If You're Only Watching the Iran War, You're Missing Trump's Larger Strategy
When I first experienced high-speed trains years ago in Japan, the view out the window made me dizzy, poles flying by at 120 miles an hour. Some trains go twice that fast now, but that disorienting feeling surges back to mind as this new Middle Eastern war unfolds.
So much is going on in so many different places, flashing past at the speed of modern news in complex and hidden ways, it’s impossible to fully track. “It’s been a pretty wild time,” Donald Trump acknowledged Saturday.
High-speed has been the choice from Day One of his final term.
Border security. Military rebuild. Trade controls. Tax cuts. Peace deals. Deportation of illegals. New domestic investments. Bombing drug boats. Removing Venezuela’s dictator. Blockading oil to Cuba.
Now, he is with Israel dismantling the radical regime and its embedded means of repression of theocrats and terrorists that have ruled Iran for decades and spread death and despair across the region and at home.
So far, so good on that campaign of extermination. However, very much remains to be done. It’s one thing to violently disassemble weapon systems, buildings, and people from the sky. It’s something else to rebuild a functioning society there that can live peacefully with its neighbors.
Remember Iraq’s fracture after Hussein’s ouster? Barack Obama and his European allies toppling Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi in 2011? And what came of that? A lawless state and training ground for terrorists amid feuding militias fighting for domain and causing the Benghazi tragedy.
But any attempt to track the poles flashing past in this blizzard of news these days can easily lose sight of what is actually emerging as Trump’s more important, grand strategy: the restriction of China's vital energy supplies to curb its regional ambitions.
This amazing president doesn’t talk about the Big Picture much. He may not even see it that way. But a definite strategic pattern is emerging. And it’s not good news for any of America’s ardent opponents around the globe and in this hemisphere.
Take Venezuela, for example. All the legal charges against Nicolás Maduro and the Mrs. and virtually all the media coverage focused on drug trafficking. Illegal drugs entering this country are a serious problem, with fentanyl overdoses alone accounting for some 100,000 deaths annually in recent times.
Joe Biden’s open southern border intentionally invited that.
However, the more important lasting result of the illegal Venezuelan president’s involuntary departure was the end of oil exports to China, which relies heavily on foreign oil.
This is Trump’s open secret. He’s slowly, relentlessly removing the sources to fill China’s desperate need for foreign oil, while removing Venezuela’s dictator as a bonus for the neighborhood.
Because of sanctions on Iran, Venezuela, and Russia, China has negotiated deep discounts from global prices.
China’s economic strategy involves massive loans to numerous countries, which then become indentured through repayments, often in the form of natural resources like oil, rare earths, and metals.
Venezuela’s debts to China might run as high as $20 billion, much of it spent on expensive and allegedly sophisticated surveillance and air-defense systems and missiles.
All of which failed miserably during the U.S. commando raid to capture the Maduros on Jan. 3. And most of which were destroyed in the successful stealth attack they were intended to thwart. China will not be advertising those failures in future arms-sales campaigns.
Venezuela has the world’s largest proven reserves of crude oil. Last year, Venezuelan crude oil provided almost five percent of China’s petroleum imports, which was 80 percent of Venezuela’s exports.
That spigot is off now, as are the debt repayments, turning China’s massive loans into bad debts.
The communist regime in Cuba got much of its oil from Venezuela and Mexico. Trump has successfully pressured Mexico to reduce its sales and has imposed a naval blockade to shrink the island’s supplies further, likely threatening that regime’s viability.
Last summer’s joint US-Israeli attacks on Iran were aimed at destroying much of the country’s nuclear enrichment program and supplies.
As he did with Maduro and with Iran last summer, Trump first attempted to negotiate with the mullahs an end to their enrichment and ICBM programs. Their enduring refusal revealed the uselessness of Barack Obama’s 2015 reward-laden agreement with Iran that included $1.7 billion in cash up front.
Those funds helped finance Iran’s terror-proxy operations across the region, including Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis, all now severely damaged since the Hamas terror attack of Oct. 7, 2023.
Two years later, Trump abandoned the Obama agreement, calling it “the worst deal ever made.”
When Trump determined that Iran was simply stringing out the current talks and refused to abandon its enrichment program, as it had successfully with Obama, Trump approved the attacks with Israel.
On some days since the Feb. 28 start, planes and missiles have hit 2,000 targets.
On Friday, Trump demanded Iran's "unconditional surrender." He said, the US and allies would make Iran "economically bigger, better, and stronger than ever before" after it picked "acceptable" new leadership.
And therein lies a potentially immense problem. When the U.S. and allies ousted Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Libya’s Gaddafi, no plans were in place for government successions. Libya fell into armed chaos that continues to this day.
Iraq slipped into factional strife, fueled in part by Qasem Soleimani, head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. He was chief architect of that country’s terrorism exports, including IED’s that killed and maimed hundreds of American troops.
On Trump’s orders back in 2021, Soleimani’s car ran into a Hellfire missile fired by a circling Reaper drone outside the Baghdad airport.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei died in the initial attack Feb 28. Naming of a successor Ayatollah (“Sign of God”) was delayed after Israel vowed to get him too.
The regime executed thousands of protesters after the most recent uprising. In mid-January, Trump assured Iranians, “Help is on the way.” So far, no overt signs of renewed uprising.
Not surprisingly, establishing a postwar system of government in Iran will be a challenge, given residual pockets of ambitious power remaining from the ruthless regime of clerics.
And then, there are numerous ethnic and religious minorities across the world’s 17th-largest country, many of whom have been discriminated against by the clerics in Tehran.
At 636,000 square miles, Iran is 80 times larger than Israel, four times larger than Iraq, and about one West Virginia smaller than Alaska.
It is a multilingual, multi-ethnic country of 93 million where Shiite Muslims form the majority, but nearly half are ethnic and religious minorities like Kurds, Azerbaijani Turks, and Sunni Muslims.
All of which raises a pair of worrisome possibilities. First, that with the disappearance of a strong, though ruthless, central authority, these groups begin fighting each other or seek to splinter into separate enclaves, as the Kurds did in Iraq.
Then, to protect the war’s investment, there is the ominous specter of a prolonged and perilous nation-building attempt as occurred in Afghanistan, its immediate neighbor to the east.
There, the initial allied military success against al Qaeda and the Taliban after 9/11 morphed into an attempted nation-building effort that was well-meaning but hopeless in a land of feudal warlords and tribes that no one has succeeded in uniting, going back to Alexander the Great 2,350 years ago.
The Soviets gave up their attempted conquest in 1989 after 10 years. The U.S. effort endured 20 years before being abandoned back to the Taliban in an ignominious and lethal evacuation in 2021 under Biden.
One could fairly argue that a weak U.S. president’s botched, indecisive operation – leaving behind thousands of allies and billions in new military vehicles and gear – played an influential role in Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine just six months later.
Oh, look! Iran has been constructing walls, barbed-wire fences, and trenches along its 572-mile border with Afghanistan.
China had been purchasing almost 90 percent of Iran’s sanctioned oil production, just under 1.5 million barrels a day, at a 10 percent discount.
And now the ayatollah’s vaporization has cut that supply off, just as Trump did in Venezuela and is doing to Cuba.
(According to current estimates, China is now purchasing about 20 percent of its oil from Russia, its largest supplier at two million barrels a day. That’s up from 15 percent five years ago. Each barrel of oil produces about 44 gallons of petroleum products, including 20 of gasoline.)
Notably, after the removal of Venezuela’s Maduro, Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have left the existing government mostly intact, subject to guidance and democratic elections at an undetermined date.
That would seem unlikely in Iran with the remnants of such a harsh regime and lingering resentments.
One other fallout from the new war is a sharp spike in oil prices, and hence, U.S. gas costs, an everyday consumer barometer of living expenses. That’s always important, but especially so in this election year when polls show high prices are a major irritant.
Before the last midterm elections in 2022, Biden raided the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve of 180 million barrels of oil that Trump had built up at cheap prices.
Biden sold them at great profit on the world market to ease U.S. gas prices soaring from his anti-energy policies.
He hoped to mitigate political damage, then spent the profits on his extravagant programs. And, by the way, he abandoned his promise to refill the oil reserves. You didn’t see coverage of that betrayal in mainstream media.
The same political concerns exist for a GOP administration ahead of this year’s midterm elections. On Friday, Trump’s Treasury Department eased some sanctions on Russian oil sales to allow more oil to flow onto the legal global market, hopefully, dampening price hikes.
Putin has used revenues from Russian oil sales to finance his Ukraine invasion, now in its fourth year, though he expected it to take only weeks.
In another little-noticed connection, early in the Ukraine invasion’s first year, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin saidpublicly that a major reason for U.S. support of Ukraine’s defense efforts was to see Russia "weakened to the degree that it can't do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine."
That has happened with Russia forced to bring out World War II equipment.
Congress has authorized about $175 billion in Ukraine aid since 2022. About two-thirds of that, $117.4 billion, was for military, defense, and security expenditures.
And, also little-known, up to 90 percent of that gets spent back in the U.S. on gear, weapons, and munitions made by American workers in U.S. companies.
I warned you early on about the complex, dizzying speed of all this news these days.
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