Hormuz Ceasefire or Mexican Stand-off?

Two & a Half Powers in a Pinch

Having spent the better part of 15 years hip-deep in the strategy of conflict, I’m not sure the situation with Iran really is a ceasefire. What was supposed to be a “night in Caracas” operation to decapitate a regime has become a Mexican stand-off. And like any good spaghetti western, this isn’t two powers - but three. Or two and a half depending how you look at it.

We have two badly matched powers, each controlling crucial aspects of a multi-faceted, complex conflict. Both have deployed similar “escalate to de-escalate” tactics, seeking a public win rather than a rational success. There is a difference: A union strike might be a win if its demands are met, but if that bankrupts the employer, it’s hardly a success. Here Iran’s duplicitous madman approach has served it against a rules-based order until it ran into Trump’s mercurial madman approach. Without an order to game, Tehran is facing a savage reappraisal of its foreign strategy at precisely the moment where the factions that formed in Tehran’s power-vacuum are splitting. The regime may have brutally side-stepped a popular revolution, but it’s dealing with a coup by committee.

The regime’s decentralized “mosaic” defense plan kept Iran in the fight, but without a legitimate Supreme Leader to bring the elements back together the fight to fill the power-vacuum is already underway. Iran isn’t refusing to meet in Islamabad because they’re winning the war, the factions are fighting over who calls the shots.

This leaves the world with what we might call a cease-fire of attrition. Given the resource mismatch, it is an attrition that the US will likely win. It will be an expensive win, and it may not be a success.

Why it Matters:

It’s facet of any crisis in the TikTok age that every conflict will have a smack-talking gallery of interests pushing their own narrative. It’s tedious but if you can ignore the noise, the market signals don’t really indicate a cataclysmic energy shock so much as a long squeeze. It will hurt, cost a lot and probably trigger a global recession. Yet the world, as it does, will rewire itself away from the Hormuz chokepoint and Iran’s “atomic” leverage.

The longer term problem for the US is getting mired in yet another forever war in the Muslim world, while Beijing displaces Washington as the stable superpower. This is no fringe possibility: In 1922 the British Empire was the largest in human history, comprising roughly a quarter of the earth and its population. A single generation later, the empire was asking the US for bail-outs and permission to invade Egypt. These things do happen.

What are the Options?

Basically, to wait it out without further involvement, and if we’re going to blockade, don’t do it halfway. Beijing, the 800 pound panda in the room, is theoretically on Iran’s side, and would love to see the US stretched and tied down. More practically, the world’s largest energy importer can’t do much about a blockade without triggering a war.

At the chokepoint, Washington’s madman approach wasn’t a bad short term tactic, but it was at the price of future effectiveness. To avoid the use of absolute force, some expectation of rationality is required in either delivering a threat or withholding it. For its part, Iran can’t do a whole lot more than it’s already done, so taking its oil off the market will move the needle, but not by much.

Iran’s larger problem is one Washington just needs to wait out. Its factions have been playing against each other for a decade, and now they are making a dash for a prize that hasn’t been open since 1989. By decapitating the regime, America’s ham-handed foreign policy may have triggered a slow-moving coup. Perhaps, but there is no reason to believe that the beard calling the shots in Tehran at the end of this Mexican stand-off is going to – a la Venezuela – start working for us.

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Further reading on just why the Islamic Republic has had it out for the United States since its inception download chapter from Pothole of the Gods: Holy War, Proxy War & Fake News