This war of aggression, with the intent if not just regime change in iran but utter destruction of the country, is turning out to be an unmitigated disaster for the the US and Israel. They’ve entered a quagmire with no escape, and have repeatedly chosen to double down and escalate, but they have no clear goals, other than pure destruction, and no strategic vision, other than potentially to cripple China’s rise by curtailing its oil supply. Trump is flailing, knowing he’s caught in a trap and resorting to regular market manipulation in order to profit financially despite the disaster on the ground.
For Iran the situation is very different. While this is undoubtedly a crisis for them, as they’re losing many thousands of innocent citizens and important civilian infrastructure, it also represents an opportunity to reshape a great deal of the global economy in their favour. The US had controlled global oil flows and pricing for the decades since the 1974 advent of the petrodollar system, but that arrangement has now ended. America is being rapidly driven out of the Gulf entirely, with the loss of hundreds of billions of dollars in infrastructure – military bases, data centres, businesses, banks, universities etc. Iran is now in a position to take over that control in a seismic shift in global geopolitics.
Iran now controls the Straits of Hormuz completely. Ships need their permission to pass, and ships without that permission will be destroyed, as several already have been. Iran can mine the region at any time should they choose to do so. Already the shipping lane has been changed to lie much closer to the Iranian coast, so as to allow for visual inspection of shipping. Ships must prove that their cargos are contracted in yuan rather than dollars, and they must pay a toll determined by the Iranians. Ships have been paying two million dollars as a toll so far. Over time this will earn Iran enough to rebuild from the destruction of the war, so it amounts to involuntary reparations.
The flow of goods, not just oil, has now moved beyond the control of the US, and the situation is about to get worse for them since Ansar Allah (the Houthis in Yemen) are now planning to assist Iran by imposing conditions on passage through the Red Sea via the Bab-al-Mandab southern entrance. Control of volume and flow can confer pricing power, and undermine fatally dollar hegemony. The loss of dollar hegemony would be the equivalent of losing a major war, and in this case the US is likely to hit by both losing dollar hegemony and losing and majir war at the same time. The impact will be enormous. The petrodollar system generated the gargantuan money flows that allowed for the full financialisation of the US economy, at the expense of its real productive economy. Reversal of that trend, for an empire mired in forty trillion dollars of debt, evenbefore taking account of tens of trillions more in unfunded liabilities, will be catastrophic.
The situation is also catastrophic for Israel, which has drastically overreachedits potential in its zeal to create a Greater Israel encompassing most of the region. Their apparent belief was that the Iranian regime could be toppled easily, with no real price to pay. They underestimated Iran to an extent that is turning out to be tragic for them, as their citizens live in bunkers while the built environment takes terrible punishment. IDF generals are desperate. They’re running out of manpower and cannot recruit. They’re facing attacks from Ansar Allah in the south, a resurgent Hezbollah in the north, and both Iraq and Iran to the east. The country is small and indefensible now that the Iron Dome has essentially run out of interceptors. Moral is low and falling, although the blood lust remains and is increasing. The Knesset just passed a law allowing them to execute their Palestinian hostages, on trumped up charges in a court with over a 95% conviction rate. There are ten thousand such hostages, many of them children. They face hanging, often following years of horrendous abuse in Israeli jails.
War crimes and crimes against humanity are commonplace now, as international law, the laws of war and the Geneva Conventions have all been discarded in favour of the law of the jungle – might makes right. Unfortunately for those who consider themselves to be on the mighty side of the equation, they have over-estimsted their own capacity while drastically under-estimsting the capacity of their opponents. One of the latest terrible ideas has been attacking nuclear sites, which have always been off-limits before due to the potential for regional contamination.
Most recently, Trump has indicated that he might simply give up and go home without achieving a single one of his many stated goals, which change regularly. Crucially, the Straits of Hormuz would remain under Iranian control unless others do something about it. Trump had attempted to corral vassals states into taking the obvious and overwhelming risk of doing so, but comprehensively failed. Trump’s response has been to sulk, and to promote buying American oil instead.
If the US does decide to abandon the war, it’s extremely likely that Trump and his Secretary of War Crimes, Pete Hegseth, will do as much damage as possible on the way out, in order to punish Iran for its ability to resist. They may even resort to the use of nuclear weapons, unless prewarned that doing so would bring other nuclear states into the conflict, which may have happened behind the scenes.
Air power never was the be all and end off of war, despite the biased views of the airforce. Destruction is possible, but not victory.
