BEFORE the war in the Middle East started on Feb. 28, when the United States and Israel began bombing Iran, the general consensus among army experts is that there are only three major military powers in the world: the US, China, and Russia. The latter’s inclusion is largely due to its still-intact nuclear arsenal, and not its diminished land, air and naval power.
Now, they are suggesting the emergence of Iran as the fourth military power, and they have a strong argument on why that country, with most of its leadership decapitated in the Feb. 28 bombing — which also defenestrated many of its critical defense infrastructure — should now be regarded as such.
The compelling evidence offered by the experts is this: though weakened militarily by the US and Israel’s superior air power, Iran has taken control of the Strait of Hormuz — through which 20 percent of the world’s oil and its distillates, natural gas, and fertilizer pass — then used that to dictate which ships could use that narrow but vital waterway.
This allowed it to effectively control all shipping and commercial activities in the strait and choke the supplies of critical commodities. By wielding that power, which no country or force in the world is strong enough to restrain it, Iran is now the new arbiter of which oil- or fertilizer-dependent country — the Philippines is a prime example — can get these commodities from Gulf suppliers.
That’s the unrestrained, awesome power Iran’s ruling mullahs have cleverly leveraged.
Question: Why would warship-escorted tankers not dare use the strait to bring oil barrels out of Gulf areas to their destinations, say, in Asia? Can the US and the European Union — or United Nations-sanctioned vessels — not provide warships to escort these commercial ships and ensure their safe passage?
The answer is no, and this is why: a $5,000 drone prodigiously produced by Iran that can be fired undetected from any point on its long coastline is potent enough to destroy a multimillion-dollar supertanker navigating the strait, or blast to kingdom come the most sophisticated warship that costs twice as much as that supertanker it is escorting. Remember those cheap drones and remnants from Iran’s missile stockpile that the country has used in its retaliatory strikes on Israel and US allies in the Gulf? Their deployment caused the massive explosion that ripped apart the multibillion-dollar complex owned by Qatar Energy, the world’s largest liquefied natural gas producer, after the Feb. 28 attack.
Cheap drones are rewriting the history of 21st-century wars, and unfortunately for US President Donald Trump and his “excursion” in Iran, these unmanned aerial vehicles have inflicted so much pain on American military installations in the Gulf and on critical oil and gas facilities of US allies there. And news reports say a defiant and unbowed Iran wants to dictate to the US the terms that could lead to the end of the war.
Military experts agree that Trump’s decision to help Israel attack Iran on Feb. 28 was a grave miscalculation and is ranked as probably the worst decision he made as president. It was a reckless decision that experts said was based more on megalomania and hubris than on a real battle plan with a defined endgame.
Now Trump is losing the war badly. Worse, he does not know how to end it. He has alternated from declaring that the US will bomb Iran back to the “Stone Age” — which implies bombing everything, including civilian facilities, mosques and schools — to declaring that the war is about to end, with the US triumphant.
It is in this context that the two-week US-Iran ceasefire agreement brokered by Pakistan was greeted with relief by a weary, battered world. There is also this great hope that those two weeks would be used to give Trump time to decide on an off-ramp to end the war without admitting defeat. Or the ceasefire, tenuous as it is, will lead to fruitful talks between the main war actors with the aim of establishing permanent peace.
Will the ceasefire, indeed, lead to the forging of an agreement to end the Middle East war? If that happens, experts say peace will be written not on Trump’s terms. Right now, the mullahs, with their cheap but lethal drones, their control of the Strait of Hormuz, and a warring tradition with a 5,000-year history, will dictate a peace pact that will allow Trump to save face and give him nothing more that puff up his vainglory.
For countries like the Philippines that are heavily dependent on oil and fertilizer from the Gulf states, any kind of peace agreement leading to the free passage of tankers and cargo ships through the Strait of Hormuz will be acceptable. That is maybe the general sense of most democracies in the world. There is no great ideological battle at stake in Trump’s war-cum-Gulf “excursion.” The war on hold was the folly of a megalomaniac suddenly consumed with old-fashioned imperialism and conquista, and the expected resistance from the cruel theocracy in a country toughened by centuries of conflict.
