The Big Picture is the Loss of US Supremacy in West Asia

It has been three months since the US-Israeli attack on Iran began on February 28. There was feverish action on social media Thursday night after the US news website Axios claimed to have “scooped” a deal between the US and Iran. The two were reported to have agreed on a 60-day extension of the ceasefire, with some progress in talks over Iran’s nuclear programme, frozen assets, oil sales, and the opening of the Strait of Hormuz. But the deal is not yet done, US Vice President J.D. Vance said early Friday morning. 

Meanwhile, there have been aerial attacks by the US and retaliatory missile launches targeting the US base in Kuwait. Late Thursday, Iran fired warning shots at ships trying to transit the Strait of Hormuz, and early Friday morning (Indian time), US State Department spokesperson Tommy Pigott declared “Economic Fury” against Iran’s “dark fleet and illicit oil networks”, sanctioning eight vessels carrying Iranian crude. The story, in short, is of a continuing impasse with the hope of an imminent deal.

But what is being lost in the fog of war is the bigger picture: the loss of US, or rather Western, supremacy in the Persian Gulf. The post-war world order that survived the rise and fall of the Soviet Union, the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, the decimation of Libya, the pulverisation of Syria, the genocide in Gaza, and the coups and digital regime-change operations in the Indian subcontinent has now become stuck in the shallow waters of the Strait of Hormuz.

The current war in West Asia was not about exhibiting US military might or even its unquestioned hegemony. With Israel to the west and Pakistan to the east, Anglo-American imperialism had controlled the entire Persian Gulf without a murmur of dissent for about 100 years. Iran was, at best, a heavily sanctioned, impoverished Third World nation trying to stay afloat, selling crude oil that others were reluctant to buy. Then, why did the Americans go to war?

The US attempt was to maximise strategic and economic gains for itself and its allies, and corporations, while also seeking to pressure oil-importing China. The US, if victorious in West Asia, could have unfurled the flag of Pax Americana over Asia and Europe yet again. This was part of the old British imperial playbook used to maintain global supremacy. But the American planners forgot the epilogue to the colonial classic — nationalism ultimately defeats colonialism, albeit at the cost of martyrdom.

On the very first day of the aerial invasion, Iran’s supreme leader became a martyr. And that very day, Iran became a bigger quagmire than Vietnam for the US. Unlike in Vietnam, where the south offered a base to launch the inhuman attack on the northern people, even three months later, the US does not possess an inch of Iranian soil. Their bases across Gulf Cooperation Council countries continue to be targeted, depleting the vast armouries of the biggest armed forces in the world. The allies in the region have had enough.

The excuse of Israel and its Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pushing the US into an unwanted war is wearing thin. It might well have been a factor — for Netanyahu could even persuade Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to make an ill-timed visit to Israel on the eve of the war — but the prospect of exploiting and selling the world’s third-largest oil reserves and second-largest gas reserves, and controlling the biggest population in West Asia with a puppet regime, cannot be discounted.

All of those hopes have come to nothing. First, the covert operation to engineer regime change, as seen in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Nepal in recent years, did not work. The tricks of the espionage trade work for the West only in a wired world with social media and mainstream media working in tandem to discredit a government and foist a proxy. With the internet shut down and the Western media thoroughly exposed as a force multiplier for regime-change operations, Iran was an alien territory.

No amount of idealistic martyrdom — which is now being described as a country’s capacity to absorb kinetic aggression and endure death and misery — prepares a nation to bring the mighty US to the negotiating table. Only military preparedness can do it. First, Iran countered the democracy doublespeak by shutting out media outlets it regarded as vehicles for US propaganda. Then, it built drones, missiles, mobile launchers, radars and hideouts for its arsenal. 

The level of military preparedness achieved by a sanctioned nation would not have been possible without iron-clad military alliances. The Chinese were not merely building a 10,000-km rail corridor connecting Tehran with Xinjiang; they were doing much more. The Russians seem to have sold the S-400 Triumf surface-to-air missile systems that have bolstered Iran’s air defences. The Iranian people’s willingness to endure hardship for the national cause made a difference only with Russian and Chinese technology and weaponry.

Then, of course, Iranian intelligence outwitted Mossad. Finally, Israeli intelligence agencies have been exposed as being far inferior to their enemies, who lulled them into believing that Iran could be conquered in a week. Along with Western supremacy, the myth of Mossad was also shattered in the Iranian war. It is just another bumbling spy agency that has been propped up for a long time by MI6, the CIA and Hollywood.

All this happened only because the Iranian leadership defied its own entrenched corruption, proving that it cannot be bought any longer. The Anglo-American empire had thrived on bribing Eastern kings and bureaucrats, gobbling up huge chunks of the globe in the process. Mossad’s playbook wasn’t any different. But now it seems the Iranians were keeping the gifts and lying about their missile launchers, drone factories and radar capabilities.

The Iranians have made the US agree to discuss a deal in which even ownership of the Strait of Hormuz is being negotiated for the first time in a century. That in itself is a significant assertion of regional hegemony by Iran — something that would have been inconceivable three months ago. This is how empires decline.