Trump boxed in by war with Iran
By Gwynne Dyer, International Columnist
Donald Trump may be discovering that the war he chose is harder to end than to start.
The U.S. president launched what he called Operation Epic Fury expecting that overwhelming force would bring Tehran to “unconditional surrender” within weeks. If there was a broader plan beyond using massive force, it is not evident now.
The initial American-Israeli strike succeeded in killing much of Iran’s senior leadership in the opening hour. The attack came even as peace talks with Iran were still underway. But removing the older leadership may simply have cleared the way for a younger generation of hard-line believers to lead Iran’s resistance.
Iran’s political culture places heavy value on martyrdom, particularly in Shia Islam. The deaths of senior figures at that meeting created new martyrs for the regime’s supporters, including relatives of Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei.
Khamenei himself is considered a hard-liner. He fought as a teenage volunteer in the Iran-Iraq War after Iraq invaded Iran in 1980. That war, which lasted until 1988, began with encouragement and support from the United States for Saddam Hussein’s government.
Under Iran’s new leadership, the chances of a negotiated peace with the United States or Israel appear extremely small. Iran’s leaders may also believe they do not need one.
American military planners reportedly assessed Iran’s conventional forces as outdated and incapable of surviving more than a short conflict against U.S. and Israeli forces. But that assumes Iran intended to fight a conventional war.
Iranian planners appear to have focused instead on economic leverage. Their strategy centres on disrupting the global flow of fossil fuels. If oil and natural gas exports from the Persian Gulf are halted, Western economies could face severe disruption, creating pressure for a negotiated settlement.
The idea is not new. The oil embargo of the 1970s demonstrated how vulnerable Western economies can be to energy supply shocks. Despite decades of warnings, the world economy still depends heavily on fossil fuels from the region.
The key pressure point is the Strait of Hormuz. Roughly 20 per cent of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas shipments pass through the narrow channel linking the Persian Gulf to the open ocean.
Technically, the United States and its allies could reopen the strait. French President Emmanuel Macron has already suggested a multinational naval operation to escort tankers and keep the shipping lanes open.
But such an operation carries serious risks. Oil prices have already surged and global markets are showing signs of strain. Military action in the confined waterway could also result in damaged or sunken vessels that block the channel entirely.
Meanwhile, Trump faces the political consequences of a conflict that may be far more difficult to control than anticipated. The president may also be realizing that Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu helped shape the circumstances that led to this confrontation.
For decades Netanyahu has warned that Iran was only a few years away from developing nuclear weapons. He first made that claim publicly in 1992 and has repeated similar warnings many times since.
Intelligence agencies in Israel, the United States and other countries have long assessed that Iran was still years away from producing a deliverable nuclear weapon.
If that assessment is correct, the nuclear threat served mainly as a political argument to bring Western countries into direct confrontation with Iran.
Netanyahu’s objective has long been to draw the United States into such a conflict. With Trump in the White House, he may finally have succeeded.
For Trump, the problem now is how to exit the situation. Admitting a mistake is rarely part of his political style.
The more likely outcome is escalation. That could include deploying ground forces, particularly if the United States decides it must control Iranian islands near the Strait of Hormuz in order to keep the waterway open.