“There are a couple of huge assumptions underlying the US narrative that I think are seriously flawed,” said Rosemary Kelanic, director of the Middle East program at the Washington-based think tank Defense Priorities and author of Black Gold and Blackmail: Oil and Great Power Politics. For a start, Iran already appears to be exploring alternative transit routes to mitigate at least some of the economic impact of the US blockade. “Iran is not an island,” she explained. “You can trade oil in many ways that are difficult to trace. It might be harder to scale, but they can send things by rail, through the Caspian Sea, or overland through Turkmenistan. They can’t do it overnight, it will take some time, but they will find ways to export oil outside the blockade because they are highly motivated.” Pakistan reportedly opened six overland transit corridors with Iran on 25 April, allowing goods to be transported across their 900km border by road. Iran has also shut in—and resumed—some production before, without ruinous consequences.
Then, there is the assumption that economic pain will force the Iranian regime into making significant concessions even if the blockade is effectively enforced. “Economic warfare—whether that takes the form of blockades, sanctions, embargoes, or even strategic bombing of industrial infrastructure – has been tried in many different ways for at least a century,” Kelanic argued. “It almost never works, particularly when a country believes it is facing existential stakes.”
She pointed to the examples of the Allied naval blockade of Germany during World War I, the blockade of Japan during World War II, and even the blockade of Confederate ports in southern states during the American Civil War. Japan continued fighting until the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Soviet Union entered the war against it. In the case of both Nazi Germany and the Confederacy, “it took four years, plus a devastating ground war to get the other side to surrender,” she noted. “So the idea that this is going to magically happen in a tolerable span for the world economy, and for Trump as president, is just fallacious….”
Of course, it is always possible that Trump will decide to simply declare victory—again—and walk away from a conflict that has already cost an estimated $25 billion and is extraordinarily unpopular at home, continuing to insist that he has won. But that would likely mean abandoning his efforts to extract serious concessions from Iran on its nuclear program and leave the Iranian regime in a stronger position than it was before the war. He could just as easily decide to escalate, ordering the U.S. military to resume bombing Iran in another attempt to force its leaders to come to terms. Asked where she thought the conflict would go from here, Kelanic said the best strategy for the U.S. would be to cut its losses while it was still possible to minimize the damage to the American economy, and with it, global economy, but that was not the most likely outcome. “I think it is much more likely that Trump continues this conflict for months more,” she said. “It is just politically difficult to lose a war. It is the same reason we stayed in Afghanistan for 20 years.”
Featuring
