Iran: Trump TACOs … a Neocon lament

Life and death go on of course, my post yesterday notwithstanding. I’ll be posting less, I guess, and leveraging time and effort by recycling third party output I deem worth airing. Here are two such, both pertaining to the US-Israeli war of criminal aggression on Iran.

Yesterday Naked Capitalism’s Yves Smith responded to the latest reminder that Trump Always Chickens Out:

Trump Keeps Up Threat Display, False Claims of Negotiations as He TACOs; Israel Still Pressing for Escalation as US Withdrawals Continue

Trump again TACOed over the weekend, calling off a loudly-broadcast, supposedly monster attack on Iran at the very last minute, in yet another instance of Trump being influenced by the last person who spoke to him. Recall we and many others warned that Trump was likely to Do Something after meeting Netanyahu and being surrounded by hawks at Lindsey Graham’s funeral. After making yet another in a long series of threats to devastate Iran, Iran not only cleared its throat and reminded the US and Israel that petrostate energy infrastructure would be obliterated, but published a target list with notes for the Trump dummies as to why they mattered. And to make sure this landed, Iranian Foreign Minister called key Gulf State leaders. As Axios first reported, MBS called Trump to get him to stand down. The Wall Street Journal later provided more detail, including that the UAE was still pumping for the strikes.

And of course Trump is again fronting the bogus line of Iran begging for a deal.

From Al Jazeera’s live feed:

A recap of remarks by Iran FM spokesman Baghaei

• • There are currently no negotiations with the United States, and Iran is not planning to send or host delegations “these days”.

  • Negotiations are ongoing, and progress has been made with Oman to secure a temporary passage through the Strait of Hormuz.

  • Reaching an agreement with Oman is not sufficient to reopen the strait; the situation will remain unchanged if US “aggression” continues.

  • China is concerned about “the escalation of conflict and insecurity in the region” and is trying to prevent the situation from escalating.

  • There is no new mediator in talks with the US, with Pakistan and Qatar carrying out the duty.

  • The US-Israeli war on Iran is not just a war against one country; it is “a war against the entire region”.

  • The situation in Yemen is not related to the war on Iran, and linking any issue to the war is “a form of evasion of responsibility”.

… and from the Wall Street Journal:

After days of threats to launch a new offensive against Iran, President Trump is once again trying to achieve through diplomacy what he has yet to accomplish through war.

The question is whether Trump’s Gulf partners can make enough headway in the days ahead to reopen the Strait of Hormuz to shipping, at least temporarily, and lay the groundwork for eventual nuclear talks….

Still, if talks falter as they have in the past, Trump could once again fall into a familiar cycle of reviving his military threats shortly after he shelved them.

“He is trying his hand now at a diplomatic solution to avoid military escalation. But there’s no clear path, either diplomatically or militarily, to get Trump to a place where he can declare victory,” said Vali Nasr, an Iran expert at Johns Hopkins University.

Policy Tensor on Twitter puts it more pointedly

The extreme mendacity and total lack of credibility of the US Administration is self-defeating. It makes it dramatically harder to conduct either coercive diplomacy or find an off-ramp.

Coercion is harder because Iran has learnt not to believe US threats. Finding an off-ramp is harder because Iran has learnt not to believe US promises.

Continue reading Yves’ report at Naked Capitalism …

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I’m doubly indebted to her NC output since today Yves alerted me to a candid piece yesterday from the glumly Neocon pen of Simon Watkins, bewailing on OilPrice.com that Beijing and Moscow are helping Iran in the war of survival thrust upon it.

And so they should when, for reasons set out in many a post on this site – here for instance – and elsewhere, defeat for the Islamic Republic must have catastrophic consequences for both.

Watkins’ beef with Trump is, like that of Neocons in general and a Democrat Party in which they are well represented, not that the war is psychopathically criminal but that its timing and lack of planning have been disastrous for the US ruling class.

Why Have China and Russia Just Stepped Out Of The Shadows In The U.S.-Iran War?

• • Russia and China are reportedly expanding support for Iran, providing intelligence, satellite navigation, and advanced weaponry.

  • The conflict is putting growing pressure on global energy security by threatening key export routes, including the Strait of Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb.

  • China could ultimately emerge as the main geopolitical beneficiary by leveraging its influence over Iran to shape future peace negotiations and expand its regional influence.

As with all wars, particularly in the world’s main oil and gas repository of the Middle East, the U.S./Israel-Iran conflict has long threatened to widen out to include other interested parties aside from the main protagonists. The involvement of Washington’s and Tel Aviv’s allies so far has been limited to intelligence sharing and strictly defensive air support, rather than participating in offensive bombardments. For Tehran and its proxies, support from its key longtime sponsors China and Russia has been largely focused on diplomatic cover and economic lifelines, together with some deniable hardware for the war being supplied to Iran by Russia and China, including microelectronics and materials required to manufacture missiles and drones. All this helped keep the global oil markets under the ‘total panic point’ that might otherwise have been expected from such a conflict. However, dangerous new developments indicate that this covert war involving Russia and China might be stepping out of the shadows and into plain sight.

In Russia’s case, U.S. intelligence reports now indicate that Moscow is actively providing real-time satellite feeds and intelligence tracking on U.S. targets to Iran. This data on American warships and aircraft movements has enabled Iran to conduct far more precise retaliatory missile strikes. Moscow has also integrated its GLONASS satellite navigation system into Iranian drones, according to the same sources, allowing Tehran’s long-range projectiles to bypass allied electronic jamming more effectively. Widening out the loop even further, Iran’s newest drones and missiles also benefit from being able to track Chinese BeiDou-3 systems at the same time as Russia’s GLONASS. By merging Russia’s Ukraine-era upgrades with China’s tech, standard Western jamming systems cannot block both at once, as each system operates on entirely different radio frequencies. This gives the new drones that Iran is using against the U.S. unprecedented precision against its bases, as well as those of its allies.

In China’s case, news emerged last week from various intelligence sources that Iran is acquiring up to 400 Chinese-made Man-Portable Air-Defence Systems (MANPADS). These are highly accurate against helicopters, drones, and low-flying jets, utilising sensitive infrared and ultraviolet seekers that lock directly onto the heat signature of an aircraft’s engine, and are immune to countermeasures. They are also easy to deploy, weighing only between 15 and 20 kilograms, and basic operational training for a MANPADS launcher can be completed in less than a week. They are also impossible to locate, emitting zero electronic signature while tracking. In short, they aim to try to deny the U.S. low-altitude air superiority.

As effective as these pieces of kit are, they become even more potent in the broader geopolitical context that China (and Russia) want to halt what had been, until the Iran War, a successful push by President Donald Trump to reassert U.S. influence across the Middle East. The foundation stone for this was to have been the rolling out of further ‘relationship normalisation’ deals (‘Abraham Accords’) between Israel and other Middle Eastern countries, brokered by Washington. The UAE had been the first major Middle Eastern signatory to such a deal back in 2020, and Trump had been confident that he had shifted the backdrop across the region sufficiently to pave the way for several new deals. His bullishness was based on the U.S./U.K.-led removal of the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria in December 2024, which removed Russia’s key Middle Eastern power hub at a stroke, a massive surge of U.S. investment in Iraq that saw multiple new oil and gas projects awarded to American firms rather than Chinese ones, as had been the previous trend. And Trump had ensured major new investment for Saudi Arabia too, while all the time tightening the sanctions noose around its principal regional nemesis, Iran.

Had Trump continued along this tack, the final obstacle to his vision of the Middle East returning to the U.S.’s sphere of influence, and away from that of China and Russia, may well have been realised. However, with direct attacks on Iran, he opened a Pandora’s Box, with the first problem flying out of it being Iran’s predictable closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which flows up to 30% of the globe’s oil and around 10% of its liquefied natural gas (LNG). Worse still, is that the Iran-backed Houthis could widen their current blockade of Saudi Arabian ports and ships sailing through the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait any time they wanted to. This would lock out another 12% of the world’s crude oil flows and 8% of its LNG from the global supply chain. Added to this economic disaster for the Middle East’s energy suppliers is the daily threat from Iranian drones and missiles that target their key energy installations and vital infrastructure related to their other financial mainstay, the tourist sector. The geopolitical fallout here for the U.S. is no less catastrophic, as many of these countries are now questioning their rationale for buying hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of U.S. defence equipment and relying on Washington as their protector against Iran.

Read in full at Oilprice.com …

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