Don’t Worry About Iran
The Islamic Republic of Iran is the United State’s biggest boogie man in the Middle East. Then, at the beginning of this year the US killed Qassem Soleimani and the potential of war between Iran and the United States drastically increased. Since the U.S.’s position in the region has been cast into question. And I am here to say that this is just the most flashy outburst of what is becoming an American removal from the Middle East.
To understand why the United States is in the Middle East requires a geography and history lesson. Today about a third of all oil and a fifth of the world’s energy comes out from the Persian Gulf (Barden). The Gulf is surrounded by seven countries; the most important of which are Iran and Saudi Arabia. Iran is important because it is the only local player that can blockade the Gulf (Cohen) due to its geographic position, and Saudi Arabia is important because it can produce some of the cheapest oil in the world (Knoema). So, when the United States needed to supply oil to its allies in the Cold War, because that was the deal the U.S. made at Bretton Woods, it came to the Gulf to fill that need. The U.S. had a very valuable ally in Saudi Arabia, the U.S. lent the occasional helping hand to the British in controlling Iran, and the U.S. used its navy to make sure everything ran smoothly and that no one would rock the boat (Gause). But as the years went on American oil production waned and it started to import more and more crude and by the 70’s America had started to import oil en mass from the Middle East (Editors of CFR). So it was no longer imposing an order in the Middle East for others, but instead for its own domestic needs. And then two massive shocks came. OPEC began an oil embargo against the United States in 1973 to respond to the U.S. backing Israel in the Yom Kippur War and the U.S. saw oil shortages for the first time in its history. Next, the U.S. lost control of Iran during the 1979 Iranian revolution. Suddenly the one country that had the ability to threaten American naval dominance, via its ability to blockade the Gulf, absolutely despised the United States. This created a stressful relationship between the Islamic republic and the U.S., but they never came to direct blows since each had very good reasons not to go to war with the other. For the U.S., Iran is an incredibly mountainous region that would be impossible to occupy and expensive to invade (Takeyh). Not to mention the massive hit to the oil market and the utter lack of supply that would make all of America’s allies and citizens lose access to the quality of life they had become accustomed to. So, invading Iran was off the table for the Americans. Why the Iranians didn’t declare war is very simple: How? The U.S. is halfway around the world and drastically more powerful. The Iranians could make sure the Americans could never win, but would never be able to achieve victory themselves. So this awkward status quo maintained itself until 2003.
Here is where more current events come in and things get even more complicated. Iraq was the buffer state that kept Iran bottled up in Perisa and stopped it from encroaching into Arabia as proven by the Iran-Iraq war (Takeyh). But in 2003 the United States completely decimated the Iraq army for the second time in a little over a decade and killed the only man who was able to hold Iraq together, Saddam Hussein (Ignatief). Just to be perfectly clear, Saddam was a brutal dictator who definitely deserved to pay for his crimes against humanity, but his policies kept Iraq stable (by killing people who disagree with him but still stable). Once the US moved in and killed Saddam, the third most powerful country on the Gulf, Iraq, became a toss up and who ever secured it would have an advantage in the region.
This is where the cold war between Saudi Arabia and Iran really started to heat up where each side supported different opposing groups, the Saudis supporting Sunnis and the Iranians supporting Shitas, to try and create an allied state (Wehrey). Each side has a strategy they are going with. The Iranians know that they have more manpower than the Saudis so they attempt to throw men into conflicts to create a friendly state to later use against or hem in the Saudis (Grumet). On the other hand, the Saudis know that Iran has more manpower so they know that defeating Iran in an open battle is impossible, so they don’t try and instead outspend the Iranians (Salisbury). Syria is a really good example of this. The Syrain people rebeled against their Shite government in 2011 and both sides saw their chance. The Iranians heavily funded and supported Assad’s government and the Saudis funded the rebels (Grumet) (and possibly ISIS as well but the Saudis very much deny that). The conflict raged on for eight years, or it might still be going on (it depends), but at its end in 2019 Syria is not a country capable of assisting anyone with anything. This is the Saudi playbook for every single conflict in the Middle East. Yeman (Salisbury), Iraq, Syria (Grumet), and many more are all just pawns in the Saudi’s and Iranians chess game and the winner gets control of the most profitable region for oil in the world. So the stakes are kinda high. The main thing keeping these two juggernauts from clashing is that war interrupts supply, and the US can not have that. For now. Remember the US is only interested in the Middle East because of oil, so make America energy independent, like the Shale Revolution has (Editors of IER), and the incentive to stay in an increasingly toxic region disappears.
The US has been moving out of the region since Donald Trump entered office. And the Iranians are seeing how much they can get away with before the US notices. In the middle of last year, the Iranians hit Saudi Arabia’s largest oil producing facility and cut the nation's production in half (Editors of Al Jazeera). The US did nothing. Actually the US did do something, the next month the US pulled out of Syria (Hubbard, Patrick). This blatant act of ambivalence sent a clear message to both sides, the Americans don’t care. So when early this year a totally ‘popular’ uprising in Iraq started to besiege the American embassy and Qassem Sulemani, the guy Iran uses to support ‘popular uprisings’ (Gan), was supposed to come to the country, they stepped too far. The US killed him with a remote drone as he was leaving the Baghdad airport. The Iranians miscalculated American disinterest in the Middle East and pushed a little too hard too soon and it backfired, but that doesn’t mean they were inherently wrong. The recent influx of troops will be temporary as the US still has little reason to stay in the region aside from political inertia. Iran sought an early advantage, but ended up adding time to the clock.
America’s relationship with the Middle East has been testy for about eighty years, but, to the relief of many, it is about to end. For an American audience that may sound like fantastic news, to a Western European or East Asian audience that will sound terrible, and to a Middle Eastern audience it will sound like business as usual. So take that into consideration next time the Trump administration makes another brash decision, because it will, or when Iran seems to be getting a little frisky, or when China seems weirdly interested in Iran, or when anything ever happens with oil. It's all connected. It always is.
Bibliography:
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Cohen, Ariel. “Can Iran Crash Oil Markets By Blockading The Strait Of Hormuz?” Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 26 July 2018, www.forbes.com/sites/arielcohen/2018/07/26/can-iran-crash-oil-markets-by-blockading-the-strait-of-hormuz/#640c85539694.
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