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Conrad Black: Trump has humiliated Iran

A decisive victory for the United States and Israel is nearly here

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Regular readers will note that most of what was predicted about the Iran War in the last three weeks in this column is coming to pass. The Iranians entered into the Islamabad discussions exuding confidence that the Americans were suing for peace and that Iran had found and struck the Achilles’ heel of the West by closing the Strait of Hormuz. This revealed the infirmity of the Western Alliance and exploited the consumptive flabbiness of the American public itself with the terrifying spectre of somewhat higher gasoline prices.

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As was predicted here, the United States has now shut the Hormuz Strait to Iran so its revenues from the world have abruptly collapsed and as an incidental strategic benefit, between Venezuela and Iran, China has lost much of its oil supply. At the same time, the United States is opening the Strait to other countries and at time of writing the passage of non-Iranian tankers through the strait has risen significantly. While Friday, Iran declared the Strait open, Trump said the U.S. blockade of Iran put in place last weekend would remain. Minimal research reveals that the United States Navy possesses the ability to open the Strait or close it to whomever it wishes: America has held the scepter of the seas for 85 years.

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Having wrung from the Iranians the concession that it would cease to blockade the Strait of Hormuz, by threatening to “destroy its civilization,” which was referred to in American government circles as “bridge and power-plant day,” a fearsome havoc in Iran’s infrastructure but with no implication of extensive civilian casualties, the Americans were, as generally occurs with Iran, affronted by the bad faith of the ayatollahs who purported to close the strait to everyone except themselves and the Chinese, and those who paid them a toll of $1 million per tanker.

This was enough to send the international and American anti-Trump media into a jubilant flutter that Iran had won the war and Trump, the loudmouthed bully of the world, had been laid low by the brutal theocratic gerontocracy still festering in Tehran. This fatuous delusion only prevailed for 48 hours. When the Iranians realized that practically all of their foreign income had been stopped and that they were powerless to intimidate the other Gulf oil exporters or to dispute any relevant theatre or activity with the Americans, they requested a return to the talks in Islamabad.

As predicted here and elsewhere, either Iran will, subject to constant verification, abandon its nuclear military aspirations, cease to finance terrorism on the frontiers of Israel or anywhere else, and stop its impudent nonsense about shutting the Strait of Hormuz, or America’s economic strangulation of it will continue and violations of the ceasefire by Iran will be greeted by punitive enactments of “the day of bridges and power plants,” (blowing them up). For Iran, this is completely unsustainable and the United States can impose it at practically no risk to itself and without prohibitive harm to Iranian civilians. (The nonsense about the end of Persian civilization that so flustered the pope and others, was just the usual Trumpian hyperbole, and it got the attention of the Iranians.)

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This war is now almost over and is a decisive victory for the United States and Israel. It may not be immediate regime change in Iran, but the vast nuclear and missile development program which has impoverished the country and is even responsible for the dangerous compromise of its water supply, has been largely destroyed and cannot be revived. The regime has been thinned and completely humiliated before the Iranian public which largely detests it. Drastic changes in foreign policy goals are now imposed upon Iran and its government will not be able to terrorize its population with the same brutal arrogance that it has for 47 years.

The consequences of these events are profound and benign. The war on terror has effectively been won by the antiterrorist governments of the world. The petro-Arab states have realigned themselves much more closely to the United States, having previously, as they thought, profitably straddled between Washington and Tehran. China too, has had its comeuppance; it will no longer be able to buy oil from Venezuela and Iran at discounted prices. The world has also seen the complete ineffectuality of Russian and Chinese defences against superior American technology and the extraordinary professionalism of America’s elite air and naval forces. No sane person could seriously consider a Chinese invasion of Taiwan now. And as a bonus, the inability of Iran to land a single hit on the American aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, despite firing hundreds of missiles at it simultaneously, indicates that fears that the giant Nimitz Class American aircraft carriers will be sitting ducks in wars of the future as the battleships at Pearl Harbor were in 1941, will have to be re-thought.

The hideous Islamist experiment in Iran has failed. As distinguished historian Victor Davis Hanson blogged on Tuesday: “It is one thing for the people (of Iran) to be ruled by globally feared autocrats armed to the teeth, but quite another to be governed by humiliated, now impotent incompetents and buffoons.” He mentioned that it took up to two years for the Soviet Union and its bloc to disintegrate after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the USSR was immensely stronger and more successful than the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The crisis of NATO cannot be long deferred. If in 1982 the United States during the Falklands war had behaved towards the U.K. as the U.K. has behaved towards the United States in the Iran War, the Falklands would be Argentinian. As it is, the Argentinian government and its leader Javier Milei are considerably more impressive than Keir Starmer’s seventh consecutive failed British government. The Royal Navy, which ruled the waves from Henry VIII to World War II, apparently does not have a ship that could easily sail as far as Cyprus, where Iran did land a rocket. The British have waffled shamefully, the French have postured absurdly, the Germans have sent mixed messages, the Italian government has been intimidated by the Pope, and Spain should be expelled from NATO.

The pope morally criticized America but not Iran and squandered his moral authority on this issue. Trump’s response was churlish, but elegance is not his strong point. However, winning, personally and for his country, is his strong point. Unlike Britain and France, Canada has not disgraced itself, but Mark Carney’s sophomoric plan of countering American might (from which we have again benefited), with a peppy alliance of “middle powers” is a Panglossian charade.

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