Blessed Are the Warmakers, for They Shall Inherit the Strait

On the night of April 12, 2026, the President of the United States posted an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus Christ, hand on a sick man in a hospital bed, golden light radiating behind him, a nurse and a soldier flanking the scene. Minutes earlier, he had attacked Pope Leo XIV as “weak” and “very liberal” for condemning the Iran war. By 10 a.m. the next morning, the US Navy began enforcing a blockade of all Iranian ports in the Strait of Hormuz, the chokepoint through which roughly 20% of the world’s oil supply passes.

Three acts. Twelve hours. The man who posted himself healing the sick ordered the strangulation of the world’s energy supply while feuding with the head of the Catholic Church for calling his war immoral.

Pope Leo XIV had a phrase for it: “a delusion of omnipotence.”

The strait is about to prove him right.

The Beatitude

The feud started over a bomb threat. On April 7, Trump threatened Iran with the words “a whole civilization will die tonight.” Pope Leo, born Robert Prevost, a Chicago-raised Augustinian who became the 267th Bishop of Rome, responded by calling the threat “truly unacceptable” and a symptom of the “delusion of omnipotence” driving the war.

Trump’s retaliation was extraordinary even by his standards. He called the Pope “weak,” “terrible,” and suggested Leo should “stop catering to the radical left.” Then came the AI Jesus image: Trump in flowing white robes, hand outstretched on a patient’s bed, surrounded by figures in prayer. It was deleted within hours but not before screenshots spread across every platform on earth.

Archbishop Paul Coakley, president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), said he was “disheartened” by the president’s words about the Holy Father. Massimo Faggioli, a papal expert at Villanova University, told Reuters that “not even Hitler or Mussolini attacked the Pope so directly and publicly.”

Pope Leo did not flinch. On Monday morning he told reporters: “I will continue to speak out strongly against war, seeking to promote peace.” He added: “I have no fear.”

There is a reason this burns hotter than Trump’s 2016 skirmish with Pope Francis. Francis was Argentine. Leo is American, the first American pope. When the first American pontiff tells an American president his war is immoral, it lands in the pews differently. Trump won 55% of Catholic voters in 2024, according to AP VoteCast. Catholics make up roughly 22% of the US electorate. The Pope’s words are not a diplomatic protest from Rome. They are a crisis of conscience broadcast from the heart of Trump’s own coalition.

The Inheritance

While Trump was posting himself as the Son of God, his military was preparing to seize control of the world’s most important waterway.

The Carter Doctrine, established in President Jimmy Carter’s January 23, 1980 State of the Union address, committed the United States to using military force to keep the Strait of Hormuz open. For 46 years, it worked. Every president since Carter treated the free flow of oil through Hormuz as a non-negotiable national interest.

Trump is the first to invert it. His war on Iran, launched in late February 2026, triggered Iran’s closure of the strait. Commercial traffic collapsed from roughly 129 ships per day to about 10. Over 600 vessels and 325 tankers sat stranded in the Gulf. The April 7 ceasefire barely moved the needle: just 12 ships crossed in the first three days.

Then the Islamabad peace talks collapsed. JD Vance announced the failure on April 12. Hours later, Trump declared a full naval blockade: the US Navy would block all ships entering or leaving Iranian ports, interdict any vessel that had paid Iran’s crypto-and-yuan toll, and clear the strait of mines.

The stated goal: force Iran to open the strait.

The structural problem: the United States bombed it shut, demanded it open, failed to negotiate it open, and is now blockading it to force it open. The Carter Doctrine did not envision a scenario where the United States would be the party closing Hormuz. Trump did not break the doctrine. He ate it.

Brent crude surged above $102 a barrel on Monday. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) climbed above $105. Oil has risen roughly 40% since the war began.

Iran’s army called the blockade “piracy.” Under international law, they have a case. A naval blockade is classified as an act of aggression under United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3314 (1974). The United States is running a blockade on a country it is already at war with, on a strait it already closed, to solve a problem it created.

The Broom the Navy Doesn’t Have

Here is the part no one is talking about.

CENTCOM (United States Central Command) says the Navy will clear the strait of mines. It sent two Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyers, the USS Frank E. Peterson Jr. and USS Michael Murphy, through the strait on April 11 in what it called a mine-clearing demonstration.

Destroyers do not clear mines. Sending a destroyer to sweep mines is like sending a fighter jet to plow a field. It can fly over the field. It cannot plow it.

The US Navy has exactly four dedicated mine countermeasures (MCM) ships left in its fleet: Avenger-class wooden-hulled vessels, purpose-built for finding and destroying naval mines. All four are based in Sasebo, Japan, seven thousand miles from the Strait of Hormuz.

How did this happen?

In 2006, the Navy dismantled its Mine Warfare Command. The bet was that a new class of Littoral Combat Ships (LCS), fast modular warships with interchangeable “mission packages,” would replace the aging Avenger fleet. The LCS would carry mine-hunting drones, towed sonar arrays, and remote-operated vehicles capable of finding and killing mines without risking crews.

The bet failed. A 2022 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report found the LCS fleet had “several significant challenges, including the ship’s ability to defend itself if attacked and failure rates of mission-essential equipment.” In fiscal year 2025, the Navy conducted zero operational testing of the Independence-variant LCS with its mine countermeasures package. The Navy’s own assessment: it “cannot determine operational effectiveness.”

Meanwhile, the Navy decommissioned its last Bahrain-based minesweepers, the ships actually stationed in the Persian Gulf, in September 2025. They were loaded onto the transport vessel M/V Seaway Hawk and shipped to the Philadelphia Inactive Ship Maintenance Facility in January 2026.

The war started eight weeks later.

Iran, according to the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), maintains over 5,000 naval mines in its arsenal and a doctrine built around exactly this scenario, dating back to the 1987 Tanker War. China operates roughly 40 dedicated mine-warfare vessels. The United States, with a defense budget of $893 billion, nearly triple its 1988 equivalent, has zero mine-clearing ships in the theater where it just ordered a mine-clearing operation.

The Navy plans to deploy underwater drones to fill the gap. These systems have not been tested in combat. The AN/AQS-20 towed sonar has had trouble identifying mines even in the calm waters off Southern California. Doing it in a contested environment, where Iranian missiles, surface drones, fast-attack boats, and shoulder-fired anti-aircraft weapons can target the slow-moving platforms, is not the same test.

The defense budget nearly tripled over four decades. The mine-clearing capability went to zero. The money went to aircraft carriers, destroyers, and submarines: glamorous platforms built in politically powerful shipyards. Minesweepers are small, cheap, and boring. They did not have a congressional lobby. They did not get funded.

Now the president has ordered the Navy to sweep a minefield without a broom.

April 14, 1988

Iran has mined this strait before.

On April 14, 1988, the guided-missile frigate USS Samuel B. Roberts was escorting a reflagged Kuwaiti oil tanker through the Persian Gulf as part of Operation Earnest Will, the Reagan-era convoy operation during the Iran-Iraq War’s Tanker War phase. The ship struck a single Iranian M-08 contact mine.

The blast blew a 15-foot hole in the hull, flooded the engine room, knocked both gas turbines from their mounts, and broke the keel. That kind of structural damage is almost always fatal to a vessel. The crew fought fire and flooding for five hours and saved the ship.

Four days later, the US Navy launched Operation Praying Mantis, the largest American naval surface engagement since World War II. The Navy sank two Iranian warships, destroyed two surveillance platforms, and severely damaged a third vessel. It was the first and only time the US Navy has exchanged surface-to-surface missile fire with an enemy.

The critical difference: in 1988, the Navy had the infrastructure to respond. Over 30 US warships operated in the Gulf during Operation Earnest Will, including destroyers, frigates, minesweepers, and carrier battle groups. The Mine Warfare Command was active. Purpose-built mine-clearing ships operated in theater.

In 2026, the ships are in Japan. The command was abolished two decades ago. The replacement technology has not passed testing. And Iran’s mine arsenal has grown fivefold.

	1988 Tanker War	2026 Hormuz Blockade
Minesweepers in Gulf	6+ Avenger-class	0
Mine Warfare Command	Active	Dismantled (2006)
Iranian mine arsenal	~1,000 (est.)	5,000+ (DIA)
US defense budget	~$300B	$893B
Ships/day through Hormuz	~129	~10
Primary clearing platform	Purpose-built MCM ships	Untested underwater drones

The Delusion

Pope Leo XIV was not speaking as a diplomat when he used that phrase. He was speaking as a diagnostician.

The blockade lacks the tools to clear the mines; the Navy scrapped them years ago. It can stop ships from reaching Iranian ports, but it cannot make the strait safe for anyone else. Five thousand mines do not respect CENTCOM press releases. Iran’s parallel toll booth, charging $1 to $2 million per vessel in yuan and cryptocurrency, continues to operate. The crews still refuse the run. The insurance markets still price Hormuz as a war zone.

The blockade is not a military operation. It is a sermon delivered from the deck of a destroyer to an empty strait, by a president who posted himself as Jesus twelve hours earlier.

On the same day the commander-in-chief depicted himself healing the sick, his military began an operation that will keep oil above $100, raise gas prices for every American driver, and extend the economic damage of a war he started and cannot end. On the same day he attacked the one religious leader with the moral authority and the institutional reach to challenge him, his Navy proved the Pope’s thesis: the man giving the orders believes he can do things that physics, history, and 5,000 Iranian mines say he cannot.

That is not strategy. That is not strength. It is the behavior of a leader who believes his own mythology, and the cost is measured in dollars per barrel and mines per mile.

But the Pope is not backing down. “I have no fear,” Leo said. And the strait, answering to physics and not faith, is proving him right with every mine the Navy cannot sweep.

Blessed are the peacemakers, said the man in the painting.

Blessed are the warmakers, said the blockade.

The ships that could have cleared the mines are rusting in Philadelphia.