How the Iran War Ends
The likeliest scenario is that the U.S. largely clears the Gulf but the regime survives.
By Walter Russell Mead
War is the teacher of kings.
As President Trump is discovering, it is also a tough grader.
So far, air superiority, even supremacy, hasn’t prevented Iran from putting massive political and economic pressure on Washington by choking off the Middle East’s oil flow to the world.
There are no signs yet of a popular rebellion capable of toppling the regime.
And waves of attacks against Iran’s strongholds and assets haven’t yet enabled any surviving pragmatists to steer the regime away from its radical approach.
As surging energy prices and declining stock markets worldwide drove a vibe shift, many analysts and foreign leaders concluded that Iran’s strategies were working, and that the U.S. would have to choose between ending the war well short of victory or committing large numbers of ground troops to another Middle East quagmire in the making.
The pessimism is likely premature.
Vibe shifts are common in war as fear, hope and rage swirl together.
The lesson so far is that Iran’s threat to America is both greater than many Iran doves understood and more difficult to address than many Iran hawks hoped.
With missile and drone attacks, Tehran has succeeded in at least temporarily blocking nearly all traffic in and out of the Strait of Hormuz and has forced some Gulf countries to curtail oil and gas production.
If the waterway remains largely closed, we can expect what analysts call the greatest energy shock since the 1970s.
The Gulf is more than fossil fuels.
As the Gulf Cooperation Council countries have sought to reduce their dependence on oil and gas exports, they have built up energy-intensive industries like data centers and aluminum smelters.
These are vulnerable to Iranian missile and drone attacks.
Additionally, exports of helium—vital for South Korean semiconductor production—have been blocked.
The Gulf is also an important center for fertilizer production.
The White House and Congress can expect calls from frantic farmers as costs shoot up, and poor countries may be priced out of the fertilizer market.
Since World War II, U.S. presidents of both parties believed that preventing any hostile country from blackmailing the rest of the world by blocking exports from the Gulf was a vital national interest.
This reality, not Israeli lobbying, has been the driving force behind American Middle East policy.
The war shocks rattling global financial markets show how important this factor remains.
If Iran pressures the U.S. to end the war before it can break the blockade and cripple Tehran’s ability to impose new blockades down the road, the mullahs will hold an acknowledged veto power over the ability of their Gulf neighbors to trade with the world.
The Iranian regime could then threaten a global economic crisis at will and would build up the weapons and war chests that will make its position unassailable.
The current war holds another lesson.
Tehran’s nuclear-weapons program is an important element of the threat to the region, but nukes are only one of the weapons Iran could use to block trade there.
Already Iran’s missiles and drones have blocked the Gulf, at least temporarily; this capability would only grow in time as the mullahs replenish their arsenals.
Unless checked, Iran could soon deter attacks on its nuclear program by threatening to close the Gulf.
The war looks set to end in one of three ways.
One would be a clear and damaging American defeat.
If a mix of global pressure and domestic opposition forces the Trump administration to end the conflict before full trade is restored through the Gulf, a battered Iran will emerge having demonstrated its ability to close the Gulf against everything the world’s greatest military power can throw at it.
America’s power and prestige, not to mention Mr. Trump’s, would struggle to recover from such a fiasco.
Alternatively, the Americans could reopen the Gulf as a new Iranian government more focused on developing the country than on dominating its neighbors emerges.
This would be a major victory for the Trump administration.
Most likely is an in-between scenario in which the U.S. largely clears the Gulf but the current regime survives.
Operation Epic Fury would in that case be remembered as the Mother of All Lawnmowers, solving nothing fundamental but preserving a fragile balance of power in a vital part of the world.
Mr. Trump was never much of a student, but the school of war has set him an exam that he can’t afford to fail.
Let us hope he manages to pass.
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