The end of the American empire
www.newstatesman.com | by John Gray
Speaking to Republican lawmakers at his Trump National Doral Miami golf club on 9 March, the tenth day of the war, Donald Trump described American military intervention in Iran as “a little excursion”. Questioned at a news conference at the resort later that day on whether it was an excursion or a war, he replied that it was both: “An excursion that will keep us out of a war.” He went on to declare that the operation was “very far ahead of schedule” and would be over “very soon”.
Trump’s excursion has proved to be a march to disaster. His “major combat operation” has shifted from aiming to block Iran achieving a nuclear capability that was supposedly “obliterated” last June to unblocking the Strait of Hormuz and restoring the situation that existed before the operation began. Whatever the objective may be, the pre-war status quo is irretrievable. Reopening the strait to Western shipping by military force would likely incur high American casualties, and mean the strait would revert to Iranian control as soon as American forces departed. Trump cannot declare victory and walk away without surrendering the vital shipping conduit to Iran. Even if a ceasefire plan that reopened the strait, of the kind that reportedly emerged from Pakistan on 6 April, was agreed and implemented, Tehran would have had (and still has) the upper hand. With its proven capacity to wreak havoc on the world economy, a bombed-out military-theocratic dictatorship has begun the final unravelling of US imperial power.
The Iranian parliament’s national security committee has approved proposals to toll ships transiting the strait, offering safe passage to vessels from friendly and non-aligned countries. In a mocking post on X, the head of parliament’s National Security Commission, Ebrahim Azizi, stated: “Trump has finally achieved his dream of ‘regime change’ – but in the region’s maritime regime! The Strait of Hormuz will certainly reopen, but not for you; it will be open for those who comply with the new laws of Iran. The 47 years of hospitality are over forever.” The Iranian state, monetising what was for nearly half a century an open international waterway, now owns a crucial link in the global supply chain.
Iran has shown itself well prepared for the conflict into which Trump has blundered. On 18 March, an unprecedented missile and drone attack on Qatar’s Ras Laffan Industrial City, the world’s largest liquefied natural gas (LNG) production hub, inflicted damage the Qataris estimate will take three to five years to repair. Iran’s ability to hit high-value American assets was confirmed by the 27 March attack on the Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, in which a critical “eye in the sky” Airborne Warning and Control System aircraft was effectively destroyed. An unsuccessful attack on the UK/US base at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, around 2,400 miles from Iran’s coastline, revealed unexpected ballistic missile capabilities. The downing of an American fighter jet on 3 April punctured Trump’s boast that Iran’s air defences have been “100 per cent annihilated”. The ejected crew member – rescued in a dramatic extraction operation after a heavy firefight – brings home the perils of the war.
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The hazards of Operation Epic Fury were not unforeseen. Sober military professionals in the US, UK and other countries have war-gamed conflict with Iran dozens of times over many years. Trump was warned and chose not to listen. By 30 March, he was using Truth Social to threaten that unless a deal is “shortly reached” and the Hormuz Strait is “immediately ‘Open for Business’”, “We will conclude our lovely ‘stay’ in Iran by blowing up and completely obliterating all of their Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells and Kharg Island (and possibly all desalination plants!), which we have purposefully not yet ‘touched’.” A day later, the Wall Street Journal was reporting that he told aides he was considering ending the war even if it meant leaving the strait closed. Hormuz is the channel through which around a fifth of the world’s oil is shipped. Ships do not need to be sunk for the conduit to be unsafe. Iran has weaponised Lloyd’s of London, the insurance marketplace for much of the globe’s shipping. All that is needed is a credible threat which leaves them uninsurable. In a dual blockade – with the Houthis closing the Bab el-Mandeb Strait on the other side of the Arabian Peninsula – around a quarter of global oil would be choked off. There would be acute shortages to vital ingredients in food supplies, semiconductors and plastics. Economic growth would stall or reverse, and worldwide stagflation would be unavoidable.
The fiasco that is unfolding is not the result of strategic error. In her magisterial study The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam (1984), the American historian Barbara Tuchman described how governments persistently pursue policies contrary to their own interests even though better alternatives are available and known to them. Choosing spectacle over prudence, the Trojans brought the Greek wooden horse inside their walls. Overconfidence and extravagant spending by Renaissance popes fuelled the Protestant Reformation. The stubborn pride of George III’s government provoked rebellion and the loss of Britain’s American colonies. A refusal to admit the war was unwinnable produced humiliating defeat in Vietnam. Hubris, self-deception and corruption led inexorably to ruin.
All these marks of folly are visible in Trump’s war on Iran. The president and his coterie imagined that decapitating the leadership – “getting rid of some people,” as he put it in his golf club homily – would disable the regime. But Tehran is not Caracas, from which President Nicolás Maduro and his wife were extracted in a special operation on 3 January and Venezuela handed over to the deputy leader, Delcy Rodríguez. Iran’s government is multi-layered and – for all its murderous repression of the millions who yearn for a Western way of life – deeply embedded in society. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) manage a business empire spanning oil, telecommunications, construction and banking. The Basij militias, volunteer paramilitary forces used to crush domestic resistance, receive state benefits and jobs in IRGC-linked companies. Religious foundations and clerical elites control billions of dollars of assets seized from dissidents and minorities. For these groups, losing the war means losing their property, their livelihoods and their lives. They will fight to the death. Some may welcome death in battle as an opportunity for martyrdom – an enduring and still potent element in Shia Islam. The White House screens out these facts, along with Iran’s mastery of low-cost techniques of asymmetric warfare.
Corruption plays a part. Hours before the joint US/Israeli attacks of 28 February in which the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed, clusters of bets were placed on sites such as Polymarket, a crypto-based, partly offshore “prediction market” on which gamblers can wager on outcomes ranging from sporting scores to missile strikes. In March this year, a succession of bets minutes before White House announcements regarding the war made hundreds of millions of dollars for anonymous traders. On 23 March, thousands of oil futures contracts totalling around $1.5bn in notional value changed hands in a couple of minutes – a volume around 16 times higher than the daily average. There is no proof that Trump, his aides, or his family are profiting from these trades, but the inescapable conclusion must be that insiders are using privileged information for personal gain.
Trump’s war is folly in precisely Tuchman’s sense. Politically it can only harm him, raising petrol prices at the pump and worsening his dwindling prospects in November’s midterms. It flouts his campaign promises of no more “forever wars”, and alienates him from the neo-isolationist America First wing of his fracturing Maga base and strengthens the hand of his rival, JD Vance. Internationally, his expedition can only marginalise him. Even the European far right – Marine Le Pen, Giorgia Meloni, Alternative for Germany – are distancing themselves.
In the Middle East, the war has undercut the financial foundations of US hegemony. An assurance of protection was the basis of the petrodollar system set up in the early 1970s, when the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement establishing the dollar as the global reserve currency collapsed under the weight of heavy American spending on the Vietnam war. Needing a prop for the sinking dollar, the Nixon administration tasked Henry Kissinger with negotiating a quid pro quo with Saudi Arabia. The upshot was the petrodollar system, in which the Kingdom agreed to price its oil exports exclusively in dollars that could then be recycled in purchases of federal debt. Without the petrodollar, the spiralling American deficit becomes ever more unsustainable.
Some suggest Trump’s war follows a hidden road map: the goal is to stem the rise of China. Operation Absolute Resolve in Venezuela disrupted Chinese imports of oil from the South American country, and the US is redirecting flows to American Gulf Coast refiners. When, as seems likely, Cuba falls into the American sphere of influence in the coming months, it will be a further setback for Chinese influence. Beijing has invested heavily in Cuban infrastructure, including cybersecurity and surveillance facilities.
Assuming there is any such strategy, the results are mixed. As a major oil importer, China is under some pressure. Unlike Russia, which is benefiting from higher prices, Beijing needs oil to keep flowing to maintain its export-oriented economy. But as Iran’s largest oil buyer, China is one of the countries allowed through the strait and paying the toll in yuan – a direct challenge to the petrodollar.
In some ways the Gulf States are more fragile than Beirut before its collapse after the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975. As missiles continue to penetrate their air defences and their safety premium is lost, Dubai and other cities in the United Arab Emirates are Ballardian landscapes of deserted hotels, drained swimming pools and sand-shrouded abandoned automobiles. All of them depend on vulnerable water salination plants for their survival. (Despite its own water shortages, Iran is less reliant on the plants.) An apocalyptic scenario of mass evacuation, fleeing populations and a vast refugee crisis are not unrealistic.
However the war ends, the result will be the re-emergence of Iran as a major power. Toppling Saddam Hussein and his Baathist secular dictatorship was bound to strengthen Tehran and make it the dominant influence on Shia-majority Iraq. Today, the boost to Iranian power is far greater.
As the arbiter of passage through Hormuz, Iran has become the deciding force in the global oil economy. When transport and industry are factored in, renewables meet only a fraction of humanity’s energy needs. Globalisation in its current form is a by-product of hydrocarbons. Requiring large-scale mining for the minerals that go into batteries and magnets, renewables are themselves fossil-fuel derivatives. China rules over these supply chains, where it often holds a near-monopoly, and appears to be expanding its coal production. Any green transition is a distant prospect. Meanwhile, Iran will be the single most important player in energy markets.
Trump’s jaunt has ended in a cul-de-sac. If he retreats from the Middle East, states that were under US protection will waver between shades of neutrality and forging coalitions against a resurgent Iran. More endangered than they were before the war, Israel and Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Oman will be juggling multiple threats. If he opts to “finish the job” and launches a ground operation, the US will be dragged into a debacle larger than Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq combined.
In his 1 April presidential address, Trump threatened to bomb Iran “back into the Stone Ages, where they belong”. The phrase echoes that of General Curtis LeMay, who in his memoir Mission with LeMay (1965) recalled advising that North Vietnam must be “bombed back into the Stone Age”. LeMay’s plan was to target factories, harbours and bridges; Trump threatened on 6 April to attack bridges, power and, possibly, water plants. It too will fail, at the cost of an irrecoverable strategic defeat.
The cardinal consequence of the war will be the death of an idea of American empire. Founded in the imagination as a city on a hill that left the empires of Europe behind, the founders of the United States ostensibly repudiated anything that smacked of imperial power; but by the time of the First World War, it had acquired several territories that functioned as colonies in a traditional European sense – numerous small Caribbean and Pacific islands (1856), Alaska (1867), Hawaii (1898), the Philippines (1898) and the Panama Canal Zone (1903). It is this old-world imperial order to which Trump aims to revert in his revival of the Monroe Doctrine, asserting America’s hemispheric suzerainty. In the 20th century, the idea of empire mutated with Woodrow Wilson’s fervent promotion of “national self-determination” at the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference. The projection of an American model of government became an anti-imperial project, professedly advancing the rights and aspirations of all peoples. Beneath the accidents of their historical identities, an ideal American was latent in every human being.
Some version of this fanciful notion informs the catastrophe that is under way today. Relentless aerial bombardment does not release an imaginary inner American and unify populations against their governments, no matter how repressive they may be. Especially when civilian infrastructure is targeted: it unites them against the invader. When Trump posts he will “reign down hell on them [sic]”, he expresses the same idea as the American commander who said of a Vietnamese city in 1965: “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.” The sequel will not be dissimilar in Iran.
This is not simply a case of the lessons of history being ignored. Trump’s war looks more like an example of what Sigmund Freud described as repetition compulsion – an unconscious process in which the mind acts out what it cannot properly remember. A creature of the moment as he may be, Trump seems driven by an impulse to reimagine the past and reassert American – and his own – greatness. Even as he is taking a wrecking ball to the historic White House East Wing to construct a monumental ballroom that may never be built, he seems bent on demolishing a global order he has failed to remake in his image. When an infantile fantasy of omnipotence comes up against unyielding realities, the response is inchoate rage. Psychopathology may be more illuminating than geopolitics at this point. In a more profound sense than is commonly recognised, Donald Trump does not know what he is doing.
Trump-whisperers such as the Nato secretary-general Mark Rutte believe they can inject a sliver of reason into his deliberations. But Trump’s logic is instinctual not rational. As his lifting of sanctions on Russian oil has demonstrated, he has visceral sympathy for Vladimir Putin’s blend of tyranny and oligarchy. Détente with Russia will create many lucrative business opportunities. While Nato may linger on in name, the transatlantic alliance is operationally defunct. America is returning to its pre-1914 trajectory as a civilisation separate from Europe.
In the UK, the default position is to wait out the storm until sanity returns to Washington. Why Putin or Xi Jinping should exhibit similar patience is not explained. Could there be a better time for them to act? Ramping up hybrid warfare in under-defended Europe will give Putin leverage in any peace deal in Ukraine. With Trump having shifted military assets from the Asia-Pacific to the Middle East and running down munitions, Xi may be able to absorb Taiwan without firing a shot. There has been talk of an Anglo-Gaullism in which the UK relies on itself and European allies for its security. Obviously, this presupposes much higher defence spending, and soon. But renewing Britain’s defence capacity requires reindustrialising the economy, an enterprise that could take decades. Without an actionable plan, British Gaullism is an idle dream.
Trump’s little excursion is a point of no return in America’s retreat as a global power. In what world could such an outlandish figure be president of the US – twice? Well, our world – the one our rulers made and then showed they did not comprehend when they dismissed him as a passing aberration. Trump may wreck everything he touches, but his standing as a world-historical figure is beyond doubt. Might he be leading America towards another regime change, foreshadowed in the toxic trickster, Tucker Carlson, and the smooth left-populist, Zohran Mamdani? They, too, belong in our world.
