Iran Echo? In Vietnam, the U.S. Negotiated While Bombing

Tehran has, so far, thwarted Trump's expectations of victory. His response, like Nixon's in 1972, will likely be escalation. (But Nixon didn't have to worry his war would tank the world economy)

A month into the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, we shouldn’t be distracted by the illusion that Trump’s talk of negotiations promising an imminent end to hostilities. On the contrary, “negotiations” or posturing over the terms of an agreement to end the war are — as the U.S. war on Vietnam showed us — simply another front on which the war is fought. And usually when, as we’ve seen now, the two sides of an expeditionary war set out dramatically different terms as their basis for negotiating a resolution, each side seeks to reinforce the leverage behind its demands by inflicting greater levels of pain on its adversary. The militarily stronger side tries to bludgeon its enemy into collapse or capitulation; while the weaker party seeks to raise the cost to the aggressor of continuing the war. Both sides know that nothing can be won at the negotiating table that hasn’t been won in the field, but both sides also see value in appearing ready for peace.

(Nixon carpet-bombed Hanoi and Haiphong over 11 days in December of 1972 in hopes of forcing the Vietnamese to accept his terms in their ongoing negotiations. The bombings, which killed some 2,000 Vietnamese civilians, were called “terrorism on an unprecedented scale” by the New York Times! But they failed to force Vietnamese capitulation. Still, they’re an enduring reminder how epic levels of violence can be a form of “negotiation” by the U.S. in such situations.)

If anything we can expect the war to escalate on wider fronts: Sure, Trump has extended the deadline for his threat to bomb Iran’s power grid, perhaps he’ll abide by that, perhaps not (he’s hardly proven himself to be a reliable negotiating partner). But that only refers to one particular tactic; there’s plenty more to bomb. Still, the bombing campaign as a whole, despite massive destruction it has wrought, shows no sign of achieving U.S. goals. (Again, echoes of Vietnam, where as the war criminal Henry Kissinger put it, the U.S. side lost by not winning; the Vietnamese side won by not losing – an apt metric for assessing the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran). So, what other forms of leverage could Trump, and his Iranian adversary, introduce?

Until now, U.S. goals have been frustrated by

* Iran’s system retaining its coherence and ability to continue punishing strikes of its own using missiles and drones despite a month of U.S. and Israeli bombing and “decapitation strikes”;

* Iran’s “horizontal escalation”, targeting both military and civilian infrastructure across the Gulf, particularly by stopping shipping passing through the Gulf of Hormuz – which has plunged the world economy into turmoil from which it won’t quickly recover;

* Iran’s suprising capabilities in its vertical escalation, continuing to inflict significant damage on U.S. facilities across the region (including early-warning radar system and even, it seems, an aircraft carrier) and on Israel, where muzzling of media coverage keeps the full impact from public view.

* By the Trump Administration’s geopolitical and domestic political isolation: Western and Arab allies are furious at the U.S. for launching a war that has hurt them all, with no consultation or even clear plan, and declined U.S. demands for military help on a widening battlefield. Only one in three Americans supported the decision to start the war; three out of four oppose adding any U.S. ground troops to the fight. And they’re already feeling the inflationary impact of the war, with average prices Americans they’re paying for gasoline having surged by more than 30% over the past month.

Chat GPT made this for me

* Israel — the genocidal apartheid regime that may have goaded Trump into the war is a growing political liability in the region where it’s Greater Israel goals require weakening and humiliating both friend and foe of the United States, while its targeting of Iran’s civilian infrastructure, from steel factories to universities, make abundantly clear that this is a war on the entire Iranian nation. It’s hard to see how the Trump “Abraham Accords/Board of Peace” survive his choice to fight Israel’s war. Oh, and it seems the Greater Israel exertions have prompted the Israeli military to warn that it faces a manpower crisis that puts it on the verge of collapse.

With the failure of quantitative escalation of bombing, it now looks increasingly likely that Trump will be persuaded (again by false expectations of an easy win) to – to the surprise of many of us – seek a qualitative escalation of the attack on Iran by deploying ground forces, albeit in some limited fashion. Western media have obsessed on the expectation that 10,000 or so Marines and paratroopers would be tasked with capturing Kharg Island, Iran’s oil export terminal. But that would be the escalatory equivalent of destroying the power grid, and would make widespread retaliation against Gulf energy infrastructure more likely. And it would subject U.S. forces there to sustained counterattacks from the nearby Iranian mainland.

More plausible, perhaps, is the scenario outlined here by Mouin Rabbani: A ground raid on one or more of three smaller and less strategically significant islands claimed by Iran under the Shah in 1971, but which are recognized by most Arab countries as belonging to the United Arab Emirates. And the big strategic bonus for the U.S. side would be that the UAE would participate directly in such an action. It would mark a pivot towards dramatic qualitative escalation because even if Trump has been persuaded that it would force Iran’s collapse or capitulation, Mouin writes that instead it would set the stage for further escalation on a massive scale because once the U.S. had landed just a few thousand US troops on Iranian territory, the escalation logic would lead to exponentially more. (Like Vietnam…)

Indeed, it’s already clear as we’ve reported that Israel opposes any deal with Iran’s regime and seeks to keep the war going. The likelihood of it trying to sabotage any such deal via air strikes remains high — but right now its more effective weapon is its influence over President Trump and those around him, combined with similar lobbying from the UAE, pressing him to avoid what would be universally viewed as a defeat.

Still, there’s no doubt Iran has planned for a long war that it wins by not losing, while exhausting the U.S. will to maintain its aggression because of the costs, on the battlefield and off.

Iran’s most effective leverage thus far has been its control over the Strait of Hormuz, and its its ability to determine which ships are allowed to pass through this arterial channel of global energy trade. (The low likelihood of any imminent negotiated agreement is also reflected in Iran’s demand that under any settlement, its adversaries give it a postwar right to police the strait and extract tolls for passage through it — needless to say that demand is also a maximalist non-starter not just for the U.S. but for all of the Arab, Asian and Western countries that depend on the free passage of shipping through the Strait.)

One potential strategic asset Iran has not deployed is the ability of its Yemeni ally, Ansar-al-Islam (aka “the Houthis”) to choke off the Red Sea alternative route at the Bab al-Mandeb strait, inflicting further economic pain and adding to the burden on U.S.-allied militaries. Ansar entered the fray by targeting Israel with missile strikes over the weekend…

So, despite the talk of negotiation (Trump statements are designed also to soothe oil prices and reassure investors, but the movement of the indexes shows us the diminishing returns on each new promise by Trump of an imminent off-ramp) this looks more likely to be a violent contest that persists for some time, escalates and creates a new, globally painful, status quo.

And it’s fairly clear, already, that the Iran disaster will accelerate the weakening of the U.S. geopolitical position. But what scenarios will fill the vacuum of the vanishing Pax Americana? It is, to borrow a T-shirt worthy quote from Zhou Enlai, when asked in 1972 to comment on the French Revolution, “too soon to tell.”