Kamal Ghorui
President Donald Trump has vowed on Saturday a major escalation in his war against Iran, warning that if Iran does not “fully open, without threat” in 48 hours the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway that is vital for global oil shipping, the US military would “obliterate” Iranian power infrastructure, “starting with the biggest” power plant. In return, Iran has threatened to “irreversibly destroy” US-linked energy sites across the Middle East if its power plants are targeted.
This is not the first time President Trump has threatened “obliteration” to signal the massive damage his country has done, is capable of doing, to the enemy. Last year in June, he claimed to have obliterated Iran’s nuclear programme, using heavy “bunker busting” bombs to attack three nuclear sites. Yet, in applying the same reasoning of dismantling Iran’s nuclear threat to justify the current strife, the President appears to be admitting a failure of his earlier attempt. Just days into the ongoing conflict, he stated that the operation has obliterated Iran’s military. Yet, Iran’s the military capacity to send drones and missiles that are still striking targets in the region and beyond as far as the joint US-UK base in Diego Garcia, give a lie to the President’s gratuitous boasting.
This latest obliteration threat shows how the Strait of Hormuz has become the focal point in the US-Israel Operation Epic Fury war against Iran. Earlier, President Trump said opening the Strait of Hormuz is a “simple military manoeuvre”. Yet, for now only Iranian-approved ships are transiting the waters.
As the war enters its fourth week, it is becoming clearer that the Strait of Hormuz was Trump’s biggest miscalculation. His folly was based on the thinking that America being energy self-sufficient, being a net oil and gas exporter now, it is somehow immune to global price fluctuations. He also believed that once the top Ayatollahs are removed from the scene, he would find someone in the theocracy malleable enough to deal with — the Delcy Rodríguez of Iran.
The US has failed to appreciate the fact that Iran could wage a parallel war of its own against the global economy, specifically the global energy industry, primarily using the Strait as a chokehold. Iran has demonstrated that it retains the muscle to launch random strikes on vital energy infrastructure of UAE, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Iran has enough reasons to conclude that its strategy of keeping the global energy market as a hostage is working: following an Iranian missile attack on a Qatari natural-gas hub, the crude prices went up to the highest since the war broke out. Even seizing Kharg island, home to Iran’s export terminals, may not prevent Iran from continuing to fire missiles at the shipping lanes in the Strait of Hormuz.
With each strike on shipping in the Strait of Hormuz and the oil infrastructure of its neighbours, the global oil market has become volatile, with gasoline prices in the US also looking up. If the waterway remains closed until the end of April, the oil price could reach $150 a barrel. That would be very bad news for Trump, who was re-elected on the promise of taming inflation and not starting any war.
Trump’s disdain for strategy and his failure to heed warnings about Strait of Hormuz has made the war suddenly unwinnable for him; now how he will get around it would decide the course of his Iran “excursion”.
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