After years of dominance by a hostile U.S. superpower, nuclear-armed and militarily superior Israel, and significant local nations linked with the United States, “Iran has, with American help, completely reconfigured the power structure of the Middle East and the Persian Gulf,” writes Robert Kagan, a senior fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution and writer for The Atlantic.
The Iranian regime survived U.S. attacks, made no concessions, and “exposed America’s Achilles’ heel: the vulnerability of Iran’s neighbors,” Kagan says.
Iran’s attack on the world’s largest liquefied-natural-gas facility, in Qatar, showed that though Iran couldn’t defeat the United States in an air war, its missiles and drones could inflict enough damage on the oil-and-gas infrastructure of the Gulf to plunge the world into a prolonged economic crisis, he says.
“This alone was enough to alter the balance of leverage between Iran and the United States,” Kagan says.
But in addition, it became clear that shortages of U.S. weapons meant the United States would have few interceptors to protect Gulf nations and its own regional bases.
Control of the Strait of Hormuz is Iran’s biggest deterrent to future attacks from the United States or Israel, says Kagan. Iran not only is claiming the right to charge tolls but has proposed excluding vessels associated with governments it considers hostile and has demanded compensation from nations that participated in attacks against it.
Iran’s control of the strait is a more useful instrument of power than a nuclear weapon, Kagan says. While a nuclear weapon might deter an attack, control of the strait gives Iran daily leverage over dozens of countries.
The sanctions strategy that for decades isolated Iran depended on international cooperation. But will countries that rely on access to the strait “choose solidarity with Washington — this Washington — over their economic interests?” Kagan asks.
“American allies in Asia and Europe can see that a relatively brief war against a second-rank power has consumed much of America’s supply of the weapons needed for missile defense,” he says. “They can see that the United States began a war it could not finish, exposed its partners to retaliation, and then stopped when the costs became too great. Beijing’s conclusions about Taiwan, and Moscow’s conclusions about Europe, may be impossible to know. But America’s allies will inevitably be asking whether Washington has the weapons, stamina, and political will to sustain another major conflict.”
“The world has spent decades worrying about what Iran might do if it acquired a nuclear weapon. It should now worry about something even more consequential: an Iran that has defeated the United States, no longer fears American attack, and controls access to the Persian Gulf. Nuclear weapons alone could never have given Iran this kind of power. The failed U.S. and Israeli war with Iran has.”
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