The Wall Street Journal—Yes, THAT Wall Street Journal—Expatiates on the Quagmire Trump Has Created
If Trump proclaims victory, stops the bombing and begins to withdraw the huge air and naval assets he assembled in the Middle East, it could soothe global markets, at least in the short term, and reassure American voters uneasy about the prospect of another forever war.
But leaving in place Iran’s theocratic regime—angry, defiant and in possession of its nuclear stockpile and what remains of its arsenal of missiles and drones—would essentially grant Tehran control over the world’s energy markets. It would also sacrifice the security of America’s partners and allies, and possibly make another, more devastating, regional war likely.
Sensing impatience in Washington, Iranian officials say they will fight on, until an agreement is reached on Iran’s terms, including America paying reparations to Tehran. “We must strike the aggressor in the mouth so it learns a lesson and never again thinks of launching an aggression against our dear Iran,” Parliament speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf said Tuesday in a social-media post.
Oil held hostage
Iran is still believed to have plenty of short-range missiles and drones—not to mention naval mines—that it can use to choke off oil and natural-gas exports by making the Strait of Hormuz too risky for tankers. Around 20% of the world’s oil supplies transited the strait daily before the war started. Just on Wednesday, three vessels were hit in the area.
“If the regime holds on—even a rump regime—what is to stop its missiles and drones from threatening tankers through the Strait of Hormuz, and the energy infrastructure of America’s Gulf allies at the time of their choosing?” said Andrew Tabler, a White House official in Trump’s first administration and senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “Its ability to impact energy prices would be enormous.”
An additional twist is that Iran is letting its friends, including China, take oil out of the Gulf, while preventing everyone else.
Now that Tehran has demonstrated the capacity—and global implications—of choking off the Hormuz strait, it has created significant geopolitical leverage for itself, and an incentive for Gulf states to appease it in the future. Reopening the strait, military analysts say, may require a ground operation to seize the Iranian coastline. That would mark an open-ended escalation, potentially leading to much higher American casualties.
American deterrence weakened
The performance of the U.S. military is, of course, closely watched by China—and America’s Asian allies. The U.S., alongside Israel, has unleashed high-precision firepower, establishing air superiority over Iran and eliminating much of its navy and air forces.
Yet 12 days into the war, Iran keeps firing missiles and drones across the Middle East, albeit at a slower rate. Iran’s ability to destroy with precision strikes some of the most sensitive and scarce U.S. military targets in the Middle East, such as radars for air-defense installations, didn’t go unnoticed. Should America abandon its Gulf partners after exposing them to existential danger, there will be inevitable repercussions in South Korea, Japan and Taiwan.
“This war hugely damages U.S. standing in the world, which means that China has much more scope to establish its own standing in the Middle East and the Global South generally,” said Steve Tsang, director of the SOAS China Institute in London.
“Meanwhile, everyone is observing that Iran has, at best, a middling military capability—and the Americans can’t take them out,” he said.
Nuclear-weapons race
“There is no easy way out of this once we’ve started it,” said Marc Sievers, a former U.S. ambassador to Oman who is now a political commentator based in Abu Dhabi.
“The regime lost a lot of its military capability, but not all of it clearly,” he said. “If they are left standing, they will do everything they can to rebuild, and to do once again all these things that they were doing that triggered this.”
Iran’s stockpile of 60% enriched uranium—close to weapons-grade in its purity and buried underground after last June’s American airstrikes—remains as a potential pathway to a rapid nuclear breakout.
“The bad news is you would leave Iran potentially in a position where it can produce nuclear weapons, and you also leave Iran potentially with more motive to produce nuclear weapons,” said Eric Brewer, an expert at the Nuclear Threat Initiative who served in senior nuclear-related roles in the White House and the U.S. intelligence community. “That’s a big risk.”
Taking out this enriched uranium, if the regime remains defiant, would require a risky ground operation. “America and Israel are witnessing the limits of what air and naval power alone can do,” said Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute.
“Strategic priorities, like opening the Strait of Hormuz and securing what remains of Iran’s nuclear stockpile, will likely require some ground troops if no diplomatic options are pursued,” he said. “What we are looking at is potentially a very messy situation.”
Gulf monarchies under threat
One nightmare scenario, in particular for America’s Gulf partners now bearing the brunt of Iranian attacks, is that the U.S. and Israel would stop, then Iran would continue harassing strikes to cow these oil-rich monarchies into submission. The fear is that Tehran will try to pressure them to expel U.S. bases and sever their dependence on an America that failed to protect them.
“There are many dangers. A wounded, angry Iran is not the best-case scenario for the Gulf states. While the U.S. has to a large degree castrated Iran in terms of its ability to attack Israel, this gives Iran only one other option: to attack the Gulf states and to weaponize the Strait of Hormuz,” said Dania Thafer, executive director of the Gulf International Forum think tank. “Militarily speaking, the U.S. is on the winning side. But politically speaking, the U.S. and Israel have really gotten nowhere when it comes to Iran.”
Gulf leaders aren’t voicing in public their anger with the Trump administration, which dragged them into this war. This is in part because their nations are so dependent on American air-defense supplies to protect from the expected next round of Iranian attacks, something that neither China nor Russia can provide. Yet under the surface, many are starting to wonder whether the alliance with the U.S. is more of a liability than an asset—especially if the Iranian regime survives and rearms after the war.
“We are stuck between two outcomes, each of them worse than the other,” said Mahdi Ghuloom, a fellow at the ORF Middle East think tank in Bahrain. “One is that the regime stays intact, and the second is the power vacuum in Iran. The Trump administration’s Middle East policy has not been thought through completely, the decision to conduct this war was taken in haste, and its ramifications miscalculated.”
“While the Gulf-American relationship will remain resilient, a lot of diplomatic frustration will be expressed,” he said.
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