“No plan survives first contact with the enemy” is a military dictum usually credited to Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, and more recently to the boxer Mike Tyson in the form “Everyone has a plan until he gets punched in the mouth.” The United States, in its war with Iran, is an unusual counterexample, insofar as it appears that the Trump administration did not have a plan. It did however get punched in the mouth, and spat bloody Chiclets out all over the document it was forced to sign last month, pausing the war on terms favorable to Iran.
On July 14, the United States returned to the field of battle. The administration has said almost nothing about why it is attacking Iran again, and how this round will improve on the previous. The Washington Post reported last weekend that U.S. intelligence doubts that the new attacks will force Iran to change course. But the Pentagon does seem to have patched some of the holes in its initial strategy, or lack thereof. Regime collapse is unlikely, but a revised approach might still degrade the Iranian position.
In the initial assault, the U.S. killed Iran’s leadership, then set to work degrading Iran’s defense-industrial capability. But Iran inflicted so much pain on the economy of the United States and its allies that their will to fight petered out first. Iran inflicted this pain through drone and missile attacks and by closing the Strait of Hormuz. The patch for round two: move the bases for the American operation away from the most vulnerable American allies—the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia—and instead stage attacks from Jordan, Kuwait, and Bahrain. These three countries have vulnerabilities of their own, but they all have a long history of hostility to Iran, and therefore have less to lose from going all in with the United States. Falling back to Jordan also places valuable American assets slightly farther from Iran’s missiles and drones. The Iranian response has been painful and effective nonetheless: In Jordan this weekend, Iranian missiles killed three U.S. service members by blowing apart their barracks, and seem to have destroyed numerous air assets.
In round one, Iran characterized its responses as self-defense and tit-for-tat retaliation. American public diplomacy, nonexistent then as now, all but conceded this framing, which left the blame on the United States and Israel for the woes of their allies: the cratered tourism sector of Dubai, the destruction of a fifth of Qatar’s natural-gas capacity, and, of course, the maiming of the world economy resulting from the closure of the Strait. These points were each raw nerves, and Iran vivisected them adeptly while attributing the pain to the United States.
[Andrew Exum: The war is lost. Now fix what it broke.]
A political goal of the second round seems to be to change perception of the war from one of American aggression and Iranian resistance to one of Iranian aggression and hostage-taking. Iran has retaliated as before and hit American military targets. But to maintain its leverage, it has to focus on targets that push the blame for the war and its consequences further toward Tehran.
Iran has attacked civilian ships transiting the strait. In the most serious such incident, Iran killed an Indian merchant seaman and seriously wounded another nine on an Emirati-flagged oil tanker that was hugging the Oman side of the Strait, presumably to avoid Iranian interdiction, when an Iranian cruise missile hit its side and caused a fire. The Indian government summoned the chargé d’affaires of Iran’s embassy in Delhi to protest the strike. The Financial Times reported that missiles fired at eight vessels since July 8 have hit ships’ engines, near where crew sleep.
Iran has also launched attacks against Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea port of Yanbu, and has coordinated with its Houthi allies in Yemen to close the Bab al-Mandab strait, at the south end of the Red Sea. The Houthis are attacking ships that attempt to pass. Yanbu is Saudi Arabia’s alternate exit path for its oil—a bypass route that will allow it to avoid the menace of the Iranian navy and export without hindrance. Already about 70 percent of its crude exports pass through Yanbu, via pipelines from eastern Saudi Arabia, and the Saudis are raising that percentage as fast as they can. The Emiratis have a similar play: shipping through Fujairah, the emirate on the Gulf of Oman, also bypassing Hormuz and the Iranians.
The Iranians hate being cut out of the deal. But the theory that they have the right to shut down passage through international waterways, or charge tolls to pass through them, is based on extreme circumstances: War is afoot, and it can detain enemy commercial vessels. As the Emirates and Saudi Arabia fall back from the field of battle, this theory applies less and less, and Iran’s rationale becomes more and more untenable. The basis for attacking Yanbu and Fujairah is shakier still: Even if Iran had the right to control the strait, it would have no right to force other countries to squeeze their traffic through the Iranian tollbooth, when those countries have a sovereign right to routes that could bypass it. The recent outbreak of war occurred because ships tried to pass the strait simply by avoiding Iranian waters—an act that Iran, but not the United States, considered a transgression of the June agreement.
[Read: Who really controls the Strait of Hormuz?]
None of this change of perception will stop Iran from throttling maritime passages or striking Saudi or Emirati ports. These are, as all agree and the Iranians themselves state openly, the only sources of leverage for Iran, and it will under no circumstances give that leverage up. In the past weeks, the United States has declared that it will transfer nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia, sell weapons to Qatar, and load up the UAE with AI-enabling chips. These goodies will help the Gulf Arab countries zoom further past Iran, and none of them depend on the strait. But Iran has gone from attacking its neighbors because they are helping the United States to attacking them because the United States is helping them.
The objective of this strategic turn is the re-isolation of Iran. Among the blunders of the first round was to turn Iran from a pariah state into a sympathetic one. If it insists on disrupting international shipping—including, at least for now, ships from China—then it will move steadily back into the category of an internationally recognized bad actor, ready to collapse under its own incompetence. It will, in other words, be back where it was in January, before this whole mess began.
And what, if that happens, is Iran’s next move? Iran has performed well against a hapless foe. But if its long-term plan is to threaten its neighbors and close international waterways—formalizing an extortion racket, and keeping that up forever—then it is not the only party to this conflict that is strategically bankrupt.
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