Trump's reverse Suez The Iran war is an obvious quagmire

As we approach the 70th anniversary of the Suez Crisis, from which France’s political class learned to never again let their country’s security become subject to America’s veto, and Britain’s to never again distinguish between its own national interests and Washington’s whims, it is worth remembering that — judged purely as a military operation — the seizure of the Canal Zone was highly successful. The Canal itself, and a buffer zone around it, were captured within days, with limited casualties; the operation’s technical proficiency was praised by the First Sea Lord, Lord Mountbatten, even as he twice attempted to resign in protest at the political folly of it all.

Yet success or failure will be a harder judgment to make for historians of Trump’s own latest Middle East adventure, which is already starting to look like a reverse Suez: its exposure of the limitations of pure military power; the domestic and international hostility; the fragility of alliance systems lazily assumed to be solid; and the wider overtones of an empire wildly overreaching in an attempt to stave off terminal decline. The difficulty in ascertaining, when this ends, whether or not Trump has achieved his war aims rests simply in the fact that the aims so far put forward have differed wildly, and are often mutually contradictory. The Suez Operation possessed a clearly defined military goal which succeeded, and a wider political one, which failed. As it stands, the Trump administration appears in possession of neither.

As we approach the 70th anniversary of the Suez Crisis, from which France’s political class learned to never again let their country’s security become subject to America’s veto, and Britain’s to never again distinguish between its own national interests and Washington’s whims, it is worth remembering that — judged purely as a military operation — the seizure of the Canal Zone was highly successful. The Canal itself, and a buffer zone around it, were captured within days, with limited casualties; the operation’s technical proficiency was praised by the First Sea Lord, Lord Mountbatten, even as he twice attempted to resign in protest at the political folly of it all.

Yet success or failure will be a harder judgment to make for historians of Trump’s own latest Middle East adventure, which is already starting to look like a reverse Suez: its exposure of the limitations of pure military power; the domestic and international hostility; the fragility of alliance systems lazily assumed to be solid; and the wider overtones of an empire wildly overreaching in an attempt to stave off terminal decline. The difficulty in ascertaining, when this ends, whether or not Trump has achieved his war aims rests simply in the fact that the aims so far put forward have differed wildly, and are often mutually contradictory. The Suez Operation possessed a clearly defined military goal which succeeded, and a wider political one, which failed. As it stands, the Trump administration appears in possession of neither.

The broader arguments against the current conflict were most memorably made by Trump himself, campaigning as an anti-war candidate who would keep the United States out of costly and unmanageable Middle Eastern entanglements. His Vice-President, JD Vance, once articulately made the case against this very war. Having successfully demolished his own policy platform, it is difficult to determine what would now count as victory for Trump. The desired outcomes given, at the time of writing, have ranged from the maximalist deliverance of “freedom” to the Iranian people through full regime change in Tehran, through to inspiring an ideal “Venezuela solution” in which more amenable military figures launch an internal coup, then perhaps installing a Shah, ruling Iran remotely from the more stable comfort of Maryland. Or else simply destroying Iran’s nuclear enrichment capacity (which Trump claimed to have “obliterated” in June last year). This scrambling for post facto rationales appears to derive from the fact that Iran did not immediately fold, as Trump apparently assumed it would, with the assassination of its leadership: unlike today’s America, it is not a personalist regime.

Yet if America’s war aims are nebulous from a lack of preparation, Israel’s appear haphazard by design. Summing up Netanyahu’s goals, the Israeli strategic analyst Danny Citrinowicz observes that “If we can have a coup, great. If we can have people on the streets, great. If we can have a civil war, great. Israel couldn’t care less about the future [or] the stability of Iran.” Whatever Netanyahu’s aspirations, a heavily armed but leaderless Iran, engulfed in chaos, represents a strategic threat rather than a victory for the wider West. In this, it appears that America has launched a war alongside, and at the behest of, a notionally junior partner with wildly divergent goals, and which Washington has already admitted it is unable to rein in. For British politicians, all the warning lights should now be blinking red: even the Iraq War, a historic disaster, was vastly better conceived, planned and resourced than this.

And if America’s war aims are vague and contradictory, their proposed means of achieving these desired outcomes are too — including Iranian submission through aerial bombing alone — a result which has never yet been obtained in the century-long history of air power — through launching a peripheral revolt in which Kurdish and perhaps Baluchi separatists act as America and Israel’s boots on the ground. The best that can currently be said for Trump’s gamble is that the desired end-state is so nebulous in its imagining, and the approach so scattergun, that almost any off-ramp can be spun as a victory by his imperial court and its attendant sycophants. With no single, coherent outcome proposed, Trump can claim, as he already has, that the war has already succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of planners. This is even as he is warning his base that victory may yet take some weeks, and cautioning Congress that “it is not possible at this time to know the full scope and duration of military operations that may be necessary”.

The war was, it seems, resourced for a few days of intensive bombing, with little anticipation of Iran striking back against Gulf states, and American early-warning facilities, with its arsenal of low-cost drones. Policy is now being made on the hoof, with senior administration officials “at each other’s throats” on the need for ground troops. CENTCOM, overseeing the war, has requested an increase in military intelligence analysts “to support operations against Iran for at least 100 days but likely through September”. The spectacle of a days-long special military operation, entered into with an over-confident faith in hard power achieving a swift political solution, then dragging on interminably, is all too familiar. For Vladimir Putin, certainly, America’s unforced error of embroiling itself in a quagmire US presidents have spent a half-century studiously avoiding is a godsend, depleting Western munitions stocks, replenishing the Kremlin’s coffers through rising oil and gas prices, and weakening Europe’s negotiating power.

Judged on strict military terms, though, the operation has chalked up notable successes. Iranian ballistic missile launches have slowed, and no doubt the aerial onslaught is depleting Iran’s arsenal of both munitions and launchers. The looming switch from stand-off munitions to less sophisticated bombs implies that air superiority has already been achieved, as Israel declared last weekend, or will soon be achieved, as the White House more cautiously claims. Whether or not Israel, the US and the Gulf states will run out of interceptor munitions before Iran runs out of missiles is a matter of speculation for even the best-informed analysts. Even as Pentagon sources brief concern over their dwindling arsenal, the Trump administration, for what it is worth, claims that it possesses “unlimited” stocks of munitions for a war that could last “forever” — while simultaneously blaming Ukraine for running down its weapons stockpile.

The most recent American attempt to exert its will in the region through air power alone, against Yemen’s Houthis, who are vastly weaker than Iran, entirely failed. The Houthis have not yet joined the war, as Hezbollah now has in response to Israel’s invasion of southern Lebanon: the prospects for escalation grow wider by the day. As for boots on the ground, the much-briefed claims that Iran’s Kurds are willing to join in the war against Tehran remains debatable. The Kurdish Regional Government of Northern Iraq, which hosts exiled Iranian Kurdish militias, has been warned by Iran that their entry into the war will invite an Iranian response, and has stressed its neutrality as a result. It has not even been a month since Washington abandoned its last Kurdish partners: they must now judge whether this time round America will prove a more dependable ally.

For all the military risks involved, it is very possible, though far from certain, that US and Israeli bombing can bring about the collapse of the Iranian state, though what happens next is anyone’s guess. The US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Dan Caine, reportedly cautioned before the strikes began “about the potential downsides of launching a major military operation targeting Iran”, citing “the scale, complexity and potential for US casualties of such a mission”, and asserting he was “​​unable to predict what the result of a regime change operation would be”. Both the Iranians and the Americans have already claimed to have received, and rejected, the other’s request for a ceasefire, with Israel reportedly seeking assurances Washington is not already seeking private talks. In any case, the Iranians have good cause to be wary of negotiating with Trump, given that their previous rounds of negotiations ended in American and Israeli bombing. Indeed, the current war began with Israel’s aerial assassination of the country’s political leadership in the middle of negotiations which, the Trump administration later boasted, were merely a ruse. Some of America’s intended new rulers of Iran, Trump has claimed, have already been killed by Israel. Having launched a war of choice, at a time convenient to him, Trump may now find ending it a far less simple affair.

As it stands, it is in Iran’s interest to drag out the war for as long as possible, expanding it across the wider region, increasing the economic disruption to American allies, and capitalizing on the widespread hostility to the war. As both Trump’s anti-interventionist base and the Democrat opposition rightly proclaim, this war has been entered into without any coherent plan, seemingly through Israel’s chain-ganging of the United States into military action it would not otherwise have chosen, an observation claimed as antisemitic by Israel’s advocates in the United States yet which has nevertheless also — bafflingly — been offered as proof of the war’s necessity by America’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the House Speaker Mike Johnson, Senate Intelligence Committee chair Tom Cotton, and most recently by Trump himself.

As for Netanyahu, he exultantly claims that bringing America into the war is something he has “yearned to do for 40 years”. The Democrats, repeatedly briefing the attack line that Trump was “the first president stupid enough” to be cajoled by Netanyahu into war with Iran, have now been gifted a path to success in midterm elections which may yet overlap with the conflict itself. When as cynical a politician as Gavin Newsom feels safe questioning future military support to the “apartheid state” Israel, demanding from the podium “Why did we help Israel kill little girls?”, we see the cracks in America’s only true special relationship widening into a gulf. This war was, most probably, Netanyahu’s last chance to enlist the fading superpower against his decades-long foe. Whether it improves Israel’s long-term strategic position is doubtful in the extreme  — but none of this is Britain’s problem.

It goes against instinct to praise the Prime Minister for his lawyerly prevarication. Yet given all the risks and uncertainties inherent to this war the arguments against joining America and Israel’s wild gamble are as strong as can be imagined. Just weeks ago, the same Trump administration which now chides us for our caution was threatening to annex European territory, and mocking our participation in its previous disastrous wars. Even if we exclude, as the Prime Minister does not, the moral factors, Starmer is entirely correct to say that this is a war with “no viable plan”. It appears that the Prime Minister, through his twin flaws of excessive deference to both European opinion and international law, may yet be dragged, unwillingly, towards the national interest. We already have our own war to worry about, in which the desire or ability of the United States to negotiate a satisfactory conclusion looks as doubtful from London as Washington’s reliability as a negotiating partner must look from Moscow. American realists may be correct in stating that the Ukraine war, in which Britain is already dangerously over-exposed, is not a core Washington interest — but neither is Netanyahu’s latest war of choice a British or European interest. Simply put, there is no advantage for Britain in joining this distant conflict, and the national interest, as in the Gaza War of which this is a vast escalation, remains in staying out of the affair as far as possible.

It is absurd, then, to watch Reform politicians, so recently bemoaning Britain’s political enmeshment with distant Middle Eastern conflicts and diaspora grievances, caper onstage with Israeli and Iranian monarchist flags, demanding our involvement in this mess. Farage’s hiring as foreign policy adviser of the neoconservative lobbyist Alan Mendoza, who has never yet seen a disastrous war he did not wish to join, was a rare deviation from his sharp political instincts, and a warning of the major strategic risks inherent in a Reform government, however much their domestic agenda may appeal. The Greens will rightly benefit from this misstep, as will, on Reform’s Right, Restore, edging towards a Powellite indifference to distant wars. If he holds his course, so will Starmer too.

The dilemma now for the Prime Minister is whether or not to join the emergent European policy of defensive neutrality, protecting national and continental interests while refusing involvement in the wider campaign. Yet the almost wholesale capture of the British security establishment by an Atlanticist ethos indistinguishable from vassalage, along with the looming American usage of British bases for offensive purposes, will complicate this. Starmer initially refused to permit offensive raids to launch from British territory, a policy which, in Spain’s case, has seen Trump threaten to use its bases anyway. Such threats would appear less stark, no doubt, if Britain had not already placed the sovereignty of Diego Garcia under question, but we cannot all boast the strategic wisdom of David Lammy’s former brain. If allowing British bases to be used cannot be prevented, Starmer can either explain why, or — politically more likely — spin a plausible rationale for active involvement, attempting to make a virtue out of compulsion.

Yet there is another path, the one shown by Emmanuel Macron, now expanding across the continent the French-led defense axis initially trialed with Greece. At the same time, Macron is drawing a sharp dividing line between the interests of Europe and her many nation states, and of the erratic empire which alternately threatens and cajoles us. Seventy years ago, a misadventure in the Middle East saw Britain and France adopt opposing positions on American domination, which led us to this impasse. Through an accident of British politics, it falls to as unlikely a figure as Starmer to make just such another historic choice.