The details of the agreement to end the war between the United States and Iran have not yet been published. But it is already clear that the war has precipitated the biggest shift in Washington’s strategy in the Middle East for half a century.
Trump upends US strategy in the Middle East
The deal to end the war in Iran will not be signed until Friday when senior officials from Washington and Tehran will meet in Switzerland, but its contours have been widely publicised. It will see the toll-free opening of the Strait of Hormuz and the lifting of the American naval blockade, as well as a 60-day ceasefire during which sanctions relief for Iran and the future of its nuclear programme will be discussed.
The Iranian news agency Mehr said the agreement contains 14 points, including a US commitment to withdraw all its forces from around Iran, the suspension of sanctions on Iranian oil sales and the release of $24 billion in frozen assets. The US side suggested that sanctions relief would be linked to progress on the nuclear issue and vice-president JD Vance claimed the deal marked a major success in securing a commitment from Iran’s leadership on nuclear weapons.
“Iran will never have a nuclear weapon, and not just pursue a nuclear weapon, but procure or try to buy a nuclear weapon as well. That’s built into this agreement,” he said.
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Iran renounced any ambition to develop nuclear weapons when it signed the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty under the shah in 1968, and the Islamic Republic reaffirmed that commitment, most importantly in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the 2015 nuclear deal agreed with the US, China, Russia, France, Britain, Germany and the European Union.
In the days before the US attacked Iran on February 28th, Oman said Iran had agreed in talks with the US “never, ever” to have nuclear material that could create a bomb.
The Iran nuclear file is complicated and it will take more than 60 days to resolve it but the shape of a deal is visible. It may be impossible, however, to restore the status quo before the war in the Strait of Hormuz, where Iran has demonstrated that it can close the waterway to shipping and the US has shown that it is unable or unwilling to keep it open using military force.
For decades, Washington’s essential strategic imperative in the Middle East has been to keep energy and trade flowing, a commitment expressed in the so-called Carter Doctrine. In a State of the Union address in January 1980, months after the Iranian revolution and weeks after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Jimmy Carter warned Moscow against seeking hegemony in the Gulf.
“An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force,” he said.
In the years that followed, the US built up a massive naval presence in the region, centred on the Fifth Fleet based in Bahrain and with bases in a number of friendly Arab states including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Qatar. The decline and fall of the Soviet Union meant that the Carter doctrine was directed instead against two regional actors, Iran and Iraq.
Washington intervened in the tanker wars during the Iran-Iraq War during the 1980s and sank much of Iran’s navy in a single day in the 1988 Operation Praying Mantis. The 1991 Gulf War was the fullest expression of the Carter Doctrine, when the US invaded Iraq after Saddam Hussein attempted to seize Kuwait’s oil resources.
War weariness in the US after George W Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the exploitation of shale gas in the US that diminished the importance of the Gulf in American energy policy helped to undermine the logic of the Carter Doctrine. But Iran’s successful defiance of Trump means that Washington is no longer a reliable guarantor of energy and trade flows through the Gulf, a responsibility that is now likely to fall to regional powers.
During the first half of the 20th century, Britain guaranteed the security of trade and energy through the Gulf with its network of protectorates including Bahrain, Kuwait and the Trucial States, which later became the UAE. The arrangement continued for a couple of decades after the end of the second World War until Britain finally acknowledged its imperial eclipse in 1968 and declared that it was withdrawing its forces from East of Suez.
Trump is unlikely to make any such formal declaration about Washington’s strategic shift and there will be no immediate drawdown of US military assets in the Middle East. But the debacle in the Strait of Hormuz over the past few weeks will have far-reaching consequences, not only for the US and the Middle East but for Washington’s allies across the world.
I hope to look at some of those in tomorrow’s newsletter.
Please let me know what you think and send your comments, thoughts or suggestions for topics you would like to see covered to denis.globalbriefing@irishtimes.com
