Tag Archives: Iran

A US Blockade of the Gulf of Oman is a Desperation Move to Avoid Invading Iran

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The US Blockade of Iran’s Strait of Hormz’ Blockade will Occur in the Gulf of Oman

So Trump is now going to ‘blockade a blockade’? Seriously? Does anyone think that is going to work? I don’t think so is what I wrote at 1945 this week. Please go there for my full argument.

I am not sure Trump even knows how this blockade will work. I guess this idea is that what little traffic does come through the Strait of Hormuz will now be blocked into the Gulf of Oman by the US Navy waiting in front of the India Ocean. Won’t this just lead to exploding gas prices, again? Shortages of helium and fertilizer, again? The stock market crashing, again?

I guess Trump could cut deals with individual countries or even individual ships to let them through our blockade line. That’s the kind of grift Trump excels at. But that is exactly what the Iranians are doing – imposing tolls. We are decrying that as a violation of free navigation. So we can’t do that without looking absurd and hypocritical.

And the questions keep coming: What happens if a country tries to run the blockade? Do we shoot at it? What if it is a big country like China or India? Are we going to imprison their crews? What if it is friendly country? How long would the US Navy have to stay on station to enforce this blockade? Stuff like embargoes and sanctions take a long time to generate big effects, so I could see us staying there for months. Do we have the infrastructure regionally to sustain all that? Isn’t the US Navy already overstretched?

I see this as Trump trying to find some off-ramp which lets him declare victory without invading Iran. The idea is that the US blockade will cause huge global pain which the world will blame on Iran, and that will force Tehran to the table.

I doubt this will work. Iran cares about ideology a lot, and facing down the Great Satan, as they have over the last 6 weeks, is worth the pain. Besides, the whole world already blames Trump for this conflict as an unncessary war of choice. They are more likely to blame this newest American belligerence on Trump yet again.

In the end, Trump can’t win – re-open the strait, definitively denuclearize Iran, and change the regime – without invading on the ground to definitively defeat Iran. I have been arguing that since this war started (here, here, here), and I still think that claim is correct. Airpower, and now seapower, are not enough. So this blockade is yet another desperation manuever to avoid an invasion but not embarassingly TACO.

Iran: I Thought Trump would Try a Limited Ground Assault Rather than TACO

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El Vaquero tacos, the best tacos in Columbus, Ohio (where I live in the US)

I am pretty surprised Trump just capitaulated in Iran this week. Wow. I figured the embarrassment of losing a war would be too much for him and that he would escalate at least to a limited ground invasion on the Iranian side of the strait of Hormuz before throwing in the towel.

That’s what I wrote about in 1945 this week. I figured a limited incursion would not stay limited. We would almost certainly get sucked in deeper, because the Iranians would attack any enclaves we took, which would require us to go further into the country to suppress those attacks. Mission creep loomed. Small missions growing into big ones supplemented by escalating airpower sounds an awful lot like Vietnam.

That post got overaken by events, but I still think its analysis of a ground war is correct. Lots of other analysts were saying the same thing. So I would like to think that all that pushback helped dissuage Trump.

Trump will declare victory, but this was obviously not one. We came off clownish, reckless, and ultimately dangerous, which is pretty much the defintion of Trumpian foreign policy. The Iranian clerical regime is still in power. It knows now that it can close the strait at will and demand cash. Its nuclear material is still in-country, and it will likely sprint for nukes once the war is truly over. The only way to really prevent Iran from dominating the strait and going for nukes was a ground invasion to insure regime change. That likely would have been a disaster on the scale of Vietnam.

So we should be happy that Trump did not make the mistake LBJ did in 1965 and which Bush made in 2003. But a limited error which does not spiral into a larger error is still an error. And that’s what this war was.

Iran War: Can We Open Hormuz or Denuclearize Iran Without a Ground War? Probably Not

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The Strait of Hormuz, including Qeshm which the US probably has to neutralize

I increasingly don’t think that Trump can win this war without going in on the ground. I wrote this up at 1945 magazine this week. Specifically:

1. Opening Hormuz will probably require at least taking a strip of coast on the strait’s Iranian side. Qeshm island is emerging as a key, heavily-fortified location from which Iran threatens Hormuz shipping. So we are now bombing along the Iranian side of the strait to destroy the capabilities which frighten off shipping.

But the Iranians have been preparing for this for decades. They’re dug in. There seems to be a general consensus that we can’t bomb our way into getting the strait opened. So US ground troops are probably necessary to dislodge Iranian coastal power projection. But once you actually land troops – especially if they land on the coast and not just strait islands – the potential for mission creep and an escalating ground war is obvious.

2. If the Iranian clerical regime surives the war, it will sprint for a nuke. They won’t trust negotiations with the US or Israel again for a long time. They will see North Korea as the model: once you have a nuke, you are in a position of strength to bargain, plus you won’t get bombed. The war will strengthen the hardliners who want a nuke for protection.

So now, the only way to keep Iran from getting a nuke is to push the current regime out of power. Ideally, the air strikes would open a window for a domestic revolution to push out the clerics – which might have been possible in January when the dissident movement was on the streets fighting. But they were crushed violently, and there’s been no uprising since we started bomnbing.

Thus the US has to go in, on the ground. Bombing alone won’t provoke regime change. The Iranian people don’t look like they are gonna do it. If the clerics survive, they’re definitely going for a nuke. So the only way to stop that is regime-change which requires a ground war, and we are the only force capable of doing that.

* And yes, I am aware of current idea that we can use special forces to snatch Iran’s nuclear program. That strikes me as unbelievably dangerous. Those facilities will be guarded by Iran’s best troops, and there is no element of surprise to such an operation now, because it’s all over the media. I’d guess that such an operation would fail.

** Yes, Trump could just withdraw and drop the whole thing. He could ‘TACO,’ which markets still seem to expect. I doubt this, primarily for psychological reasons, as I have been arguing on Twitter for a week now. Trump can’t admit defeat. He can’t process it. He will almost certainly escalate to at least a limited ground incursion, and there are no Congressional checks-and-balances to stop him.

Iran War: Will the US Ever Pivot to Asia? It Sure Doesn’t Look Like It

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Hillary Clinton’s original, 2011 article in Foreign Policy announcing the pivot

I wrote a couple op-eds this week on this question of the ‘pivot’ in the wake of yet another US Mideast war – one at Channel News Asia, another at 1945. Here’s the arguement flow:

  • the strategic case (China) for the pivot to Asia is stronger than ever
  • the Iran War is probably going to be bigger and longer than we thought
  • so we can’t pivot more to East Asia for while
  • in fact, we are ‘de-pivoting’ – i.e., moving resources from East Asia to the Persian Gulf
  • also, a lot of Americans don’t want the US to pivot out of the Middle East for religious reasons
  • at least we are pivoting out of Europe. It’s long overdue that Europe do far more for its own defense and take the lead
  • Trump’s interest in Western Hemispheric hegemony will pull away resources better sent to East Asia
  • So the pivot is probably dead
  • So Japan and South Korea better start spending more on defense and cooperating more

I wrote an academic article on the pivot twelve years ago (here), where I argued that American Protestant fundamentalism is the big domestic reason the US can’t quit the Middle East for East Asia. 40+% of Americans believe that Israel plays a major role in the End Times and/or sees Israel as a Western, civilizational bulwark against Islam which they hate/fear. So you’ve got both eschatology and the ‘clash of civilzations’ motivating a deep, religious conservative commitment to America’s presence in the Middle East.

China does not move Americans like that. To most Americans, China is some place farway which makes cheap stuff you buy at Walmart. Does grandma care that much about Taiwan? Probably not. Yes, the American foreign policy community is really worried about China, but the voters don’t care about foreign policy much, and the GOP detests America’s intellectual class. So nobody is listening to us. If they did, we wouldn’t be fighting Iran right now.

So here we are, in yet another Middle Eastern war with yet another president talking about regime change and fighting evil, with the pivot pushed off into the future yet again.