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Opinion
Trump's War and Tariffs Are Driving Up Prices
Inflation rose in April as the war on Iran has increased energy prices and import-dependent businesses continue to pass tariff costs on to customers.
May 18, 2026
Inflation, a general rise in prices, increased in April due to higher costs for energy primarily, at 40%; food; and shelter.
"The Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) increased 0.6% on a seasonally adjusted basis in April, after rising 0.9% in March, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported. Over the last 12 months, the all items index increased 3.8 percent before seasonal adjustment."
Energy prices are up in no small way due to the unprovoked US-Israel war against Iran begun on February 28, 2026. That violation of international law has caused 3,468 deaths and over 26,500 injuries in Iran, according to Iranian authorities, and closed the Strait of Hormuz.
An estimated 20% of the world's petroleum passes through this route, which was open for business before the war began. Moreover, that closure is evidence of a US defeat, writes Robert Kagan, a leading neoconservative and Iraq War hawk who co-founded the Project for the New American Century, in The Atlantic magazine recently.
To say the impacts of the Trump tariffs on aluminum, steel, and other commodities from abroad has been chaotic understates the case.
There's another factor driving inflation, according to Dan Anthony, head of We Pay The Tariffs, a grassroots coalition of nearly 1,200 small US businesses that advocates against tariffs. “Tariffs raise prices," he said in a statement. Basically, the tariffs are part of a trade war spurring inflation.
Recall that President Donald Trump imposed tariffs, or taxes on imports from US global trading partners, on March 4, 2025. The tariff rates have increased and decreased since then. To say the impacts of the Trump tariffs on aluminum, steel, and other commodities from abroad has been chaotic understates the case.
Recent research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas agrees with Anthony's assessment of tariffs and inflation. The Fed researchers found that import-dependent businesses passing along the cost of tariffs on imports have added a full percentage point to the inflation of consumer prices. What can be done?
“There aren’t many levers the government can pull to lower prices," according to Anthony, "but permanently eliminating tariffs is one of them." That is accurate and also unlikely at least in the short term. Further, a brief look back reveals another presidential lever available, and a precedent for it, one that coincides with a past US military defeat and its role in triggering inflation.
On August 15, 1971, President Richard Nixon, the Republican born a Quaker who later became an anti-communist crusader, subsequently dubbed "Tricky Dick” in the White House, imposed wage and price controls for 90 days. That lever froze wages and prices to fight inflation, an outcome of US deficit spending to wage war in Vietnam. The point that I am making is that presidents have battled inflation in more than one way.
In the meantime and on a related note, President Donald J. Trump might have delayed the signing of executive orders to temporarily reduce tariffs on beef imports, and back policies to increase the domestic cattle herd. The two policy aims of these proposed executive orders seem contradictory. Are they at odds with each other? What’s really going on here?
Sarah Carden is the research and policy director at Food Action. “The administration appears to be presenting this move as a way to lower beef prices for consumers while supporting domestic cattle ranchers," she said in a statement, "but we’ve already seen this approach fail. Previous import expansions from Argentina did not meaningfully reduce beef prices because the real problem is a highly consolidated meat-packing sector controlled by just a handful of dominant corporations."
Consider this. Four major meat-packers control roughly 85% of the US beef industry, according to Farm Action. This is the definition of market consolidation.
Such consolidation can and does spur higher prices. Fewer producers in the marketplace mean that they can and do avoid price competition. Why should monopoly companies with consolidated market power reduce prices if competitors do not offer lower-priced products to consumers? Why cut prices except to counter competitors' threats to grab market share and profits?
In a for-profit economic system, such a move to decrease prices absent competitive pressures to do so makes no business sense. Meanwhile at the end of the day, domestic cattle producers, some of whom make up the base of MAGA, are feeling the pain, along with US consumers and import-dependent businesses generally, coping with the impacts of inflation, tariffs, and war.
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To Stop Failing in the Middle East, the US Must Consider the Needs of Arab People
US policies in the region are headed toward disaster—not only for the US and its stated goals, but also, and more importantly, for the people who live there.
May 18, 2026
One reason why US policy in the Middle East has been so problematic is because policymakers refuse to consider its impact on the needs of Arab people. With Israel, it’s a different story. Overattentiveness to Israeli concerns coupled with the lack of sensitivity to what Arabs think about our actions has led to deep fractures between Arabs and the US and within the Arab World.
Since 2000, we’ve conducted over 50 multination opinion polls on a variety of topics. We explored Arab attitudes toward other Arabs, the US, China, Russia, Iran, and Israel. We also examined attitudes toward conflicts in the region.
It’s been over two years since we’ve polled across the Arab World, but based on what we saw developing during our two and a half decades of work, it’s clear that US policies are headed toward disaster—not only for the US and its stated goals, but also, and more importantly, for the Arab people.
What follows are some observations based on the trend lines we have culled from our surveys:
- After 9/11, President George W. Bush famously claimed, “They hate us because they hate our values.” Our 2002 polling found the opposite: Arabs liked American people, products, education, and values, but strongly disliked US policies toward the Arab world—especially regarding Palestinians. As I said during a congressional hearing on my polling: “Arabs like us and our values—what they resent is that we don’t apply those values to them.”
Bush’s Iraq war and neglect of Palestinians further lowered US ratings. They rose with President Barack Obama’s promise of change but fell when he didn’t deliver on them. Attitudes further plummeted with President Donald Trump’s pro-Israel, anti-Muslim policies.
By late 2023, our last multination poll showed President Joe Biden’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza generating even stronger negatives. To make matters worse, the complications created by President Trump’s US-Israel attacks on Iran, coupled with his assault on the very aspects of America that were respected worldwide—our universities, press freedom, and immigration policy—make it likely that Arabs are now finding it difficult to even like American values.
- Over the years, we have often polled on favorable and unfavorable attitudes toward China and the US. During this time, while opinions toward the US ebbed and flowed, attitudes toward China remained steady. By the end of 2023, for the first time, China’s ratings were competitive with those of the US in areas that had previously been the US’s strong suits—education and doing business. And in several Arab countries, China was seen as a more reliable partner than the US.
- Arab attitudes toward Iran have followed a consistent pattern. When Iran was perceived to be under attack for resisting the US and the West, it found a strong base of support among many Arabs. But when Iran directly meddled in Arab countries, opinion turned against it. And when its ally Hezbollah turned its weapons against its domestic Lebanese opponents and joined Iran in direct involvement in Syria’s civil war, majorities in most Arab countries turned against Iran.
Following this trajectory, one can reasonably assume that the US-Israel attacks on Iran coupled with Israel’s attacks on Lebanon and Syria, and Israel’s boasts of becoming the regional power that was “defending Western civilization against barbarism,” won Iran some sympathy in Arab public opinion. The same might be true for the recent US-Israel attacks on Iran, except that instead of seeking Arab support, Iran deliberately attacked its Arab Gulf neighbors—the very countries that had been trying to restore relationships with the meddlesome Islamic Republic. This, no doubt, turned opinion among many in the Gulf against Iran. It is uncertain, however, how much intra-Arab friction this is causing in the rest of Arab world.
- Support for Palestinians has long been a central Arab concern. They showed little interest in making peace with Israel—even in those countries that had signed peace agreements with Israel. As Israeli repression of Palestinians intensified and the fractured and visionless Palestinian leadership failed to inspire, Arab opinion began to change. In late 2019, we asked Arabs if they felt it would be desirable to make peace with Israel, even if Israel didn’t accept the terms of the Arab Peace Initiative. When significant numbers said that it might be desirable, we asked why. The responses varied but many told us that it might help end the violence and give Arabs more leverage to convince Israel to grant Palestinian rights.
We repeated this question at the end of September 2023 and had completed about half of the questionnaires by October 7, the date of the Hamas attack. We interrupted the survey and only went back a few weeks later to complete it. The changes in the results were significant. Before October 7, responses were similar to the 2019 poll, but by the end of October, in reaction to the intensity of Israel’s assault on Gaza, attitudes shifted dramatically against any attempt to deal with Israel. Three years later, one can reasonably assume this hasn’t changed.
In 2024 and 2025, on three occasions, we polled in the Occupied Lands. Results were disturbing. Israeli policy had worked to discredit the Palestinian Authority, weakening its ability to govern. Opinion in the West Bank had turned against the PA, with respondents saying they preferred Hamas. In Gaza, we found that Hamas had fallen into deep disfavor, with a strong plurality of Gazans preferring the PA. In both the West Bank and Gaza there was little support for US, Israeli, or international governance. They preferred Palestinian unity.
Meanwhile, Israel continues to lay waste to Gaza and is running roughshod over the West Bank and East Jerusalem, further angering Palestinians and discrediting the PA. All the while Israel rejects any role for the PA in Gaza. As the situation further unravels, the US ignores Palestinians’ wishes and turns a blind eye to Israeli misdeeds.
- In Lebanon, when Hezbollah was seen as resisting Israel, it found favor among many Lebanese, especially since Israel frequently bombed Lebanon and occupied a swatch of its land from the late 1970s to 2000. However, when in 2008, Hezbollah turned its weapons against the state and in 2019 against the popular revolt, Lebanese opinion divided along sectarian lines. Our polling before 2023 showed that most Lebanese wanted Hezbollah disarmed or under the control of the Lebanese army. But Israel’s recent devastating assault on Lebanon; its bombing throughout the country; its forced expulsion of 1 million Lebanese from the south; its destruction of homes, farmlands, and entire villages; and explicit intention to annex a large portion of the country has no doubt restored some support for Hezbollah and exacerbated internal sectarian tensions, while turning more Lebanese against Israel and the US.
Seen in this light, US efforts to pressure the Lebanese government to forcibly disarm Hezbollah and make a peace agreement with Israel is dangerous for Lebanon’s stability.
***
In each instance, it is America’s lack of attentiveness to Arab sensitivities and needs that contributes to making a bad situation even worse—further embittering Arabs toward the US, deepening fissures within the Arab World, while fostering every-expanding Israeli impunity.
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Trump Reigniting Iran War Proves It Was Failure From the Start
As Tehran believes Trump intends to prosecute the next war with far greater ferocity, Iranian planners are preparing a far more expansive and punishing retaliatory campaign. It doesn't have to be this way.
May 18, 2026
The Middle East is once again teetering on the brink as Trump appears poised to reignite war with Iran. Press reports indicate he will convene military advisers on Tuesday, though my understanding is that both the meeting and the decision are likely to come sooner. Over the past several hours, Trump has flooded Truth Social with a barrage of incendiary threats. While some of this may be theatrical brinkmanship designed to force Tehran into submission, sources in the Iranian capital tell me they expect the United States to resume hostilities within the next 48 hours.
We should first recognize that restarting the war amounts to an admission that Trump’s previous escalatory gambit — the blockade of the blockade — has failed. That, in turn, was itself an admission that the war had failed. Which was an admission that the threats of war in January had failed. As I have argued before on my Substack, this relentless search for an escalatory silver bullet capable of bringing Iran to its knees is not unique to Trump; it has become a defining pathology of American Iran policy for decades.
Although negotiators have made meaningful progress on several fronts, talks have thus far failed to produce an agreement, largely because of irreconcilable differences over Tehran’s highly enriched uranium stockpile. And as Washington has come to realize that the blockade is backfiring, a new and dangerous dynamic has emerged: both sides now believe another round of fighting will strengthen their hand in the negotiations that follow.
As I argued in numerous interviews in January, Trump dramatically underestimated Iran’s strength, while hard-liners in Tehran believed war would strengthen Iran’s leverage by exposing the illusion of Iranian weakness. In their view, the outcome of the conflict vindicated that assessment, leaving them increasingly confident — even emboldened — about what a second round of war could yield. I am told the new Supreme Leader belongs to this camp.
Moreover, just as Tehran believes Trump intends to prosecute the next war with far greater ferocity, Iranian planners are preparing a far more expansive and punishing retaliatory campaign, complete with new strategic objectives and targets.
First, Iranian officials increasingly describe the next war as an opportunity to inflict maximum strategic damage on the United Arab Emirates, citing Abu Dhabi’s active role in the previous conflict, its deepening and increasingly overt partnership with Israel, and its role in urging Trump to resume hostilities.
Tehran is likely to target American data centers in the UAE, a move that serves multiple purposes. Iranian officials argue that these American technology firms have already become participants in the conflict through their support for the Pentagon. At the same time, Tehran sees an opportunity to cripple the UAE’s ambitions to become a global artificial intelligence hub — and, in doing so, potentially undermine Washington’s AI competition with China.
This points to a second defining feature of Iran’s strategy in a future war. Tehran believes Trump and his family hold financial stakes in many of these same technology ventures. Targeting Trump’s personal business interests is a lever Iran conspicuously avoided pulling during the first conflict but now appears increasingly willing to use. The logic is straightforward: Trump may tolerate damage to American strategic interests, but he is acutely sensitive to threats against his own financial empire. Raise the personal cost to Trump himself, the reasoning goes, and he may prove more willing to adopt a realistic negotiating position.
Third, Tehran is likely to show far less restraint if evidence emerges that other Gulf Cooperation Council states permit the United States or Israel to use their territory or airspace in a renewed conflict. The result would be broader and far more perilous horizontal escalation, with potentially catastrophic consequences for the global economy should critical energy infrastructure come under attack.
Fourth, the Red Sea is now in play. That would dramatically widen the geographic scope of the conflict while placing even greater upward pressure on already volatile oil prices.
Finally, Tehran is increasingly examining the possibility of severing the major submarine fiber-optic cable networks running beneath the Persian Gulf — arteries through which most GCC internet traffic flows, including billions of dollars in financial transactions. Iranian officials increasingly view this as a potential second Strait of Hormuz: a powerful new point of leverage capable of disrupting the global economy at enormous scale.
Renewed war is not inevitable. But when both sides convince themselves that another round of fighting will strengthen their negotiating position, the gravitational pull toward conflict becomes dangerously strong — however irrational the logic may ultimately be.
This article was republished with permission from Trita Parsi's newsletter
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Donald Trump Has Waged a War on... Everything
There really can’t be any question that this president is distinctly intent on nothing less than making war not just on specific nations like Iran, or on ships in the Caribbean Sea, or on anyone in or near the Strait of Hormuz, but on this very planet in every way imaginable.
May 18, 2026
Hey, I always suspected that Donald Trump and I, having both grown up in New York City in the 1950s and early 1960s, had something in common. Now, I know just what it is — his boyhood love for the 1950s TV program Victory at Sea. (“Did you ever see ‘Victory at Sea?’ ” he asked reporters in January while talking about the new “Trump class” battleships he wants to build. “What a great thing that is to watch!”) I was similarly fascinated by that prime-time documentary series on World War II when I was a youngster, and I imagine that the two of us were watching it at the very same time in the very same city, both of us possibly with our fathers, on what were undoubtedly black-and-white TVs. Of course, his father built barracks and garden apartments for the Navy during World War II, while my father, at age 35 and unlikely to be drafted, volunteered for the military the day after Pearl Harbor and ended up a major in the U.S. Air Force fighting the Japanese in Burma. (He seemed to have made it back just in time for my birth in July 1944.)
Oh, and there was another difference between us, come to think of it. Only one of us, possibly inspired by that very TV show, has the power to order that a fleet of new battleships — a “golden fleet,” no less (“They’ll be the fastest, the biggest, and by far 100 times more powerful than any battleship ever built”), including one to be named the USS Defiant — be constructed to fulfill his childhood war-making fantasies. And only one of us has the power as well to fire any Navy secretary, most recently John Phelan, who doesn’t seem to be working hard enough to make the president’s version of Victory at Sea into our global reality. As President Trump put it at one point, “The U.S. Navy will lead the design of these ships along with me, because I’m a very aesthetic person.” (Hey, the Trump fleet is going to be a stunner! Count on it!)
And oh (yet again), as it turned out, only one of us would have the power late in life to kidnap Venezuela’s head of state, try to claim Greenland as the property of this country, prepare for a possible future war with Cuba, blow ships out of the water in a never-ending fashion in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean, launch staggering numbers of airstrikes in (yes, can you believe it?) Somalia — well, of course you can’t because, with the exception of Dave DeCamp at Antiwar.com, those bombings are barely covered in this country — as well as at one point in Nigeria, launch a genuine war with Iran in the Strait of Hormuz (brilliantly crippling the global economy while he was at it), and… well, count on it, in the next two-plus years of Donald Trump’s America, there will surely be all too many more examples to cite. In truth, it’s probably not even worth trying to imagine what countries might prove to be next for the “President of Peace,” as he’s distinctly unpredictable on such matters (on just about any matter, in fact).
Trump Reigns (But Doesn’t Rain) Supreme
Whew! I’m already out of breath! But who wouldn’t be since we’re all now living in his world? And given what the “peace president” has done so far, the second time around, I suspect that everything I just brought up will be no more than the start of a future list that could prove all too breathtaking — and possibly even planet-breaking. (Yes, I’m out of breath just from writing all of that and I know perfectly well that I haven’t even managed to cover it all.)
Oh, and I’m so sorry! I almost forgot to mention one more Trumpian set of acts of war, undoubtedly by far the most important and devastating of all: those he’s launched against planet Earth itself. I mean, we’re talking about the president who has done his — and this word couldn’t be more appropriate — damnedest to shut down wind farms of any sort, cut solar energy projects, and expand the burning of fossil fuels in just about every way imaginable, including by opening up 1.3 billion acres (no, that is not a misprint!) of U.S. coastal waters to further oil and natural gas drilling.
New York Times reporter Maxine Jocelow caught this Trumpian moment on Planet Earth perfectly in a recent piece on the “triumphant resurgence in Mr. Trump’s Washington” of climate-change denial. She summed up the Trumpian viewpoint this way: “Climate change is a hoax perpetrated by ‘leftist politicians.’ Fossil fuels are the greenest energy sources. More carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will be harmless.”
And in its own way, that also sums up “our” president and his crew to a T in their search for Victory (with a capital V) — a word spelled d-e-f-e-a-t in the age of Trump — on Planet Earth. After all, in an address at the U.N. last year, he labeled climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world” and insisted that, “if you don’t get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail.” And his White House even released a document labeled “Ending the Green New Scam,” promising that “President Trump is committed to eliminating funding for the globalist climate agenda while unleashing American energy production.”
There really can’t be any question that this president is distinctly intent on nothing less than making war not just on specific nations like Iran, or on ships in the Caribbean Sea, or on anyone in or near the Strait of Hormuz, but on this very planet in every way imaginable.
It should be stunning, in fact, that on planet Earth at this moment such madness quite literally reigns (but unfortunately doesn’t rain) supreme in Washington, D.C., and will do so for (again literally) ever hotter years (at least two and a half of them) to come.
Defeat on Land, at Sea, and Anywhere Else Imaginable
Once upon a time, such wildly futuristic madness would have been left to the most dystopian of science-fiction novels — and undoubtedly not very popular ones at that, since such a plot and such a president would (once upon a time) have seemed far too unrealistic even for fiction. But now, thanks to President Donald J. Trump, the United States of America, in addition to all its other warring acts of recent months, is distinctly at war — and there’s no other adequate word for it — with Planet Earth (at least as a habitable place for future versions of us).
Someday, if anyone is still making TV series (since by then they’ll all undoubtedly be AI-created), I wonder if there will be one that young people, along with their parents, would be able to catch called not Defeat at Sea, but something far larger and more definitive like Defeat on Planet Earth. After all, we now have a president of the United States who seems ready not just to make war on Iran, but on more or less everything.
Hey, when the president’s military crew recently fired — and given what they’re doing to this planet of ours, they’re giving that word new meaning — Secretary of the Navy Phelan, it made perfect sense (at least in the Trumpian version of our world), given that he didn’t seem to be producing that Trumpian fleet in double (triple? quadruple?) time. Hey (again!), it’s strange that Phelan didn’t grasp the situation he was in, since it really wasn’t all that complicated. The only thing the president wanted from him was the most beautiful fleet of Trumpian naval vessels imaginable tomorrow.
And hey (yet again!!), since the president and I have so much in common from our childhoods, let me try to make some predictions about our Trumpian future on this beleaguered planet of ours. Let’s start with the fact — and it is a fact — that, despite everything Trump and crew are trying to do when it comes to destroying green energy in the United States, as the Guardian reported recently, “In March, the U.S. generated more of its electricity from renewable sources such as solar and wind than it did via [natural] gas, the first time clean energy has surpassed the planet-heating fossil fuel for a full month nationally, according to data from the Ember thinktank.” (And mind you, despite Donald Trump and crew, 2025 was indeed a record year for green energy growth in this country.)
And yes, green energy production has already become cheaper than new oil and gas production and, even with a president who couldn’t be clearer — “We aren’t allowing any windmills to go up and we don’t want the solar panels. Fossil fuel is the thing that works” — it’s still clear where we humans are headed in energy terms. Just not, of course, fast enough.
No, none of what we’re doing when it comes to clean energy is (as yet) faintly enough. And Trump and crew, while working as hard as they can to launch a thoroughly useless fleet of naval vessels, have also been doing their damnedest to heat this planet to the boiling point. He has literally decided to transform himself into a hell-on-earth president at a moment when renewable energy has beaten out coal as the primary source of energy globally for the first time ever. And, of course, one other thing “our” president has done is to functionally hand over the production and sale of green energy (and the equipment to make it) to that rising power on planet Earth, China, which has already poured hundreds of billions of dollars into such energy development (though it also continues to pour greenhouse gases from coal, natural gas, and oil into the atmosphere in a record fashion).
And don’t forget something else. With their endless nightmarish decisions on green energy and climate change, Trump and crew are, among other things, in the process of all too literally reordering this planet of ours. Though you won’t hear much about it in the media, we are all watching in real time (whether we faintly realize it or not) what not so long ago was the greatest power in history, the United States, turning the future (imperial and otherwise) over to China.
Someday, if any of us are around to see it, we are likely to witness what could prove to be a historic trade-off of great powers. After all, in these years, Donald Trump has put remarkable energy (literally and symbolically) into taking down the planet’s greatest power, the United States. (Of course, if it hadn’t already been heading down, he would never have been elected in the first place.)
And China, while remaining distinctly quiet in this otherwise all-too-loud Trumpian moment, has been building what could prove to be a near-monopolistic control over our planetary future by becoming THE country that produces green energy (or, more importantly, the equipment to make it) for the rest of the planet in a record fashion.
Donald Trump, of course, is distinctly intent on making war on planet Earth (including, by recently making war on Iran, pouring yet more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere). War, after all, may be the world’s most efficient producer of such gases and the U.S. military, even in peacetime (which, unlike during his first term in office, is no longer Trump time), remains the largest institutional emitter of greenhouse gases on this planet. In the process, he’s doing his damnedest to take both his country and the planet down with him.
All too sadly, if he’s successful, American children of tomorrow, when they turn on their machines (whatever they may be), could witness not Victory, but Defeat at Sea, on Land, and Anywhere Else You Might Imagine.
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