SerpApi.Org
Sitting alongside Lebanese president Joseph Aoun in the White House on Tuesday morning, President Trump painted his own version of reality about the war in Iran and America’s ability to win it.
Despite the war registering as the most unpopular since polling began, Trump delivered his usual sales pitch. The United States, he stated, was hitting Iran hard and preparing to expand its list of targets to the underground nuclear facility at Pickaxe mountain. The Iranians were absolutely desperate for a deal and couldn’t do a thing to stop the US bombing campaign.
If you didn’t know any better, you might think that Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei was only days away from signing a surrender agreement.
The actual reality, of course, is much different. The Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) that the Trump administration and Iran signed in mid-June is dead. US bombers have strafed hundreds of Iranian military targets for 10 straight days and are beginning to hit infrastructure like bridges and ports.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps continues to shoot missiles and drones at vessels that dare sail through the Strait of Hormuz without Iranian permission, bringing daily crosses back into the single digits. The Arab states who got a reprieve from Iranian strikes after the April 8 ceasefire are now being attacked again, causing such frustration that some are now urging Washington to send US ground forces.
Trump is in essence dealing with a situation he created. Without the war, the Strait of Hormuz would be free and open as it always was rather than the de-facto Iranian lake it has now become. Without the war, tech entrepreneurs and investors of all stripes would be hobnobbing in Doha, Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Riyadh, chatting in ballrooms and government offices rather than hearing air raid sirens in their hotel rooms. And world oil markets would be well supplied instead of susceptible to constant price shocks.
The big question now is how Trump will get out of it. Thus far, he’s sticking with gradual escalation. Iran’s southern provinces hugging the coastline across the Strait of Hormuz are getting clobbered on a daily basis, with Iranian missile batteries, drone storage facilities, missiles and small boats destroyed in the process.
The aim is two-fold: degrade Iran’s military capacity to threaten civilian shipping and coerce the regime into, if not re-opening the waterway, then getting back to serious talks. Meanwhile, regional mediators are pressing for a 10-day ceasefire to calm nerves and get both Washington and Tehran back into the MoU – a document that was so light on specifics that both sides came away with completely different interpretations of what it said.
Neither goal has been achieved. There’s no doubt the Iranians are losing military equipment in the US bombings. Yet there’s also no doubt the attack drones Iran has relied on since the war erupted can be manufactured at scale and used to keep the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed.
The coercive diplomacy Trump is so fond of isn’t moving the needle or getting him the deliverables he’d like to see. If anything, the Iranian regime gets more hardened for war with every US bomb that lands on Iranian soil. If Tehran is so desperate for a deal as Trump says, then it would be suing for peace, not pressuring its Houthi allies to muck up civilian tanker traffic in another regional chokepoint.
Trump is still betting that military force will get the regime to fold. But this calculation severely underestimates the extent to which the status-quo in the Persian Gulf has changed to Washington’s detriment.
Iran may be the weaker party militarily and economically, but its decision to weaponise its own geography has all but undercut US military superiority and forced Trump into one of the most difficult binds of his presidency. By leveraging the Strait of Hormuz, the Iranians have deployed a strategic card that it can play against the Americans and their Gulf Arab partners for as long as it takes them to spend billions of dollars constructing new pipelines to bypass the Strait entirely.
Trump’s war gave Iran one of the biggest gifts it could possibly hope for, and it’s a gift the regime won’t give up no matter how many strikes the US military conducts.
Eventually, the war in the Persian Gulf will end. But the region itself is likely to be different than it was before the conflict started. Transit fees may now be inevitable.
More from Daniel DePetris
There's a new Cold War in the Middle East, and neither side is winning
The Gulf Arab states won’t cut ties with the United States but will most certainly search for alternative security arrangements to decrease their dependency on a superpower run amok. And others, like Qatar and Saudi Arabia, will try to mend fences with Iran in the hope that détente will allow them to get back to business.
You can thank Trump for all that.
