Trump may escalate the war against Iran. But decades of US attempts to dominate the Middle East are running up against the growing power of its rivals.
There’s a good chance the war between the US and Iran will heat up. But in the longer term, US imperialism is losing the campaign it’s been waging for decades to dominate the Greater Middle East.
Since the short-lived “memorandum of understanding” (MOU) between Washington and Tehran collapsed in July, the two sides have been playing a cat-and-mouse game with repeated armed clashes.
The Pentagon is trying to break the Iranian blockade of the Straits of Hormuz. Their opponents, however, don’t just want to maintain their control of this key waterway.
The Islamic Republican regime wants an end of the economic blockade of Iran that Donald Trump’s administration has been tightening. Only last week, US treasury secretary Scott Bessent threatened sanctions against any country that allows Iranian planes to use its airports.
The MOU, that US vice-president JD Vance signed in June, offered Iran substantial economic relief. But Trump quickly dropped it. This must have removed any Iranian doubts that, as Canadian prime minister Mark Carney puts it, the US signature on international agreements “is written in pencil”.
So, Tehran’s official offer of a seven-day ceasefire during the United Nations (UN) General Assembly last week may not have been intended very seriously.
In any case, after telling the UN that he expected a deal with Iran after the US midterm elections in November, Trump immediately rejected the offer.
According to the Wall Street Journal newspaper, “privately Trump was sceptical Iran would meet his demands and has told his staff that he sees a renewed bombing campaign as likely” after the midterms.
Trump bragged to the UN that he might “annihilate the Islamic Republic” and celebrated how the US is reinforcing its domination of the Western hemisphere. And it’s true that the Danish government has just signed an agreement conceding Washington military and economic control over Greenland.
But Iran is a much tougher nut. It has demonstrated its growing capabilities by firing advanced missiles at the US fleet, forcing them to retreat into safer waters. This was a warning that Iran can sink US ships.
Its allies in Yemen and Iraq have tightened the Gulf energy squeeze by shutting the routes to the Red Sea via the Bab-al-Mandab Strait and the Saudi pipeline—though the latter has reportedly been reopened.
The rapid advances of the Ansarullah movement in Yemen are a direct threat to the survival of the monarchy next door in Saudi Arabia.
Cambridge energy expert Helen Thompson told the Financial Times newspaper, “I don’t think we’re ever really going back to a world in which the US acting as a guarantor of passage through the Strait of Hormuz can be taken for granted. And you can see that in the way in which various Arab states, including Saudi Arabia, are working on the presumption that they need pipelines. You are going to see Arab states really trying to move as far away as they can from reliance on maritime passage through that body of water.”
Another sign of the times is that US forces are pulling out of Iraqi Kurdistan. Run by two competing and ultra-corrupt nationalist parties, the region has effectively been a Pentagon protectorate since the end of Washington’s first war against Iraq in 1991. Masrour Barzani, the statelet’s prime minister, whined that the US withdrawal was a “shameful” abandonment of a loyal ally.
Last year, the US completed a huge $800 million consulate in the regional capital of Erbil. Iranian drone and missile attacks have left it largely deserted.
Toby Dodge, an Iraq specialist at the London School of Economics, told the Financial Times, “The message it sends to long-term US allies in the region is clear—do your own deal with Tehran because Washington cannot be relied upon.”
The success of US imperialism in reasserting its hegemony in the Americas reflects specific conditions.
No local ruling class has the capability or will to challenge Washington and there is a powerful and aggressive pro-US far right.
The situation is very different in both west and east Asia, where Chinese power is growing. Even if Trump escalates against Iran, the US is losing the Middle East.
