How This Ends

When Trump was preparing the assault on Iran, his advisors apparently expressed surprise that, given the quantity of US firepower amassing off its coastline, Iran had not caved. The regime’s continued resilience and capacity to resist under heavy bombardment has also, no doubt, surprised Israel and the US. But those of us old enough to remember media reports about waves of ill-armed Iranian youth charging across battlefields into the teeth of Iraqi gunfire were not surprised – Iran has made an ‘art-form’ out of tackling foes by whom it is militarily over-faced.  And the failure to anticipate the virulence of the Iranian response to the US/Israel assault demonstrates a worrying failure to understand that the Iranian regime views this attack as a threat to its very existence and is prepared to do whatever it takes (literally) to defend itself.

Iran knows it cannot defeat the combined military might of the US and Israel in a straight fight on the battlefield.  So it has resorted to asymmetrical warfare. The Iranian response to the US/Israeli onslaught and the way it has continued to respond after the death of Ayatollah Khamanei suggests that the regime had been planning for this attack since the 12-day war ended last year – indeed, probably even before then.  Power has been disaggregated and decentralised, delegating military targeting as far down the command chain as possible, meaning that it is extremely difficult to ‘decapitate enough’ of the regime to bring the missile and drone attacks to an end, or to kill enough senior officials and figures in the regime to have the desired effect of weakening Iranian resistance. And, despite the deaths of many of the regime’s leaders, the speed and accuracy of the Iranian response to both the Israeli attack on South Pars and on Bushehr and Natanz suggests at the very least that, Tehran still has an effective and joined-up command-and-control system.

The Iranian response has been simple, brutal and effective.  Attack neighbours and wear down their population and air-defences with cheap drones (a Shaheed drone costs around $35,000 to make: an interceptor missile can cost up to $4.2 million…!); unsettle domestic political communities with extremely effective online disruption; and spread as much economic pain around the globe as possible by destroying Gulf hydrocarbon infrastructure and closing the Strait of Hormuz. And the effectiveness of their response has given the Iranian regime confidence.  If anyone doubted before they could or would escalate, or that their escalation would have upper limits, they no longer do so now.

It cannot have been a surprise to the US that Iran closed the Strait.  When I was Head of the UK’s international energy strategy in the UK Foreign Office, we ran scenarios on the impact of an attack on Iran.  Every single one of those scenarios led to Iran responding to an attack by closing the Strait.  Perhaps the US calculated that by decapitating the regime in the first seconds of the war, the regime would fall before it could close the Strait (I am not sure that Israel was bothered either way: Netanyahu’s objective appears to be to reduce Iran to the same smoking pile of rubble to which he has reduced Gaza and is reducing Lebanon).  Either way, I would imagine that Iran has been surprised at how apparently unprepared the world was for the closure of Hormuz and therefore at how effective that entirely predictable response has been in damaging the global economy.

There has been some talk of ‘taking Kharg Island’ to force the Iranians to surrender or negotiate.  But since the Strait is closed, unless the US is prepared to fight its way up the Gulf, troops would have to be dropped in an airborne assault on the island – risky at the best of times.  And even if Kharg Island fell, since the Iranians believe they are in a struggle for survival (and one moreover that they feel they are currently winning), it is likely that their response would drag the conflict into an even more extreme cycle of escalatory violence. Witness today’s madness - Trump threatens Iranian energy infrastructure: Iran responds by threatening to “irreversibly destroy” essential infrastructure across the Middle East, including vital water system. This is monstrous and irrational.  But nothing, it seems, is off-limits in the regime’s determination to survive and they are prepared to endlessly escalate in a way that is difficult either to comprehend or defeat. 

So what happens now? For Trump, all outcomes are now bad.

Option 1: Victoria Americana Trump could point to the decimation of Iran’s conventional ballistic weaponry and its launchers; the decapitation of the regime and the IRGC; and the destruction of Iran’s ability to make a nuclear weapon (at least for several years). Declare victory.  Withdraw forces.  Walk, sail, fly away.  Go and attack Cuba.

Result? A destabilised Iranian nation in a catastrophic economic crisis, with hundreds of kilogrammes of highly-enriched uranium still at large somewhere. Governed by an embittered and vengeful regime desperate to consolidate domestic control.  With an ageing leadership replaced by a younger, hungrier, harder-line version harbouring a deepened and violent grudge against the US, perhaps more determined than ever to build a nuclear bomb.  Its neighbours (whose air defences have been hugely depleted) under permanent threat of air assault and hostage to a regime that has learnt it can cause disruption to energy infrastructure or close the Strait at will and given new self-confidence by its resilience in seeing off the US assault.

And even if the US did cease operations tomorrow and withdrew its forces, there is no guarantee either that Netanyahu (who has dreamt of this war for 40 years and whose war aims seem increasingly divergent from those of the US) would do likewise; or that Iran would immediately re-open the Hormuz.  And even were those three miracles to occur concurrently at 0900 tomorrow morning (an outcome which is vanishingly remote), the damage that has been done to Gulf oil and gas infrastructure and the disruption caused to global hydrocarbon shipments is already so bad that it will be months (the Qatari LNG refinery at Ras Laffan has been so badly damaged, there is talk of it needing years to repair) before things return to a semblance of normality: a global recession and inflation seem inevitable.

From the US perspective, even if Trump seems to believe that saying something repeatedly makes it true, the rest of the world will note the US failure to quell Iranian rocket and drone fire, or find a solution to its effective asymmetric response.  Many countries will take note and conclude that, if you can make the economic pain sufficiently unpleasant, the US will walk away. Far from signalling American strength, Option 1 could actually highlight American weakness.

Option 2: Negotiate a Truce

Trump, Netanyahu, Khamanei junior and Sheikh Naim Qassem all sit down together.  Talk about their grievances.  Agree to an immediate cessation of hostilities. Agree future sequence of talks leading to a permanent ceasefire and respect for international boundaries. Everyone declares victory. Hormuz opens.  Israel withdraws from Lebanon. The grateful world heaves a sigh of relief.

Result? ‘… A destabilised Iranian nation etc…’  In addition, Iran would feel that it had forced US and Israel to the negotiating table and (on the basis that it held the whip-hand) would insist they agreed not to renew hostilities and that sanctions were dropped (Iran might also demand the right to have a civil nuclear programme).  Any agreement would have to be UN-backed and with damages payable in the event of breach.  Even then, Iran would almost inevitably start re-arming itself on the basis that the US’ word is not to be trusted (the regime has repeatedly pointed out that both last year’s 12-day war and this one were begun whilst Iran was negotiating with the US).

As an ex-diplomat, a negotiated settlement under which everyone gives up something and no one gets everything they want is by some distance my preferred outcome.  But even with my most optimistic set of rose-tinted spectacles on, I really cannot see a peace agreement leading to a permanent ceasefire with Iran when the levels of trust are so spectacularly low. Which sadly leads me to…

Option 3: Regime Change

The only outcome in which we do not end up with… ‘an embittered and vengeful regime desperate to consolidate domestic control etc…’  is if that regime is removed.  It is the only way that the US (and the world) can be sure that at some point in the future, Iran will not decide to once again close the Strait as leverage to gain better terms, or sanctions relief.  It is the only way the US and Israel (and the world) can be sure that Iran will once-and-for-all abandon its pursuit of a nuclear weapon (let us leave aside for a moment the rights and wrongs of Israel possessing one…).  And it is the only way that the deeply traumatised countries of the Gulf, which have become innocent collateral damage in Iran’s asymmetric warfare, can have the confidence that their neighbour will not decide at some point to lash out at them again.

And I believe that this is the conclusion to which Trump has come.  Helped, no doubt by whisperings from Netanyahu.  It is this option which explains Trump’s petulant demand for assistance from NATO allies in opening and keeping open the Hormuz (an important data point is that the US escorted Kuwaiti tankers through the Strait of Hormuz during the Iran-Iraq war. It took around 10 ships for 5 tankers per day – and the US was not a protagonist in that war.  The FT reckons it would take 8-12 destroyers to escort a flotilla through the Strait: the US only has 16 available). It is this option that explains the despatch from the Far East of 2,200 marines on board the amphibious assault ship the USS Tripoli.  It is this option which explains the departure of three more amphibious assault craft from US territory over the past week.  It is this option which explains the continued build-up of US forces in the Gulf with around 70,000 US troops now in or nearing theatre.  It explains the additional $200 billion that Trump has requested from Congress.  It (counter-intuitively) explains Trump’s comments that the war is ‘close to winding down’: he needs to avoid global economic meltdown whilst he awaits the arrival of his additional forces from the US and the Far East – forces which he needs to quell Iranian resistance and force the Strait to re-open. And is also explains the comment by Scott Bessent, the US Treasury Secretary, that ‘Sometimes you have to escalate to de-escalate’.

Conclusion

None of these options is attractive.  I am no proponent of regime change, having seen close up in Libya, Iraq and Syria the way that it tends to destroy a nation and destabilise its neighbours.  And I shudder to think what horrors and migration flows might result from an ethno-centric civil war unleashed in Iran by the splintering of central control. But having ill-advisedly begun this war of choice, it feels increasingly as if the US must now view this war as one of necessity.  Failure to prosecute it to the bitter end risks creating an inevitable cycle of violence in the Gulf which, with each spin, will start the new cycle at a higher pitch of destruction and instability.