The beauty of the Plan is that it only works because the world remains far, far more dependent on oil and gas than most of us realize. Modern agriculture is reliant on fossil fuels. Getting any item in the world from one place to another requires fossil fuels. Flying for work or pleasure requires fossil fuels. Fertilizer production requires natural gas. The shelves of all our stores — even the natural food co-op — are stocked by a civilization whose every move is overwhelmingly petro-powered.

For now, even our post-carbon future is powered by carbon. Solar panels and wind turbines are, as of yet, not self-producing. The creation and delivery of electric vehicles (EVs) and cargo e-bikes rely on a web of inputs still deeply reliant on fossil fuels: plastics, lubricants, blast furnaces, mining equipment, and container ships.

Restrict the flow of oil from this system — by ensuring that a small slip of water between Iran and Oman remains closed — and suddenly humanity’s governing classes are faced with a question they’ve been mostly ignoring for decades: What do we do next? Even if you end the war, there remains a feeling among governments, planners, and investors that it could resume any day.

If you’re as shrewd as Trump you’ve already gamed this all out. What better way to force humanity to face this problem head-on than to drive up the price of oil and gas — and everything else? If $6 a gallon at the pumps doesn’t focus the mind on climate-friendly alternatives, what would? You could write papers and books and give presentations at conferences on the waning strategic desirability of the stuff, or you could make dependence on it seem so rash that remaking the economy begins to look like the safest option.

The cynics among us may argue that energy shocks do not just make renewables that much more attractive. They also snarl supply chains, boost inflation, and create political panic. Maybe so. But to cut through the noise and get people talking about the fossil fuel products that still serve as the substrate of global distribution networks is no small task. How else to get the chattering classes to go on about urea, helium, diesel, and jet fuel? Removal of these critical inputs would cause devastating and cascading effects. And there is nothing quite like catastrophe to get people to sit up and notice. Indeed, if the Plan succeeds too well, the inflationary pressures may make recent affordability crises look like a picnic. However you slice it, by the autumn, politicians of various stripes will likely be facing not just soaring energy prices but crippling food prices as well.

Want to deplete strategic oil reserves? Bomb Iran. Want a higher rate of electric vehicle adoption? Bomb Iran. Energy sovereignty? Bomb Iran. More battery storage investment? Bomb Iran. An acceleration of renewable energy permitting? Bomb Iran.

And when you stop bombing? You make sure everyone knows that should things go sideways, which they often do, the bombing will recommence.

The thing that makes the Plan truly visionary is that governments will be left with few options. To contend with critical energy insecurity, countries will be left with seemingly two choices. One leads to dependence on Chinese green manufacturing. The other leads to Elon Musk’s poisoned chalice of privatized Tesla powerwalls, charging networks, and AI-managed grids. The first option leads to Beijing’s stranglehold over the road to energy modernity. The second entrusts essential infrastructure to a trillionaire oligarch. Sitting offstage, however, is a third option: public ownership and provision of energy infrastructure.

It’s in moments of crisis that the impossible can take on shades of the possible, even practical. Caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of Chinese and Muskian green tech, governments may be forced to look to the solution that’s been sitting in front of their face this whole time. Public power generation. Public transmission lines. Public EV-charging infrastructure. A green transition that runs through energy as a public good, not delivered through tax credits and consumer choice.

The Plan, of course, anticipated all of this. The fiendish cleverness of Trump’s seemingly slow-witted missteps is that they are creating the conditions in which such ambitions will no longer appear radical — they will appear increasingly necessary.

There was always a risk that some so-called freethinker would demur, would doubt, or would even be so bold as to challenge the vision. That wasn’t to be worried about. Recall the army of true believers who are and remain all too ready to feel the truth and beauty of the Plan, to understand and accept that devotion to irony-as-answer is not just intelligence but wisdom. Every fighter-bomber is an oracle, every troop a piece played in a game of green four-dimensional chess with the fate of the world at stake. But there was never any doubt as to who’d win.

Some in the press or on the opposite side of the political aisle will suggest that breaking so many eggs to make an omelette is unnecessary. But they were never going to appreciate the Plan any more than they’d appreciate a well-placed cliché. They’ll claim Trump has mishandled the war — that he has no plan, that he’s never had a plan, and that he will never have a plan. They’ll say when push came to shove, he even capitulated.

Well, no one’s ever tried exactly this sort of thing before. But the heroes who unleash the Owl of Minerva at dusk need not understand the forces they unleash. The irony here is not that Trump is stealthily implementing a green transition. It’s that his blunderings and debacles are creating the very conditions under which one becomes difficult to avoid.

History, you’ll note, is made by those willing to dare — even if their ambition comes at great cost, even if those unable to share in their vision cry foul, or “fascist,” in the face of their genius. But to doubt, disbelieve, or, worse, resist is to sit out the communion of humankind. In this case, it is also to take the side of those who’d doom the planet, civilization, and the species itself to oblivion.

But you don’t have to worry about any of that. The breathtaking aspect of the Plan is its autonomy — somehow, even its chief architect doesn’t understand that it exists. Blessed are we who live at this moment to witness a man standing athwart history, heroically lurching and floundering toward outcomes he neither entirely intends nor comprehends.