US vice-president JD Vance made an incredible remark last week. Yes, he admitted, the American people are exhausted from 25 years of forever wars in the Middle East. But this time is different: those past invasions had “idiots” in charge.
Setting aside any debate about his principal’s intellect, it is an extraordinary claim that regime change and destruction will have any dissimilar effects to that which took place in the decades that preceded it.
It is just more than a week into the American and Israeli war with Iran. The catastrophic effects of the conflagration are already being felt, and far beyond Iran’s borders.
After the assassination of its Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran launched missiles and drones across the Middle East. The salvos have grounded most flights in the region, leaving thousands stranded who have not been able to keep pace with the surged pricing of transport in and out.
In his own extraordinary remarks on Saturday, Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, apologised to the Gulf nations his country had attacked. He insisted the assaults would now stop provided assistance is not given to the US and Israeli war effort. At the time of writing, analysts find the promise equivocal: unsure whether merely the presence of American assets will disqualify the exemption.
The state of Iranian munitions has also become a guessing game. While much of its attack power has been decimated, it’s impossible to know how deep its stockpiles of the notoriously cheap Shahed drones go. The offensives could be sustained for days, weeks or even longer.
Regardless, Iran’s disruption of energy production is still effective, and, particularly, its choke of the Strait of Hormuz remains firm. With the taps turned off on 20% of the world’s oil, prices have surged to a two-year high; they continue to climb, and the ceiling looks perilously high. (Little confidence has greeted US President Donald Trump’s Friday pledge to guarantee safe passage through the strait.)
African business has been dealt untold damage. The infrastructural and financial relationships between the continent and the Middle East have grown exponentially over the past two decades, and in many ways the fortunes of the two regions are intertwined.
Europe, too, is facing up to the fallout. As Asia becomes increasingly desperate for oil, it is widely expected to outbid most European states for the barrels that still remain on the market. For all the resilience those nations have shown after four years of Russian war in Ukraine, their energy standing remains tentative.
Much of the world would be willing to set aside all moralising about its causes and the death of Khamenei for a moment and objectively agree that the war has to end.
But the US is more blasé about that idea. It has said from the beginning that it is willing to go on as long as is necessary. Intermingled in that show of confidence has been callous language that has shuddered many a diplomat. Department of war secretary Pete Hegseth has declared that the Iranian regime is “toast” and promised to rain “death and destruction” from the skies. His vow was joined by White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt who said that America’s enemies were “paying in blood”.
While he has emboldened the appetite for destruction, Trump has been ambivalent on the long-term objectives or conditions for peace. His latest in a string of vacillating demands: “unconditional surrender”.
War is almost always an enemy of international prosperity. But when it is underpinned by weak reasoning and uncertainty, the consequences are significantly worse.
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