Oil Is Iran’s Real Weapon

 WAS THERE EVER an endgame or exit strategy for the US and Israel? It’s a question that many now, three weeks into the war, will be asking. For the Israelis, I think the response is clear. The endgame was dynamic, the exit strategy to be decided. In the worst-case scenario, Iran would have been damaged with its nuclear weapons programme put further back, and its depleted ballistic missile stockpile impossible to rebuild rapidly.

In the best-case scenario for the Israelis, they would be able to bring about a regime change which would not only alter the nature of Iran but also much of the Middle East. But either outcome would be acceptable.

For the Americans, it appears much less clear. The likelihood is that a regime change was thought to have been very likely once Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed in the first hours of the war. From what US President Donald Trump has said and others have said around him, it seems they considered this a strong possibility. Once it had failed to come about, that is when we moved to a different phase with very shifting and unclear objectives.

As for what might happen inside Iran, if Mojtaba Khamenei survives and consolidates his leadership, it is very likely that the new Supreme Leader is effectively limited to a rather ceremonial role, despite the great powers attached to his office. He is there because of the support of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), or at least their opposition to the succession to power of other senior figures who might be much more reform-minded. We are still unclear about his real physical state and how badly injured he might be. In a sense, this does not matter. As he will not be playing a full executive role in any case and be limited to a much more figurehead function.

The killing of Ali Larijani, a political heavyweight who was a pragmatist and who opposed Mojtaba Khamenei’s succession, makes this more likely.

Talk of the danger of Syrianisation or Balkanisation is overwrought for the moment, I think. Despite its obvious weaknesses, the Iranian state is a very resilient one. There are threats from separatism and from internal unrest, but both are probably insufficiently strong to seriously destabilise the country. Even if the war continues for months, I don’t think Iran will break up. We will undoubtedly see very severe oppression internally, which would limit any kind of dissent. Talking about the breakup of Iran is getting well ahead of ourselves. At the moment, we have a state that is successfully waging an asymmetric war against two much more powerful enemies. It is taking significant damage. It is losing senior officials and others who are irreplaceable. It has lost allies. It has made enemies. But we are very far from a situation where Iran is in the process of or coming close to fragmentation. There are clear pressures that will keep it together. There is a strong sense of Iranian nationalism, whatever the feelings many have about their own leaders. Even ethnic and other minorities often stress autonomy rather than independence from the country as a whole. Yes, there have always been tensions. These have always generated centrifugal forces. But at the moment, we should be focusing on the conflict at hand rather than the possible scenarios of Iran’s breakup in the more distant future.

On the military side of things, it is obvious that the US and Israeli weapons are dominant. But then the Iranians were not equipped with the best available weaponry from alternative sources, and the US and the Israelis are deploying the absolute cutting-edge of what has been produced by their respective industries. One of the much broader lessons of this conflict is that Russia and China are still much weaker powers than the US. They have had great difficulty projecting any influence whatsoever on this conflict and, in fact, have come out of it significantly weakened on the international stage.

As for other powers, such as the Europeans or the UK, there is much talk about the end of the West or the idea that the bilateral relationships between European states or the UK and the US are mortally wounded. It is true that such relations are at a low point, perhaps the lowest point since World War II. However, these things are dynamic and it is absolutely the case that were there to be another president with different views and a different style in the White House, then the UK and European powers would rush to repair relationships as fast as they could. They might well be successful too.

The crux of the whole issue is the Strait of Hormuz and the fact that the Iranians have demonstrated that they have the ability to maintain a chokehold on the world’s oil supplies, or certainly enough of them, to influence the oil price globally to a very significant degree. That is a huge strategic weapon that may well be the one that wins the war for them. The Iranians are sustaining very significant damage, certainly. They cannot go on forever with such losses and remaining so exposed and isolated globally, but nor can the US and it is much more likely that the Trump administration will blink first even if its war planes and those of its ally Israel are dominant in military terms, and that could decide the course of the war in the coming weeks. The strategic centre of gravity of this conflict is the Gulf and the oil. That is the front on which the war will be won or lost.