Trump Promised the Iran War Would Cost America Nothing. It Might Cost It Everything.

By Nadege Bizimungu

Four ceasefires have collapsed in five months. That’s not a failure to reach peace, it’s a war being kept alive because it enriches a small number of people, while it quietly costs America the global power it went to war to protect.

In February, standing before cameras, Trump made Americans a promise. The war against Iran would cost them nothing, he said, because America is “the largest oil producer in the world, by far” So when oil prices rise, “we make a lot of money.”

Six months later, at least some parts of that promise are no longer adding up. America keeps an emergency oil stockpile buried in salt caverns along the Texas and Louisiana coast the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, built after the 1970s oil shocks so no president would get caught without options. It has now fallen to its lowest level since 1983. The Pentagon, meanwhile, has fired off close to half its supply of Tomahawks, the cruise missiles the U.S. military uses to strike targets from hundreds of miles away without risking a pilot, and roughly 80 percent of its total stockpile of THAAD interceptor missiles. A leaked Pentagon memo shows a senior defense official giving weapons manufacturers three weeks to submit plans for surging production, because what’s left in storage might not be enough. But experts say some of it could take three to four years to rebuild.

So far, this war has seen four attempts to end it, and four collapses, in five months. In April, Pakistan brokered a two-week ceasefire meant to buy time for talks in Islamabad, but it only held for eleven days. In June, American and Iranian negotiators went further and signed a fourteen-point deal sanctions would lift, Israeli attacks in Lebanon would stop, the Strait of Hormuz would reopen. Israel bombed Lebanon that same day. Iran called it a violation and walked, and within weeks the U.S. was bombing Iran for thirteen straight nights, a streak that only stopped when Washington reportedly started running low on interceptors. In response, Iran shut down the Strait of Hormuz again, the waterway that around a fifth of the world’s oil passes through.

if nothing is actually being won here, why does the war keep getting close to ending without ever actually ending?

These negotiations are not simply failing because the two sides can’t reach a deal. They are being allowed to drag on in a way that continues to benefit a specific strata of society, while ordinary people are left to absorb the human and economic cost of a war that will end up costing America the same hegemony it went to war to protect.

In a recent report by Drop Site News, Iranian officials say Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, and Steve Witkoff, his envoy to the peace talks, made close to $9 billion trading oil futures with knowledge of where the war was headed before the public did. One trade, worth $800 million, landed minutes before Trump announced a pause in the fighting. Another, worth $960 million, landed just before a ceasefire. Most recently, Trump Media launched a $100,000-a-month service called Truth API, which gives Wall Street trading firms early access milliseconds, in some cases to Trump’s posts on Truth Social before the public sees them, including posts about tariffs, foreign policy and military action. More than ten firms have reportedly signed up. An NYU Stern economist told Fortune bluntly, that “this is insider trading by definition.”

But what is certainly clear is that Trump’s own net worth has grown by more than a billion dollars since the war began. His family has taken in roughly $1.4 billion from crypto ventures over the same six months. His son, Donald Trump Jr., sits on the board of Polymarket, a betting app where users reportedly guessed the exact hour the war would start and profited from it, and holds a paid stake in a second betting company, Kalshi, which just announced it will let people bet on whether the government approves new drugs. None of that requires the insider-trading accusation to be true. It only requires noticing that a war costing the country dearly has made the president’s own family considerably richer.

There is a name for this pattern, and the journalist who has spent most of his career laying it out in forensic detail is Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times war correspondent who now publishes independently on Substack. In a recent essay, he compares this war to Trump’s failed Atlantic City casino, the Taj Mahal, which opened in 1990 on debt no analyst thought could ever be repaid, and went bankrupt five times. Trump, by his own account, walked away having collected millions in salary and fees, while the people who lent him money lost more than $1.5 billion. His argument is that Trump runs a country the same way he ran that casino: extract what you can while it’s still standing, and let everyone else absorb the wreckage. “He is harvesting and extorting the organizations he oversees for personal profit,” Hedges writes, “while the rest of us are left bereft amid the ruins.”

But there are winners and losers in Iran too, even though that looks different. For starters, ordinary Iranians have paid for this in human life, with Iran’s Health Ministry putting the toll at 3,468 killed since the war began, but independent estimates put the broader death toll at more than 7,000 or higher. On top of that, the country is living through inflation near 90 percent and a currency that’s lost 60 percent of its value, which is mostly due to sanctions that have targeted Iran for nearly half a century, since Washington first imposed them after the 1979 hostage crisis. But the Revolutionary Guard, the branch of Iran’s military that also runs large parts of its economy, is a different story. It’s been documented smuggling oil worth an estimated $12 to $25 billion a year past those same sanctions. And in July, Reuters traced a separate $4 billion pipeline moving through an unlicensed Dubai crypto exchange linked to Iran’s central bank and to Revolutionary Guard wallets — built partly on an illegal gambling network of more than 2,000 websites.

It’s also why Tehran arguably has little reason to rush toward peace. Every extra week the war drags on is a week closer to a new, permanent source of income: transit fees on tankers passing through the Strait, which could eventually bring in close to $100 billion a year. Iran’s parliament is reportedly moving to lock that arrangement in for good, even after the fighting stops.

But the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, Iran’s biggest source of leverage, is already reshaping the region in ways that may not be reversible for years to come. Saudi Arabia recorded zero oil exports through its main shipping route this year, the first time that has happened in the kingdom’s modern history. In response, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan recently signed the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement, a pact declaring that an attack on any one of them is an attack on all three. Washington isn’t mentioned in it. Analysts at Chatham House, a London-based foreign policy think tank, say China stands to benefit no matter how this war ends, simply because Gulf governments no longer trust an American security guarantee the way they used to.

That’s the part worth sitting with, especially if you’re reading this from outside the United States. This was never simply a story about Iran losing or Trump winning. It’s a story about something much bigger cracking: the system America built after World War II that has run the global economy for almost eighty years. Under that system, the U.S. dollar became the currency the whole world trades and saves in. The U.S. Navy controlled the world’s major oil routes, including the Strait of Hormuz, giving Washington leverage over who could move oil and when. And in 1945, the U.S. struck a deal with Saudi Arabia that locked in oil being bought and sold in dollars, everywhere, ever since. That’s the arrangement quietly being drained right now, not by Iran, but by the very people in Washington who are supposed to be holding it up. Whether or not this shifting balance of power is good for anyone, it’s ordinary people around the world who are paying the price, in higher gas and food prices and the threat of broader economic fallout. Empires rarely collapse all at once. They’re weakened gradually, through decisions that protect short-term interests while leaving ordinary people to absorb the consequences. And we are only beginning to see the long term ones emerge.