So here we are. Right where we thought we’d be. It isn’t hindsight; everyone with even a passing acquaintance with the brutal realities of war and geopolitics feared, and most were happy to predict, an outright strategic failure as an outcome of Trump’s blundering into a pointless and unprovoked war of choice with Iran, mainly, it seems, at Bibi Netanyahu’s urging, who visited Trump personally prior to the attack to sell Donald a bill of goods about regime change, popular uprising, and Iranian acquiescence. Netanyahu’s pitch was the sheerest bullshit, utterly delusional magical thinking, and anybody with a lick of sense would have seen right through it.
Which they did, outside of the Oval, anyway. Everybody worth listening to across the entire spectrum of a very concerned commentariat worried that Trump would dig the United States into such a hopeless military hole that just to get out of it he’d have to bribe the Iranians something wicked, with goodies amounting to a formal surrender and acceptance of a new status quo in the Gulf, the like of which would have been anathema in the not so distant Before Time. Why, I predicted it right here. Anne Applebaum predicted it in the pages of The Atlantic. My intellectual soul mates over at the Bulwark, in particular the redoubtable J.V. Last, predicted it loudly and often. Indeed as conflict loomed, you’d have been hard pressed to find anyone who wasn’t appalled at the prospect, outside of the brainwashed MAGA faithful, and presumably Pete Hegseth. Almost nobody thought this was a good idea. Nobody except of course Bibi, a credulous, cretinous Donald, and their assorted lickspittles and hangers-on. Word is that even J.D. Vance raised his timorous voice against it, prior to withering under the scornful scowls of the Mad King, and going along to get along.
The sad thing is that between the options remaining after Donald painted himself into a strategic corner, folding like a cheap umbrella was by far the better way to go. It was either that or a calamity that would have rated its own chapter in the eternal annals of infamy. Just yesterday, having set a deadline of 8 PM EST for Iranian capitulation, this was Donald’s promise:
As those of us in the strategic studies community would put it, Yikes!, and Holy Shit! In a prior bleat, Donald had already promised Bridge and Power Plant Tuesday, vowing to lay comprehensive waste to civilian infrastructure throughout Iran in bald-faced contravention of the Geneva Conventions, but this, this was something more again. You didn’t really have to read between the lines to discern the threat of nuclear attack, and that’s probably how the Iranians took it, but dammit, they wouldn’t be bullied. They called Donald’s horrific bluff, and true to form the burnt umber lunatic backed down at the last minute, hurriedly and no doubt gratefully latching on to a cease-fire brokered by the Pakistanis, after which Tehran laid out the basis upon which discussions could proceed towards a more permanent peace. Thank Christ! Except – except – this is where we’re left, as articulated by John Gray in The New Statesman today:
Donald Trump’s self-described “little excursion” in Iran has proved to be a march to disaster. His “major combat operation” has shifted from aiming to block Iran achieving a nuclear capability that was supposedly “obliterated” last June to unblocking the Strait of Hormuz and restoring the situation that existed before the operation began. Whatever the objective may be, the pre-war status quo is irretrievable. Trump cannot declare victory and walk away without surrendering the vital shipping conduit to Iran. With its proven capacity to wreak havoc on the world economy, a bombed-out military-theocratic dictatorship has begun the final unravelling of US imperial power.
Over-reaction? Hyperbole? Nyah-unhh. Not if the “Ten Points” announced by Iran are actually the terms upon which the peace can be be secured by a flailing Trump administration desperate to exit the unholy mess of its own making. Read it and weep:
I mean, wow. Those are just about as stringent as the terms we once offered Germany and Japan (to be fair, Donald did say at the outset that he wouldn’t accept anything but unconditional surrender, so…). No more attacks on Iran, ever, it seems. No more Israeli strikes on its mortal enemies in Lebanon. All sanctions against Iran lifted. And then, the cherry on the parfait: Iran retains control over the Strait and gets to keep on charging multi-million dollar tolls, in return for which the mullahs will graciously forgo the years and years of timely U.S. reparation payments to which they’d otherwise be entitled. No mention of Iran curtailing its nuclear program, limiting its development and deployment of ballistic missiles of ever-increasing range and ferocity, or ceasing its support for radical islamist militias all over the Middle East. No Iranian concessions at all, actually. And why would there be? Who holds all the cards?
As they conclude at the increasingly influential internet Meidas Touch Network:
Or, as J.V. Last puts it in The Triad, his daily Bulwark newsletter:
So yes, this is the better of the remaining possibilities considering Trump’s alternative plan to eradicate an entire civilization (short of which the other available options, like a ground invasion, are less calamitous only by comparison to armageddon), and is, all things considered, painful but tolerable, if only just barely. Not that we still shouldn’t damn Donald’s black worthless soul to eternal Hellfire for leading us into this geopolitical quicksand, but at this point, the best of a bad lot is all we can grab. As J.V. Last concludes, you have to be clear-eyed enough to recognize that Trump’s surrender may be a shit-sandwich we can afford to eat—but that Trump is the one who marched the country into the diner in the first place. Up yours, Donald, but for the love of God take the last available off-ramp while you still can.
Yeah, fine, but it still rots my socks. Worst of all, from where I sit, is the ceding of sovereignty over the Strait to Iran. As my avid reader(s) will recall, I fretted about this at some length in a prior post a while back, I dunno, seems like an eternity ago but maybe it was just a few days, in which I also offered a personal promise:
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 the Americans have 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 demand 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…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 streaking down the bay windows of homes all over the Western Hemisphere, including, probably, yours.
I guess this means my personal detonation is imminent, and all y’all are about to be showered by little bits of my former self as they rain from on high. Look, sorry about that, but at this point what else can I do?
Anyway, before I go ballistic, quite literally I’m afraid, a couple of concluding thoughts.
First, it’s not clear, I have to admit, that Trump and the Israelis are really going to scarf down the malodorous bounty of Tehran’s heaping shit platter, everybody sporting broad smiles as they chew, so we’ll see. The latest news is that Israel has continued its strikes into Lebanon, and possibly Iran as well, and meanwhile Iran has continued to lob missiles at Israel and has once again shut down the Strait to boot. Maybe the whole thing falls apart, though I don’t see how that would lead to anything better, strategically. Quite the contrary, if Donald sets himself back on the war path, perhaps landing an army (involuntary shudders with flashbacks to prior military tar pits) or committing, this time, to carrying through on his threats to put an end to a whole civilization (doesn’t bear thinking about).
Second, granting the mullahs control of the Strait is not only contrary to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, to which Iran and the US are not signatories, but to centuries of international law governing the freedom of navigation through narrow waterways connecting larger bodies of freely navigable water, and it’s not clear to me why other interested powers in Asia and Europe are going to go along with America purporting to sign away their rights, in Trumpian fashion, without so much as a by-your-leave.
Third, this leaves all of us in the West in a precarious position when it comes to other potentially contested strategic straits, like the vital Strait of Malacca in the Western Pacific, the the Bab-el Mandeb Strait leading to the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, the Strait of Taiwan, and so on. If Iran can control Hormuz, why can’t other potentates, or for that matter non-state actors, start charging their own tolls all over the world, and if they do, what are we prepared to do about it?
Fourth, America’s abject humiliation, and the depletion of its conventional forces and critical ammunition reserves, would seem to leave the door cracked open a little – or maybe a lot – for potential risk takers in places like China and North Korea to make whatever moves they’d have long since already attempted, but for the threat of countervailing US power. So watch out Taiwan, the time for Xi to attempt his gambit may be nigh (or maybe Taiwan, now naked and sensing the inevitable, will simply come to an understanding with the mainland tantamount to capitulation).
Fifth, NATO is dead, with all that implies for the deterrence of Putin’s Russia and the support of Ukraine, now standing as the West’s beleaguered bulwark against revanchist post-Soviet aggression.
Sixth, this is the most awful geopolitical shit show I’ve ever had to witness, and I’ve seen a few. I never would have dreamed it could get as bad as this mess bids fair to get. I’m reminded of the Suez Crisis and its aftermath, which, well, you can look it up, I haven’t got the heart to go into the implications for America as a superpower.
Oh well. Off I go to explode, and again, powerful sorry about the mess.
the needlefish 