economy on earth. And the trigger for it now sits not in Washington but in Sanaa, in the hands of a militia that answers to Tehran.
Trump’s own escalation has handed Iran a weapon aimed at the wallet of every household in the Western world.
No way out
Here is the difference between this round and the last. In June, Pakistan could mediate because both sides retained something to trade. Today, Iran has declared Trump’s signature “worthless”. What Iranian leader can now sign a document bearing that signature and survive politically? What mediator can broker a deal when one party has publicly established that the other’s word means nothing?
Iran’s Supreme Leader says US breaches show Trump’s signature is ‘worthless’ https://t.co/U1boWrA4ct https://t.co/U1boWrA4ct
— Reuters (@Reuters) July 18, 2026
Trump has manoeuvred himself into the one position a great power must never occupy: a war he cannot win, cannot afford, and can no longer end.
Napoleon at least had Moscow to march towards. Trump is bombing a country of 90 million people with no defined objective beyond his own vindication, while his soldiers die defending bases that exist only to sustain the war that endangers them.
Sixteen Americans are dead. More will follow.
And every one of them is the price of a president who was handed peace and could not bear to keep it.
Lim Tean is a Singaporean lawyer, politician and commentator. He is the founder of the political party People’s Voice and a co-founder of the political alliance People’s Alliance for Reform. He also hosts Lim’s Substack.
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
APR editor | Radio Free (2026-07-19T13:20:00+00:00) Two US soldiers dead in Jordan – Trump’s ego has restarted a war he cannot win. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2026/07/19/two-us-soldiers-dead-in-jordan-trumps-ego-has-restarted-a-war-he-cannot-win/
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