Donald Trump’s retreat over claiming Strait of Hormuz tolls of 20% for all shipping passing through is the latest climb-down by the US President. Every time he makes a threatening outburst it erodes his chance of making a favourable deal with Iran, even though the war has fractured the regime. Its military is vastly depleted, its defences are degraded but the less hardline within the upper structure of Tehran’s rule are losing the argument to end the war.
Washington is now torn between continuing to step up pressure in the hope that Tehran’s defiance will collapse or take over Kharg Island and impose a permanent presence. The former would require another climb-down eventually, possibly giving up control of the Strait of Hormuz and the latter would embed the US in a military operation for years. It is near-impossible, without a major military operation to secure the Strait of Hormuz, with boots on the ground, to imagine Iran not retaining some control over the waterway.
It is a diplomatic and military mess further confused by the President’s rolling bulletins of lies and obfuscation that make it impossible to see a way out. He has hinted again at a major military campaign stepping up, hitting more civilian infrastructure and even launching a boots on the ground operation. Again, he has been vague, possibly using dissident Kurds to launch a campaign within Iran, which will be messy, unpredictable and inevitably will require US Special Forces.
He said: “Next week comes the bridges. We’re going to knock out all their power plants. We’ll knock out all their bridges unless they get to the table and negotiate. Sometimes you need a ground campaign, but we have other people that will do the ground campaign for us.” Whether Kurdish forces will have the appetite for this, having been treated so shabbily by the US in Syria and Iraq, is uncertain.
It was different factions of Kurdish forces who deposed Islamic State, backed by the US who then all but abandoned them, leaving them to cope with swollen jails packed with ISIS terrorists. Iran has hit out aggressively at the UK’s finally designating the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a banned terrorist organisation and we can expect threats to follow. They could be sabotage, violence towards Iranian dissidents within the UK or perhaps even terrorist threats towards UK interests abroad.
Although currently a bit of a sideshow to the worsening US war with Iran this could become very serious if the conflict in the Middle East settles into the shadows. America’s dumb escalation in the Middle East has put the UK in the sights of the IRGC and they cannot be bombed out of existence as we have already seen. The shadowy force, which exerts immense control over the running of Iran, has tentacles of contacts all over the globe, through Europe and all the way to South America.
Our intelligence agencies and counter-terror police are already stretched with the Islamist terror and far-right threat plus state-sponsored or planned disinformation campaigns, sabotage and murder campaigns by enemy states such as Russia. And Britain’s rightful reticence towards becoming involved in Trump’s war- plus that of the rest of NATO- is alienating our strongest ally, which in turn has been weakened by it. The effect of Trump’s war on Iran has been to put countries such as the UK under threat at a time when our military and intelligence structures are already wrestling with Russia.
