Trump’s Iran playbook was written in the 1980s

He sketched out the first outlines in 1987, spending $94,801 to place a full-page ad in three US newspapers. The world was “laughing” at America’s leaders over the Gulf crisis triggered by the Iran-Iraq war, Trump declared. 

As the US escorted tankers through the Strait of Hormuz, he said Washington was trying to “protect ships we don’t own, carrying oil we don’t need, destined for allies who won’t help”. 

It is a line that his tirades echo today. But back then, as he tested the waters for a possible presidential run, Trump had concluded the problem was a lack of “backbone”. 

Appearing a few weeks later at a New Hampshire rotary club event in 1987, Trump sneered at how the Iranian navy — “little runabouts with machine guns” — had held America to ransom. “Why couldn’t we go in there and take some of their oilfields near the coast?” he asked.

The then 41-year-old businessman put it even more starkly in a 1988 interview with the Guardian: “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.”