You know, if there was one central tenet of the now moribund rules-based international order, one core principle of the global system enforced since Britannia ruled the waves, following which the mighty United States Navy took up the baton, it’s freedom of navigation. The regime established over centuries is really quite simple: nation states bordering the seas can claim sovereignty over a limited envelope of contiguous water, a band limited to twelve nautical miles off the coast, beyond which it’s open seas, and the seas are free. Full stop. While modified somewhat by the UN Law of the Sea, which recognizes 200 mile exclusive economic zones – a Convention that America never signed anyway – nothing has been allowed to interfere with freedom of navigation beyond the long established limit of 12 nautical miles.
Narrow passages connecting international bodies of water have likewise been treated as open sea, free for everyone to transit. Nobody, but nobody, gets to stop naval vessels and the merchant ships they protect from sailing as they please through the world’s many strategic choke points, or for that matter into any bays, or seas bordered on all sides by foreign powers. Anyone who held otherwise was soon disabused of the notion by Western naval might. Thus, for decades now, American warships have regularly and quite deliberately sailed up and down the Strait of Malacca and the Taiwan Strait, into the Gulf of Sidra and the Black Sea, and through the international waters surrounding artificial Chinese islands which the Communists in Beijing have the temerity to claim as their own. It’s yours, is it? Really? Is that so? That’s funny, because last time I checked, that was a US Navy carrier battle group transiting those very waters, going wherever it wanted, and snapping its fingers under your noses, you miserable tinpot tyrants and overweening dictators. Year in, year out, just on general principle, the US Navy continually conducts what are known as freedom of navigation operations all over the globe, the better to remind everybody that the rules still hold, the seas are now and forever free, and anyone who doesn’t like it is cordially invited to suck it up, shut his yap tight, and pretend to enjoy the way it all works.
Yeah, well, not anymore it seems.
One of the more miserable aspects of Donald Trump’s breathtakingly ill-advised war of choice in the Middle East has been Iran’s closure of the vitally strategic Strait of Hormuz, through which, you will undoubtedly have heard dozens of times by now, flows 20% of the global oil supply, and commensurate quantities of natural gas, all of it transported by huge and extremely vulnerable ships that are easily disabled or outright destroyed if anybody has the cajones to try it. The last time anything similar happened was in the late 1980s, when Iran, then fighting a protracted and quite hideous war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, began mining the waters and attacking tanker traffic in the Persian Gulf. Eventually, inevitably, an American warship, the frigate Samuel B. Roberts, struck and was disabled by one of the Iranian mines, which was the last straw for a very irritated Ronald Reagan and his security advisors.The response was the destruction, in 1988, of most of the Iranian navy by US warships and airpower via the execution of what the Americans called Operation Praying Mantis. Things calmed down after that.
The outcome of the late Eighties “tanker war” might have persuaded the current crop of American policy makers – or should I say the present rabble of unqualified morons and magical thinkers – that when it came to contesting free access to the Persian Gulf, a sufficient application of military force could always be relied upon to push the Iranians back into line. Sadly, that doesn’t seem to be the case, not by a damn sight, and it’s not clear what we in the West are going to do about it.
It’s often reported – I’ve said so myself a few times in this space – that the Iranians have “shut down the Strait of Hormuz”, but that’s not quite right. What they’ve done is taken charge of the waterway, arrogating to themselves the prerogative to dictate whose ships can and cannot pass, in the exercise of which they’re quite pleased to let the vessels bound for all sorts of countries come and go, including those supplying oil and gas to the Chinese, the Indians, and others. All the shipowners have to do is pay a modest two million dollar fee per ship to the Islamic Republic, amounting, depending upon the size of the tanker, to maybe a couple of bucks per barrel of oil, possibly less, a charge big enough to be worth collecting, yet modest enough to make it worth paying. Two million simoleons, that’s all, unless they decide to jack the price, which maybe they will, maybe they won’t, anyway don’t worry about it, they’ll let you know. You don’t want to pay? Sure, OK, let’s see how you feel about it when Iranian drones and missiles punch a few jagged holes in your hull, supposing you even try to run the gauntlet, which you probably won’t, because you’re not insured for that sort of thing, are you?
So what now?
Well, if we want to restore free navigation of the Strait, it’s a little late to be threatening force, isn’t it? What are we going to do, promise to bomb them back to the Stone Age? We’ve already bombed them into the Paleolithic, having pulverized something like 15,000 (!) targets, many of them probably twice over, destroying just about everything the obliteration of which wouldn’t constitute a war crime. A couple of days back Donald had a bright idea and bleated out over social media a new threatened strategy that amounted to fuckit then, let’s just go ahead and commit frickin’ war crimes too, promising to wipe out the entirety of Iran’s civilian energy infrastructure, power plants, substations, transmission lines, the lot, unless Iran opened up the Strait within 48 hours. This sounded pretty scary, but the deadline came and went after Donald, or perhaps his military commanders, proved unwilling to carry through on a bombing campaign that might one day land them all in The Hague, looking like Slobodan Milosevic.
So what’s left? Just a couple of bad options, seems to me. One is a negotiated cease fire, which sounds appealing, but needn’t be. Ideally, the terms of the arrangement would obligate Iran to let maritime traffic flow unheeded – that is, restore the status quo from which we were already benefitting before Trump decided set the whole region ablaze – in return for a cessation of hostilities, plain and simple, but I don’t see why the mullahs would go for that. They’re now charging their transit tolls despite the worst we’ve proved willing to throw at them, so merely promising to lay off with the air attacks wouldn’t seem to be sufficient inducement; if we want them to play ball, why wouldn’t they now demand a couple of key concessions? How about, say, they promise to grant everybody free passage, no more threats of force, provided that everybody agrees that the Islamic Republic gets to keep on collecting transit fees, perhaps annually, perhaps on a per-ship basis, hey, they’re nothing if not flexible (and we’ll talk about ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons later, TBD). What if they demand de facto, if not de jure sovereignty over the Strait going forward? A deal like that would, of course, set a terrible example, and might snowball into a geopolitical disaster as nations astride strategic waterways all around the world demanded similar deals (and why wouldn’t they?). This could leave the Americans with the choice of military action all over the globe while Iran still lords it over the Strait, or, God forbid, simply knuckling under and paying tolls to everybody who wants to impose them, and there goes freedom of the seas and several hundred years of consistent foreign policy. I just can’t believe they’ll go down that road.
If, then, that doesn’t appeal – and by all that’s holy, it damned well better not – then the Americans (ideally with allied support, but probably without out it given the myriad ways in which Donald has made it his mission in life to fuck over everybody America once listed among its most trusted friends), will have to prove they can reopen the Strait by sheer application of naval force, no matter how many missiles and drones and sea mines and fast attack craft the Iranians can fling against unauthorized traffic. I’ve noted in this space before how dangerous and difficult this mission would be; it would strain American naval forces to their limit and beyond, almost undoubtedly at the expense of fulfilling existing commitments in other theatres (especially the Western Pacific), and would probably result in the disabling and outright destruction of many from the Navy’s finite roster of multi-billion dollar destroyer escorts, a force that’s already spread too thin trying to police the rest of the world’s oceans and their many strategic hot spots. Even under the rosiest assumptions, protecting what would have to be miles-long convoys of tankers – there’s no way there are enough warships to shepherd the floating targets through one by one – would be at best a dicey proposition, and pulling it off would probably wind up requiring the deployment of an army ashore to push Iranian military assets back out of range (to the extent that’s even possible, given the reach of a lot of the Iranian arsenal), with all the attendant risks and possibly disastrous outcomes, at which point welcome, America, to your new Forever War.
That’s a completely unsatisfactory and even unthinkable scenario, but come what may, we can’t allow Iran to claim national sovereignty of the Strait. We simply can’t have it. No matter what it takes.
But wait, you ask, isn’t it conceivable that a cease fire on more agreeable terms, requiring Iran to disclaim any sort of sovereignty over the Strait, while ceasing the imposition of tolls on maritime traffic, could be wrangled without further concessions, supposing the Americans continue to pound Iranian targets with everything they’ve got? Won’t the Iranians, battered and bloodied 24/7 for weeks on end, eventually cry uncle? Sure, I guess that’s within the realm. I’m in no position to claim that no such thing is possible. In fact, let’s keep our fingers and toes crossed, hoping for the best.
Im not sanguine though. Look at what’s already been done to them. Does it look to you like the mullahs are fixing to cave?
The hell of it is, this is all so utterly unnecessary, and increasingly infuriating the more it looks as if, after all the death and destruction, the best possible outcome is to put things back to exactly the way they were before Donald ever started his stupid war, God damn his black soul. Such may well be the best we can hope for, and that’s an outright defeat and humiliation for the United States. I suppose there might be some semblance of a silver lining if, in the aftermath of this godawful shit show, nobody’s keen any more to let Bibi Netanyahu drag an apparently witless American policy community around by its nose ring. That would be good, supposing Donald is capable of learning any hard lessons from abject failure, which, judging by his track record, I very much doubt. But swear to God, if the long term outcome of Trump’s cretinous so-called “excursion” is the demonstration of the West’s inability to maintain freedom of navigation throughout the World Ocean – if Iran successfully sets a corrosive example that others worldwide seek to emulate – I’m going to blow up into a billion little high-velocity chunks, many of which will wind up tracing ballistic arcs straight into the front yards and down the bay windows of homes all over the Western Hemisphere, including, probably, yours.
Sorry. It’s an autonomic response, there’s nothing I can do about it.
the needlefish 