View from Washington: The end of the American empire…

Donald Trump’s war in Iran presages the destruction of US authority, not its renewal, ‘The New Statesman’ stresses.

Speaking to Republican lawmakers at his Trump National Doral Miami golf club on 9 March, the tenth day of the war, Donald Trump described American military intervention in Iran as “a little excursion”. Questioned at a news conference at the resort later that day on whether it was an excursion or a war, he replied that it was both: “An excursion that will keep us out of a war.” He went on to declare that the operation was “very far ahead of schedule” and would be over “very soon”.

A march to disaster

Trump’s excursion has proved to be a march to disaster. His “major combat operation” has shifted from aiming to block Iran achieving a nuclear capability that was supposedly “obliterated” last June to unblocking the Strait of Hormuz and restoring the situation that existed before the operation began. Whatever the objective may be, the pre-war status quo is irretrievable. Reopening the strait to Western shipping by military force would likely incur high American casualties, and mean the strait would revert to Iranian control as soon as American forces departed. Trump cannot declare victory and walk away without surrendering the vital shipping conduit to Iran. Even if a ceasefire plan that reopened the strait, of the kind that reportedly emerged from Pakistan on 6 April, was agreed and implemented, Tehran would have had (and still has) the upper hand. With its proven capacity to wreak havoc on the world economy, a bombed-out military-theocratic dictatorship has begun the final unravelling of US imperial power.

The president and his coterie imagined that decapitating the leadership – “getting rid of some people,” as he put it in his golf club homily – would disable the regime. But Tehran is not Caracas, from which President Nicolás Maduro and his wife were extracted in a special operation on 3 January and Venezuela handed over to the deputy leader, Delcy Rodríguez. Iran’s government is multi-layered and – for all its murderous repression of the millions who yearn for a Western way of life – deeply embedded in society. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) manage a business empire spanning oil, telecommunications, construction and banking. The Basij militias, volunteer paramilitary forces used to crush domestic resistance, receive state benefits and jobs in IRGC-linked companies. They will fight to the death. Some may welcome death in battle as an opportunity for martyrdom – an enduring and still potent element in Shia Islam. The White House screens out these facts, along with Iran’s mastery of low-cost techniques of asymmetric warfare.

The fiasco

The fiasco that is unfolding is not the result of strategic error. In her magisterial study The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam (1984), the American historian Barbara Tuchman described how governments persistently pursue policies contrary to their own interests even though better alternatives are available and known to them.

Trump’s war is folly in precisely Tuchman’s sense. Politically it can only harm him, raising petrol prices at the pump and worsening his dwindling prospects in November’s midterms. It flouts his campaign promises of no more “forever wars”, and alienates him from the neo-isolationist America First wing of his fracturing Maga base and strengthens the hand of his rival, JD Vance. Internationally, his expedition can only marginalise him. Even the European far right – Marine Le Pen, Giorgia Meloni, Alternative for Germany – are distancing themselves.

In the Middle East, the war has undercut the financial foundations of US hegemony. An assurance of protection was the basis of the petrodollar system set up in the early 1970s, when the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement establishing the dollar as the global reserve currency collapsed under the weight of heavy American spending on the Vietnam war. Needing a prop for the sinking dollar, the Nixon administration tasked Henry Kissinger with negotiating a quid pro quo with Saudi Arabia. The upshot was the petrodollar system, in which the Kingdom agreed to price its oil exports exclusively in dollars that could then be recycled in purchases of federal debt. Without the petrodollar, the spiralling American deficit becomes ever more unsustainable.

A hidden road map?

Some suggest Trump’s war follows a hidden road map: the goal is to stem the rise of China. Operation Absolute Resolve in Venezuela disrupted Chinese imports of oil from the South American country, and the US is redirecting flows to American Gulf Coast refiners. When, as seems likely, Cuba falls into the American sphere of influence in the coming months, it will be a further setback for Chinese influence. Beijing has invested heavily in Cuban infrastructure, including cybersecurity and surveillance facilities.

Assuming there is any such strategy, the results are mixed. As a major oil importer, China is under some pressure. Unlike Russia, which is benefiting from higher prices, Beijing needs oil to keep flowing to maintain its export-oriented economy. But as Iran’s largest oil buyer, China is one of the countries allowed through the strait and paying the toll in yuan – a direct challenge to the petrodollar.

However the war ends, the result will be the re-emergence of Iran as a major power.

As the arbiter of passage through Hormuz, Iran has become the deciding force in the global oil economy. When transport and industry are factored in, renewables meet only a fraction of humanity’s energy needs. Globalisation in its current form is a by-product of hydrocarbons. Requiring large-scale mining for the minerals that go into batteries and magnets, renewables are themselves fossil-fuel derivatives. China rules over these supply chains, where it often holds a near-monopoly, and appears to be expanding its coal production. Any green transition is a distant prospect. Meanwhile, Iran will be the single most important player in energy markets.

Trump’s jaunt has ended in a cul-de-sac. If he retreats from the Middle East, states that were under US protection will waver between shades of neutrality and forging coalitions against a resurgent Iran. More endangered than they were before the war, Israel and Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Oman will be juggling multiple threats. If he opts to “finish the job” and launches a ground operation, the US will be dragged into a debacle larger than Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq combined.

Trump seems driven by an impulse to reassert ‘American greatness’

The cardinal consequence of the war will be the death of an idea of American empire. Founded in the imagination as a city on a hill that left the empires of Europe behind, the founders of the United States ostensibly repudiated anything that smacked of imperial power; but by the time of the First World War, it had acquired several territories that functioned as colonies in a traditional European sense – numerous small Caribbean and Pacific islands (1856), Alaska (1867), Hawaii (1898), the Philippines (1898) and the Panama Canal Zone (1903). It is this old-world imperial order to which Trump aims to revert in his revival of the Monroe Doctrine, asserting America’s hemispheric suzerainty.

Trump’s war looks more like an example of what Sigmund Freud described as repetition compulsion – an unconscious process in which the mind acts out what it cannot properly remember. A creature of the moment as he may be, Trump seems driven by an impulse to reimagine the past and reassert American – and his own – greatness. Even as he is taking a wrecking ball to the historic White House East Wing to construct a monumental ballroom that may never be built, he seems bent on demolishing a global order he has failed to remake in his image. When an infantile fantasy of omnipotence comes up against unyielding realities, the response is inchoate rage.

read more in our Telegram-channel https://t.me/The_International_Affairs