Three months into his war with Iran, President Trump faces a fork in the road. Thousands of American and Israeli strikes have killed Iranian senior leaders, shattered Iran’s air force and navy, and attrited its missile stocks and production facilities. But the Islamic Republic remains armed and defiant. Its clerical regime is intact and in control, with hardline Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps leaders ascendant. After battering its Arab neighbors, U.S. bases, and Israel, the majority of Iran’s missile and drone arsenal remains intact, according to intelligence assessments cited in the New York Times. Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz has set off a global energy crisis that is biting Africa and Asia first, but will hit Europe and America with full force soon. The impact of the Strait’s closure goes far beyond oil and natural gas: numerous other critical economic goods, from aluminum to fertilizer, also depend on Gulf inputs or production.
With American and Iranian negotiating positions far apart, major economic pain drawing near, and U.S. ground troops in the region, Trump’s options remain what they were two months ago: the United States can either escalate, climb down, or hunker down and try to wait Iran out.
An American retreat from the Gulf would be humiliating. Despite causing tremendous damage to Iran’s military and state capacity, the United States would be leaving the Islamic Republic in functional control of the Persian Gulf. Iran’s tollbooth on the Strait could generate tens of billions of dollars of annual revenue. Its unsanctioned oil exports and its continued ability to generate salvos of drones and missiles against its neighbors will enable it to rebuild and rearm. War reparations to Iran, under the guise of an “investment fund,” may even be in the offing. Any claims of American victory would sound hollow, if not ridiculous.
Should Trump declare victory and go home, he would be ceding American preeminence in the Gulf, long taken for granted as an American strategic birthright. The Carter Doctrine would be dead and buried. The continued basing of the U.S. Fifth Fleet in battered Bahrain would be called into question, while the remaining Gulf Cooperation Council states might look elsewhere for both security and investment partners. The entire petrodollar system, and with it the “exorbitant privilege” of the U.S. dollar as the global reserve currency, could be in peril.
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