March 20, 2026
On Wednesday, Israeli forces hit Iranian facilities in the South Pars natural gas field in the Persian Gulf, shared by Iran and Qatar. Helen Regan and Ivana Kottasová of CNN explain that the South Pars gas field is part of the largest natural gas reserves in the world, supplying most of Iran’s domestic energy and crucial to Iran’s economy.
Targeting crucial oil infrastructure is a significant escalation in the war. Iran responded by hitting energy targets in Qatar and Saudi Arabia. As Summer Said, Rebecca Feng, and Alexander Ward of the Wall Street Journal wrote, these strikes put oil and gas facilities at the center of the war, worsening the crisis over the supply of energy around the world.
Trump’s social media account blamed Israel for the strike and said the U.S. hadn’t been informed about it ahead of time, but Barak Ravid of Axios reported that both Israeli officials and an official from the U.S. Defense Department said the strike was coordinated with and approved by the Trump administration. The Wall Street Journal reporters added that Trump approved the strike to put pressure on Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz.
Today Iraq declared “force majeure” on the country’s oilfields developed by foreign oil companies. This is an acknowledgement that a catastrophic event—usually an earthquake or something similar—means they cannot meet their obligations to deliver their product. In this case, the catastrophe is the disruption to the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20% of the world’s oil and natural gas flows. Kuwait Petroleum Corporation and Bahrain’s state-owned Bapco Energies declared force majeure earlier this month.
This morning, Trump’s social media account once again blamed U.S. allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) for not joining his war, although NATO is a defensive alliance, designed to respond to an attack. The account posted: “Without the U.S.A., NATO IS A PAPER TIGER! They didn’t want to join the fight to stop a Nuclear Powered Iran. Now that fight is Militarily WON, with very little danger for them, they complain about the high oil prices they are forced to pay, but don’t want to help open the Strait of Hormuz, a simple military maneuver that is the single reason for the high oil prices. So easy for them to do, with so little risk. COWARDS, and we will REMEMBER! President DONALD J. TRUMP.”
This afternoon, Trump told reporters: “You know, we don’t use the strait…we don’t need it. Europe needs it, Korea, Japan, China, a lot of other people, so they’ll have to get involved a little bit on that one.” He also said: “I think we’ve won, we’ve knocked out their Navy, their Air Force. We’ve knocked out their anti-aircraft. We’ve knocked out everything. We’re roaming free. From a military standpoint, all they’re doing is clogging up the strait. But from a military standpoint, they’re finished.”
The International Energy Agency is an intergovernmental organization that was created in 1974 to provide policy recommendations on the global energy sector and whose members make up about 75% of the demand for global energy. Today it said, “The conflict in the Middle East has created the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market, due to the near halt in shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.” It added: “The resumption of transit through the Strait of Hormuz is the single most important action to return to stable oil and gas flows and reduce the strains on markets and prices.” Until then, it urged people to work from home if possible, drive more slowly to conserve energy, use public transport, avoid using airplanes, and use electricity for cooking where possible.
Yesterday President Donald J. Trump told reporters he was not sending troops to Iran, saying: “No, I’m not putting troops anywhere. If I were, I certainly wouldn’t tell you, but I’m not putting troops.” Today, Jennifer Jacobs, James LaPorta, and Eleanor Watson of CBS News reported that the Pentagon has made detailed preparations for sending troops to Iran. The administration is currently moving thousands of Marines to the Middle East. They will not be in place for a few weeks, suggesting the administration is expecting the engagement to continue.
Barak Ravid and Marc Caputo of Axios reported today that the administration is considering an assault on Iran’s Kharg Island, the center of Iran’s oil-processing facilities, to force Iran to allow free passage through the Strait of Hormuz. That operation would require the U.S. military to pound Iran’s military capacity near the strait before sending in ground troops. A source told Ravid and Caputo: “We need about a month to weaken the Iranians more with strikes, take the island and then get them by the b*lls and use it for negotiations.”
Prices in the U.S. were already rising before Trump struck Iran, prompting the closure of the strait and the choking off of global oil supplies. The Federal Reserve’s tracking of key inflation measures, released Wednesday, showed higher prices than expected, with the Producer Price Index (PPI) jumping 0.7% in February, the most since last July. In the twelve months through February, Lucia Mutikani of Reuters reported, the PPI went up 3.4%, the fastest rate of growth in a year. Now, dramatically higher fuel costs threaten to drive those prices higher.
The war itself is also costing Americans money, and lots of it. Economist Justin Wolfers notes that the estimated cost of $1 billion a day does not include the larger cost to the economy. The Pentagon’s number counts only bombs and planes and personnel, Wolfers points out. It does not include higher oil prices, geopolitical strife, business uncertainty, and slower growth. Those costs will mount into the hundreds of billions.
G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers notes that 58% of Americans think the U.S. military operation in Iran is a bad use of taxpayer dollars, while only 32% approve. Asked if they would support the war in Iran if it raised gas prices by $1 a gallon or more, 61% of Americans said they would not, while only 30% said they would.
Aware that the war is historically unpopular, Republicans in Congress are refusing to exercise any oversight of the Pentagon and the White House. Megan Mineiro of the New York Times reported today that Republicans don’t want to expose disapproval of the war and so are simply cheering Trump on in public. Rather than holding public hearings that would allow the American people to hear the administration’s justification for the war and plans for its execution, as Democrats demand, Republicans are permitting the administration to inform Congress as it wishes, behind closed doors.
“You don’t want to show that kind of division to your enemy when you’re in the midst of a war,” Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) told Mineiro. “I don’t have a problem with the administration avoiding showing our enemy that they don’t have 100 percent support of the Congress.”
“They’re holding news conferences,” Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) told reporters last week, so there is no need for official hearings. House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said that operations were “very sensitive” and thus could not be discussed outside of classified settings “because it would adversely affect our mission.” This demand that Americans trust the government to go to war without public debate flies directly in the face of the reasoning of the Framers of the Constitution, who believed the American people must have the right to decide whether to invest their lives and fortunes in a war.
Senate Democrats have tried twice to pass a measure that would require Trump to get congressional authorization before continuing the war, but Republicans reject it. “They want to circumvent the Constitution,” Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) said. “They want to go around public oversight. They want to avoid the glare, the questions of the American people.”
The recognition that the war might drag on has driven the stock market down sharply. All three of the main U.S. stock indexes—the S&P 500, the Nasdaq Composite, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average—have fallen since the war began. Tonight, after markets had closed down again, Trump appeared to try to reassure investors over the weekend that the war will end soon, writing on social media that “[w]e are getting very close to meeting our objectives as we consider winding down our great Military efforts in the Middle East with respect to the Terrorist Regime of Iran.”
The administration continues to try to sell its war as a violent video game, and Trump as a dignified leader. Eli Stokols, Ben Johansen, Jack Detsch, and Paul McLeary of Politico reported on Wednesday that the White House is thrilled with the engagement garnered by the war videos made by White House communications staffers, in which footage of military strikes is intercut with football hits or bowling pins being blasted apart, or with clips from movies like Top Gun and Gladiator. A White House official told the journalists: “We’re over here just grinding away on banger memes, dude. There’s an entertainment factor to what we do. But ultimately, it boils down to the fact that no one has ever attempted to communicate with the American public this way before.”
Progressive political strategist Max Burns notes that the White House messaging “is appealing directly to the base, especially to these young, very online, 4chan MAGA people who, just like Trump, treat war like a video game.” He added: “You don’t see service members sharing this content.”
Since the Obama administration, the choice of whether to allow media at a dignified transfer ceremony when the remains of service members are brought home at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware has been made by the families. After Trump’s political action committee used images from a dignified transfer in a fundraising email, on Wednesday the Fox News Channel announced that “at the request of the families, the dignified transfer is going to remain private. There will not be any cameras.”
Nonetheless, the administration posted a number of photos from Wednesday’s ceremony on social media, showing Trump in the background, saluting.
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Notes:
https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/19/middleeast/iran-qatar-south-pars-gas-field-explainer-intl
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/morning-memo/its-my-war-and-ill-cry-if-i-want-to
https://www.axios.com/2026/03/18/israel-strikes-iran-natural-gas-infrastructure
https://time.com/article/2026/03/19/trump-iran-war-us-troops/
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-administration-iran-ground-troop-preparations/
https://www.axios.com/2026/03/20/iran-invasion-kharg-island-strait-hormuz
https://newrepublic.com/post/207500/trump-global-panic-oil-prices
https://www.reuters.com/business/us-producer-prices-surge-february-services-2026-03-18/
https://www.iea.org/reports/sheltering-from-oil-shocks/summary
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/18/us/politics/senate-republicans-trump-iran-war-authorization.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/20/us/politics/congress-iran-trump.html
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/03/18/white-house-iran-game-online-00834373
https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/13/politics/trump-fundraise-email-soldier
YouTube:
Bluesky:
paleofuture.bsky.social/post/3mhinph5o722c
atrupar.com/post/3mhjbtaqu6v2p
Demand oversight for the Pentagon and White House! Don’t let up. All the calls, emails, snail mail, faxes - they matter.
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Reach out (beyond your own) to as many in the Senate and House as you can. All of this is bigger than “I only represent my constituents” issues.
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