Donald Trump’s quest for regime change in Iran has backfired horribly. The president misunderstood the resilience of the 47-year-old Islamic Republic of Iran, the strategic calculations of one-time ally Israel and the physical and political geography of the Strait of Hormuz. Vice President J.D. Vance appears now to be positioned as the public face of failure.
The decision to launch the assault on Iran was underpinned by Israeli confidence that Iran’s leadership could be toppled and that the United States’ overwhelming firepower would produce shock and awe. It came in the immediate aftermath of plans to acquire Greenland, incorporate Canada, assert dominance over the Panama Canal and topple the then Venezuelan government. Cuba is no doubt next on Trump’s list. Oil, territory, shipping lanes, hemispheric dominance, real estate development and the historic ideology of frontier expansion inform the decision-making of an American president determined to make America bigger and greater.
Beyond Trump’s personal ambition to forge this expansionist America, the direction of travel of this administration has been to shift away from a rules-based global order. And until Iran, this desire had met international protests and internal dissent but not a hard stop. Until now in and around the Strait of Hormuz, a waterway that facilitates 20 per cent of the world’s oil and liquified natural gas exports from Iran and Gulf countries to Asian and other regional markets, including China. The Iranian regime, informed by past tanker wars in the 1980s, has had plenty of time to think about how it turns an international maritime passage into a chokepoint.
The next six months will be fraught
There may even have been briefings in the Oval Office that offered reassurance to the President that any Iranian retaliation, including blockading the Strait, would disproportionately affect China because it imports 50 per cent of its oil and 30 per cent of LNG from Middle Eastern suppliers. Iranian oil, heavily discounted, is also purchased, usually via third parties in southeast Asia. The US as an oil and gas superpower would be, in this geopolitical rather than geoeconomic framing, spared the worst of it.
Instead, the compact physical geography of Gulf countries and Iran produced an amphitheatre of and for drone and missile attacks, with Israel and UK military bases in Cyprus being implicated in kinetic attacks. Ukraine’s hard-earned experience in drone defence emerged as commercially advantageous as Gulf countries sought urgent advice. The first deal with Saudi Arabia was signed by the Ukrainian president in late March. Other deals emerged with Qatar, the UAE and Jordan.
The so-called ‘deal’ between Iran and the United States to end conflict in and around the Strait of Hormuz reveals the fundamental asymmetry. The lifting of the US blockade of Iranian ports will pave the way for a fundamental change in the way Iran exerts dominance. Freedom of navigation will be replaced by Iran charging users to transit the strait after an interim grace period. But one that will require the US to withdraw its forces from the immediate area, which is not defined clearly.
Not only would Iran be able to act as a paid gatekeeper via the Persian Gulf Transit Authority, but the deal also offers Tehran a package of sanction-lifting measures and the unfreezing of Iranian financial assets. A $300 billion (£225 billion) compensation package would accompany all of that to aid and abet a reconstruction programme. It is not clear at this stage who would fund that, but Trump might expect Gulf countries to provide the answer to that commitment. Whoever funds it, the net result is a huge payoff to a country that hitherto was not charging users for transiting it through adjacent waters.
For the US’s closest ally, Israel, this deal is a security disaster. Iran’s nuclear ambitions remain a live concern and Tehran is asked not to develop nuclear weapon capabilities. Iran’s funding for proxies such as Hezbollah and Hamas is not mentioned. Whether or not Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu overplayed his hand when it came to predicting Iranian regime change, Israel and the US are now engaged in a war of words. Iran arguably has achieved an extraordinary result – a public schism within the special relationship between Washington and Jerusalem. More Israeli action in Lebanon will follow.
Continued Israeli attacks on Lebanon reveal only too clearly that Netanyahu has formed the view that the United States is an unreliable security parter. Israel joins Ukraine and European Nato states such as Denmark in coming to that uncomfortable conclusion. Gulf countries including the UAE and Saudi Arabia have also had to come to terms with this assessment. They have borne the brunt of Trump’s recklessness and his unwillingness, as they would have suspected, to introduce US troops into Iranian coastal facilities.
The next six months will be fraught. Netanyahu faces an election this year and is likely to lose. Any US-Iranian deal that does not address the danger posed by Iran to Israel will finish his career. If implemented, Iran will impose costs on users that could lead to lead to Gulf suppliers looking to overland routes to export to overseas customers. Asian customers might decide to look elsewhere and thus push demand for ‘safer’ suppliers outside the Persian Gulf region. A new round of energy planning in Asia is going to take on added urgency. Iran does not have to trouble itself with short-term electoral cycles.
Demining the Strait of Hormuz compounds all of this, as the Iranians have a patchy understanding of location and numbers. It will remain a high-risk and high-premium working environment but one that consolidates Iran’s regional power. It will almost certainly embolden rather than chasten Tehran. In the end, the US carried out 13,000 strikes on Iranian military targets without shifting the dial.
No wonder that, at the G7 summit in Evian, President Macron decided to start the meeting on time and not wait for the late-arriving US president who declared that he remained ‘the boss’. Trump has revealed only too clearly to his G7 counterparts and the wider world the very real limits of American power. It is hard to frame this as anything other than a disaster and one that eclipses the Iranian-US hostage crisis in the late 1970s.
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