Trump had been making a series of increasingly lurid threats against Iran, following its attacks on American bases in Jordan and Kuwait. He had been threatening to terrorise the population and destroy civilian infrastructure, specifically power generation, which is a war crime. The attack had been proposed for this weekend, and over in time to avoid disturbing the stock market. This has been a consistent pattern of market manipulation with both Trump’s statements and attacks. This time the attack didn’t come as expected, despite American embassies in the region having warned their compatriots that they may need to leave in a hurry and that air travel may be disrupted. Trump is now saying that Iran asked him not to attack and that a deal is now close. This is another one of Trump’s fantasies. Iran has never asked Trump to make a deal, and in fact is refusing to negotiate at all after the US reneged on every aspect of the MOU deal it signed. Trump’s signature is worthless, as he changes his mind constantly and never keeps his word. The only deal Trump would accept is a complete capitulation by Iran, including giving up their control over the strait of Hormuz, but Iran has no intention of agreeing to surrender. Why would they when they’re winning?
Iran knows it cannot prevent being struck by US missiles, so long as the US has missiles to fire, but it does have sufficient air defence to threaten American planes. The US is running low on long range missiles, and its short range ones must be carried by its aircraft, bringing them into range of Iran’s air defence. The military has apparently made this clear to Trump, which may be the real reason for the latest TACO. Iran has specialised in second strike capability, meaning that whatever damage they take, they will always be able to strike back. They achieved this by burying their military infrastructure deep below the mountains, where it cannot be taken out, likely not even with a nuclear weapon. They also created a highly decentralised and resilient command structure, making them impervious to the decapitation strikes the US and Israel so often use.
This capacity to resist American aggression and retain the capacity to retaliate may well be what deterred the US military, given that Iran had threatened to cripple the Gulf monarchies if Trump carried through on his promised attack. Unlike Iran, which has sufficient water, the Gulf states and Israel rely heavily on desalination plants for drinking water. These plants in turn rely on energy supply, and it’s the energy supply that Iran had threatened to take out if the US attacked its energy infrastructure. This would render these states uninhabitable at the height of summer heat.
Iran has had decades to prepare for this war, which it knew would eventually come. The US has not prepared. It has, or at least had, many bases in the region, but these were acutely vulnerable to missile and drone attacks. Nothing was underground or sufficiently protected by air defence. US air defence has proven to be ineffective, with the PAC3 patriot interceptor having perhaps a 2-3% success rate. Iran was able to take out the extremely expensive radars on these bases with drones, leaving the base blind to incoming missiles. Further retaliatory strikes have since rendered the bases inoperable and uninhabitable. The US has been lying about the resulting casualties.
The US always underestimates the capabilities of its adversaries, generally after thoroughly dehumanising them. One only has to look at Afghanistan, where the US fought an assymmetical war for twenty years that resulted in replacing the Taliban with the Taliban. Now it’s attempting to fight a peer competitor – Russia (albeit indirectly through proxies) – and a near-peer competitor in Iran. In both cases it’s losing because it failed to understand its opponent’s military capacity and drive to defend themselves in an existential battle. Yet American warhawks still somehow think they can take on China in the future.
We are watching a failing empire, deeply indebted and over-extended militarily, embed itself in Thucydides Trap. It’s elected a mob-connected malignant narcissist with delusions of grandeur, but no knowledge about how anything works. Bullying, extortion, and perfidiousness are his modus operandi, and this fails to impress other world leaders. The US is now hated globally almost as much as the genocidal state of Israel. The regime believes, in its hubris, that it can revive its unipolar moment and rule the world in perpetuity, but that moment is decisively over.
