Trump’s foolish war is humiliating America

If Barbara Tuchman were alive today, the American historian would have to add another chapter to her compendium of great-power hubris and bungled statecraft. Donald Trump’s “excursion” in the Gulf ticks all the boxes of her timeless March of Folly.

Her oeuvre romps through the Renaissance Papacy and the illusion of invulnerability, which, in fatal stages, led to the Protestant Reformation.

It marvels at the heroic wooden-headedness of George III and his court, who turned loyal American colonists into reluctant rebels through unforced, serial errors that leave you breathless today.

Lord North’s ministers brushed aside warnings that the colonies would fight if coerced – and fight hard. They failed to anticipate that France, Spain, and the Netherlands would all muck in to avenge their own humiliations in what would become a world war on five continents.

Tuchman describes how the US sank deeper into the Vietnam War, wasting moral credit and military power in “blind pursuit of a ghost”, while chiefly serving the interests of Communist China, and it ended in humiliation, high US inflation and price controls.

The common thread is the spectacle of great powers acting against their self-interest by indulging in illusions and refusing to understand with whom they are dealing. In each case, the conflict could have been defused with a little subtlety.

Future students of epic folly will wonder why the US chose to squander its dangerously thin reserves of munitions by launching a needless war in a region that no longer supplies its energy. Why attack a second-tier country that was essentially contained? Why use up fighting capabilities needed against the real threats from China and Russia?

General Dan Caine, the chairman of the US joint chief of staff, warned Trump that a war against Iran would “dramatically deplete stockpiles of American weaponry, with no clear path to quickly replenish”.

Regime Change, the exposé of the Trump White House by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swann, says that General Caine told Trump that “America’s capacity in any future conflict could be seriously compromised”. To no avail.

The Centre for Strategic and International Studies’ latest weapons audit estimates that the US has by now burned through almost two thirds of its entire stock of Patriot interceptors, as well as half its high-altitude interceptors, also known as Thaads, at $US14 million ($20 million) a shot.

It has wasted 45 per cent of its joint air-to-surface missiles, also known as Jassms, needed to deter a Chinese naval blockade of Taiwan, and a third of its Tomahawk land-attack missiles. It will take four to five years to restock much of this arsenal.

Trump plainly wishes to extricate himself from this quagmire, and no doubt he will eventually declare a strategic variant of a Chapter 11 bankruptcy and leave the mess to others, as he did multiple times in his business life.

But the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps are pressing their advantage. They will not let him default and cut his losses so easily. It was they who chose to break the ceasefire earlier in July, and they who chose again to break the phoney ceasefire this week. It is war on their terms now.

Fighting has spread to the Red Sea and most of the Middle East. Two tankers of liquefied natural gas were attacked in an Egyptian port in the Mediterranean on Wednesday. Iraqi Shia militias have set fire to the major Saudi oil-processing hub at Abqaiq.

The jump in crude oil prices to $US87 a barrel understates the global energy shock. Demand for oil is depressed because 7 per cent of the world’s refining capacity for diesel, jet fuel and petroleum is either trapped in the Gulf or knocked out by Ukrainian drones in Russia.

The diesel “crack spread” on top of the crude price has hit a record $US90 in Texas. It was around $US20 before the war. It is as if oil prices were already $US120-$US150 for the day-to-day petroleum products Americans consume. Trump is learning that the global oil market can still ambush him even if the US is, on paper, a net oil exporter.

The future inflation embedded in these costs is pushing US bond yields to near 20-year highs, with a chain reaction through the mortgage and corporate lending markets. We can be sure that Iran will try to push the penalty higher yet to extract capitulation terms from the US before the midterm elections.

The Iran war has been a strategic fiasco on every level. The assassination of Ali Khamenei and some 180 members of the regime’s elite – how lightly political murder is undertaken these days – removed a leader who had issued a fatwa against nuclear weapons.

Danny Citrinowicz, former head of the Iran desk for Israel’s military intelligence, says the complex clerical regime has been replaced by a tight-knit and more dangerous military-nationalist regime of Revolutionary Guards that still possesses a stockpile of highly enriched uranium and is more likely to press ahead with nuclear weapons.

This fails the first Tuchman test: was there an alternative? There was. Iran had kept to the terms of the earlier Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear deal agreed with Barack Obama. The regime was under intrusive surveillance by international inspectors. Trump tore up the accord with nothing to replace it.

He had a chance to restore something workable in January. Iran was open to concessions. Talks collapsed. Trump wanted a total propaganda victory. He failed to understand Iran’s red line.

Citrinowicz’s lapidary essay “How the War Saved the Iranian Regime” could almost be inserted as an epilogue to the March of Folly. A discredited, hated, and crumbling regime was rescued by external attack, causing enough Iranians to put aside their differences in shared anger about the bombing of their country.

As was predictable – and predicted – a war of regime survival forced Iran to close the Strait of Hormuz as counter-leverage. The Revolutionary Guards discovered a weapon so potent that they would not give up again.

The war has revealed to the world that America’s shrunken 290-ship navy – it had 600 ships in the 1980s – is not capable of reopening the strait by force. It has shown that the US cannot plausibly fight a war on two fronts and lacks the political seriousness to see through what it has begun in the Gulf.

It would take 300,000 ground troops and months of counter-insurgency warfare in the mountainous hinterland to knock out Iran’s drone teams, if it could be done at all. The US has no such force in the Gulf ready for this task. In any case, such a deployment would be unthinkable in war launched for no coherent reason and without popular or congressional backing.

The debacle has shattered US credibility in the Gulf and inverted the grand bargain of the petro-states: hosting US bases does not protect them; it puts them in danger. A partial realignment of Gulf states towards China – their chief customer – is only a matter of time.

Trump’s insufferable insults against European allies for refusing to let him violate international law from their bases and airspace have further poisoned the Western alliance. It all plays beautifully into the hands of Beijing, which is better led and more skilful at disguising its own predatory imperialism. China emerges from this miserable saga as the more responsible superpower in the eyes of most of mankind. The world balance of power is changing before our eyes.

The hydrocarbon shock caused by Trump’s war has done for Asia what Vladimir Putin’s war did for Europe. It has alerted fossil-importing nations to the hazards of supply from dangerous places. The longer Trump’s war goes on, the more it turbo-charges the electrification of everything, from cars and trucks to heat pumps, via solar, wind and batteries. This, too, plays into China’s hands, the hegemon of electrotech.

One should have thought that America, as the hegemon of fossils and the world’s biggest producer of oil and gas, would refrain from rocking the boat and would seek to conserve a status quo that has served it so well until now. Instead, it has upended the status quo, deliberately and with a vandal’s delight.

Trump told the authors of Regime Change with some bombast that he was “the most powerful man who’s ever existed on the planet by far”. A presidential historian had assured him that he surpassed Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Caesar, Mao, Stalin and Hitler, no less.

It turned out that the historian was Gary Player’s golf caddie.

Telegraph, London

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