Mick Hartley

Jonathan Spyer in the Spectator on the Trumpian delusion:

Trump, speaking to Fox News, professed himself in no hurry for diplomatic progress, saying that ‘We have all the cards. They can call us anytime they want.’ The US President suggested a version of events in which Teheran, pressured by the US blockade of its tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, was showing increased flexibility regarding the issue of the future of its nuclear programme.

But that’s not how the regime thinks.

Trump’s position reflects a cost-benefit analysis which accurately notes that, objectively, the Iranian regime is vastly inferior to its opponents in conventional military capacity and in its ability to inflict harm. Given this, such a view concludes, what remains is for the Iranians to draw the same sensible conclusion and reach a deal based on the relative balance of forces. It is, according to some accounts, a matter of some bewilderment to the US President that Tehran has failed to understand the situation in a similar way.

The current level of pressure on Iran is indeed considerable. US central command announced today that it has turned around 38 vessels seeking to enter or exit Iranian ports since the blockade began. The Iranian fleet of ghost tankers is certainly getting some oil through – around 10 million barrels since the blockade began, we are told. The reserves held by Iran on the high seas will enable Tehran to continue supplying its customers for a few months hence. But without a doubt Iran’s capacity to export oil has been severely constrained by the blockade.  

This level of pressure, however, is unlikely to make Iran come anywhere close to conceding to the US’s demands. Here, the administration appears to be succumbing to the recurrent thought mistake to which western governments are prone when looking at the Middle East. Namely, the assumption that the other side ‘thinks like us’. That inside every religious or ideological extremist is a pragmatist fighting to get out.

Unfortunately, inside the religious extremist there just more religious extremism. It’s dark ages return-of-the-Mahdi Islamists all the way down. A nuclear program is part of their eschatalogical belief that the destruction of Israel is a theological necessity. There’s no reasoning with them.

None of this means that one should take the Iranian regime at its own reckoning, of course. Its bombastic rhetoric is accompanied by brutal repression against its own people, most of whom loathe it. It has mortgaged Iran’s economy and the management of its natural resources to its regional ‘resistance’ project, which in turn exports misery and failed governance to other regional countries – to Yemen, Lebanon, Iraq, Gaza, and for a time Syria. But it is important to understand that whatever we might think of the Iranian regime’s outlook, its own leaders do believe in it, and are not in the mood for accepting something they regard as surrender.  

This means that, as shown in Islamabad, the current level of pressure is unlikely to bring results. The choice facing the US therefore is to intensify and escalate the pressure, including the renewal of major military operations and including the opening of the Strait of Hormuz by force, or to accept at a certain point a face-saving deal likely to leave the regime’s regional project intact. If the latter course is followed, it will no doubt be presented as victory. The Iranian regime’s long war for supremacy in the region will then continue.