The regime only needs to survive in order to win. Despite the constant shifting of official war goals, Donald Trump clearly believed that assassinating the Supreme Leader would lead to a stooge leader being installed in Tehran within days.
But Iran’s regime has achieved more than survival. Consider the Iraq, Afghan and Libyan wars. All of these were strategic catastrophes for the West, all severely weakening US hegemony. But in all of these examples, the regimes in question crumbled swiftly in the face of the overwhelming advantage of Western conventional warfare. What did it for US power, in the case of Iraq and Afghanistan, was years of guerrilla warfare; in Libya, it was its collapse into a failed state.
In this case, the Iranian regime has not only survived – it is more hardline than it was, and has greater power. It has used its leverage to inflict a devastating economic cost on the West – by shutting down the Strait of Hormuz, where a fifth of the world’s oil passes, and pounding the Gulf allies of the West.
Iran’s strategy is straightforward: inflict such a great cost that the US and Israel not only cease their attacks, but they do not dare to renew their attacks months or even years down the line.
Forget about Trump’s wounded pride. If Iran achieves that goal, then US hegemony formally collapses. Its military weaknesses have already been exposed by the disastrous foreign adventures of the 21st century – which Trump was aware of, hence his commitment to end ‘the forever wars’.
But this would be in a completely different order: not years of being worn down by insurgency – but rather a foreign state facing down an attack altogether.
As it is, Iran has stripped away what seemed to be a US monopoly over economic warfare. That’s a crucial plank of US power – its ability to menace other countries economically, not least by sanctions. In a sense, Iran has instead sanctioned the West.
This is why esteemed political scientist Professor Robert A. Pape says:
“Counterintuitive reality: Iran may be winning the war strategically
The regime is consolidating power, fracturing the U.S.–Gulf coalition, and driving global energy shocks.”
It’s also why Trump’s former Defence Secretary Mark Esper suggests that it is in fact Iran which has more “endurance”.
It’s also why Trump sounds increasingly unhinged, even by his standards, declaring that Iran is “dead”, and resorting to disturbed genocidal rhetoric:
Gone is any pretence about saving the Iranian people: now Trump is talking about permanently destroying their entire country.
His desperation is also underlined by his toying with the strategy of “declaring victory and going home”:
The problem here is that Trump cannot just “declare victory and go home”, because Iran can continue to inflict further economic damage which the US will suffer from. If the US withdrew in those circumstances, it would simply be read – correctly – as a catastrophic defeat US power could not recover from.
Yesterday, Israel attacked Iran’s South Pars gasfield – a crucial plank of its energy infrastructure. Iran had repeatedly promised that if such infrastructure was attacked, it would respond in kind – and, in accordance with its threats, attacked Qatar’s liquified gas facilities.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump supported this strike in order to somehow pressure Iran into opening the Straits of Hormuz.
But Trump has now issued an extraordinary post:
Whatever the truth here, Donald Trump has lost complete control of the war of aggression he decided to launch.
He claims not to have known anything about Israel’s attack – which, if true, means he is admitting that he is not in the driving seat of his own war. But either way, he is clearly shocked by the Iranian response, despite Iran have explicitly and repeatedly warned what it would do. And here he threatens a catastrophic escalation which would surely mean Iran destroying other Gulf energy infrastructure – or even the desalination plants which make its neighbours habitable.
The danger of this moment cannot be understated. For Iran’s regime, getting through the war without surrender is existential. But for the US, this is now an existential question about its own hegemony. That’s why it is trapped in a cycle of escalation, with serious talk of US ground troops – which would land the country in a disastrous quagmire, not least given Iran’s geography.
The question facing humanity now is not about the fall of US hegemony – but how steep and chaotic that descent turns out to be.
