This had better be a short war or we are all in trouble
| Mark A P Williams Mar 9 |
The Powell Precedent
23 years ago I sat in the Rochester Wine Bar in Pimlico, London, with my line manager. We were enjoying what he liked to call a proper lunch: crabcakes to start, then onglet frites, followed by a cheese plate, washed down with a bottle of claret each and a few “cleansing ales” before heading back to the office.
We took our time over lunch because we were watching the then US Secretary of State Colin Powell give his presentation to the UN Security Council about Saddam Hussein’s attempts to build Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). With his vial of powder and PowerPoint slide deck, Powell told the assembled world leaders, “Every statement I make today is backed up by solid sources…What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions. Clearly, Saddam Hussein and his regime will stop at nothing until something stops him.” As the UN archives say, “The Council did not act on what was presented, and there was no resolution authorizing military action in Iraq.”
A month later, the US invaded Iraq.
As we now know, there were no WMD. The war killed thousands of Americans and NATO allied troops, plus hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. It gave rise to ISIS and set in train two decades of destabilisation in the Middle East, in turn pushing millions of refugees into Europe, which in turn led to political turmoil as the far right politicians pushed back against unsolicited immigration. One might even plot a dotted line from Powell’s speech to the 2016 Brexit vote and the clarion call to “take back control” of the UK’s borders, which has so far completely failed to happen.
In the US, the long entanglement in Iraq, followed by the inconclusive engagement in Afghanistan, fed the isolationist wing of the Tea Party. It led directly to slogans such as “No More Forever Wars” or “America First” and was in part responsible for the rise of “Make America Great Again” politicians. Among them was a New York property developer and reality TV star who intuitively understood the power of the media in politics and the allure of bumper sticker solutions to intractable political problems.
Has Anyone Seen my Casus Belli?
This time around, the President who promised no more forever wars, no more entanglements in the Middle East, no more US personnel dying for a foreign cause, has gone to war with Iran, ostensibly to finish what he started in June last year when he bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities, which was ostensibly to finish what he started in May 2018 when in his first term he withdrew the US from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which set limits on Iran’s nuclear programme to ensure that it could not produce nuclear weapons.
Let’s face it: the current US Administration has struggled to communicate its rationale for attacking Iran at this point. Was it because Iran, like Saddam’s Iraq, was weeks away from being able to deliver a weapon of mass destruction? The administration has said this was a reason. But there was no Colin Powell PowerPoint at the UN this time. The administration has produced no evidence, not so much as a vial of powder.
Was it to assist ordinary Iranians by destroying the top layer of government and giving them the space to rise up against their theocratic masters? Mr Trump has repeatedly called on Iranians to do just that. Instead, they are fleeing the cities and many are fleeing the country. Pete Hegseth contradicted his boss when he told reporters that the aim of the war was not regime change, “but the regime sure did change.” But not much. The new Supreme Leader of Iran is the son of the old Supreme Leader of Iran. You can’t doubt his bravery: he knows he is walking around with the geopolitical equivalent of a “Kick Me” sign taped to the back of his school uniform.
Some commentators have pointed to a Trump social media post in which he referred to an alleged Iran-sponsored attempt on his own life in 2024: “I got him before he got me. They tried twice … I got him first.”
Other voices suggest that the attack on Iran, like the removal of President Maduro of Venezuela, is really about China. The Middle Kingdom was receiving nearly 1 Mn bpd of crude oil from Venezuela and nearly 1.5 Mn bpd of crude oil from Iran, until recently. As I posted last week, China gets half of its oil from the Middle East. This is all now effectively blockaded. This reason at least makes strategic sense when viewed through a MAGA lens which sees the balance of this century as a Great Game between the US and China.
For shipping markets the implications have been immediate and brutal. As everyone now knows, a fifth of global seaborne oil trade normally passes through the Strait of Hormuz, along with vast volumes of LNG and refined products. Once war risk insurance disappears, commercial shipping does not simply “carry on regardless”. Owners withdraw vessels, charterers scramble for alternative routes, and freight markets spike violently as tonnage evaporates. This has already happened. In effect, a regional war became a global logistics shock within just a few days.
Wars are fought with weapons, but the global economy runs on logistics.
The Unprepared World
The political shock to the rest of the world is that, if this war is really about US-China great power competition, then the rest of us are unimportant collateral externalities to the two-power competition.
The US has known since the 1940s that the Middle East is a geopolitical and trade choke point. So it and NATO must have had contingency plans in place for decades about what to do if the Strait of Hormuz should be impassable for more than a few hours. If the US knew it was going to attack Iran well in advance, it might have conveyed to its allies that they should revue their own contingencies for a closure of the Strait.
There is no evidence to suggest that this happened. No stock building of oil or gas in the previous months as prices were falling. No quiet extra hiring of tankers through trading houses to build floating inventory. No refill of the US strategic petroleum reserve which is near five year lows and at around 450 Mn bbl is way short of its 700 Mn bbl capacity. No consideration of the war risk insurance contingencies. Even the diversion of around 4 Mn bpd of oil to Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea Coast only diverts it into the Houthi shooting arcade. Who pulls the Houthi’s strings? Iran.
Even as the US armada sailed toward Iran, these issues could have been quietly addressed. The fact that they were not suggests one of several possibilities:
- The decision to attack Iran was taken at the last moment and was not previously being seriously considered. Perhaps it was thought that gunboat diplomacy would prevail. Mixed messages have come out of the US administration about the trigger that began the bombing. Now it has started, Mr Trump and Mr Hegseth have said this will be a short war of a few weeks. They need it to be as the US will consume ammunition, fuel and missile stocks over those weeks. The US has not mobilised the industrial logistics required for a longer conflict. The administration has appealed to US suppliers to ramp up production of arms and ammunition.
- The US did not sufficiently consider the possibility that the conflict (not just Iran on its own but the fact of conflict in the region) would destabilise oil and gas flows out of the region. When Mr Trump said last Friday that the US could put some kind of reinsurance backstop in place, this felt very much like an afterthought. The detail is not yet forthcoming, despite the US having had decades to plan for such a contingency. Since then, the disruption has spread quickly beyond shipping insurance to production outages for oil and gas. Import-dependent nations around the world are scrambling to manage and possibly ration resources.
- The US did not take into account the probable effect of the war on the global economy. This is possible in the context of the evisceration of the US civil service but a lack of evidence of planning is not evidence of a lack of planning. However, when US Energy Secretary Chris Wright tried to calm energy markets over the weekend, they reacted on Monday morning by increasing prices and price expectations, with oil futures pushing towards $120 per barrel. The US might not have considered the effect on the global economy, but the rest of the world is now eyeing the US with considerable suspicion about what unpredictable adventurism it might try next.
If you don’t buy the WMD argument due to the lack of evidence, then you have to conclude that this is a war of choice. If you think this is a war of choice, it has to be in order to advance US national interest. If you think that the US, being largely self-sufficient in energy, will not be affected by an energy shock and probable global recession, you are misguided. If you think that the rest of the world is going to give the US a bye on this, you are also probably misguided. Wars have unintended consequences.
If you think I am being Anti-American in this post, I am not. I am focusing on the dangers of miscalculation. Twenty-three years ago I watched Colin Powell hold up a small vial at the United Nations and tell the world that the evidence was solid. History has judged that moment harshly. Today the world is again being asked to accept that another war in the Middle East is necessary. Perhaps it is. But strategic miscalculation in the Middle East has shaped the last twenty years of global history in unexpected ways. It would be a tragedy if the next twenty were shaped by another such miscalculation.
