Iran holds the Trump cards

President Trump spent Easter bragging about the rescue of an American airman and vulgarly cursing Iran:

Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP

The vulgarity from a president was unusual, but not unexpected from Trump. He is a vulgar, irreverent man.

The successful rescue was particularly fraught. The US military, not the president, deserves plaudits for it. Never mind the loss of two C-130s. Such operations are the rule whenever air crews go down. Trump’s effort to portray this one as his own genius is false.

The straightened strait

Others kept their eye on the ball: Iran has closed the strait of Hormuz to most ships and will only gradually reopen it once the fighting stops.

David Goldwyn on NPR was particularly good. He talked about his six “re”s:

1. Reopening will be slow.
2. Repair of infrastructure takes time.
3. Restart of production will be slow to avoid damage to oi fields.
4. Refining the crude, which takes 45 days to reach the US and 20 days to Asia.
5. Restocking of inventories.
6. Repricing, including whatever Iran is charging for transit (perhaps $2 million each way).

The consequences he suggests are predictable: if the war continues for months, gasoline in the US will rise to $6 or $7 per gallon. Inflation will accelerate. The Fed may maintain interest rates, or even increase them. That will bring on a “COVID style” recession. In 2020, the GDP loss in the US was 3.4%. The recovery from COVID-19 was quick. Slow reopening of the strait will prolong the recession.

Negotiations are going nowhere

While Trump continues to claim negotiations are ongoing, they are going nowhere. The Iranians have made their demands clear, including continued control over the strait. Trump vacillates between saying that is not America’s problems and threatening destruction of Iran’s infrastructure if it is not open by tomorrow.

He has already backed down twice from that threat. It is not an empty one, but Iran is a large country with an intricately interconnected electrical grid and many power plants, one of them nuclear. I don’t share the view that attacking power plants is necessarily a war crime, as electricity is also used for military purposes.

But wiping out the entire power grid would take weeks, if not months, and raise serious issues. Millions of Iranians, facing serious deprivation, would then flee to neighboring countries, including Turkey and Iraq. That is something no one in Washington should want. Creating that kind of humanitarian crisis would also be entirely inconsistent with Trump’s avowed effort to support Iranians in overthrowing their regime.

Trump has accomplished nothing good

Trump claims that he has already changed the regime because the Americans and Israelis have killed much of its leadership. That however is not what regime change means. The Islamic Republic is still very much in charge of Iran, with more militant and uncompromising leadership than in the past.

Trump says the new leaders have agreed not to develop nuclear weapons. But that is something Tehran said under the previous leadership as well. The question is not about what they are willing to say, but whether they will allow intensive monitoring of what they are doing. That was the great achievement of the Obama-era Iran nuclear deal (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action), which Trump torpedoed in 2018.

A month of war has accomplished nothing more than destruction of much of Iran’s missile, rocket, and drone stocks and production capabilities. But Tehran still has missiles, rockets, and drones. The drones include boats that have made the loss of its conventional navy irrelevant. The missiles include some that have brought down American aircraft.

America is manifestly not better off now than before the war. Trump would have been wise to duck out by now. He is stuck in a war without an upside for the United States.