CHARLES MATSEKE | Middle East war: Is Trump engineering a new deal through conflict?

In the theatre of contemporary geopolitics, Donald Trump has perfected a peculiar duality: he performs war, but outsources peace.

When threats are issued, ultimatums declared, and enemies named, the president speaks in his own unmistakable voice; dramatic, personal and absolute.

Yet when diplomacy is required, when mediation, negotiation and compromise must take centre stage, other US state officials are dispatched to do the work. This is not a contradiction. It is a strategy worthy to be noted.

The recent breakdown of US-Iran negotiations in Islamabad illustrates this pattern with unsettling clarity. After days of high-level engagement, the most significant since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, talks ended without agreement.

Both sides traded blame, while Trump escalated rhetoric, issuing renewed threats. The fragile two-week truce, set to expire on April 22, now hangs in the balance.

But to interpret this merely as a diplomatic failure is to miss the deeper logic at play.

What we are witnessing is not the collapse of diplomacy, but its deliberate subordination to a broader strategy of coercion; what might be called performance-driven anti-diplomacy. The question is not whether negotiations failed, but whether they were ever intended to succeed.

At the centre of this strategy lies a more provocative question: what does the United States ultimately seek from this escalation? Increasingly, the answer may lie not in the Middle East itself, but in the structural anxieties of the American political economy.

There is a growing argument often dismissed as speculative but increasingly difficult to ignore, that the current posture reflects an attempt to engineer a form of externalised economic restructuring.

In essence, a geopolitical equivalent of the New Deal, but achieved not through domestic reform as under Franklin D. Roosevelt, but through crisis, coercion and strategic disruption abroad.

The original New Deal (1933–1939) emerged from the ashes of the Great Depression.

It was anchored in the “three Rs”: Relief, Recovery, and Reform.

It created jobs through programmes like the WPA, stabilised finance through institutions such as the SEC and FDIC, and laid the foundation for the modern welfare state through Social Security. Crucially, it redefined the role of the state in managing capitalism, shifting from laissez-faire to a more interventionist model.

Today’s United States faces a different, but equally profound, set of pressures: rising debt, widening inequality, de-industrialisation, and growing questions about the long-term dominance of the dollar.

In this context, crisis becomes not merely a threat but a potential instrument. As Rahm Emanuel once remarked, one should “never let a good crisis go to waste.”

In Trump’s case, the logic appears inverted: if a crisis does not exist at the necessary scale, it may be manufactured, amplified, or prolonged.

The Middle East; long a theatre of strategic intervention, provides an ideal stage.

The Strait of Hormuz is not merely a waterway; it is the artery through which a significant portion of the world’s oil flows, roughly 20–25% of global supply.

Its disruption would reverberate across global markets, driving up energy prices, destabilising economies, and potentially triggering new forms of financial and political realignment.

But beneath the surface of regional escalation lies a deeper geopolitical contest, one that has little to do with Iran itself and far more to do with China. The war, in this reading, is not fundamentally about nuclear weapons, nor about liberating the Iranian people, nor even about defending Israel. It is about energy, leverage and great power competition.

China is the single largest beneficiary of oil flowing through the Strait of Hormuz. Estimates suggest that between 40% and 50% of China’s crude oil imports transit this narrow chokepoint, with some figures placing dependency as high as 45%.

More broadly, Asian economies, led by China’ consume the overwhelming majority of energy passing through the strait, accounting for roughly 80–90% of its flows.

This creates a structural vulnerability. If the Strait is disrupted or worse, strategically controlled, it places immense pressure on China’s energy security, and by extension, its economic and industrial capacity.

In this context, the logic of U.S. strategy becomes clearer. A compliant or U.S.-aligned Iran would fundamentally alter the balance of power in the region. It would transform the Strait of Hormuz from a contested chokepoint into a lever of geopolitical control. One that could be used, in a moment of heightened rivalry, to constrain China’s access to energy.

And that rivalry is no longer hypothetical. The United States and China are already locked in a protracted economic confrontation, marked by tariffs, technological decoupling, and supply chain fragmentation.

China’s dominance in rare earth processing, refining up to 85–90% of global supply, has already demonstrated how resource control can be weaponised. In such a world, energy becomes the next frontier of strategic competition.

The implications extend even further. From the Panama Canal to Venezuela’s oil reserves, to the emerging Arctic routes near Greenland, a pattern begins to emerge. Control over energy corridors and shipping lanes is no longer peripheral, it is central to 21st-century power.

Energy, in this sense, is not just about fuel; it is about the future. The accelerating race for artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing and technological supremacy depends on vast and reliable energy supplies. Limiting a rival’s access to that energy, while securing one’s own becomes a decisive strategic advantage.

This is where the concept of creative destruction borrowed from economic theory takes on a darker meaning. Traditionally associated with innovation and market renewal, it is here transposed into the geopolitical realm.

Destruction becomes a precondition for restructuring. Infrastructure is not only rebuilt; it is reconfigured, often under new systems of control, investment and governance.

In this sense, the comparison to the New Deal becomes more than rhetorical. Where Roosevelt mobilised state capacity to rebuild domestic infrastructure and restore economic stability, Trump’s approach appears to externalise this process.

Leveraging global instability to create conditions for economic and strategic re-organisation. The tools are different military coercion rather than public works but the underlying objective may be analogous: a systemic reset.

The Gulf region is uniquely vulnerable due to its dependence on desalination for freshwater, accounting for roughly 90% of drinking water in some states. The targeting or disruption of desalination infrastructure would not only constitute a humanitarian catastrophe but would also amplify the scale of crisis to unprecedented levels.

Cities such as Dubai, Doha, and Kuwait City could face water shortages within days, triggering mass displacement, public health emergencies, and systemic collapse.

The Abraham Accords further complicate this picture. By normalising relations between Israel and several Arab states, the accords restructured regional alliances, effectively isolating Iran.

While framed as a peace initiative, they also created a geopolitical architecture conducive to coordinated pressure. In this context, escalation is not an aberration but an extension of a broader strategic design.

Yet, this strategy is not without risks; indeed, it may be inherently self-defeating. The deliberate destabilisation of a region as critical as the Middle East carries unpredictable consequences.

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz, whether by conflict or strategic calculation, could trigger a global economic shock that undermines the very system the United States seeks to preserve. A sustained disruption could remove a significant share of global oil supply and sharply reduce global economic growth.

Moreover, the normalisation of coercive diplomacy erodes the legitimacy of international norms.

The principle of freedom of navigation becomes fragile when major powers treat it as negotiable. Human rights frameworks, already under strain, risk becoming irrelevant if violations are selectively condemned.

Ultimately, the question is not whether Trump seeks a “new deal,” but what kind of deal this might be and at whose expense. If the current trajectory continues, the answer may be clear: a restructuring of global power achieved through instability, where crisis becomes both the means and the justification.

The danger lies not only in the immediate consequences but in the precedent it sets. If crisis-driven coercion becomes an accepted tool of statecraft and international relations, the international system may enter a new and more volatile phase, one in which the line between economic strategy and military aggression is increasingly blurred.

In that world, diplomacy does not fail. It is simply no longer the point.

Charles Matseke (MPhil in Politics and International Relations) is a researcher and writer with a keen interest in contemporary political dynamics. His research focuses on electoral politics, foreign policy analysis, and international relations, with a particular emphasis on the Global South and Africa's role in global affairs.