COLUMNIST: Hitting Iran’s power plants would invite reckless escalation |
In the space of a weekend, Donald Trump went from saying his war goals in Iran had been achieved and he'd soon be winding down to issuing a 48-hour ultimatum for Tehran to either open the Strait of Hormuz or see the U.S. bomb its power plants, starting with "the biggest."
The U.S. president has a decidedly mixed record on carrying through with threats, and this time was no different. On Monday he moved his deadline back by five days, saying on social media that he was in "VERY GOOD AND PRODUCTIVE CONVERSATIONS REGARDING A COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION OF OUR HOSTILITIES IN THE MIDDLE EAST."
We'll see. Trump said the U.S. was in talks with a top official, which Iran's state media denied, and that a deal might leave him in joint control of Hormuz. Neither side's statements can be taken at face value, and the threat posed by his ultimatum remains.
The logic behind it is obvious: Having started the war, Trump can now only win it by cutting a deal or continuing until at a minimum, Iran is unable to endanger tanker traffic through Hormuz. Yet there are no guarantees he would succeed, and the escalatory implications of declaring open season on critical energy infrastructure would be enormous.
There is very little chance of the Iranians backing down on Trump's terms, which at various times he has characterized as surrender, or that the strait will return to pre-war risk levels. For decades Tehran held the threat of closing Hormuz in reserve, never daring to actually do it, for fear of inviting a U.S.-Israeli attack aimed at ending the Islamic Republic. That came anyhow, and in closing Hormuz they have made a discovery that cannot be unlearned: Geography and developments in modern warfare allow them to control who gets in or out, and that gives them the power to hold the global economy at ransom.
In a war that the U.S. and Israel are winning hands-down in purely military terms, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commanders now in de facto control of Iran are not about to give up their best card without making demands of their own.
If Trump thinks the threat of hitting Iranian power generation will cause them to cave, he still does not understand his enemy. These are men who used human-wave attacks to thwart a 1980 invasion by Iraq's better-armed military and continued the fight for six years longer than made any strategic sense. They were bitterly disappointed when then-Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini called time in 1988 in the face of economic collapse and Iraq's use of chemical weapons to slaughter the teenagers being thrown at it.
Those same IRGC commanders have been fighting a rear-guard action against their own population ever since.
These men are not going to give up the fight just because Trump threatens Iran's power generation, a move that would be far more damaging to the general population than to the IRGC. Plus, as the Iranian response to Trump's threat shows, they believe they can hit back, pledging to strike U.S.- and Israeli-linked water desalination and energy infrastructure across the region and to mine the entire Persian Gulf. If this war and Russia's invasion of Ukraine have taught anything, it's that they probably can.
It's impossible to predict with any confidence how this conflict will play out, not least because Trump seems to have planned for a speedy victory and is now having to make it up as he goes along. But his choice has become binary. He can either double down on removing the regime and completely destroying its ability to strike back, or negotiate a settlement with an adversary that--ironically, and despite all of the U.S. and Israeli militaries' impressive success--has more bargaining leverage at this point than it did before the war.