America first: US President Donald Trump’s administration’s broader engagement with the Middle East has been, to put it charitably, a study in contrasts, says the writer. Photo: The White House
Let us begin with an appreciation. Hollywood, whatever its many and well-documented shortcomings, has given the world something genuinely valuable: a marker of America’s global cultural dominance, if I may use the words of CNN’s Fareed Zakaria and a reliable early-warning system, if one thinks of movies like Robocop, The Matrix, Frankenstein and The Terminator (we wrote about this on a competing news platform with Tshilidzi Marwala), which foretold robotics and the age of artificial intelligence.
Studios commission historical dramas in the hope of awards and ticket sales. And yet there is a pattern, consistent enough to merit observation, in which the industry reconstructs the past with such fidelity that it accidentally foretells the future.
Hollywood makes us laugh, weep and wonder about the future. We return to our comfort zones from the big or small screens only to find that the film has followed us.
I read somewhere that Stanley Kubrick made a sharp comedy about nuclear deterrence in 1964 and the Pentagon briefly wondered if he had somehow read classified material.
Ron Howard made a film about a Cold War mathematician in 2001 and audiences settled comfortably into their seats for what felt like a safe historical story.
Christopher Nolan made a film about the man who built the bomb in 2023 and the atmosphere in the cinema was considerably less relaxed.
Each film arrived precisely when its subject had stopped feeling historical. Each one turned out to be a dispatch from the near future, wearing period costume.
The satire industry has recently found itself in a similar position, though from a rather different angle. The Daily Show, that reliable barometer of political absurdity, this week mocked a remark made by the president of the United States regarding the Strait of Hormuz and its future management.
The framing the President himself reached for, the one that best captured his vision of America First in everything, including absurdity, was a romcom. His words, not mine, not The Daily Show’s: “Me and the Ayatollah” will govern the Strait — the irony is not lost. I am not inventing this from the archive of Inanda proverbs. I am merely holding up the mirror, which is reflecting something that would have been rejected as ‘too on-the-nose for any writer’s room in Hollywood’, if I may borrow a phrase from the internet.
The Strait of Hormuz is the chokepoint through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil supply passes daily. Iran has spent considerable effort developing the military capacity to control it as a geopolitical lever. Joint control with Washington would dissolve that leverage entirely, meaning Iran would never agree to it and any administration that genuinely believed otherwise would be misreading the strategic situation with a thoroughness that is, in its own way, rather impressive.
This is where John Nash, the Princeton mathematician whose romantic overtures provided A Beautiful Mind with its most memorable scenes, contributed something rather more durable to human affairs than awkward courtship dialogue.
His work on non-cooperative game theory established that rational actors in a competitive environment will converge on a stable strategy from which neither side has an incentive to deviate unilaterally.
The romcom ending requires both parties to simultaneously abandon a rational position in favour of a sentimental one. Nash, one suspects, would not have found that mathematically persuasive. The conversation starting with this line is striking: “I have a tendency to expedite information flow by being direct. I often do not get a pleasant result.” A foretelling description of the US president?
Tehran’s actual strategic doctrine, sometimes called forward defence, operates through a network of proxy forces distributed across the region: the Houthis in Yemen, various militia formations in Iraq and Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon.
No single actor and no single action, rises to the level of a formal act of war. The cumulative effect, applied steadily across multiple theatres, is sustained pressure on American interests that is difficult to cleanly attribute, expensive to counter and politically awkward to escalate against. It is a John Nash equilibrium in the most literal sense. The position is stable precisely because changing it unilaterally would cost more than maintaining it; my Chinese-American economics professor would be proud of me for a pedestrian attempt at game theory.
What makes this particularly durable, from Tehran’s perspective, is that it exploits an underlying unevenness. A democratic administration with a news cycle measured in hours is politically sensitive to sustained, incremental attrition in a way that a supposed theocratic government with a high tolerance for economic hardship (because of decades of sanctions) simply is not.
The Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping disrupted global trade routes. The militia strikes on American bases in Iraq produced casualties and congressional hearings. Iran, correctly reading the equilibrium, has seen no reason to adjust its position. Europe, a co-prisoner in the North Atlantic alliance of hegemony, is choked.
The Trump administration’s broader engagement with the Middle East has been, to put it charitably, a study in contrasts. Its diplomatic achievements in the region were genuine; the Abraham Accords represented a meaningful reconfiguration of Gulf and North African politics that more cautious administrations had declined to attempt.
Its rhetorical tone has been rather less measured, oscillating between declarations of maximum pressure on Iran and signals that a deal remains possible, sometimes within the same news week.
There is a deeper structural problem though. An administration simultaneously conducting a campaign against its own universities, independent media outlets and research institutions is, in game theory terms, operating with a progressively degraded information base.
Oppenheimer, in the movie of the same name, did not lose his security clearance for betraying state secrets. He lost it partly because his independent moral authority had become inconvenient. The pattern is being replicated domestically: the removal of any institution capable of producing a credible counter-analysis is precisely the pattern that historically precedes the largest strategic miscalculations.
Iran’s strategists are not unaware of this. What they have identified, with some consistency, is that the United States is at its most dangerous not when it is strong and deliberate but when it is frustrated and searching for a gesture large enough to restore the appearance of control.
The proxy network is a provocation calibrated to produce exactly that frustration, without providing a sufficiently clean target to justify the response that frustration might demand. It is, in its own way, a masterpiece of applied game theory. Let us attempt the game.
Here is what we think of how the scripts are written in Hollywood.
A researcher at a Washington think tank is quietly recruited by the administration to observe his colleagues. Convinced he alone can see the real threats assembling at the margins, he begins keeping records. The twist is not dramatic: his paranoia has become similar to that of the administration directing him and neither the audience nor he can determine where analysis ends and delusion begins.
The think tank’s final report, suppressed before distribution, accurately predicted the current crisis in the Gulf. Nobody has read it.
An Oppenheimer inversion with a Persian Gulf address. A respected academic who helped design the administration’s Iran strategy is designated a liability in a quiet administrative review. The subsequent hearings reveal that the concern is not disloyalty. She knows precisely how far the policy’s stated rationale falls short of its operational reality, including which regional partners were briefed and on what.
The process is conducted correctly. It is not an investigation. It is a demonstration, administered for the benefit of everyone still watching, like my literature professor, who will be very proud of my attempts at dramatisation.
A mathematician develops a game-theoretic model demonstrating that the administration’s approach to Iranian deterrence is self-defeating: by foreclosing graduated options, it eliminates the face-saving exits that prevent escalation from becoming compulsory.
The administration does not engage with mathematics, at least not the Maga incumbents. It commissions a campaign to reframe the findings as politically motivated. The model, circulated discreetly among allied defence ministries in London, Paris and Riyadh, continues to be cited. Tehran has been aware of it for some time.
A journalist obtains documents from inside a federal records office, expecting revelations about foreign interference. The documents are more quietly devastating: a series of analytical reports from a defunded research institution, predicting with near precision the current state of Iranian proxy activity and the probable shape of the American response.
The administration did not suppress the archive because it was inaccurate. The final page contains a recommendation that was not implemented (because the author is accused of being a left-wing radical) and a projected timeline. The timeline has already passed.
There is a question at the end of all of this that has not yet found its film, possibly because the ending remains unwritten. Harry Truman authorised the use of atomic weapons against Japan in August 1945 for reasons that historians continue to debate: to end the war, to avoid a land invasion, to send a signal to Moscow and, some argue, because the capability existed and the moment had arrived.
The bomb was used partly to demonstrate that it could be. It was a large gesture, deployed to restore clarity to a situation that had become, for an impatient man in a difficult position, intolerably ambiguous.
Donald Trump is not Harry Truman, 2026 is not 1945 and Iran is emphatically not Japan. These distinctions carry real weight and any analysis that elides them sacrifices precision for drama.
And yet the logic of the present Middle East situation has a shape that is not entirely unfamiliar. An administration drawn instinctively to the definitive gesture, confronting a state that has spent 40 years building smarter defence systems against its aggressive neighbour and the grudging historical rival across the Atlantic. There is a nuclear programme that has never been further from resolution.
The question arises: will Donald Trump (who is promising to sue a South African comedian for saying “Epstein” live at the Grammys) become the 21st century’s Truman — reaching, in some final moment of chaotic impatience, for the instrument that makes the point he believes only the largest gesture can make?
That he can (make America great again — through the nuke)? The romcom, it is worth remembering, does not typically end with a mushroom cloud. But then the romcom was not supposed to be foreign policy either.
Hollywood has been rehearsing this scene for 80 years and still does not know how to end it. The Daily Show has been watching Washington for 30 years and has at least stopped being surprised. On present evidence, the rest of us are somewhere in between, including, surprisingly, Tucker Carlson.
Busani Ngcaweni is the director of the Centre for Public Policy and African Studies at the University of Johannesburg