And why American consumers are up Shit's Creek
Bullshit.
The problem isn’t just that Iran has blocked the Strait of
Hormuz. It’s also that Iran, Israel, and the United States have all inflicted —
and continue to inflict — serious damage to the oil and gas infrastructure of
the Middle East. This damage will take months if not years to repair.
At one point on Thursday oil prices jumped to $119 a barrel
before falling back to around $111 a barrel — all but guaranteeing that the
price of gas at the pump will continue to rise, as will the prices of many
other products and services indirectly affected by oil prices.
What we are now witnessing is one of the grossest military
and political blunders in modern history.
It’s not hard to understand why Trump is trapped in Iran. He
doesn’t listen to anyone outside his small circle of sycophants who tell him
what he wants to hear.
But there’s something else. Iran has adopted an asymmetric
war strategy that’s working.
Boyd found that victory doesn’t go to the side with more
firepower. It goes to the side that cycles through the OODA loop faster —
observing what’s changing, orienting to its meaning, deciding what to do, and
acting before its adversary does.
Get inside your opponent’s loop, Boyd reasoned, and you
don’t just outpace him. You break his ability to form a coherent picture of the
war he’s fighting.
Manley observes that Iran has adopted Boyd’s approach. Iran
hasn’t needed to match American firepower; it’s needed only to generate
economic and political problems for Washington that outrun Washington’s ability
to orient, decide, and act.
Iran has gotten inside Trump’s OODA loop because Iran has
responded to U.S. airstrikes by widening the war horizontally —
attacking tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, launching drones and missiles at
Gulf state oil and gas infrastructure, provoking the U.S. and Israel to destroy
even more of that infrastructure, hitting Amazon data centers in the United
Arab Emirates and Bahrain (causing regional outages for banking, e-commerce,
and cloud services), and squeezing other choke points that the global economy
depends on.
Iran’s leaders — veterans of asymmetric wars in Iraq and
Syria — are applying the same asymmetric logic to Trump’s war. Inexpensive
drones, short-range missiles, and sea mines can have the same effect that IEDs
had in Iraq — only with far greater strategic impact, because they disrupt
global supply chains.
What has Washington done? Dropped more bombs and launched
more missiles.
On March 18 Israel struck at the crown jewel of Iran’s energy industry — the giant South Pars gas field that Iran shares with Qatar and is by far the largest in the world. (Israel says Trump gave the attack his blessing; Trump says he didn’t.) Iran quickly retaliated with an attack on Qatar’s Ras Laffan Industrial City, the world’s largest liquefied natural gas facility.
The attacks have sent the global oil benchmark soaring and
prompted a mad scramble in Washington. Trump threatens “to blow up the
entirety” of Iran’s South Pars gas holdings if Iran attacks Qatar again. His
treasury secretary says the U.S. will consider lifting sanctions on millions of
barrels of Iranian oil.
Since he and Israel began bombing Iran, Trump’s strategy has
been entirely reactive. Iran is generating problems for Washington faster than
Washington can contain them — a clear sign that Iran is inside Trump’s OODA
loop.
Trump and Israel assumed that overwhelming airpower would
either compel Iran to surrender or trigger regime change. But neither has
happened. The regime seems more entrenched and bellicose than ever.
As Iran continues to block the Strait of Hormuz and attacks
its Gulf neighbors’ oil and gas infrastructure, the cost-benefit ratio
continues to shift against Trump: Economic and political pressures are mounting
on Washington faster than they are on Tehran.
Sure, Iran is hurting — but, as Manley argues, Iran can
sustain its counteroffensive more easily and longer than the U.S. can sustain
economic damage to Iran. An Iranian Shahed drone made of styrofoam and powered
by a motorcycle engine, for example, costs orders of magnitude less than the
precision missiles sent to intercept it or the economic havoc it causes when it
ignites a tanker, data center, or desalination plant.
In addition, the longer Trump’s OODA loop stays broken, the
more bad consequences occur that no one in the Trump regime anticipated.
Trump’s war in Iran is now being led by Israel rather than the other way
around, and Trump has no easy way to alter this power imbalance.
The war has also shifted the power balance between Russia
and Ukraine, with Russian oil revenues potentially doubling as U.S. weapons
stocks become depleted.
So what’s next for the U.S.? Is there any way out for Trump?
He could put “boots on the ground” in Iran and attempt to
seize Iran’s stockpile of approximately 970 pounds of 60 percent enriched
uranium — enough to produce multiple nuclear weapons if further enriched. If he
could pull this off, a major feat.
But this would be a particularly dangerous move in terms of
American lives lost. It could even risk an accidental nuclear explosion.
Moreover, no one knows where the enriched uranium is being
stored. In the wake of U.S. and Israeli strikes last June, it’s likely in deep
underground tunnels near Isfahan and other secure locations, but the
International Atomic Energy Agency can’t verify the exact locations or status
of the stockpile due to lack of access to bombed sites.
What about returning to the diplomatic table? As Richard
Haass points
out, Trump hardly gave diplomacy a chance before launching his war. U.S.
envoys Witkoff and Kushner blended maximal positions — effectively demanding an
end to Iran’s nuclear program, ballistic missile force, and support for proxies
— with minimal time for negotiation.
Haass notes the stark contrast between this process and the
administration’s apparently endless willingness to give Russia the benefit of
the doubt and compromise Ukraine’s interests.
If Trump returned to negotiations now, from a position of
demonstrated military capability rather than exhaustion, Iran might be forced
to reorient and respond to an adversary that did something unpredictable.
The problem is that the Trump regime has repeatedly reneged
on his promises to Iran, so Tehran has no reason to believe any offer Trump
makes.
So, presumably for the foreseeable future, Iran will remain
in Trump’s OODA loop, Trump will remain trapped in Iran, and American consumers
will be trapped by soaring energy prices.
