I'm so old I remember that Osama bin Laden's goal with 9/11 was to get the US to overreact and get itself tied up in a war that would destabilize its, and the world's, economy.

But nearly two months into a shipping supply shock, you’d think that investors would wake up and act accordingly. In fact, their compulsive wishful thinking is making the crisis worse, by not providing the kind of signal that has historically gotten Trump to back off his most destructive impulses. Sadly, this time it may be too late, given the operational control of the Strait of Hormuz that’s firmly in Iran’s hands.

The evidence that investors are overlooking the implications of the current situation is piling up. The war’s end is no longer the point at which things will return to something approaching normal. U.S. inflation was at 3.3 percent last month and is expected to rise further, and the second-order effects on goods that are derived from fossil fuels or rely on energy—in the latter case, all of them—haven’t even hit yet. Diesel and jet fuel, the heavy transportation fuels, are rising faster than gasoline. There are trucking costs and fertilizer costs and plastic and aluminum packaging costs, all of which will spark more core inflation, which hasn’t budged much relative to more volatile benchmarks like energy.

Bin Laden also thought the US's overreach would lead to the west withdrawing from the ME, resulting in a ME unification, etc.. That still seems pretty unlikely.