What else are the foreign-policy graybeards missing?
What else are the foreign-policy graybeards missing?
T he news out of the Strait of Hormuz is pretty straightforward: The Islamic Republic of Iran has all but lost whatever control it once had over the maritime traffic flowing through that contested choke point. “Middle Eastern crude exports rebounded this month to around their highest level since the war began in February,” the Wall Street Journal reported. “Shipments via Hormuz and bypass routes were delivering just under 80% of their prewar regional flows as of last week, according to tracker Kpler.”
That’s just about where the U.S. wants energy exports out of Hormuz to be. After all, the whole point of the blockade is to ensure that Iranian exports never make it to market in the first place. In that sense, U.S. policy in the region has succeeded. Iranian outbound flows are basically at zero.
Since mid-August, the Trump administration has maintained that the blockade, and its efforts to protect shipping through the strait’s southern Omani channel, is bearing fruit. At the time, the claim met with some understandable skepticism. But, as I wrote then, it made sense that the inventories that Trump officials had described were invisible to trackers. They wouldn’t become visible until they’d successfully evaded Iran’s dragnet. Now, six weeks later, “It’s clear that Washington’s figures were substantially correct,” former Bush administration official Michael Allen observed. “As many as 22 million barrels may have passed through the strait in 48 hours over the weekend, compared with about 20 million a day before the war.”
If the community of foreign-policy observers has internalized the news that Iran is losing control of the strait, they have not yet wrangled with the development’s implications. We can speculate about these implications by reviewing the claims made by those who, mere months ago, not only anticipated that Iran’s control of the strait would persist indefinitely but also thought that it represented a greater geostrategic lever for Tehran than even a deployable atomic weapon.
Iran would determine the future of traffic on the strait, Alan Eyre wrote in The Atlantic in April. It represented a form of “deterrence” more powerful than any weapon. Reopening it “can almost certainly not be done without Iran’s cooperation.”
“No matter how the blockade plays out, Iran will be in a far better position in the long term when it comes to maintaining control over the strait — not the U.S.,” Deakin University research fellow Ali Mamouri declared. Indeed, “Hormuz risks becoming America’s Suez moment — a strategic chokepoint that reveals the limits of power rather than its reach.”
“As long as they have the capacity to launch drone attacks, they can control the strait,” Emory University associate professor Mark Nevitt told The Hill in April. The California-based academic Sahar Razavi agreed, insisting that “there’s really nothing the U.S. can do to totally remove Iran’s influence over the strait as long as Iran’s government remains.”
We were told that there was little the U.S. could do about Iran’s efforts to throttle traffic through the strait — and that there was also little it should do. In an August op-ed in the New York Times, Rosemary Kelanic, a contributor to the Quincy Institute’s Responsible Statecraft blog, said that “defeat” was, at the time, America’s “least bad option.” Tehran’s attacks on shipping established an “endemic risk of crossing Hormuz that even a negotiated deal with Tehran would not eliminate.” It is “impossible to decisively defeat” Iran, so giving in to its attempt to make an international waterway into a tollbooth might be desirable. By granting the Islamic Republic an “alternative source of prestige” beyond its aspirational nuclear weapons, Iran’s piracy on the strait could actually have a moderating influence on the regime.
Even if that was a little too rosy for the Brookings Institution’s Robert Kagan, he agreed that the U.S. was the last to recognize that Iran had won the war. In May, Kagan described “the new strait regime” as a durable enterprise in which anti-American powers such as Russia and China will have greater sway, while U.S. partners in the region would be compelled by Iran to accept the new normal at Washington’s expense. “Vessels associated with nations that Iran regards as an adversary will be denied access to the strait entirely,” he wrote.
Kagan’s outlook seemed impervious to countervailing narratives. “Iran is establishing the principle that passage through the strait will henceforth be a privilege that Tehran can grant, condition, delay, or deny,” he wrote in late August, even as the blockade strategy had begun yielding returns. A parade of horribles would soon follow. Iran will use the strait to “reward friends, punish enemies, and extract revenue.” It will extort U.S. allies, weakening the effect of U.S. sanctions. It will be “free to resume its own nuclear-weapons program without fear of another major attack.” And its “impossible victory” against the U.S. will reverberate well beyond the Middle East, giving bad actors everywhere license to challenge U.S. power.
If the sequence of events that these and many, many other foreign-policy analysts forecast over the late spring and summer came to pass, it would represent a strategic disaster for the U.S. But since it hasn’t, what are the consequences?
Is Iran’s regional power on the rise, as forecast? Or is it sinking deeper into pariah status as the regional networks it once used to evade sanctions wither away? Have Iranian proxies shown the capacity to project unambiguous power throughout the region, let alone into Europe and North America? Has Iran’s capacity to throttle energy markets weakened the West’s resolve to maintain the sanctions regime or the president’s willingness to stay the course?
Iran is in a terrible position. Its currency is valueless. Its trade relationships are being severed. Its citizens and political officials cannot fly in or out of the country. Its political class is in a state of semipermanent revolt against the informal leadership of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Protests are once again breaking out in Iran’s universities, despite the explicit threat represented by the hated Basij. And there are now credible reports of insurrectionary activity in outlying provinces such as Baluchistan, where at least one IRGC commander was killed in the fighting.
In the Western press, however, Iran’s troubles are forever understudied. Today, media outlets are moving on to the next crisis. “With more crude coming out of oil inventories than going in, eventually the market will reach its long-predicted and feared tipping point, at which point stockpiles are insufficient to satisfy demand,” CNN reported on Tuesday. What’s more, Iran retains the capacity to escalate the crisis in its pursuit of de-escalation. The IRGC “has changed tactics rapidly and could increase attacks on ports, refineries and pipelines,” the Wall Street Journal reported.
The enemy gets a vote, and Washington would be well-advised to prepare for the worst. But few have revisited the heavy breathing that accompanied Iran’s initial efforts to shutter transit through the strait — or Washington’s belated but successful efforts to deprive Iran of that capability. That collective failure of imagination has received no scrutiny, which raises another question: What else are the foreign-policy graybeards missing?