Donald Trump’s Iran war is playing out like a Defense Department war game in which a neophyte is schooled in the stodgy and risk-averse reasons why a couple of generations of presidents and joint chiefs of staff have resisted demands to overthrow Iran’s clerical regime by force. Well, yes, we do have a super, super powerful military, the schoolers might say, and Iran is still using rusted-out jets we sold the Shah half a century ago, but here’s the thing …. and you go from there.
Or perhaps, in my hypothetical, you do some war-gaming in which a neophyte president learns that basically any of the small regional powers can harry the Strait of Hormuz and throttle the global oil supply. And since Iran has been the United States’ core regional adversary since 1979 — with the exception of a decade or so interlude in which it was Iraq — all war games assume that the power that’s going to do that is Iran.
If you want to patrol the Gulf or escort oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz, our ships can turn out to be pretty vulnerable not only to conventional missiles but also asymmetric threats. Remember when the USS Cole was nearly sunk at the port of Aden in 2000 when an al Qaeda suicide skiff blew a 40-foot-wide hole in the guided missile destroyer? The USS Stark was seriously damaged by two Iraqi Exocet missiles in 1987 and another U.S. Navy vessel almost sank in 1988 when it hit an Iranian mine.
The point is that these Navy ships can be very vulnerable in a relatively confined space like the strait. So in addition to the difficulty of protecting oil tankers, the Navy generally wants to avoid these kinds of missions because it’s afraid of the threat to its own ships. (It’s a whole other question how vulnerable our Great Power Navy might be not only to asymmetric threats but the kind of mass-swarm strategies posed by drones.) And the more general point is that these risks and downsides are ones that everyone has known about forever. And they’ve kept the U.S. from launching such a war for the hell of it.
President Trump launched off on this war with basically no international support and took a swaggering and cocky attitude to the need for any support or assistance as recently as a week ago. Now he’s doing something between demanding and begging other powers to get involved in our behalf, as David Kurtz noted in today’s Morning Memo. There’s additional context to this that is important. Only a tiny number of powers can do anything about the situation in the strait. They are almost all either European powers that Trump has spent years shitting on, or they are adversary powers like China or perhaps Russia. The whole situation is crashingly absurd.
The advantage Trump has is that as much as this is all transparently the product of his own stumbling ineptitude that’s not the end of the story for the other powers. Even if it’s his fault and his own just deserts, it’s still bad for everyone since it’s very bad for Europe and Asia if energy supplies through the Strait removed throttled. The European powers are now asking for clarity about just what Trump’s war aims are? Which is to say, how long are you going to be doing this? And when will you be willing to stop? Which is another way to saying, how long are we going to need to do this?
The idea that there’s going to be some multinational escort force probably isn’t something that anyone is serious about. It’s a ploy to calm oil futures markets until the White House can figure out what it’s doing, figure out a way to “win,” or extricate itself from what increasingly looks like a perfect storm of open-ended military involvement and economic cataclysm.