Is Iran Trump’s Suez crisis, or just a passing thunderstorm?
Donald Trump’s addiction to framing every event in the most apocalyptic terms is what allows conservative commentators such as Mark Levin to praise him as “a once-in-a-century president”. But Trump cannot play out his entire presidency on a reckless high wire without eventually falling off – potentially taking America with him into a steep decline into the unknown. Trump likes to portray Europe as being under civilisational threat from migration, but this week he threatened that a 7,000-year-old civilisation would “die … never to be brought back” if it did not comply with his demands. He swiftly discovered it was not a threat on which he could follow through, and had to be extricated from it in a rescue mission led by Pakistan and, ignominiously for him, China. He pulled back in a social media post issued just 88 minutes before the implied destruction of Iran. Not for the first time, Trump had disregarded Iran’s history of resilience. As the late Iranian essayist Bastani Parizi once wrote: “Sometimes the fate of this kingdom hangs by a hair, but that hair does not break.” Faced by Iran’s refusal to back down, symbolised by millions of Iranians volunteering to stand on the bridges of their homeland, a late-night White House scramble ensued to find a justification to bring his latest piece of brinkmanship to a semi-dignified end before his ghoulish deadline.
Tuesday night’s chaos, entirely self-induced, led to Wednesday’s mess – including the US administration’s claim that “a legitimate misunderstanding” had led Iran to believe the ceasefire covered Lebanon, as the mediators Pakistan insisted. Similarly, the White House asserted that Trump’s explicit acceptance in a social media post that the 10-point plan would form “the framework of the talks”, was in fact a reference to a milder, different plan that is yet to be revealed. Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, insisted that the published Iranian plan – written in Farsi and containing full sanctions relief and an Iranian right to enrich uranium – had been merely a Tehran wishlist that Trump had immediately thrown in the garbage. By Thursday, there was zero agreement on what was agreed to secure the two-week ceasefire. Iranian diplomats say the explanation is simple. Trump, once he realised coercive diplomacy had failed and the strait of Hormuz would not be reopened, promised the Pakistani mediators more than he intended to deliver. His only interest, the Iranians say, was to get himself off the hook. Not for the first time in his decade-long dealings with Iran, Trump has proved, from Tehran’s perspective, to be entirely untrustworthy. Faced by a hail of criticism from the right, yet knowing his whole presidency is imperilled by a project he had vowed on the campaign trail to abjure, Trump is reluctant to accept the consequences of his own errors. These include the original sin of being gullible enough to believe the Israeli prime minister, Benjamim Netanyahu, when he said that a war was winnable in days.
It is a measure of the extent to which the fate of the two leaders is intertwined that Trump, in the face of worldwide criticism, is reluctant to order a halt to Israeli’s assault on Lebanon. Yet the White House knows Iran cannot desert Hezbollah after it suffered so much by answering Tehran’s call to intervene. With few allies left in the Middle East, and so much hostility created, Iran cannot be seen to abandon its most important Shia ally. As a result, the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, has said the US must choose between ceasefire and continued war via Israel. “It cannot have both. The ball is in the US’s court, and the world is watching whether it will act on its commitments,” he said. So Trump is trapped, just like the oil tankers awaiting clearance from Iran’s Revolutionary Guards to chug through the strait of Hormuz. “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell,” Trump had fruitlessly demanded. Instead it is Trump who is living in hell, as he watches his poll ratings slide in a year of midterm elections. A worldwide mess If one seeks Trump’s current monument, one need only look around. The mess across the world is astonishing. Americans face $4-a-gallon petrol at the pumps. The world economy is unhinged by the worst disruption in the history of the oil market, with the International Monetary Fund predicting lower growth and higher inflation worldwide. Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin is likely to see Russian coffers swell by anything from $45bn to $151bn over the next year, according to the Kiel Institute thinktank.
Across the Gulf region, the crafted aura of stability and modernity looks suddenly fragile. It will take many years for Qatar to repurpose its liquid gas industry. In a sign of the times, British Airways is ending flights to Jeddah from May, in the expectation that tourism will shrivel. A complex debate awaits a divided Gulf Cooperation Council on the security provided by allowing the US to site so many military bases in the region. Inside Iran, schools, universities and medical research centres have been bombed. The US-based group Human Rights Activists in Iran estimates that a total of 3,636 Iranians have been killed, including 1,701 civilians. The trauma is captured in this vignette from the citizen journalism website IranWire: “My husband counted 13 explosions in a row. Women in the neighbourhood were screaming, some on the verge of a nervous breakdown, There was dust – endless dust – that seemed to cling to one’s throat.” Iran started 2026 mired in an economic crisis. This led to one of the biggest outbreaks of popular protest in years, which was brutally suppressed by the regime. Now, the only street demonstrations are regime-backed shows of patriotic solidarity, and the Iranian government looks stronger. The prospect of regime change or at least ideological rethink has receded. One infirm Khamenei has been replaced as supreme leader by another. The Revolutionary Guards may have lost many buildings and missile launchers, but not the ability to wreak havoc across the Gulf, control the strait of Hormuz and “manage” civil society – the true metrics of its authority.
The internet remains shut to most after a record six weeks, and since 19 March, six members of the dissident People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran and seven young protesters have been hanged on charges of “moharebeh”, or enmity against God. No one can know whether – once the internet blackout ends and the economy’s travails return to the fore – a call for a different Iran will emerge from the darkness and rubble, framed by the memory of the bloody protests of January. For now, Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium remains in place, and the US’s negotiators are starting to hint of concessions as talks in Islamabad approach. JD Vance, the US vice-president, said on Wednesday: “The president said that we don’t want Iran to enrich uranium with a view to developing a nuclear weapon, and we want Iran to give up its nuclear fuel.” He did not formally deny Iran the right to domestic enrichment – the central point of dispute in previous talks brokered by Oman. Iran has already agreed not to build up its nuclear stockpiles.
Yet there is a risk that Iran’s leadership, heady at its survival, may now overplay its hand. The country’s former foreign minister Javad Zarif proposed in Foreign Affairs magazine this week that in return for sanctions relief, Tehran should cap domestic uranium enrichment, blend down existing stockpiles of nuclear materials, transfer enriched uranium to a new multilateral consortium, and reopen the strait of Hormuz. The plan was supported by the former president Hassan Rouhani, but pilloried by hardliners in the conservative media and at demonstrations. The test in the Islamabad negotiations, apart from the terms for opening the strait, will be whether the US team can secure something on nuclear they were not already on course to achieve in the Geneva talks that took place immediately before the start of the war. The US still lacks a theory of evolutionary change inside Iran, preferring rupture and revolution, rather than the reform most Iranians appear to favour. Sanctions relief is still the prerequisite for a more modern Iran. If there is anyone that speaks Farsi in the US administration, they have surely not been invited anywhere near the situation room. The European angle Faced by such incompetence and recklessness, Europe now faces a choice about how hard it tries to maintain the US alliance. Europe in the short term deserves to fume, as the UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, has started to do. Europe was excluded from the nuclear talks, declined to support a war over which it was not consulted and did not believe necessary, and has repeatedly been blamed by Trump for refusing to “be there” for the US. But the internal rifts that divided Europe over the 2003 Iraq war have not been replicated – either over the war’s necessity or Lebanon’s inclusion in the truce. Instead, Britain and Spain, the two European countries most supportive of George W Bush, have been clear opponents of the war – albeit deploying very differing timbres.
For all that Trump has belittled Starmer as no Winston Churchill, the UK prime minister has refused to join the White House in pretending war is a Call of Duty video game in which you can die and get to play again. In 2003, the Downing Street comms team tried to persuade President Bush not to deploy cowboy vocabulary, warning him it alienated potential support in the UK. This time there is no constraining advice. Iran does not hold back on the polemics, but the language used by the self-styled secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, has been crude, cruel, and sometimes to the European ear, little short of repulsive. It serves only to widen the Atlantic. A Politico poll this week found that only 12% of those polled in March in Poland, Spain, Belgium, France, Germany and Italy saw the US as a close ally, while 36% saw it as a threat. By contrast, China was seen as a threat by 29% of those polled across the six countries.
The transatlantic alliance, institutionalised through Nato, presupposes consent not only within the White House, but also among the people of Europe. Washington can pretend it does not care if it loses allies, even as it dispatches the vice-president to Hungary to try to prop up the pro-Russian prime minister, Viktor Orbán. But what it cannot countenance is no longer being feared. Might is right is, after all, what Trump offers the modern world. American military and technological power is of course unmatched. US defence spending is equal to the defence budgets of its next eight largest allies combined. But despite the massive destruction and the billions spent, force has failed to win the day in Iran. Decapitation plus air power may destroy a state, but it cannot occupy it. Historical parallels Whether this is the US’s Suez crisis, a perfect failure, or “essentially a passing thunderstorm” – as some in 1956 insisted Suez represented – is now the question. But wars, especially badly misjudged wars, tend to accelerate pre-existing change, and the parallels with Suez are too numerous to ignore. Faced by the nationalisation of the Suez canal – an artificial waterway of similar commercial strategic importance to nature’s strait of Hormuz – the then British prime minister, Anthony Eden, announced that Gamal Abdel Nasser, then president of Egypt, could not “be allowed to have his thumb on our windpipe”. Nasser retorted that if the British and French did not like what he had done, they could “choke to death on their fury”. Britain and France applied sanctions, with London holding a 15-nation conference to assert the legal rights of a Suez Canal Users Association. With diplomacy floundering, Eden even contemplated the assassination of Nasser.
When France, the UK and Israel cooked up a plan to re-occupy the canal and remove Nasser, the US president, Dwight Eisenhower, intervened to stop it. Eisenhower disapproved of Britain’s actions for many reasons, including regarding Suez as an unnecessary distraction from a more important conflict in Europe’s East – the Soviet Union’s brutal suppression of an uprising in Hungary. Only Australia backed Britain, while Pakistan threatened to leave the Commonwealth. Anti-war protests sprung up across the UK and senior civil servants resigned in protest, saying experts had been systematically sidelined. Evelyn Shuckburgh, the Foreign Office official for Middle Eastern policy, was not alone in deciding “Eden had gone off his head”. What Britain had hoped to prevent by its actions in November 1956, it actually succeeded in guaranteeing. Egypt maintained control of the canal with the support of the UN and the US. The canal was closed to traffic for five months as a result of ships sunk by the Egyptians. British access to fuel and oil became limited and resulted in shortages. Nasser emerged from the crisis much strengthened, with Britain’s decline in the Middle East exposed. Harold Beeley, a British diplomat in the Foreign Office at the time who later served as ambassador to Egypt, believed Suez was a “disastrous adventure” that showed Britain could no longer enforce its will through major military action.
Stories of the end of the American empire have long been in circulation, of course. Michael Cox, a professor of international relations at the London School of Economics, said in a seminar last month: “If the American era is over, nobody told the Americans, and they certainly did not tell Trump. But we may be in a paradoxical situation where the US is still the dominant player in the world, but not promoting a liberal order, and that seems to me to be the heart of the problem.” Asked who would be the architect of a new order, in the absence of the US, Cox answered China. But in the same seminar, Prof John Ikenberry, one of the world’s leading liberal international theorists, answered that the liberal order could come back. The Princeton professor insisted the virtues of the liberal order – open trade, institutions that enforce rules, democracy, interdependence – remain robust and more attractive than the alternatives, including “fractured zones of micro-imperial oppression”. But the future role the US will play in any new order is unclear. Judging by the recent Mansion House speech given by Yvette Cooper, the UK foreign secretary, Britain’s security still requires relations with the US to endure at least until Europe shows it can be responsible for its own defence. At another LSE seminar, the political scientist Nathalie Tocci argued that defence work needs speeding up, and to be made genuinely European. Something fundamental has changed in the liberal leviathan America, she said. It was now “neither liberal nor a leviathan”. As a personality, Trump may be Levin’s once in a century aberration, but he is also the tip of an iceberg, Tocci argued, in which structural irreversible forces will diminish US hegemony. If that is indeed the case, it will be the greatest of ironies, as Iran – nominally a backward-looking country – will be the midwife of a new era.
