Ever since December 27,
war clouds have been gathering over the Strait of
Hormuz, the narrow body of water connecting the
Persian Gulf with the Indian Ocean and the seas
beyond. On that day, Iranian Vice President
Mohammad Reza Rahimi warned that Tehran would
block the strait and create havoc in international
oil markets if the West placed new economic
sanctions on his country.
"If they impose
sanctions on Iran's oil exports," Rahimi declared,
"then even one drop of oil cannot flow from the
Strait of Hormuz." Claiming that such a move would
constitute an assault on America's vital
interests, President Barack Obama reportedly
informed Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei that Washington would use force to keep
the strait open. To back up their threats, both
sides have been bolstering their forces in the
area and each has
conducted a series of provocative military
exercises.
All of a sudden, the Strait of
Hormuz has become the most combustible spot on the
planet, the most likely place to witness a major
conflict between well-armed adversaries. Why, of
all locales, has it become so explosive?
Oil is a major part of the answer, but -
and this may surprise you - only a part.
Petroleum remains the world's most crucial
source of energy, and about one-fifth of the
planet's oil supply travels by tanker through the
strait. "Hormuz is the world's most important oil
chokepoint due to its daily oil flow of almost 17
million barrels in 2011," the US Department of
Energy noted as last year ended. Because no other
area is capable of replacing these 17 million
barrels, any extended closure would produce a
global shortage of oil, a price spike, and
undoubtedly attendant economic panic and disorder.
No one knows just how high oil prices
would go under such circumstances, but many energy
analysts believe that the price of a barrel might
immediately leap by $50 or more. "You would get an
international reaction that would not only be
high, but irrationally high," says Lawrence J
Goldstein, a director of the Energy Policy
Research Foundation.
Even though military
experts assume the US will use its overwhelming
might to clear the strait of Iranian mines and
obstructions in a few days or weeks, the chaos to
follow in the region might not end quickly,
keeping oil prices elevated for a long time.
Indeed, some analysts fear that oil
prices, already hovering around $100 per barrel,
would quickly double to more than $200, erasing
any prospect of economic recovery in the United
States and Western Europe, and possibly plunging
the planet into a renewed Great Recession.
The Iranians are well aware of all this,
and it is with such a nightmare scenario that they
seek to deter Western leaders from further
economic sanctions and other more covert acts when
they threaten to close the strait. To calm such
fears, US officials have been equally adamant in
stressing their determination to keep the strait
open. In such circumstances of heightened tension,
one misstep by either side might prove calamitous
and turn mutual rhetorical belligerence into
actual conflict.
Military overlord of
the Persian Gulf In other words, oil,
which makes the global economy hum, is the most
obvious factor in the eruption of war talk, if not
war. Of at least equal significance are allied
political factors, which may have their roots in
the geopolitics of oil but have acquired a life of
their own.
Because so much of the world's
most accessible oil is concentrated in the Persian
Gulf region, and because a steady stream of oil is
absolutely essential to the well-being of the US
and the global economy, it has long been American
policy to prevent potentially hostile powers from
acquiring the capacity to dominate the Gulf or
block the Strait of Hormuz.
President
Jimmy Carter first articulated this position in
January 1980, following the Islamic Revolution in
Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. "Any
attempt by an outside force to gain control of the
Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault
on the vital interests of the United States of
America," he told a joint session of congress,
"and such an assault will be repelled by any means
necessary, including military force".
In
accordance with this precept, Washington
designated itself the military overlord of the
Persian Gulf, equipped with the military might to
overpower any potential challenger. At the time,
however, the US military was not well organized to
implement the president's initiative, known ever
since as the Carter Doctrine. In response, the
Pentagon created a new organization, the US
Central Command (CENTCOM), and quickly endowed it
with the wherewithal to crush any rival power or
powers in the region and keep the sea lanes under
American control.
CENTCOM first went into
action in 1987-1988, when Iranian forces attacked
Kuwaiti and Saudi oil tankers during the Iran-Iraq
War, threatening the flow of oil supplies through
the strait. To protect the tankers, president
Ronald Reagan ordered that they be "reflagged" as
American vessels and escorted by US warships,
putting the navy into potential conflict with the
Iranians for the first time.
Out of this
action came the disaster of Iran Air Flight 655, a
civilian airliner carrying 290 passengers and crew
members, all of whom died when the plane was hit
by a missile from the USS Vincennes, which
mistook it for a hostile fighter plane - a tragedy
long forgotten in the United States, but still
deeply resented in Iran.
Iraq was
America's de facto ally in the Iran-Iraq war, but
when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990 -
posing a direct threat to Washington's dominance
of the Gulf - the first president George H W Bush
ordered CENTCOM to protect Saudi Arabia and drive
Iraqi forces out of Kuwait.
And when
Saddam rebuilt his forces, and his very existence
again came to pose a latent threat to America's
dominance in the region, the second president Bush
- George W - ordered CENTCOM to invade Iraq and
eliminate his regime altogether (which, as no one
is likely to forget, resulted in a string of
disasters).
If oil lay at the root of
Washington's domineering role in the Gulf, over
time that role evolved into something else: a
powerful expression of America's status as a
global superpower. By becoming the military
overlord of the Gulf and the self-appointed
guardian of oil traffic through the Strait of
Hormuz, Washington said to the world: "We, and we
alone, are the ones who can ensure the safety of
your daily oil supply and thereby prevent global
economic collapse."
Indeed, when the Cold
War ended - and with it an American sense of pride
and identity as a bulwark against Soviet
expansionism in Europe and Asia - protection of
the flow of Persian Gulf oil became America's
greatest claim to superpowerdom, and it remains so
today.
Every option on every table With the ouster of Saddam in 2003, the one
potential threat to US domination of the Persian
Gulf was Iran. Even under the US-backed shah, long
Washington's man in the Gulf, the Iranians had
sought to be the paramount power in the region.
Now, under a militant Shi'ite Islamic regime, they
have proven no less determined and - call it irony
- thanks to Saddam's overthrow and the rise of a
Shi'ite-dominated government in Baghdad, they have
managed to extend their political reach in the
region.
With Saddam's fate in mind, they
have also built up their defensive military
capabilities and - in the view of many Western
analysts - embarked on a uranium-enrichment
program with the potential to supply fissile
material for a nuclear weapon, should the Iranian
leadership choose someday to take such a fateful
step.
Iran thus poses a double challenge
to Washington's professed status in the Gulf. It
is not only a reasonably well-armed country with
significant influence in Iraq and elsewhere, but
by promoting its nuclear program, it threatens to
vastly complicate America's future capacity to
pull off punishing attacks like those launched
against Iraqi forces in 1991 and 2003.
While Iran's military budget is
modest-sized at best and its conventional military
capabilities will never come close to matching
CENTCOM's superior forces in a direct
confrontation, its potential pursuit of
nuclear-arms capabilities greatly complicates the
strategic calculus in the region.
Even
without taking the final steps of manufacturing
actual bomb components - and no evidence has yet
surfaced that the Iranians have proceeded to this
critical stage - the Iranian nuclear effort has
greatly alarmed other countries in the Middle East
and called into question the continued robustness
of America's regional dominance. From Washington's
perspective, an Iranian bomb - whether real or not
- poses an existential threat to America's
continued superpower status.
How to
prevent Iran not just from going nuclear but from
maintaining the threat to go nuclear has, in
recent years, become an obsessional focus of
American foreign and military policy. Over and
over again, US leaders have considered plans for
using military force to cripple the Iranian
program though air and missile strikes on known
and suspected nuclear facilities.
Presidents Bush and Barack Obama have both
refused to take such action "off the table", as
Obama made clear most recently in his State of the
Union address. (The Israelis have also repeatedly
indicated their desire to take such action,
possibly as a prod to Washington to get the job
done.)
Most serious analysts have
concluded that military action would prove
extremely risky, probably causing numerous
civilian casualties and inviting fierce Iranian
retaliation. It might not even achieve the
intended goal of halting the Iranian nuclear
program, much of which is now being conducted deep
underground.
Hence, the consensus view
among American and European leaders has been that
economic sanctions should instead be employed to
force the Iranians to the negotiating table, where
they could be induced to abandon their nuclear
ambitions in return for various economic benefits.
But those escalating sanctions, which appear to be
causing increasing economic pain for ordinary
Iranians, have been described by that country's
leaders as an "act of war", justifying their
threats to block the Strait of Hormuz.
To
add to tensions, the leaders of both countries are
under extreme pressure to vigorously counter the
threats of the opposing side. Obama, up for
re-election, has come under fierce, even
hair-raising, attack from the contending
Republican presidential candidates (except, of
course, Ron Paul) for failing to halt the Iranian
nuclear program, though none of them have a
credible plan to do so.
He, in turn, has
been taking an ever-harsher stance on the issue.
Iranian leaders, for their part, appear
increasingly concerned over the deteriorating
economic conditions in their country and, no doubt
fearing an Arab Spring-like popular upheaval, are
becoming more bellicose in their rhetoric.
So oil, the prestige of global dominance,
Iran's urge to be a regional power, and domestic
political factors are all converging in a
combustible mix to make the Strait of Hormuz the
most dangerous place on the planet. For both
Tehran and Washington, events seem to be moving
inexorably toward a situation in which mistakes
and miscalculations could become inevitable.
Neither side can appear to give ground
without losing prestige and possibly even their
jobs. In other words, an existential test of wills
is now under way over geopolitical dominance in a
critical part of the globe, and on both sides
there seem to be ever fewer doors marked "Exit."
As a result, the Strait of Hormuz will
undoubtedly remain the ground zero of potential
global conflict in the months ahead.
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