Will this ‘beautiful armada’ deliver WW3?

Business tip for the tangerine narcissist. When you urge another party to “make a deal or else”, two simple steps increase the likelihood of success. One, try not to have form on pretending to negotiate while preparing a lethal strike. Oops, I forgot: Trump 1 did just that when he murdered General Qasem Suleimani in 2020; Trump 2 with the US-Israeli attacks on Iran last June, and on Hamas negotiators in Doha in September.

The other is not to stand the Godfather’s axiom on its head by making an offer that party can’t accept. The “deal” on the table requires not only a halt to independent nuclear enrichment, but limits to Iran’s long range hypersonic missile development. Said missiles being Iran’s ace card, causing Israel to sue for peace after twelve days in June, following Iron Dome’s failure to thwart the Islamic Republic’s response to the rogue regimes’ (note my apostrophe placement) treacherous attack.

So I guess my tips to the Donald come way too late, and there’ll be no deal. This post is about the “or else” bit.

Forgive my insulting your intelligence merely by saying this, but Washington ‘concern’ for the Iranian people …

… has pretty much the same grounding in reality as its ‘fears’ of an America awash with fentanyl from Venezuela.

As I put it on January 18, there is:

… an abundance of evidence of empire machinations in a quarter-century of ‘colour revolutions’ and coups which by divine coincidence advanced the interests of a US oligarchy masquerading as a democracy and determined at all costs, up to and including thermonuclear Armageddon, to shore up its weakening but still murderously powerful grip on the planet.

But let me get back to Trump’s WW3 conducive “beautiful armada”. In a video just under ten minutes long, Defense News – “serving senior military, government, and industry decision-makers throughout the world” – assesses the balance of forces. This can be summarised as massive sea and air power, integrated within the Aegis combat system, versus Iran’s missile capacity combined with decades of building asymmetric war capability, especially in the lethal confines of the Persian Gulf.

It’s worth the ten minute watch but – as if to show the blinkered perspective of weapons geeks speaking to arms buyers – it makes by omission the astonishing assumption of a one-on-one war between Iran and the US. This despite Tehran’s vow earlier this month as noted in Tehran tells Trump: “destroy us and we destroy Israel”.

The video is similarly silent on the global consequences when, the moment hostilities begin, Iran attacks not just Israel, not even just the US military assets now exposed across Western Asia, but the Gulf States themselves. (Pious and easily reversed vows from Riyadh that Saudi airspace will be closed to the US will cut no ice in Tehran. All prior understandings and hard won rapprochements will vaporise.) Then there’s the world recession triggered by Iran’s certain closure, by mine and submarine, of a Hormuz Strait through which a huge proportion – precise figures vary – of the world’s oil passes.

Including China’s, but I’ll be getting to that in due c.

Will it happen? Let’s first note that the June attacks had caught Iranian air defences off-guard as its diplomats negotiated with the Americans, revealing the extent of US perfidy and consequent folly of appeasement. Tehran now knows beyond doubt it can’t trust Washington, and that the “deal” on offer, even if sincere, demands military suicide.

Which makes this existential for Iran. Less so for a US oligarchy which will struggle to sell to its citizens the case for boots on Iranian soil when air/sea power on the one hand, decapitation strike on the other, fail. Given these realities, and Trump’s acumen in lipsticking a climb-down, there are grounds for hope.

Then again:

• Trump may dislike protracted war (as does his MAGA base) but even he might find it hard to paint withdrawal of his beautiful armada, from waters vastly less favourable than the Caribbean, as mission accomplished.
• Trump has the likes of Lindsey Graham egging him on with poison and unctuous flatteries that shrink his room for manoeuvre. More seriously, the relative strength within the deep state of now-or-never Iran hawks is not easily calculated.
• The concentration of forces and febrile climate up the likelihood both of miscalculation in the war zone, and of it having fatally unstoppable consequences.
• All the above should be considered within the context of great power rivalry similar to the conditions prevailing in August 1914. In a non nuclear age WW3 would have broken out three decades ago, with the USA again emerging as prime beneficiary.

So far unsaid though is that Iran is not alone in concluding that appeasing a flailing empire now carries more risks than benefits. Neither of the other two nuclear superpowers can afford to let her fall.

Half of China’s oil imports pass through the choke point of the Hormuz Strait at Bandar Abbas, while Iran is vital to New Silk Road, one of whose benefits will be immunity to naval blockade imposed at other choke points like Malacca by US maritime supremacy. Vital too to north-south routes linking Russia to Persian Gulf and West Asia.

If you’ve twenty-two minutes to hand, this video from Global Economic Briefing is startling. A robotic delivery suggests AI generation, and I cannot corroborate through any other source its sensational claim that China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, just announced that war on the Islamic Republic will be war on the PRC. But while the specifics are likely fake news – such is the post-truth morass we now must wade through – the geopolitical tensions consequent on the events of this momentous month are not.

Here’s a shorter and more sober setting out, by a pundit I’ve learned to take seriously, of why Beijing cannot allow Iran to fall under the US orbit:

Finally I get to the main item. This twelve minutes thirty-five offering from an outfit new to me, Money Over History, spells out just how rapidly the question in my title could be answered in the affirmative.

Have a great day.

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