It’s hard to know where exactly the Iran war is headed. Some reports suggest that President Donald Trump has grown “bored” of the conflict and may want an off-ramp. More signs point to the Trump Administration preparing to deploy ground troops, pulling the U.S. deeper into a war that has already killed hundreds of Iranian civilians and sprawled into a wider regional conflict, with Iran launching retaliatory strikes against its Arab neighbors and—through its closure of the Strait of Hormuz—sending energy prices soaring and disrupting global supply chains. As Trump fumbles with the Pandora’s Box he’s broken open, there’s no shortage of historical analogies to choose from. Could Iran end up like Libya, where a NATO air campaign in 2011 helped topple a decades-old dictatorship, but paved the way for the disintegration of the Libyan state into a thicket of rival factions and warring militias? Or perhaps the U.S.’s wars with Iraq are the better guide. The Gulf War left Saddam Hussein in power, but weakened and dangerous, a source of regional instability for another decade—a pattern that some fear might be playing out in Iran, if the regime emerges from the war battered but no less entrenched. The U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 did topple Hussein, but not without becoming a parable for American hubris and strategic folly.
Of all the parallels to invoke, though, Suez might be the most apt, at least in this moment. Just as, in 1956, when France and Britain kept Washington in the dark about their real plans, America’s European and Arab allies say they were caught off guard by Trump’s decision to attack Iran, and have been skeptical of the intervention, instead pushing for a diplomatic solution. The clearest echo, of course, is Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which mirrors Nasser’s decision to thwart passage through the Suez Canal. In both cases, it was a foreseeable response that the attacking parties somehow failed to anticipate: “Instead of keeping the Suez Canal open, the [Anglo-French] action closed it, as the dumbest intelligence analyst, either British or American, could have predicted,” Miles Copeland, a famous C.I.A. agent working in the Middle East in the nineteen-fifties, wrote. Senator Chris Murphy, of Connecticut, recently wrote something similar, on social media, after Iran closed the strait: “This was totally predictable, but Trump has lost control of this war.”
The grimmer parallel is what all this may reveal about American power. By 1956, Britain and France were already empires in decline: Britain had let go of its major colonial possessions in the Indian subcontinent, while France had suffered major losses in Indochina and was in the throes of an era-defining battle to hold Algeria, where Nasser’s anti-colonialist message was proving persuasive. Their failure to retake the canal underscored their diminished status on a world stage. In the wake of the Second World War, Britain had still been considered a third superpower, alongside the Soviet Union and the United States, Alex von Tunzelmann, a British historian and the author of “Blood and Sand: Suez, Hungary, and Eisenhower’s Campaign for Peace,” explained. “After Suez,” she continued, “that just drops,” and we hear “more about a binary, bipolar world. What became obvious is that Britain couldn’t act expressly against the will of the U.S.”
Now the U.S.’s own ability to exercise its will as a paramount hegemon is in question, according to Rosemary Kelanic, the director of the Middle East program at Defense Priorities, a Washington think tank that advocates policy restraint. Trump’s mistaken belief that the campaign against Iran could be done swiftly and neatly, Kelanic said, “shows that the United States doesn’t have the strategic advantages and power that it thought it had, and that it maybe previously did possess.” Despite U.S.-Israeli military dominance, Trump is struggling to beat back Iranian reprisals and prevent the conflict from spiralling wider. Satellite imagery suggests that various U.S. bases in the Middle East have had to be evacuated in the face of Iranian strikes, and Tehran now appears to believe that it can effectively veto shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, even though it shares the channel with its Gulf neighbors. (In fact, Iran is now earning nearly twice as much from daily oil sales than it did before the war began, according to The Economist.) This raises troubling questions about the efficacy and role of U.S. forces in the region. As Stephen Wertheim, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, put it: “What is the point of the entire U.S. military role in the Middle East? If it has any point, it should be to prevent something like the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Yet U.S. military action has only brought about the very problem it’s supposed to prevent.”
