IRAN WAR

Intro: Iran’s leaders will not be threatened into relaxing their hold on the Strait of Hormuz. The US president will have to break it for them

It cannot have been part of America’s plan that nearly four weeks into this war with Iran, Donald Trump should still be issuing furious threats and ultimatums.

By now, he must have believed that the Islamic Republic would either have been overthrown or so incapacitated by American and Israeli firepower that its surviving leaders would be imploring him for terms. The reality is closer to being the other way round. Incredibly, it is the US president who finds himself making ever more fevered demands for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

The reason why he has landed himself in this invidious position is that his administration failed to foresee the blindingly obvious: that Iran’s regime, once backed into a corner, would retaliate by closing the Strait of Hormuz and start firing missiles at America’s allies in the Gulf. Why else would Iran have spent decades amassing the biggest arsenal of ballistic missiles in the Middle East? The commanders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps always knew that their greatest strategic asset was the power given to them by Iran’s geography to, in extremis, wreck the global economy.

Supertankers laden with 20 per cent of the world’s seaborne oil pass every day – at least in normal times – through the Strait of Hormuz.

By attacking only a handful of these tankers, the IRGC calculated that it could sabotage global oil supplies as no one has ever sabotaged them before. That is exactly what has happened.

If Trump had possessed any foresight, he would have ordered the US navy to secure the Strait of Hormuz before the war began. That was supposed to be why the US Fifth Fleet was based in Bahrain.

Instead, before starting the war on Feb 28, Trump neglected to send any more warships than would be needed to bombard Iran and protect the two American aircraft carriers.

Now that the IRGC has closed the strait to any shipping that Iran considers hostile, the president has resorted to threatening escalation. Will Iran give way and allow free passage? That is almost inconceivable.

Will Trump have to make good on his threat to attack power stations in Iran? Given his unpredictable habit of zig-zagging from one position to another, no one can be sure. But even if he did, the IRGC would almost certainly refuse to yield. Iran would then likely act on its threat to strike power stations in “countries in the region that host American bases”. Given that the IRGC has already fired missiles at the world’s biggest gas export facility – Ras Laffan in Qatar – this cannot be excluded.

At some point, it should dawn on President Trump that the Iranian regime will not be threatened into relaxing its stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz. Given that they will never choose to loosen their grip, Trump will have to break it for them. He will soon have to decide whether to reopen the Strait by force – a highly risky operation that would probably require troops on the ground – or endure huge economic damage. He surely never planned in having to face this dilemma.