Thinking About the Unthinkable

Iran’s Grand Plan to End US Presence in the Middle East

President Trump after announcing in 2018 that the United States would withdraw from the nuclear deal with Iran. Photo credit: Doug Mills

Iran and Donald Trump have each explained why failure to fight the current war to the end would simply lead to a new set of mutual attacks. Trump announced on March 6 that “There will be no deal with Iran except unconditional surrender,” and announced that he must have a voice in naming or at least approving Iran’s new leader, as he has just done in Venezuela. “If the US military must utterly defeat it and bring about a regime change, or else “you go through this, and then in five years you realize you put somebody in who’s no better.’” It will take at least that long for America to replace the weaponry that has been depleted, rebuild its radar and related installations and mount a new war.

Iranian officials likewise recognize that US attacks will keep being repeated until the United States is driven out of the Middle East. Having agreed to a ceasefire last June instead of pressing its advantage when Israeli and regional US anti-missile defenses were depleted, Iran realized that war will be resumed as soon as the United States is able to re-arm its allies and military bases to renew what both sides recognize is to be a fight to some kind of final solution.

The war that began on February 28 can realistically be deemed to be the formal opening of World War III because what is at issue are the terms on which the entire world will be able to buy oil and gas. Can they buy this energy from exporters in currencies other than the dollar, headed by Russia and Iran (and until recently, Venezuela)? Will the present US demand to control of the international oil trade require oil-exporting countries to price it in dollars, and indeed to recycle their export earnings and national savings into investments in US government securities, bonds and stocks?

That recycling of petrodollars has been the basis of America’s financialization and weaponization of the world’s oil trade, and its imperial strategy of isolating countries that resist adherence to the US ruler-based order (no real rules, but simply US ad hoc demands). So what is at issue is not only the US military presence in the Middle East—along with its two proxy armies, Israel and ISIS/al Qaeda jihadists. And the US and Israeli pretense that it is about Iran having atomic weapons of mass destruction is as fictitious an accusation as that levied against Iraq in 2003. What is at issue is ending the Middle East’s economic alliances with the United States and whether its oil-export earnings will continue to be accumulated in dollars as the buttress of the US balance of payments to help pay for its military bases throughout the world.

Iran has announced that it will fight until it achieves three aims to prevent future wars. First and foremost, the United States must withdraw from al its military bases in the Middle East. Iran already has destroyed the backbone of radar warning systems and anti-aircraft and missile defense sites in Jordan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain, preventing them from guiding US or Israeli missile attacks or attacking Iran. Arab countries have bases or US installations will be bombed if they are not abandoned.

The next two Iranian demands seem to far-reaching that they seem unthinkable to the West. Arab OPEC countries must end their close economic ties to the United States, starting with the US data centers operated by Amazon, Microsoft and Google. And they not only must stop pricing their oil and gas in US dollars, but disinvest in their existing petrodollars holdings of the US investments that have been subsidizing the US balance of payments since the 1974 agreements that made to gain US permission to quadruple their oil-export prices.

These three demands would end US economic power over OPEC countries, and thus the world oil trade. The result would be to dedollarize the world’s oil trade and re-orient it toward Asia and Global Majority countries. And Iran’s plan involves not only a military and economic defeat for the United States, but an end to the political character of the Near Eastern client monarchies and their relations with their Shi’ite citizens.

Step 1: Driving the United States out of its Middle Eastern military bases

Iraq’s parliament has continued to demand that US forces leave their country and stop stealing its oil (sending most of it to Israel). It has just approved legislation yet again directing that American forces to leave their country. Meeting with senior advisor to Iraq’s interior minister and his accompanying military delegation in Tehran last Monday (March 2), Iran’s Brigadier General Ali Abdollahi reiterated the demand that Iran has been making for the last five years, ever since Donald Trump closed his first administration on January 3, 2020. by ordering the treacherous assassination of the two top Iranian and Iraqi anti-terror negotiators, Qassem Soleimani and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, who were seeking to avoid an all-out war. Seeing that Trump is now continuing the same policy, the Iranian commander stated: “Expulsion of the United States is the most important step toward the restoration of security and stability to the region.”

But all the Arab kingdoms are hosting US military bases. Iran has announced that any country permitting US aircraft or other military forces to use these bases will risk immediate attack to destroy them. Kuwait, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates already have come under attack, leading Saudi Arabia to promise Iran not to permit the US military to use its territory for part of its war.

Spain has banned US use of its airfields to support its war against Iran. But when its Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez forbade the United States from using them, President Trump pointed out at an Oval Office news conference that there was nothing that Spain really could do to prevent the US air force from using the Rota and Morón installations in southern Spain that the US and Spain share, but which remain under Spanish command. “And now Spain actually said we can’t use their bases. And that’s all right, we don’t want to do it. We could use the base if we want. We could just fly in and use it, nobody is going to tell us not to use it.” What would Spain do to prevent it, after all? Shoot down the US aircraft?

This is the problem confronting the Arab monarchies if they try to deny US access to their own US bases and air space to fight Iran. What can they do?

Or more to the point, what may they be willing to do? Iran is insisting that Qatar, the United Arab Republics, Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and other Near Eastern monarchies close all US military bases in their kingdoms and block US use of their airspace and airports as a condition for not bombing them and extending the war to the monarchic regimes themselves.

Refusal—or inability to prevent the US from using bases in their countries—will lead Iran to force a regime change. This would be easiest in countries in which Palestinians are a large proportion of the labor force, as in Jordan. Iran has called for Shi’ite populations in Jordan and other Near Eastern countries to overthrow their monarchies so as to break away from US control. There are rumors that Bahrain’s king has left the country.

Step #2: Ending the Middle East’s commercial and financial linkages to the US

Arab monarchies are under further pressure to meet Iran’s ultimate demand that they decouple their economies from that of the United States. Ever since 1974 they have tied their economies to the United States. Most recently Bahrain, the UAE and Saudi Arabia have sought to use their energy resources to attract computer data centers, including Starlink and other systems that have been associated with US regime-change and military attacks on Iran.

Opposing US plans to tightly integrate its non-oil sectors with the Arab OPEC Middle East, Iran has announced that these installations are “legitimate targets” for its drive to expel America from the region. One cloud computing manager suggested that Iran’s AWS attack on Amazon’s data center was targeted because it was serving military needs, much as Starlink (which the UAE is interested in financing) was used in February in the US attempt to mobilize demonstrations against Iran’s government.

Step #3: Ending the recycling of OPEC oil exports into US dollar holdings

The most radical Iranian demand has been for its Arab neighbors to dedollarize their economies. That is a key to preventing US businesses from dominating their economies and hence their governments. An Iranian official told CNN that Iran has accused companies that buy US government debt and invest in Treasury bonds of being partners in the war against itself, because it sees them as financiers of this war. “Tehran considers these companies and their managers in the region as legitimate targets. These individuals are warned to declare their capital withdrawal as soon as possible.”

Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait, and Qatar are indeed discussing withdrawing from US and other investments as Iran’s blocking of Hormuz has led them to stop producing oil and LNG now that their storage capacity is full. Their income from energy, shipping and tourism has stopped. The Gulf States are meeting on Sunday, March 8, to discuss drawing down their $2 trillion in US dollar investments (mainly from Saudi Arabia). The threat is that this is an initial step to diversifying OPEC investment outside of the US dollar.

In conjunction with US surrender of its military bases in the Middle East, such decoupling from the dollar would greatly reduce US control of Middle Eastern oil, and hence the strategy to use its oil trade as a major chokepoint with which to coerce other countries into adhering to Trump’s America First ruler-based order (his own whims, with no clear rules).

For the monarchies themselves, the changes demanded by Iran to end the US war against the Middle East would have an effect similar to the aftermath of World War I: the end of monarchic regimes in many of the Arab countries whose economies and political alliances have been based on an alliance with the United States. And for starters, pressure is now on Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt, Jordan, Bahrain, Kuwait and United Arab Emirates that have agreed to join Trump’s Board of Peace.

Indonesia, with the world’s largest Islamic population, has just withdrawn its earlier offer to provide 8000 troops to the Trump “peace plan” in Gaza, and Iran is pressuring Arab monarchies to follow suit by withdrawing in protest against US policy. Will they? Ending US access to bases in their territory runs the risk that the United States may simply seize their dollar holdings to force them to change their mind. But if they try to avoid being offensive to the United States, they will leave themselves open to Iranian accusations that they are not really opposing the war.

A number of other policies could escalate the Iranian challenge to the US. renunciation of the UN Charter’s rules of international law and the civilized laws of war. Countries could bring charges at the ICC against Trump for committing war crimes by starting an undeclared war against Iran, targeting and killing its leaders and bombing civilian centers such as the girls’ school that was one of the first targets?

Collateral effects of Iran’s goal to drive the United States out of the Middle East

Pursuit of Iranian aims means a long war. It will escalate as Israel and the US military exhaust their supply of anti-aircraft and missile defense, enabling Iran to launch its serious attack on a scale that it stopped short of last June when it agreee to a ceasefire. In coming weeks Iran will start using its most sophisticated missiles to attack Israel and other US proxies.

There’s nowhere to put additional oil production now that Iran has closed the Strait of Hormuz to all but its own ships, most of which are carrying oil destined for China.. No ships are even trying to approach it, because Lloyds of London is not issuing insurance policies.

The US military has recently sunk or seized Russian ships carrying oil, but the soaring oil prices have led it to permit such transfers in order to stem the world inflation. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has said the Treasury Department is examining whether additional sanctioned Russian crude shipments could be released to the market. “We may unsanction other Russian oil,” he said. “There are hundreds of millions of barrels of sanctioned crude on the water … by unsanctioning them, Treasury can create supply.” His remarks follow a US decision to issue a temporary 30-day waiver allowing Indian refiners to purchase Russian oil in an effort to maintain global supply.

Matters are not so easily cured for liquified natural gas, which is exported mainly by Qatar. Its storage tanks are full, forcing production to be shut down. Its LNG gas works have been bombed and will have to be rebuilt and put back on line. That will take two weeks plus an equal time to cool this gas properly.

The last few days have seen Iran attack two Saudi oil depots, and a drone hit a desalinization plant in Bahrain in response to an attack launched from its territory on Iran’s desalinization plant on Qeshm Island. Most of the Arab kingdoms depend on desalinization to a much higher degree, topped by Saudi Arabia at 70% and Bahrain at 60%. That makes Bahrain’s attack akin to the folly of fighting with bricks while living in a glass house oneself.

Throughout the world, rising oil and gas prices will force economies to choose between having to cut back domestic social spending in order to pay their dollar debts and higher oil-import prices, or declare a moratorium on servicing their dollar debts falling due. This war is splitting the US/NATO West from the Global Majority, by creating strains that Japan, Korean and even Europe can no longer afford. A change in consciousness is occurring—and that is the context for how countries will act (or be forced to act by their populations).

The effect of this US attack has destroyed the narrative that has enabled US diplomats to demand subsidy and tribute for its global military spending and demands for US subsidy and special tribute to finance it. The predicate fiction is that the world needs US military support to protect it against Russia and China—and now Iran, as if these countries pose a real threat to Europe and Asia.

The pretense of US foreign policy is that the United States is protecting the rest of the world by waging the present Cold War.But the consequences of its attack on Iran show that the United States actually is the greatest threat to the security of its allies. The backwash of America’s war on Iran thus has dispelled the great enabling fiction underlying the claim that America is protecting the world from attack by Russia, China and Iran. The United States has not been able to protect the OPEC countries, and its attack has hurt Japan, South Korea and Europe, whose gas prices have soared by 20% and are now on their way further upward today. Korea’s stock market has plunged 18% in the last two days. All this is shifting support for removing US control of Near Eastern oil.