In 1453, Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II (thereafter known as Mehmed the Conqueror) took the greatest city in the world, Constantinople, from the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire after a bloody seven-week siege. Controlling Constantinople, and the strategically important Bosphorus Strait which it overlooked, allowed the Ottoman Empire to replace the Byzantines as the dominant power in the Eastern Mediterranean, and set them on the path to Eurasian hegemony – a position they maintained for a century.
Observing the ongoing conflict in Iran today, it is difficult not to see a similar opportunity presenting itself to US president Donald Trump – albeit one that will almost certainly have the opposite outcome. Trump is presently locked in negotiations with the government of Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz – which is every bit as important as the Bosphorus. If he were to take it with military force, it would secure US dominance over the Middle East for the foreseeable future. Trump, unlike Mehmed II, however, is unwilling to pay the costs (in military casualties) of ‘seizing the reins of power’ in this geostrategic clash.
The results of his decision will shape the world that emerges from the Iran war and alter the course of history.
One immediate result is that, if the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) comes into effect (an outcome that is now very much in doubt), the Iranians will have established themselves as a regional power – if not the regional power – having de facto control of its critical shipping lane. The inducements that they have been able to compel from President Trump in the MOU (the dropping of sanctions, unfreezing of assets, hundreds of billions in reparations payments, and future administration of the strait – opening the possibility of charging tolls, which the Iranians fully intend to do) make it very clear who is in the driver’s seat.
The war, which was intended to topple the Islamic Regime, will end up having transformed it from a regional irritant into a global power broker, with a clamp hovering over the jugular vein of the world economy.
Another result is what might very well be the beginning of the end of US global dominance – something which has endured, to varying degrees, since the end of the Second World War. Losing control of the Middle East (and its vast oil reserves) after decades spent both fighting and sponsoring wars, orchestrating coups, propping-up regional governments, and cultivating strategic partnerships with Israel and Saudi Arabia, will be a devastating blow to American power and prestige. The world has watched Trump go from predicting the fall of the Ayatollahs to threatening the obliteration of their society to paying them for peace – all in a matter of weeks. There is no way to interpret this sequence of events as indicating that the United States is still the global superpower that has dominated world affairs for the last eighty years.
Iran War as a Turning Point for US Power
So, what does American decline mean for global peace and security? In the short term, not much – as I have written previously, the war will likely drag on in its current, low-intensity stalemate form for the foreseeable future, before ending with a whimper rather than a bang (that whimper, however, may well grow into a roar over the next decades, as international power relations realign around it).
In the medium-to-long term, it will mean quite a bit. Trump’s capitulation to Tehran (despite what he says, there is no other word for it – when wars end, reparations flow from loser to winner, not the other way around) out of reluctance to ‘put boots on the ground’ will not have gone unnoticed in Moscow and Beijing, places where potential conflicts with Washington are ever anticipated and planned for. Geopolitical strategists there will be taking one crucial lesson away from the Iran debacle: “To get the US to back down, all you have to do is put their troops in danger.”
As we watch the daily news reports of negotiations and military flare-ups, strategic plans are being drafted for future clashes – whether on the borders of NATO in Eastern Europe, or in the South China Sea – that center around forcing Washington into a position where it either has to commit ground troops to the campaign or concede key strategic objectives. Every country in the world that thinks it may one day come into conflict with the US must now be thinking along these lines. They would be foolish not to. Just how these plans will be implemented is of course unclear. Iran has shown that, as long as a nation can survive the destruction of its military infrastructure and the decapitation of much of its chain of command, it can hold on to territory that would require a ground invasion to capture, and then extract highly favorable terms from politicians in need of a speedy resolution. Whether other states can, or will, endure these costs in future conflicts, is far from certain.
But they will be planning for it. The IRGC survived a wave of high-profile assassinations early in the war precisely because its command structure is designed to function without top leaders. We can expect ‘non-aligned’ militaries around the world to follow suit. The Russians have shown in Ukraine (if it needed to be shown) that they don’t mind getting large numbers of their troops killed, which grants an automatic advantage over the United States and European powers in a hypothetical war with the Kremlin. China has not been tested recently, but there is little doubt that they would tolerate massive casualties to, for instance, annex Taiwan – which they openly claim sovereignty over, and perpetually menace. Their strategy for facing the American military – likely the only thing that has kept them from invading for years now – must now be something along the lines of: “They come to Taipei’s defence, we kill some of their troops, they back off because of domestic outrage.” Again, it is difficult to think anything else after the publication of the MOU.
Echoes of History
But this kind of thinking carries extreme dangers. On the eve of the War in the Pacific, Tokyo predicted that if they knocked out the US Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor quickly, the ‘pleasure-loving’ US people, lacking the stomach for a fight, would force Washington to back down. They were wrong, of course. It turned out that the flip side to the American people’s protectiveness of their ‘boys in uniform’ was their fury at seeing them slaughtered. Pearl Harbor backfired massively, giving Washington the political capital it needed to launch a full-scale war (which it had long desired to do, but lacked the public support for) on the highly aggressive upstart Japanese Empire. When the (radioactive) dust settled, a hundred thousand Americans, and two million Japanese were dead.
This is the great danger of the MOU – that it could embolden global power rivals like Russia and China to do what they have previously never dared to: engage in direct military conflict with the United States. Overmatched as they would be militarily, they might now be tempted to roll the dice on future presidents ‘blinking’ as Trump has blinked, when the prospect of troop casualties rears its ugly head, as per their carefully-drawn-up strategies for engineering such situations.
That is not to say that Trump must style himself a modern-day Mehmed the Conqueror, and sacrifice thousands of US troops for control of Hormuz in what would surely be a long, brutal campaign. There is a third option, although it is not one that Trump (or, likely, future American presidents) would like to entertain.
Having (unofficially) yielded control of Hormuz to Iran, and in doing so relinquished America’s long-standing dominance of the Middle East, the United States will cease to be the global superpower that emerged from the ashes of World War II. If it attempts to ‘cling to that status, despite no longer possessing its attributes’ (as great powers have typically done throughout history) it risks catastrophic future confrontations from a rising China and an emboldened Russia. If, on the other hand, it accepts that it is no longer willing to pay the costs of global hegemony, and contents itself with mere ‘regional power’ status – dominating North and Central America, while leaving Eastern Europe to Russia and the South China Sea to the Chinese, the risk of an apocalyptic confrontation diminishes greatly.
This is the ‘spheres of influence’ arrangement that prevailed in Europe during the century of (relative) peace in between Napoleon and the First World War. In the so-called ‘concert system’ each great power stuck to controlling its own little area, and disputes between them were resolved, for the most part, with conference diplomacy – grand meetings in which diplomats haggled over strategic interests to avoid war. Although far from perfect, this period was worlds better than the cataclysmic horrors that enclose it like bookends on the shelf of European history. The establishment of such a system on a global scale might be just what the world needs in order to avoid a third round of mass destruction – one from which we might well not emerge, this time.
So, the question is: can US grand strategists, so accustomed to being the world hegemon that they likely can scarcely conceive of any other state of affairs, reconcile themselves with being ‘just another regional power’? The way things are presently going, they may not have a choice.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author alone and do not represent those of Geopoliticalmonitor.com
