US-Iran war has strengthened Tehran while boxing Trump into a corner

The Phoney War is over. After a brief and awkward hiatus, encapsulating much of the longest football World Cup on record, the US and Iran are sliding back into war. The Sitzkrieg, as with the lull in fighting after the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, has given way to blitzkrieg, with all the ensuing economic effects on food and energy prices. But why? And why now?The reality is that this resumption of “kinetic” conflict – to use the dreadful newspeak of the Pentagon – is not because either side misread the bizarre and deliberately vague memorandum of understanding that ended the first phase. Both sides understood it perfectly well. That document was premised on an inherently unstable and mutually convenient misunderstanding. Washington was always determined to renege on it and Tehran was always determined to defend it. An agreement built on an inherent contradiction is not a recipe for an enduring truce. It is a countdown. Iran’s regime is more aggressive than everUS President Donald Trump made the single greatest mistake of his presidency by agreeing to Israel’s demands to topple the Iranian regime on 28 February – or, failing that, at least bombing it into accepting American terms on its nuclear programme. He has achieved neither. What the war has instead produced is the outcome US military planners have dreaded for decades; effective Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the globe’s seaborne oil passes. It is this control which is now even more essential to Tehran than their nuclear programme. They know it is their strongest card, and they refuse to give it up.The US and Israel have killed the Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and several of his senior aides. They sank Iran’s conventional navy and ran down its missile stocks. Yet the regime did not collapse; instead, it has consolidated around new, even more extreme leadership. Its drones, mines and fast attack craft can still threaten transiting tankers. Its remaining missiles can still reach American bases across the Gulf. Decapitation, it turns out, is not defeat. Rather, its head has grown back stronger, like some dreadful Hydra.Iran’s new leadership has drawn the obvious conclusion and built its entire deterrence strategy around a single asset: controlling the Strait of Hormuz. Perhaps its only regret is not blocking the strait decades ago. An adviser to Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Iran’s chief negotiator, spelled it out on state television this week: generating revenue from the strait matters less than controlling it, which the regime would do, he said, or die as martyrs in the attempt. The rhetoric might sound apocalyptic, but the logic is clear. Hormuz is the only leverage Iran has left. Give it up, and Tehran enters any future negotiation empty-handed, with no way of ensuring Washington implements a deal rather than walking away from it.The massive turnout at Khamenei’s funeral seems to have convinced the leadership that the public will bear the cost of further conflict. The strait has become a nationalist cause, one of the few remaining points of contact between a battered population and its government. It was in this context that Iran attacked two tankers off the Omani coast just as the US prepared to reopen the waterway – a show of force that invited a deliberately overwhelming response. The American bombing campaign, now in its tenth consecutive day, has struck missile and drone batteries along the Gulf coast and military and civilian infrastructure across the country. It looks only set to intensify.Iran has a clear strategy, unlike the USIran has answered in kind, striking US bases in Kuwait, Jordan, Bahrain and Iraq. Two American soldiers were killed in Jordan on Friday, with the remains of a possible third since found. Another died attempting to disable an Iranian drone in northern Iraq. The death toll is mounting. If Trump knows where he is going to take this war, he is giving no public sign of it.Tehran, by contrast, has a clear if grim strategy. If war is inevitable, better to fight it now, before the Pentagon has fully regrouped and before the global economy has absorbed the energy and supply chain shocks of the first round. Iran will soak up the airstrikes, endure the renewed naval blockade and keep making sure the price of oil goes up. As has been clear from the beginning of this mess, the bet is asymmetric. A regime fighting for survival can absorb more pain than a president fighting for approval ratings. While Americans balk at more expensive petrol, for the mullahs this is existential. Iran is betting that Trump will blink first.The implications are heading for SAMarkets are already pricing the logic. Brent crude rose above $90 a barrel on Monday for the first time in more than five weeks. US petrol is back above $4 a gallon – a dangerous number for Republicans heading into November’s midterm elections. For SA, an oil importer whose currency sells off whenever global risk appetite retreats, the arithmetic is familiar and unwelcome: more expensive fuel, renewed inflationary pressure and an ever-hawkish central bank with even less room to cut rates. Iran may be overplaying its hand. A wounded American president with overwhelming air power is not a predictable opponent. But the regime’s calculation makes complete sense; on the evidence so far, the only word the US and Israel understand is escalation. That leaves Trump with only bad options and potentially worse ones. Five months of war have bought higher petrol prices, dead soldiers, unnerved Gulf allies and a strait America does not control. All the US can hope for is a return to the pre-war status quo; even that is now looking unlikely. The decision to attack Iran at the behest of a rogue Israeli state is the defining decision of Trump’s second term. It is also a decision that illustrates, in real time and to every rival watching, how to make the American superpower weaker. DM