As soon as Operation Epic Fury, America’s latest campaign against the Islamic Republic of Iran, got underway on the last day of February, political, military and economic minds around the world should have turned their attention to the Strait of Hormuz. The waterway provided the only shipping route from the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman and the open seas beyond.
That has long made the strait the dagger Iran holds at the throat of the world. At its narrowest, it is less than 25 miles across, and Iran controls the northern shore; to the south is the Musandam Peninsula, shared by the United Arab Emirates and an exclave of Oman. Critically, between a quarter and a fifth of the world’s liquefied natural gas and seaborne oil trade passes through the Strait of Hormuz, and there is currently no sustainable, large-scale alternative route. The West has always known that Iran could disrupt or even halt this vital flow of energy in a crisis by laying mines in the strait or threatening to strike or intercept commercial shipping.
Nato has no business as an institution in forcing the Strait of Hormuz open
Iran announced the closure of the strait on the first day of American and Israeli strikes against it. This had no legal standing, but the implied threat sent premiums for maritime insurance through the roof: attacks on shipping in the Bab-el-Mandeb by Houthi militants in Yemen have shown how disruptive and destructive even a small, relatively low-tech force can be in the right strategic environment. At the end of last week, three cargo ships in the Persian Gulf were hit by ‘unknown projectiles’, the latest of thirteen suspected Iranian attacks since the beginning of the conflict.
The inevitable result has been the soaring price of oil, which now costs around 45 per cent more than it did before hostilities broke out on 28 February. If the Strait of Hormuz remains effectively impassable for a prolonged period of time, the West will quickly feel the economic effects and the embattled regime in Tehran will consequently be strengthened.
President Trump is, of course, relatively bullish. He plans to deploy US Navy warships and other assets to escort cargo vessels through the strait, using America’s military weight – amply demonstrated over the past two and a half weeks – to face down any Iranian threats to shipping. Inevitably, his deep-seated, shady and uneven instinct for ‘deal-making’ brought to the fore, he is also seeking additional advantage by attempting to force Nato partners to contribute to a military effort:
We have a thing called Nato… We’ve been very sweet. We didn’t have to help them with Ukraine. Ukraine is thousands of miles away from us… But we helped them. Now we’ll see if they help us. Because I’ve long said that we’ll be there for them but they won’t be there for us. And I’m not sure that they’d be there.
This reveals the extent to which Trump’s lowbrow, often-myopic transactional worldview sees Nato not as a defensive military alliance but as a gang, a mob in which the made men show proper respect, gratitude and service to the capo. The United Kingdom, Germany and France have all expressed varying degrees of reluctance to embrace America’s latest military adventure, leading the President to threaten: ‘If there’s no response or if it’s a negative response, I think it will be very bad for the future of Nato.’
Nato has no business as an institution in forcing the Strait of Hormuz open, however desirable, wise or necessary a process that may be. Its member states do not owe unquestioning fealty to Washington or to Donald Trump; and we should remember that Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, the foundation of Nato’s collective security, has been invoked only once – on America’s behalf after 9/11. The other member states stood shoulder to shoulder with the US.
An operation to escort shipping through the Strait of Hormuz is not ‘an armed attack against one or more [Nato members] in Europe or North America’, as the treaty sets out. However, Trump, in his grasping gracelessness, has hit on a political truth which the high-minded chancelleries of Europe have so far ignored. Frustrated by Europe’s response, he noted ‘these people are beneficiaries and they ought to help us police it. We’ll help them. But they should also be there’.
Many will be uncomfortable acknowledging it, but the President surely has a point. It is not only the United States which will benefit from reopening the strait; indeed, as the world’s largest producer of oil, America is arguably better insulated than any country against the effects of a closure. Europe has a direct financial and strategic interest here, yet Paris and Berlin seem to expect to be able to sit back while America wields its military might, then reap the benefits.
Collective security is not attentively responding to every whim which crosses the moonscape of Trump’s mind. Nato’s European members are not an auxiliary brigade of the US armed forces. At the same time, this is why diplomacy is hard: it is in the West’s interests for the Strait of Hormuz to reopen, so how do we appropriately contribute to that collectively beneficial outcome? One thing is certain: we have no right to expect America to perform the heavy lifting and then give it gracious thanks. As is probably often asked in the Trump White House, who benefits?
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