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By Anna Rahmanan
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President Donald Trump's latest threat to Iran turns the Strait of Hormuz into a biblical ledger: For every missile, rocket or drone fired at a ship, he says, the United States will bomb one Iranian bridge or power plant.
It is eye-for-an-eye foreign policy with a municipal infrastructure budget line—very much on brand, and cinematic enough to satisfy the grandiose president in residence.
Trump said on Truth Social on Wednesday that "any time" Iran fires on a ship in the Strait of Hormuz, the U.S. will "bomb and destroy ONE BRIDGE OR POWER PLANT," including sites "next to, or in" Tehran.
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The message is unmistakable—and the appeal to his fans is obvious. But can biblical arithmetic survive contact with the Strait of Hormuz?
Harm for harm! Injury for injury! It all fits Trump's preference for policies that can be explained without a flowchart. His trade agenda relied on similar morality, with the White House touting a "Fair and Reciprocal Plan" to answer what it cited as unbalanced foreign trade practices.
That retaliatory arithmetic, perhaps his preferred strategic language, was also in full display after the U.S. killed Iranian General Qassem Soleimani in January 2020, when Trump warned that the United States had identified 52 Iranian targets, including sites important to Iranian culture, matching the 52 Americans held hostage during the 1979 Iran hostage crisis. In June 2019, after Iran shot down an unmanned U.S. drone, Trump said he called off planned strikes because an estimated 150 deaths would have been "not proportionate."
The trouble is that the Strait of Hormuz is not an abstract stage for symbolic retaliation. The U.S. Energy Information Administration says roughly 20 million barrels of oil per day passed through the strait in 2024 (about one-fifth of global petroleum liquids consumption), with few practical alternatives if traffic is disrupted. U.S. Central Command said Tuesday that Iran has attacked more than 30 commercial vessels over the past three months, endangering mariners and threatening freedom of navigation.
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So yes, a clear deterrent has its logic. Iran's leaders can certainly count ships and bridges and the strategy may perhaps even work, provided Tehran simultaneously believes three things: first, that Trump will actually follow through (plausible); second, that Washington can control whatever escalation follows (unlikely); and third, that the costs to the Iranian regime outweigh the propaganda value of absorbing a strike near Tehran (unknowable until something goes down). The biblical instinct has always had a lawyer in the room, even when the prophet is posting.
This latest one-for-one threat may therefore be less a targeting doctrine than a bargaining flare: an intentionally crude formula meant to simplify deterrence, dominate the news cycle and force Tehran to contemplate an unusually concrete price tag.
Iran now has a familiar menu of choices: it can stop attacking shipping, it can test the threat with a limited strike and dare Washington to bomb infrastructure near Tehran or it can answer bridge for ship with infrastructure for infrastructure, at which point deterrence turns into a spreadsheet from hell, with each new row recording a larger catastrophe than the last. And that is the problem with turning geopolitics into Scripture: an eye for an eye may make for a memorable doctrine, but the Bible never had to keep the Strait of Hormuz open.
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