To War or Not to War?

That was our question. We chose wrong. Again.

I’m generally disgusted that here in the US we almost always frame war in terms of its economic impact. But in this case the price of oil illustrates how America is deceiving itself about the true cost of its decision to choose, yet again, to go to war.

There are two prices of oil right now, and between them is an unprecedented gap. One is the paper price, the Brent futures you hear about on TV, sitting around 100 dollars as I’m writing this. The other is the physical price, what a refinery actually pays for a real barrel on a real tanker. Dated Brent has hit 144 dollars. The spread is the widest it has ever been. Forty dollars. Before the war it was less than a dollar.

The paper price is the market telling us a calming story. The physical is describing reality. When those two come back together, and they always do, it’s paper that moves to meet physical reality. America is experiencing a similar gap. We are telling ourselves a story about our position in the world that is about forty dollars above what’s actually arriving at the dock.

The war is the clearest picture of what we’ve chosen. It’s not about Iran’s nuclear program. It’s a resource war aimed at China, routed through Iran, and the administration’s own advisors have said so on the record. Look at the pattern. Venezuela first. We seized their oil, kidnapped their leaders, routed half a billion dollars through a Qatari bank account. Then Iran. Airstrikes, a blockade, the Strait of Hormuz closed. Then Netanyahu’s pitch to pipeline Gulf oil overland to Europe and away from Asian buyers. Then pressure on Denmark over Greenland. Then Lebanon, where Israel is now openly planning to occupy eight to fifteen percent of the country with our weapons and our political cover, on top of everything we are still arming in Gaza. Then secondary sanctions threats against any bank anywhere that dares touch an Iranian barrel.

The theory is this. Break the world’s energy flows before China’s navy can project force. Keep oil priced in dollars. Strangle Chinese growth before they catch all the way up. It is coherent. That is the problem. The coherence is the indictment. We think we are going to get back to our status as a respected world power through bullying and through being wannabe gangsters, and the strategy is so openly cynical that even the foreign policy establishment is now celebrating it in public as Trump’s best hand against China.

This is not just a Trump problem.

The House has forced four war powers votes and they have all failed, partly because Democrats themselves keep defecting on their own resolutions. Four Democrats voted against the first one in March. And when Hakeem Jeffries and the Democratic leadership actually had a shot to force another vote in late March during a pro forma session, they kept it off the floor. They waited until mid-April, after the troops had been rallied, by which point the war was well underway and the vote was mostly symbolic.

That is a failure of leadership on something as basic as stripping war powers from a madman. Jeffries has not called any of the defecting Democrats out. Not publicly. Not privately as far as we can tell. No pressure, no cost, no consequence.

Remember when Democrats did a sit-in on the House floor over gun violence? Cameras on, refusing to leave, forcing the country to look. That is what resistance would look like. This ain’t that. Both parties see our path to prosperity and relevance through war. That is why the response has been letters and press conferences and votes they knew would fail. Neither party wants to actually close the barn door on executive war-making because both parties want to use it when their turn comes.

And this pattern is older than Iran. In 2011 we went into a sovereign country with drones and jets, killed the leader’s protective guards, and set up his murder by local opposition forces. Call it whatever you want. That’s what happened. What was Gaddafi working on at the time? A pan-African gold-backed currency meant to price African oil in something other than dollars. The project died with him. When the dollar gets challenged, we break the challenger. Both parties have done it. The rules-based order we like to lecture other countries about has a pretty big asterisk on it, and the asterisk reads “except when it touches the dollar.”

The strategy is already backfiring, and everyone who can count can see it. China’s clean tech exports hit 21.9 billion dollars in March of 2026 alone, up 70 percent year over year in a single month. The oil shock we engineered to hurt them solved their solar overproduction problem for them. Iranian oil has been priced in yuan since April of last year. Tankers paying tolls to cross Hormuz are reportedly paying in yuan too. Deutsche Bank is now openly naming this war as a potential catalyst for the erosion of the petrodollar.

Gallup’s global leadership approval poll from April 3 has China at 36 percent and the United States at 31. Widest gap in China’s favor in twenty years. U.S. net approval at negative 15, the worst in the history of the poll. That data was collected in 2025, before the January withdrawal from 66 international organizations, before the Iran war. The real number right now is almost certainly worse. Pew and the European Council on Foreign Relations say the same thing in different words. In most of Europe and Latin America more people now name the United States than China as the greatest threat to their country. ECFR put it cleanest. If there is a race for global popularity, America is currently losing to its Indo-Pacific rival. We are forcing the world to make choices, and we are not going to like the outcome.

We should be forcing ourselves to make choices instead. When we look at China, we are not looking at an enemy. We are looking at a reflection of our former selves, and we do not want to see it.

Sam Walton had a rule. Until you’re number one, you copy number one. He used to get arrested for crawling around competitors’ stores with a tape recorder, because the point of walking into a Kmart wasn’t to find what they were doing wrong. It was to walk out with an idea you didn’t have when you went in.

That’s what China is doing to us. And what they are copying is our playbook, the one that created the largest middle class in the history of the world. Hamiltonian industrial policy. State banks. State-directed investment in strategic industries. Alexander Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures from 1791. The American System. Lincoln’s land grant universities, the transcontinental railroad, the Homestead Act. The Arsenal of Democracy, where FDR forced competing firms to share their intellectual property because winning the war mattered more than winning the quarter. Apollo. DARPA. The NIH. The internet itself. Every single one was public capital, public purpose, public coordination, with private firms executing. We invented it. We ran it for 150 years. China picked it up off the floor where we dropped it in the 1980s, and is running it now.

Their space program is decades younger than ours and they have a space station, they are landing reusable rockets, they are scaling rapidly, and they are sharing their information. They are not competing for every single thing. They are working in unison to do better. The systems they are using are our own. We are being beaten by ourselves.

And we didn’t just invent the playbook. We invented the tempo. The Arsenal of Democracy built a wartime industrial economy from scratch in about four years. Ford was rolling a B-24 off the line at Willow Run every hour by 1944. Apollo went from Kennedy’s speech to a boot on the Moon in eight years. Rural electrification, the interstate system, the Manhattan Project. None of it took generations. China gets the tempo part too. They built the largest high-speed rail network in the world in about fifteen years from zero. EVs from nobody to global dominance in a decade. Solar in under a decade. Shipbuilding, drones, batteries, the whole deck, faster than we ever went, using our methods, while we tell ourselves a twenty or thirty year timeline is realistic.

When I was a kid we couldn’t compete with China because their labor was too cheap and they didn’t care about pollution. Then we were overregulated and our workers wanted too much. Then it was currency manipulation. Now it’s that they are too far ahead on robotics and we will never catch up. The excuse changes every decade. The underlying move never does. We explain why we can’t, instead of doing the thing.

This is the part that matters most, because it is bigger than this administration. The entire American establishment, both parties, both sets of think tanks, the Pentagon, the corporate class, the press, has quietly agreed that American renewal is a generational project. Twenty years to reshore semiconductors. Ten years for permitting reform. Slow and steady. Patient. Serious. That timeline is a lie. Nothing we have ever actually built in this country got built on it. Generational change isn’t about being pragmatic, it’s about putting off the work. It lets everyone currently in power keep their arrangement running while the country erodes underneath them. It assumes our place on earth is god-given or immutable. It’s neither. And it’s crumbling quickly unless we do something about it.

Which brings me to the thing I actually want to say. This is a choice between destruction and construction. Between valuing death and valuing life. Between taking responsibility for our future and hoping it all works out.

Destruction is what we are doing right now. Destruction is the blockade. Destruction is hobbling the Chinese by working through proxies, cutting off oil, kidnapping Venezuelan leadership, pressuring Denmark over Greenland. Destruction is arming a genocide. Break other people’s things because we have forgotten how to build our own.

Construction is the other path. Construction is Hamilton’s playbook, at speed. Reindustrialize. Repatriate the supply chains we offshored. Pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, steel, rare earths, shipbuilding. Repatriate health care from extractive finance back to something that serves the people paying for it. Rebuild public research. Rebuild the grid. Build rail. Build housing. Do it fast, because fast is the only tempo that has ever actually worked for this country.

Construction is also how you become useful to the world again. China is going to electrify the global south whether we like it or not. We can help build the world into a future like the Jetsons or we can try and bomb it into a future like the Flintstones. If we choose the Flintstones the world may turn their collective backs on us. A rules-based order means following rules, including the ones against wars of aggression and the ones against arming genocides. A democracy means practicing it. You get your respect back by being the thing you claim to be, not by bullying the people who have noticed you aren’t.

And this is where the responsibility piece lands, because I mean the word we. The American people allowed this. Voted for some of it. Looked away from the rest. Trusted that the serious people would handle it while the serious people were handling themselves. There is no version of this that gets fixed by waiting. Not for the other party, not for the next election, not for someone else to show up. We is the job description. It has to be, because hoping it all works out is how we got here.

The world is already choosing. Gallup, Pew, ECFR, they are telling us in every language they have that they have seen enough. The question is whether we will choose too. To war or not to war was our question, and we answered it wrong. The next question is what we build instead. And that one is still open.

Corbin Trent
A Fight Worth Having