The Brooklyn Rail

The current rise in gas prices is the greatest one in this century—47% in two months’ time—and the CEO of Exxon says this is just the beginning of severe economic consequences of the Iran war. Some economists are saying that the global economy only has about 6-8 weeks to open the Strait of Hormuz in order to avoid a global recession.

Right after Trump told reporters that Iran’s economy is “crashing” and that they’re down to 18 or 19% of their former missile stocks, the CIA put out a confidential report estimating that Iran can survive for at least another three or four months without severe economic hardship, and that Iran in fact retains 75% of its mobile missile launchers and 70% of its missiles. The CIA released this report because they no longer trust Trump to tell the truth.

The Trump administration has lied about the success of the Iran war from the beginning, and actively suppressed accurate reports of the damages done by the Iranians to neighboring gulf states and to US installations in these surrounding countries. Two weeks into the war in Iran, the US government asked two of the main commercial suppliers of satellite imagery, Vantor and Planet Labs, to stop supplying imagery of the region while the war is going on, making it difficult to get accurate data concerning these damages.

When the true story of Trump’s campaign in Iran is told, it will be seen as a long-term strategic disaster for the US. Iran has been preparing for such a campaign for decades and is capable of withstanding a great deal of pain in the short term. The brutal regime in Iran, which is still intact after personnel changes that have actually increased the hard-liners’ power, doesn’t care about the depredations of the Iranian people any more than Trump cares about the economic hardships of the American people.

Rather than providing information about the true state of the war, Trump tweets out strings of more and more empty bombastic threats, which the Iranian regime rightly takes as signs of weakness and ineffectiveness. As always, Trump and Hegseth substitute bluster for strategy.

As David Sanger of the New York Times has reported, Trump laid out his five objectives in Iran on February 28. The first was to ensure that Iran can “never have a nuclear weapon.” Then their ballistic missiles and launchers had to be destroyed, their navy sunk, their support of terrorist groups around the world brought to an end, and to make it possible for the Iranian people to rise up and overthrow their government. At this point, he’s delivered on only one out of those five objectives. The Iranian navy is gone. But we are no closer to ensuring that Iran cannot move toward producing nuclear weapons, and their missile systems are still largely intact, as is their support of proxy terrorist groups. And the likelihood of a people’s revolution in Iran is now nearly nil, despite Lindsey Graham’s call to load Iranian people up with weapons. Trump says he tried to send small arms to Iranian protestors, but the Kurds stole them. Also mitigating against a popular uprising is the fact that at this point only 1% of the Iranian population has access to the internet.

Trump’s promises on the Iran war are like those he made to the people who voted for him. To them, he promised lower prices and inflation, a stronger economy, and no more wars.

Tim Snyder summed it up succinctly on May 9:

The United States has just spent billions of dollars to lose a war that enriches its oligarchs, impoverishes the citizenry, sabotages its alliances, and strengthens its enemies. As justification for the self-destructive mindlessness, the White House gestures towards Jesus and genocide.¹

Snyder points out that this war is utterly self-destructive, leading ultimately to “Superpower Suicide.”

Russia is providing the Iranian regime with short-range fiber-optic drones to use against American forces. The GRU, the Russian military intelligence agency, has a longstanding relationship with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). And the Chinese are also helping the Iranians in the war against the US by providing missile parts and satellite data to target US facilities, and of course importing more than 80% of Iran’s shipped oil. Since Trump has alienated all of our allies, we’re paying the full price, and Trump is now asking Congress for a $600 billion increase in the Pentagon budget. Military analysts think the Iran War has already cost the US over $100 billion.

The former head of the Iran branch of the Research and Analysis Division (RAD) in Israel Defense Intelligence, Danny Citrinowicz, just published an essay in Foreign Affairs titled, “How the War Saved the Iranian Regime: The Unintended Consequences of the US-Israeli Assault.”² He argues that the Iranian regime was in trouble and in decline after the Obama nuclear deal, and the ill-advised Trump-Netanyahu US-Israeli attack has revived them. Trump now has only two choices: a long and costly war or a negotiated compromise that probably cannot be anywhere close to being as good as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that Obama negotiated and Trump tore up.

On May 9, as Putin celebrated the victory of Russia over the Nazis in World War II, former US ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul pointed out that Putin’s war on Ukraine has now lasted longer than the Soviet Union’s war with Nazi Germany, and Russia is losing this one. More than 1.2 million Russian troops have been killed or wounded and Ukraine has become a leader in the new approach to warfare worldwide, which is also affecting the war in Iran. Iran is following Ukraine in its approach to being attacked by a much larger and stronger opponent, and the US is following the Russian model of economic and strategic decline as the Trump family gets richer.