America Has Betrayed Its Global Mission
For many years, the U.S. foreign and security establishment has made the safety of international trade a key argument for the benefits that U.S. global primacy brings to the world, and the need to maintain that primacy. This argument has often been made with specific reference to the security of energy flows from the Persian Gulf — which was also among the reasons given for the need to maintain U.S. military bases in the region.
The Trump administration is now destroying this pillar of U.S. primacy and its international legitimacy — and it’s doing so with a majority of support from Republicans in Congress and those in the think tank world. That the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the attacks on Gulf Arab energy production come from Iran is true. It is also irrelevant.
This was a pure war of choice on the part of the administration. There was no imminent or even feasible threat from Iran to the United States. The administration previously claimed that last year’s attacks by the U.S. and Israel had destroyed Iran’s nuclear installations. However, neither those attacks nor the Trump administration’s assassination of Iranian Gen. Qasem Suleimani in January of 2020 had led to Iranian retaliation against Gulf energy exports.
The Iranian government and innumerable Western experts — and, it seems, several Gulf Arab governments — had however repeatedly warned that a full-scale attack on Iran by the U.S. and Israel would lead to such retaliation. This warning shouldn’t have been remotely difficult for the Trump administration to understand.
