The Persian Gulf War - a mise au point

What every president wants: wacky wars

Wacky Races. By AI

Speculation still persists as to why, exactly, the United States of America and Israel launched their war against Iran on 28 February 2026. The received wisdom now, in mid-July, is that, if Iran’s nuclear capability was ever a cause of the war, it no longer plays any role. Some commentators speak of a visit by Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, to Mar-a-Lago, the American president’s country home in Florida, in December of 2025, during which he allegedly dismissed concerns about nuclear bombs and instead impressed upon the U.S. president the need to prevent Iran from developing high-speed ballistic missiles, which, according to Netanyahu, Iran was on the brink of doing. If Iran has hypersonic missiles, Israel’s Iron Dome defences mean nothing, and Israel will be at Iran’s mercy.

Looking for a second at the expansionist ambitions of Israel, on the one hand, and those of Iran, on the other, a pattern is discernible. Whether or not it accords with reality, patterns are all I have to go on. Israel’s pattern, ever since 1948, has been to seek to expand its borders, which, astonishingly for a United Nations member, it has consistently declined to even define and to oppress the peoples resident in the territories that it has acquired over time: Gaza, the West Bank, the Golan Heights, Southern Lebanon, East Jerusalem and, for two periods 1956-57 and 1967-82, the Sinai peninsula. Whilst Israel’s military action seems to be in line with its Greater Israel expansionist policy, whereby invasion is followed by the flattening of existing infrastructure, followed by occupation, consolidated by a programme of settlement plus eviction or disposal of the existing populations, Iran’s strategy seems more to be axed on establishing itself as a regional power, a policy that involves less the invasion of territory, but more removing the American presence that has been established in the GCC states over the decades. Whilst cooperating states like Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Jordan saw U.S. bases as a source of security, in return for which they banked their oil and other revenues in New York, thus establishing the financial hegemony of the petrodollar, what the current conflict reveals is that the U.S. presence in those countries has proved something of a liability. Iran’s targeting of U.S. facilities in its Arab neighbour countries has been an exercise in telling the Americans Yanks go home and in telling their neighbours be careful which friends you choose.

Whatever the war is about now, one thing can certainly be discounted: those nuclear weapons. Any politician who is still bleating on about them is crying wolf after the horse has bolted. Even if Iran is intent on developing such weapons, this war has shown that the tactics thus far deployed are no way to stop them. The war aims for the Americans and the Israelis therefore divide at this point: the U.S. wants its economy back; Israel is still fixed on Greater things, probably with a heavy dose of eschatology in the mix as well.

Israel and the Israelis will not countenance defeat. In some ways they are like World War II’s Operation Market Garden: just before that campaign was launched, the Allies learned that there were two SS Panzer divisions resting and recuperating just outside Arnhem. The high echelons knew that the tanks posed a serious danger to the Allies’ abilities to capture the Rhine bridge at Arnhem, but the planning and preparation that had gone into the operation was so involved that Field Marshal Montgomery decided instead to go ahead and to sequester a senior officer on his intelligence team away on sick leave rather than face up to the man’s qualms. In fact, commentators are now borrowing the name of the movie that tells the story of Market Garden, and describing Israel’s campaign in Southern Lebanon as a bridge too far. Senior Israeli officers are saying it plain in Israel’s Hebrew press: the country’s military ambitions would need an army seven or eight times the size of the IDF. That means its programme of conquest verges on the suicidal. That goes some way to explaining the atrocities we read about and the devil-may-care attitude with which they are committed, and the eschatology that seems to haunt every policy move from Tel Aviv.

However, President Trump is less concerned about Israel expansionist policy. He seems, wittingly or unwittingly, to have gone gung-ho into this situation on the unwavering assumption that, by assassinating the supreme leader of Iran, the rest of the country would crumble to dust in his hands, and that has clearly not happened. Either because he was too easily convinced of Netanyahu’s confident projection of victory, or because his intelligence was flawed, or because he failed to take good counsel in spite of having good intelligence. If the 1970s oil crisis, the abduction of President Maduro, the CIA overthrow of Prime Minister Mossadegh of Iran and the murder of King Faisal of Iraq, together with the 2003 invasion of that country, have anything to say to us, it is that oil is America’s prime mover, both in mobility and in policy terms. Because America is cars and aeroplanes. And Trump wants the oil economy back in his hands. So Israel wants territory, and is fighting for it in Lebanon. America wants its economy back, which it would have anyway if it hadn’t been so keen to attack Iran in the first place. If you remember The Wacky Races, the arch-villain, Dick Dastardly, always had some cunning plan by which he could secure victory in the race. It always backfired and left him with egg on his face, but, nothing daunted, that never dissuaded him from devising a new sneaky plan to get the better of everyone else. That’s what the navy’s escorting of vessels down the Oman side of the strait was: whilst everyone in Iran was bewailing the death of their supreme leader, Trump thought he could pull a trick on the south edge of the waterway. It failed. Iran was wailing, but had left some of the IRGC watching. I find it interesting that Ali Khomeini took no especial precautions to protect himself at the start of the war. On the first day of hostilities, he was at home with his family. If he didn’t know, he will have strongly suspected that his life was on the line, and he gave it, I think, because dodging the bullet could have risked dividing the nation: What? The Supreme Leader’s faith is so weak, he resists being martyred into the arms of God? I think Khomeini accepted his death as a sign for the Iranian nation to unite. Because that, strangely enough, is precisely what it has done.

This makes the attack on Iran very different from the invasion of Donbas. I’ve argued before that the encroachment of NATO is at least a factor in why Russia chose to invade Ukraine. If Russia doesn’t secure Donbas and needs to go home, it will turn its attention to the Baltic, because it will not acquiesce in leaving Belarus as the exposed salient of its European sphere of influence. It wants the Black Sea, and Ukraine can’t exist without the Black Sea, so Russia may as well take all of Ukraine. That’s its thinking. Ukraine would have fallen years ago without western support and there reigns a fiction among Ukraine’s supporters that supporting Ukraine does not mean that they are party to the war. Russia is slowly disabusing them of that view, making it plain to them that that is a sad fallacy with which they have deluded themselves for too long now. It has likely been encouraged in this attitude by the stance Iran has assumed against those GCC states that have allowed bases to be set up on their territory. As of the current time, it’s not clear what stance Iran has assumed against European powers that have allowed the U.S. to station its equipment or use bases or landing strips on their territory in conjunction with the war, but, at the right moment, that stance may become more obvious than simply refusing the passage of certain vessels through the Strait of Hormuz.

Israel has no great interest in the strait, which plays no part in the Greater Israel project. Neither the Irgun claims nor the Royal Grant nor the biblical sources confer on Israel any claim to land east of (the Hashemite Kingdom of) Jordan, so the Persian Gulf is of no interest to Israel in terms of the expansionist project. For now, Israel wants Lebanon and may yet be conspiring with, of all people, ISIS up in Syria to get it, even if Israel wouldn’t mind snaffling Syria whilst they’re at it. However, fundamentally, Israel fears Türkiye. One must virtually inevitably conclude that there is a heavy dose of eschatology in Israel’s ambitions when one realises that this small state of ten million inhabitants wants to take on the military might of both Türkiye, with a population of 86 million, and Iran (population 92 million). But Southern Lebanon is not Türkiye and Iran. Lebanon’s small fry, with a population of five million. Easy; and despite all its military might, all of which is supplied by foreign powers like Britain and the States, Israel likes an easy target: hospitals, children, women, olive farmers. Stripped to their underclothes, hog-tied, queuing for bare essential nourishment. Arabs, to Israel, are camel herders. All of them. And there are an awful lot of Arabs in the territory in and around the Land of Israel.

President Trump, on the other hand, likes Arabs. He likes the aeroplanes they donate to him. He likes their golf courses and investment opportunities. He likes their sovereign funds. And he loves their oil and he doesn’t like having to serve up sludge out of his tactical oil reserves in order to fly aircraft, especially not the military aircraft he needs in order to vanquish Iran, so he wants the crazy bastards to open the Strait of Hormuz free to all shipping. And, if he achieves that, or even if he doesn’t, I would speculate that he may yet turn his attention to other turnpike waterways, like Panama and Suez.

In the early 1600s, the Dutch lawyer Cornelius van Bynkershoek wrote a treatise on the law of the sea and determined that a coastal nation has exclusive suzerainty over that portion of the sea that laps its coastline and extends for a distance away from the land that is equal to the distance that can be defended by the firing of cannon balls from the land at vessels thereupon. What looks like a carefully honed principle of law is in fact nothing more than acquiescence in the obvious principle that might is right. If I can blow your ship out of the water from my garrison upon the cliffs of my coastline, then it’s fairly obvious that you should approach the coastline only with my permission. Unless, that is, you have bigger guns than I do and are prepared to shoot them at me and are a good enough shot to knock out my garrison. In other words, the ancient law of the sea is nothing more and nothing less than the law of the jungle.

That, therefore, is the equation with which Mr Trump must conjure: how many warships, bases, merchant navy vessels, troops and allies is he prepared to sacrifice in order to conquer the eminently defensible coastline of Iran on the Persian Gulf? Because his 40+-day war has so far shown that the southern coastline of Iran is very well protected. If one drew a parallel with the canals in Panama and Egypt, one might conclude that, for the sake of safety, if not insurance premiums, the wiser tack might be to strike an accord with Iran, pay their transit fees and get commerce moving again rather than insist on a somewhat attritional conflict by which the best one might hopefully achieve is a risk-laden passage for merchant vessels and a heap of bad feeling moving on into the future, one in which Iran may yet regard nuclear weapons as an achievable goal for finally securing their position as the regional superpower.

The foregoing is all my personal view and entails a degree of speculation and assumption.

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