Trump’s Iran War Signals Seismic Shift in Global Balance of Power Between the West and Its Anti-Democratic Foes

The extension of the Iran war into a third week and the waffling and havering of many of America’s so-called allies, and the wailing and gnashing of teeth of the anti-Trump press are deafening. Elaborating on some points made here last week, they have created an odious coalition of defeatism. The united Trump-haters of the world have effectively declared the failed and brutal theocracy in Teheran to be immovable, and likely not only to survive the war but enabled to claim victory.

Commentators who don’t know anything about military matters have metamorphosed into von Clausewitzes and Liddell-Harts and are solemnly declaring that America will not be able to open the Hormuz Strait and that Iran will shut down much of the Arabian oil production precipitating a world oil crisis.

They have generally concluded that the only basis for a Trump victory is by committing substantial ground forces to the action, sustaining serious casualties, and alienating unfeasibly large numbers of his MAGA supporters who oppose American boots on the ground in what could become a “forever war.” The anti-Trump press is going to imaginative lengths to induce international forgetfulness that America and Israel have destroyed almost all of Iran’s military capabilities of all kinds and the United States has sustained a grand total of eight combat fatalities to date.

The attack on Kharg Island and Israeli attacks on Iranian oil refining capabilities signaled that oil shipments from Iran to Communist China are about to end, unless China joins the international maritime force President Trump is organizing to clear the Hormuz Strait, which he has pledged to do. Iran is about to face outright economic strangulation with nothing leaving or entering the country apart from incoming ordnance.

At this level of activity, America and Israel can continue to pummel Iran indefinitely, and the Islamic Republic’s ability to counterattack against its declared adversaries and the neighboring oil capacity of unoffending countries will be almost exhausted within approximately another two weeks. Venezuela will steadily replace Russia as a supplier of oil to Western Europe, as America and its Mideast allies replace Russian oil exports to India. Russia will be able to replace Iranian oil shipments to China but both Russia and China will be the losers in this complicated puzzle; Russia of oil revenue, and China of secure oil supply.

Most of the American national political press either lacks the perspective to see or the desire to publicize the sequence of the related recent developments that indicate a seismic shift in the international correlation of forces between the West and its anti-democratic enemies and rivals.

Comparatively few Americans are aware that the Chinese offensive in Latin America has been rejected by many of the electorates there, that Venezuela has been extracted from its alliance with the Russians and Chinese and is effectively a U.S. vassal state, that the 67-year-long fiasco of Cuban communism is about to end, that Chinese dumping of lethal drugs in the United States has been drastically reduced, and that the Iran War is one of the most one-sided conflicts in history. As commentator Margot Cleveland has remarked, if CNN were active during World War II, it would be broadcasting in German.

The original timetable for the Iran war was approximately five weeks. In that time, another three weeks, Iran will be almost completely disarmed and will have had almost all of its economic and industrial infrastructure destroyed, will be without electricity, and will be completely isolated from the rest of the world. The entire country is seething with hatred of the brutal regime riveted on its back, doubly so because of its pretensions to sectarian virtue, and after another three weeks of this intense and relentless assault, neither Iran nor any state would be able to function coherently.

The United States and Israel are in constant contact with a great many dissident Iranian groups and someone in the Iranian armed forces (not the paramilitary forces and other state authorities that terrorize the civil population), is bound to accept the incentives that will be offered to dispose of the ayatollahs and realign Iran away from its animosity to the West and permit peace and the end of the crippling sanctions that have so impoverished the country.

The aspersions Mr. Trump has cast upon America’s so-called allies, while diplomatically abrasive, have in most cases been entirely vindicated, though Chancellor Friedrich Merz has credited America and Israel with “doing the world’s dirty work.” Yet the other NATO countries have been acquiring serious defense capabilities and a military posture that goes well beyond their post-Cold War defense policy of simply keeping the telephone number of the Pentagon to hand.

The cessation of Iran’s alliance with Russia and China will be another heavy blow to the rickety and unequal marriage of desperation that the Kremlin has conducted with Beijing. With reduced oil revenues and a substantially better-armed Ukraine, Russia, with a GDP smaller than Canada, and having already taken over a million casualties and half a million desertions and draft evasions, will have to wind down its failed invasion of Ukraine and its claim to any right to repossess most of the departed former Soviet republics.

Mr. Trump’s enemies at home and abroad have thin lines of saliva at the corners of their mouths imagining that he is about to sustain a defeat. He isn’t; they are.

First published in the New York Sun.