President Donald Trump has assembled the largest American naval armada in the Middle East since the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. He is using this overwhelming display of force to intimidate the Iranian leaders into something close to capitulation.
But supposing the threat fails, will Trump then go to war with Iran, a country with a population of 92 million under a united leadership determined to stay in power? Though weakened by a string of Israeli victories over its allies in the Middle East and by the Israeli and US air attack last June, Iran still has an arsenal of ballistic missiles and might close the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow channel at the entrance to the Gulf through which passes a fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports.
Iran says loudly that it will retaliate as strongly as possible in a new war, having dropped its old policy of “strategic patience”. That meant avoiding war with the US at all costs, but it was interpreted in the US and Israel as a sign of Iranian feebleness.
Crucial changes are taking place in the Middle East, reshaping its political landscape for decades to come. If the US now inflicts a decisive defeat on Iran, marginalising it as a significant player, then America, in close alliance with Israel, will have gained hegemonic power in the region.
In what is being described as a last ditch diplomatic effort to avoid war, the US and Iran held indirect talks in Geneva on Thursday and will meet again in Vienna next week. Ostensibly, the talks concern Iran’s nuclear programme and capacity to enrich uranium, despite Trump having previously claimed to have obliterated both in a B-2 bomber raid on three Iranian nuclear facilities last year.
The US also wants to talk about Iran’s ballistic missiles and Iranian-backed Shia Muslim paramilitary groups in the Middle East. In return for concessions, Iran wants relief from the economic sanctions crushing Iranian society and fuelling massive anti-regime protests. But it suspects that such concession will simply be banked by Washington whose objective is to humble Iran irrecoverably, either through regime change or by a Venezuelan-type long distance subjugation.
On the face of it, the US has complete military superiority: the aircraft carriers Gerald R Ford and Abraham Lincoln, along with 13 guided-missile destroyers. are heading towards Iran. The US should be able to control Iranian airspace and bomb at will as Israel did last year. Yet, for all these advantages, many in Washington are hesitant as they recall how what had appeared to be easy military successes in Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 turned into draining, inconclusive conflicts in which final US victory was always just over the hill.
The Pentagon has certainly not forgotten these grim precedents and does not intend to be blamed if anything goes wrong. Over the last week, there has been a remarkable cascade of high-level leaks from the Pentagon published in the mainstream US media, warning Trump about the risks of an extended military campaign against Iran, producing US casualties, depleted munition stockpiles, and an over-stretched US military.
Trump has reportedly been told by General Dan Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that a prolonged air campaign carries significant risks. Trump hurriedly responded on Truth Social by claiming that Caine had said of a war with Iran that “at a military level, it is his opinion that it will be something easily won”.
But might that military victory turn into another “Mission Accomplished” moment, as it notoriously did with President George W Bush in the Iraq war? The downsides are as much to do with American domestic politics as with developments in the Middle East. War with Iran is a far bigger deal than Trump’s past military interventions, all of which have been limited in scope and had achievable objectives.
In 2020, Trump ordered the assassination by drone in Baghdad of top Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, who had masterminded Iranian military operations abroad. Iranian retaliation was deliberately tame, firing missiles at two US bases in Iraq while telegraphing their intentions in advance in order not to kill US soldiers and not to escalate a crisis into a full-scale conflict with the US.
On 22 June 2025, Trump ordered a single bombing raid on Iranian nuclear sites to which Iran retaliated with a symbolic missile attack on the US base in Qatar.
Wild threats and actions followed by cautious retreat in the face of resistance is a repeated feature of the Trumpian modus operandi from Tehran to Minneapolis. His critics have labelled this as TACO – Trump Aways Chickens Out – but his track record is rather to keep his distance from messy open-ended conflicts, showing pragmatic restraint masked by belligerent bombast. Always there is a performative element to what Trump says or does. “He hopes that when he starts the performance the other side will quickly say, ‘we give up, let’s settle this,’” the senior Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Jack Reed, said in an interview with the New York Times.
If the other side refuses to buckle, then Trump declares a famous victory and moves on. Iran clearly hopes this will happen in the current crisis. They know that last spring, without the rest of the world paying attention, Trump abruptly ended the US bombing campaign against the pro-Palestinian and Iran-allied Houthis in Yemen by simply – and falsely – announcing that they had capitulated.
Trump portrays himself as a global peacemaker, proudly listing conflicts he has ended in Gaza – though at least 618 Palestinians have been killed there since the ceasefire last October – as well as lesser-known conflicts between Serbia and Kosovo and Armenia and Azerbaijan. This image would be fatally damaged if he were to wage a long and unpopular war against Iran, opposed as it is by 49 per cent of Americans and supported by only 27 per cent according to a YouGov poll.
This does not mean that a US-Iran war will not happen. Israel and hawkish Republican donors are pressing for it, but Trump is evidently worried about starting his own “forever war”, the very thing he accused President Biden of doing, and knowing that the mid-term elections in November are getting close. He is casting around for a better way of selling the war to the American public. A White House official told Politico that “there’s thinking in and around the administration that the politics are a lot better if the Israelis go first and alone and the Iranians retaliate against us and give us more reason to take action”.
Viewed from Tehran, the outlook for the Iranian leadership is bleak, but not hopeless. By mercilessly slaughtering thousands of anti-regime protesters in the streets in January, they have secured their grip on power.
In the event of another air campaign against Iran, they will hope to beat the patriotic drum, absorb the material and human damage, strike back in so far as they can – and wait hopefully for Trump to tire of his very own “forever war”.
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Further thoughts
In one of the more humiliating debacles in military history, Russia invaded Ukraine four years ago and utterly failed to reach its objectives. Such was the hubris, poor information and incompetence of the Kremlin that President Putin had convinced himself that the Ukrainian state would put up no serious resistance. No extra training or military exercises were supposedly needed for the invasion force to sweep into Kyiv. In the event, Russia never even came near its goal of dominating Ukraine.
As we enter the fifth year of the Ukraine war, the Russian army is inching its way forward from village to village, but shows no sign of making a strategic breakthrough. Omnipresent drones mean that in modern warfare, the defender has very much the upper hand over the attacker. Armour and supply vehicles cannot assemble without being targeted and destroyed. Small detachments of infantry must crawl forward under thermal blankets to avoid detection.
Nevertheless, Putin still evidently believes that prolonged attrition backed by superior Russian resources in men and materials will ultimately wear down the outnumbered and exhausted Ukrainians. It would be interesting to know if Putin is as poorly informed and badly advised today as he was in 2022 when he ordered Russian forces across the Ukrainian border.
George Beebe, former chief CIA analyst on Russia and director of grand strategy at the Quincy Institute in Washington, sums up lucidly what Russia has lost in an interview with Russia Matters, saying the invasion “became a strategic blunder once Russia’s bid to seize Kyiv in a lightning strike failed. Had this succeeded, many of the strategic downsides of a long war – including deepened dependence on China and a profound alienation of Europe – would have been less severe.
Four years of war, however, have resulted in an expanded Nato alliance, a major European remilitarisation effort, a crippling of Russia’s ability to compete in an increasingly high-tech global economic arena, and a legacy of mistrust of Russia in the United States and Europe that poses genuine risks to strategic stability and will take many years to repair.”
Putin is a manifest failure as a war lord, yet European leaders still pretend the opposite. At one moment, they purport to believe that the Russian army is planning to sweep into central Europe, despite being stalled where it was four years ago. But in the next European mood swing, they speak glibly of offering terms that only a decisively defeated Russia might accept.
What the Europeans have not done is begin direct talks with Moscow. Instead, they leave negotiations to the mercurial – the polite word for the actions of an unstable megalomaniac – Donald Trump, and then have the gall to complain pathetically when they are excluded from diplomatic talks. No wonder both Washington and Moscow are openly derisive about this inane European posturing.
Beneath the Radar
Such is the deluge of documents relating to the Jeffrey Epstein scandal that I only realised recently that the notorious unredacted Jeffery Epstein Little Black Book of contacts is freely available online. It was one of the court documents released on 6 January 2024 from the civil suit brought by Virginia Roberts Giuffre against Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell.
The contact book probably belonged to her and not to Epstein as some of those named claim that they had met her but not him. Altogether there are 1,571 names listed with roughly 5,000 phone numbers, as well as thousands of emails and home addresses. The most significant names are those with multiple phone numbers listed. Former President Bill Clinton, who appeared before the House oversight committee on Friday,is mentioned numerous times.
The black book has an interesting history, first turning up in a court room in 2009 after Epstein’s former butler, Alfredo Rodriguez, tried to sell it for $50,000 to a supposed representative of Epstein’s victims, but was in fact an FBI agent. The authorities were strikingly quicker to move against Rodriguez than against Epstein himself. The former butler received an eighteen-month sentence, dying soon after he entered prison. A fascinating video of Rodriguez trying to sell the book to the FBI agent has just been released.
Cockburn Picks
Many people are now denying that they had the slightest idea about Peter Mandelson’s personal and business relationship with Jeffrey Epstein when he was in government in 2009. But somebody somewhere had a very accurate and up to date knowledge of what was going on. We know this because of an extraordinary scoop in Private Eye’s Slicker’s In the City column on 30 March 2009.
Whatever the identity of Slicker’s informant, they were evidently keeping a close and highly informed eye on Mandelson and Epstein. “In uncertain times, Government ministers need all the expert help they can get,” wrote Slicker. “Which may explain the surely fanciful suggestion that the business secretary Lord Mandelson has been having discussions with American money manager Jeffrey Epstein… Nothing wrong with that. Except that last July Epstein began serving an 18-month prison sentence in Florida after pleading guilty to soliciting sex from underage girls as young as 14.
Multimillionaire Epstein – also a friend of Prince Andrew and ex-president Clinton – has been on day release from the Palm Beach County Jail since October and so is available to meet and speak by telephone to friends. But it is surely too absurd to imagine that a British government minister would be talking to a jailbird. So these suggestions cannot be true.” Private Eye 1233, 30 March 2009.
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