In the new asymmetric world of threatened global economic suicide, President Donald Trump has stripped the terrorists of a terrifying weapon in their toolbox: the threat that the collateral damage of their own and the world's economists' overreaction to the use of military force might sink economies globally.
In our incestuously interconnected economies, the ayatollahs and others have been able to threaten the world with the closing the Straits of Hormuz — that shaving off a few tenths of a point in economic growth would bring disastrous political consequences in our evenly balanced partisan alliances and calculations.
But now a political leader has summoned the courage to defy the threat and prove it to be hollow. By standing up, Trump has, in effect, told a timid world, "Bring it on and make my day!"
More than any strategic advantage that will come from calling Iran's bluff, is the tactical fact that it can no longer threaten global economic suicide.
Just as MAD — Mutually Assured Destruction — held global insanity in check during the Cold War, so mutually Assured Economic Destruction has threatened us since.
But not any longer. Trump figured out a way to beat it.
By decapitation strikes early in the war, he assured that enemy calculations would at least be sane and that the madmen were dead.
Just as nobody was willing blow up the world during the Cold War, Trump proved that nobody was willing to blowup their civilization by economic suicide.
It took a leader like Trump who had no skin in the game or oil at risk in the Straits of Hormuz to take the chance.
He did and his courage worked.
It was a messy process and the brinksmanship we witnessed caused more than a few migraines, but Trump has brought us through it — in great shape.
It was the fate of great writers and creators like Michalangelo and Tolstoy never to have finished their works of art and literature.
Now, the Donald Trumps of foreign policy may likewise never finish their works of diplomacy. The Gaza peace isn't complete, and we wait tensely to see if the Straits will remain open.
Now, we seemed to have turned the corner, and the process of peace begun.
The world owes Donald Trump a great debt.
Dick Morris is a political strategist and author who has advised several U.S. presidents, governors, and mayors over a 40-year career. Read Dick Morris Insider articles — Click Here Now.
© 2026 Newsmax. All rights reserved.