Trump has no intention of sticking with any ‘ceasefire’ (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
The uptick in fighting between the US and Iran has a simple cause.
Donald Trump is trying to convert defeat into victory.
He allowed Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to persuade him to mount a joint assault on Iran on 28 February because he imagined it would be a walkover.
More precisely, it would be a repeat of the pirate raid on Caracas, capital of Venezuela, on 3 January.
US special forces seized Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores and whisked them off to jail in New York.
Delcy Rodriguez, Maduro’s vice president, proved a compliant replacement.
The result? According to the New York Times newspaper, US secretary of state Marco Rubio “has become de facto viceroy of Venezuela”, sending Rodriguez a stream of orders via WhatsApp.
“The US Treasury receives the revenue from most of Venezuela’s exports, then disburses it to Venezuela through the country’s banking system, a relationship akin to parents handing out allowances to children.”
Trump fondly imagined that the massacre of supreme leader Ali Khamenei and his top generals in the first hours of the war would deliver Iran into his administration’s hands, further tightening the US’s grip on global energy flows.
But, instead of caving like Rodriguez, Iran’s new leaders used their formidable precision-strike capabilities to set US bases on fire throughout the region, undermine the economic model of the US’s Gulf allies and shut the Strait of Hormuz.
The US accepted a ceasefire with Iran on 8 April above all to reopen the Strait and restart the Gulf’s exports of oil and gas to the rest of the world economy.
This was followed on 14 June by a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that was meant to lay the basis for final negotiations during the following 60 days.
Trump made clear his objective in agreeing to the MOU, declaring on social media, “Ships of the World, start your engines. Let the oil flow!”
The agreement was packed with concessions to Iran that were widely denounced by neoconservative supporters of the “forever wars” the US has waged in western Asia.
They didn’t understand that Trump had no intention of sticking by the deal.
He was buying time to allow the US and Israel to rebuild their missile stocks and above all to undermine Iranian control over the Strait of Hormuz.
Article 5 of the MOU says that “the Islamic Republic of Iran will make arrangements using its best efforts for the safe passage of commercial vessels, with no charge for 60 days only, from the Persian Gulf to the Sea of Oman, and vice versa.”
So Iran was left in charge of the Strait. But since May the US Navy had already been guiding ships along a route in the south of the Strait along the coast of Oman.
This continued after the MOU, even though Iran insists that vessels follow a northern route along its coast.
Iran is now enforcing its claim to control the Strait by attacking ships that take the southern route.
This isn’t just because the MOU supports this claim but also because the Iranian regime has no intention of giving up the power over the global economy that controlling the Strait gives it.
It also completely distrusts the faithless Trump.
US retaliation has escalated to the point where both sides are striking each other’s bases.
Trump is ramping up his rhetoric again, calling the Iranian leadership “scum”, threatening devastation and withdrawing the economic concessions he had made earlier.
So far the fighting is relatively contained.
As numerous commentators say, Iran is probably calculating that Trump will chicken out again.
With mid-term elections coming in November, he can’t afford inflation to take off again thanks to higher energy prices.
But control of the Strait has become essential to the Iranian regime’s survival.
It won’t allow Iran to become another US protectorate like Venezuela.
Edward Luce of the Financial Times newspaper predicts “a long spell of unsatisfactory stop-go talks, occasional skirmishes and Iran periodically yanking Trump’s chain to remind him who controls events”.
But no one is really in control, and the US’s manoeuvres could ignite another devastating war.
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