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Nearing its second week, the conflict in the Middle East appears to have only one direction: from bad to worse by the day. The dizzying speed at which the war has spread is as breath-taking as the virtual silence on how it may come to a close. Nearly every one of America’s allies in the region has been dragged into the mess, and none of them voluntarily.
Even those regimes in the area who may have privately egged Washington to start something with Iran must now be regretting seeing the infrastructure that had been carefully built and nursed over the decades coming under the radar of Tehran. And it is not just oil-related.
And if some missile from Israel or the United States hit a water plant in Iran that was already parched, it was a grim reminder to the Revolutionary Guards to train their drones and whatever else is at their disposal to go after the estimated 400 desalination plants of its Gulf neighbors, in the process making water a newer and deadlier weapon after airports and ordinary infrastructure.
As it is, the Gulf is facing a fertilizer shortage, it is said in many quarters. The end result is not too hard to fathom: potential investors from the West and the Asia Pacific coming to the conclusion that the Middle East does not always mean bang for the buck. Even long after peace has returned, investor confidence once shattered will take time to rebuild.
The Iranians also made sure they translated their promise of shutting the Strait of Hormuz into reality. In fact, they went one step ahead by starting to lay mines in the shallow waters. Apparently, the mining of the seabed is not said to be extensive, but Tehran is said to have a huge stockpile, enough to send jitters.
The closure of the Strait means close to 20 million barrels of crude and allied products are holed up on a daily basis, as the waterway is a global lifeline accounting for between 20 to 30 percent of transit. If supertankers have been told to take prior permission to use it, owners and insurers will not easily hedge their bets; and even if they do, it does not take a rocket scientist to figure out who will have to bear the cost in the end.
As a goodwill gesture, 32 members of the International Energy Agency (IEA) have pledged to release 400 million barrels of oil into the global market, the largest release of emergency stocks in history, even surpassing what was done in 2022 in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But analysts maintain that the gesture of the IEA would be absorbed in just 26 days. In just a matter of under two weeks, oil prices have jumped from about US$70 to nearly US$120, sending markets in America, Europe, and the Asia Pacific into a tailspin.
It is not just America’s allies in the Gulf that are nervously watching the turn of events. It is also the political spectrum in America that is carefully weighing every word President Donald J. Trump is saying. To begin with, there are those who believe that President Trump will backtrack whether his objectives have been met or not. Republicans, while publicly with their leader, are dreading the implications of the war in the midterms of November, where the party holding the White House traditionally loses seats. As things stand, folks are seeing a surge in gasoline prices at the pumps, and before long the expectation is that people will feel the pinch at grocery stores, once again reigniting the “affordability” debate.
The real question now is when President Trump believes that he can call it a day. For a person who started off the war on February 28 insisting on “total surrender,” President Trump has been teasing reporters with statements like the United States has “won,” or that the war will end “soon,” or that there is nothing left to hit in Iran. But even as missiles and bombs continue to rain over Iran, the remnants of the Khamenei leadership are showing not just resilience but outright defiance by saying that the son of the assassinated Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, has been elected to lead the country.
The junior Khamenei is said to have been injured in his foot and face during the bombing that killed his father; is said to be a hardliner, even worse than his dad; and has served the elite Revolutionary Guards and in the intelligence apparatus. At one time Washington made it known that the son of Khamenei was unacceptable, and it has not reacted to the open challenge put up by Tehran.
One thinking is that the younger Khamenei has nothing to lose, for personally he has lost his father, wife, and son during the raid. And in accepting the mantle, Khamenei Jr. has given the United States and Israel something to think about: whether the new dispensation will harden its stance on the nuclear issue, on human rights and democracy, and on Israel.
Even Republican friends of President Trump on Capitol Hill will start asking how long the Pentagon can carry on spending close to US$12 billion in the first six days alone on bombs and missiles for a war no one knows why it was even started.
Disclaimer: The opinions and views expressed in this article/column are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of South Asian Herald.
