Few think tanks have enjoyed more success with the Trump administration than the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), the pro-Israel lobby group founded and led by Clifford May, its president. FDD has aggressively lobbied for sanctions and military action against Iran for years. This week, as the government pursues the very strategy he prescribed, May admitted that he has no idea what to do about its consequences.
May was otherwise bullish at the Thursday, May 21 lunch event. When asked what the Trump administration should do next, he said the U.S. needs to finish the job with military strikes, confidently explaining that Israel already has the targets selected. Asked about the “Crown Prince” by another luncheon guest, May bragged about his close relationship with Reza Pahlavi, the son of the former shah, and reassured the attendee that Pahlavi—who has not been in Iran since the 1970s—is in fact popular among the Iranian masses. “The problem is they don’t have access to weapons,” May said. (Reporting from Israel’s Channel 14, among others, has suggested otherwise.)
But after his confident opining on military strategy, May admitted aporia about the Strait of Hormuz, the chokepoint through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil passes, which has been effectively closed to commercial traffic since U.S. strikes on Iran began in February.
“I don’t know what we do about that,” May said.
He did, however, understand the problem well enough to explain it. The U.S. has destroyed Iran’s navy, he noted, but it doesn’t matter because Iran has drones, some costing as little as $3,000 to produce. This is enough to keep the strait effectively closed and insurance rates for any vessel attempting to transit elevated.
That closure has sent oil prices surging, prompted the largest emergency release from global strategic reserves in history, and forced Americans to pay 53 percent more for their gas. This supply shock could well up prices in the long term.
It is a problem which did not exist on February 27, and which U.S. officials had warned about if the Trump administration followed FDD’s counsel. According to the Wall Street Journal, chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff Dan Caine briefed Trump multiple times before the war that an American attack was likely to prompt Iran to close the Strait of Hormuz.
“One of the many tragedies of this war,” wrote Joe Kent, the former director of the National Counterterrorism Center who resigned in opposition to the Trump administration’s decision to bomb Iran, “is that before the war began the U.S. Intel Community, including the CIA, were in agreement that Iran would target U.S. bases in the region and shut down the Strait of Hormuz if they were attacked by Israel & the U.S.”
For FDD, the Hormuz closure is an inconvenient complication to their narrative that the Iran War is going according to plan. Of course, the act means they can never admit they were wrong.
On March 29, Clifford May predicted that “Trump intends to end the conflict in a few weeks…Can the Strait of Hormuz be secured in that timeframe? Military experts I’ve spoken with believe that’s possible.” Nearly two months later, Trump has not ended and the Strait is still closed.
Also in March, Rich Goldberg, an FDD senior fellow, presented the theory, endorsed by FDD CEO Mark Dubowitz, that the U.S. could “divert [its] destroyers to escort duties and augmented missile defense for tankers” and reopen the strait.. The Pentagon tried exactly that under Project Freedom, an escort mission launched to reopen the waterway, and aborted it within its first day.
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At the luncheon, the FDD president offered his preferred creation myth of his organization, explaining to the audience how after the attacks of September 11, Jeane Kirkpatrick and Jack Kemp recruited him to build an organization to confront threats to “Western civilization,” ones that were not political like the Soviet Union, but “theological.” He did not mention that, before it was known under its current moniker, the organization was called EMET, Hebrew for “truth.” Clifford May incorporated it in April, 2001 with the explicit, IRS-filed purpose to “enhance Israel’s image in North America.” While FDD’s funding sources are opaque, donors reportedly include the Bronfman whiskey family, the Adelson casino family, Michael Steinhardt, and Paul Singer, among other pro-Israel billionaires.
Undercover footage featured in Al Jazeera’s suppressed 2018 documentary, The Lobby, revealed the director-general of Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, Brig. General Sima Vaknin-Gil openly declaring that “we have FDD,” describing the organization as one of several assets working on behalf of the Israeli government for “data gathering, information analysis, working on activist organizations, and money trail[s]” against American citizens.
Despite its miscalculations and murky agenda, FDD’s influence on the Trump administration appears only to have grown since the start of the war. Notably, FDD Action’s Nick Stewart joined the staff of the U.S. team negotiating with Iran, and the White House adopted FDD’s graphics and messaging on Iran’s nuclear program as their own. So when May and company eventually think up a solution to the Hormuz impasse, the administration has demonstrated it will follow their counsel to the letter, no matter the cost to the Americans in whose name they’re ostensibly acting.
