Three catastrophic strategic failures

The latest Gulf War exposes three catastrophic failures of American strategy.

The first was Hormuz. Both Iran and American intelligence experts had warned that a war would endanger shipping and energy flows through the Gulf. Washington nevertheless entered the conflict without an effective answer to the vulnerability of the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly a fifth of global petroleum liquids consumption passes. The United States knowingly placed a central artery of the world economy at risk.

The second was the vulnerability and depletion of American military power. Iran had explicitly warned that American bases used against it would become targets. American intelligence experts had likewise warned about the vulnerability of the concentrated U.S. military presence around the Gulf. Yet the headquarters of the Fifth Fleet and crucial American command, communications and logistics infrastructure remained within Iranian missile range. Iran struck Bahrain, seriously damaging the very infrastructure on which sustained American military operations in the Gulf depended. The subsequent disruption of naval logistics exposed how poorly the United States had prepared for the degradation of its principal regional hub.

At the same time, the war is consuming enormous quantities of expensive precision and defensive munitions whose production cannot simply be increased overnight. This depletion does not remain confined to the Middle East. It reduces the stocks available for other commitments, most obviously Ukraine, while forcing surrounding countries dragged into the Iranian conflict to reconsider whether the United States can reliably protect them. Washington has created the extraordinary situation in which its own depletion may make Ukraine an obvious alternative source of urgently needed military support, particularly air defence, for countries caught in the same quagmire.

The third may prove the most enduring: the collapse of American credibility. Oman is not simply a country with which the United States has enjoyed decades of close cooperation. It has been a loyal and exceptionally useful American partner, repeatedly using its relationship with Iran to mediate when direct American diplomacy was impossible. In the present crisis, Oman did everything it could to preserve the American position in the region, keep diplomacy alive and spare Washington the consequences of a disastrous confrontation with Iran. Threatening to bomb Oman after it had worked to prevent precisely the disaster that subsequently unfolded sends an extraordinary message to every American ally: loyalty, mediation and even efforts to protect American interests offer no protection from American coercion.

Hormuz exposed the economic recklessness. Bahrain and the depletion of critical munitions exposed the limits of American military power projection. Oman exposed something potentially harder to repair: the destruction of trust in the United States as an ally.

None of this was unforeseeable. Iran warned Washington. American intelligence experts warned Washington. Oman tried to prevent it. The administration went ahead anyway.

Pete Hegseth's public minimisation of the damage is plausible as military information policy. Failing to prepare for that damage is unforgivable. The adversary told Washington what it would do. American intelligence experts warned that it could do it. One of America's most loyal regional partners worked to prevent the confrontation. Washington ignored all three and walked straight into the consequences it had been warned about and from which, for the present U.S. government, there will be no escape.

This is an exposure of epic incompetence at the highest level of any American government.

And for what? Because Israel recklessly cajoled the U.S. into fighting a war for it with Iran in the erratic assumption that it would reinforce its own regional position.