President Donald Trump’s maritime blockade is the latest attempt to test a thus far unproven theory of the Iran war — that superior US might will inevitably break the Islamic Republic.
The strategy is based on a simple premise: The strangulation of Iran’s oil exports and the imports that sustain regular life there will trigger societal collapse. This will build unbearable pressure on the regime to bow to US demands to permanently renounce its nuclear program.
In Washington, this seems logical. Every nation, whether a radical theocracy or Western democracy, will crumble if it can’t assure access to the basics — food, energy and work. When US officials see soaring inflation, catastrophic job losses and shortages in Tehran, they conclude the two-week blockade is working.
“The blockade is genius, OK?” Trump said Wednesday. “Their economy is in real trouble. It’s a dead economy.” The president is so pleased with the plan that he’s steeled aides for it to last much longer, CNN reported.
One reason is that it’s a way of heaping pressure on Iran without risking US casualties with ground operations or resuming bombing that was relentless but inconclusive. Another is that it seeks to restore US leverage in economic warfare eroded when Iran set off a global crisis by closing the Strait of Hormuz.
The US economy is far mightier than Iran’s, so this should be no contest. Then again, a fearsome US-Israel air assault devastated Iran’s military, but wasn’t able to secure a strategic victory in the war.
Trump’s bullishness will confront two questions that will decide the fate of his latest strategy in a war that has often seemed to lack a rationale or endgame.
The first is how long Trump, his fellow Republicans and the American people can take the rising costs of the war, including $4-plus gasoline and a likely rise in inflation. Midterm election voters are already angry at high costs and Trump’s economy.
The second question is whether the plan is based on realistic intelligence about conditions in Iran and sound reasoning on how its leaders might react. There is, after all, a long and dubious tendency in Washington to apply American logic to Middle Eastern societies that don’t react as US presidents expect.
The president is betting that Iran’s leaders, in a radical Islamic theocracy with a record of inflicting extraordinary pain on its own people, will react purely on economic motives — as perhaps he might in their shoes.
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