Washington:
An ultimatum to Iran’s Supreme Leader. A warning to seize Iran’s oil facilities. And above all, a conviction that the United States’ one major blow could force Tehran to bow — these might look like pointers from Donald Trump’s 2026 Iran battle playbook, but the excerpt is from an advertisement published around four decades back.
In 1987, Trump had spent nearly $100,000 to place a full-page advertisement in three US newspapers, criticising US foreign policy. At the time, the total cost of the advert in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe– a part of the then 41-year-old businessman Trump’s first short-lived flirtation with a White House campaign– was $94,801.
In the ads, Trump had declared the world was “laughing” at US leaders over their handling of the Gulf crisis triggered by the Iran-Iraq war. The piece bore the headline, “There’s nothing wrong with America’s Foreign Defence Policy that a little backbone can’t cure.”
As the American Navy then escorted tankers through the Strait of Hormuz, Trump said Washington was trying to “protect ships we don’t own, carrying oil we don’t need, destined for allies who won’t help”. He suggested that America should stop paying to defend countries that can afford to defend themselves.
Credit: @StalwartSt on X
“For decades, Japan and other nations have been taking advantage of the United States,” and that it has been costing this nation in terms of the economy, deficit and taxes, the ad said. ”The saga continues unabated as we defend the Persian Gulf.”
Trump described the Gulf as ”an area of only marginal significance to the United States for its oil supplies, but one upon which Japan and others are almost totally dependent.”
“Why are these nations not paying the United States for the human lives and billions of dollars we are losing to protect their interests? … The world is laughing at America’s politicians as we protect ships we don’t own, carrying oil we don’t need, destined for allies who won’t help,” he wrote.
The advertisement shows that Trump’s plan for Iran has long been in plain sight, with some paying heed to it. In a much starker interview with the Guardian in 1988, Trump had said, “One bullet shot at one of our men or ships, and I’d do a number on Kharg Island. I’d go in and take it.”
Trump’s hopes for the 1988 presidential run fizzled a while later, but he has been reiterating the same core argument till today: that if US power were being exploited, it should either be priced properly or used more decisively– a core of both his tariff policy and his reasoning for his war in Iran.
Experts believe that, in the way Trump‘s musings from the 1980s have guided his mindset on the Iran war, they might foretell who the US president will want to foot the bill for this conflict.
According to a Financial Times report, the leaders of Europe and America’s other allies around the world could be the target of the US president’s next ultimatum, as, for him, the war is part of a broader effort to reset the terms on which US power is used and who benefits from it.
