No Naval Escort for Trump: US Allies and the Strait of Hormuz

With each dragged out day, President Donald Trump begins resembling a mad emperor who has not only taken leave of his senses but leave of everything else.  Having hitched his wagon to the Israeli program of chaos and destabilisation in the Middle East, he is stuck in a war he is incapable of controlling or dictating.  The periodic announcement of the next assassination of a notable Iranian leader is trumpeted like a holy ritual.  The next round of ecstatic bombing is hailed in the court as the biggest yet.  But behind these gestures lies an expansive emptiness.

Perhaps most telling of such emptiness is the sham of the alliance system he has sought to distance himself from even as he mocks its members.  Whether it is members of NATO or allies such as Canada and Australia, Trump has been treated with scrupulous, sometimes grovelling care.   Flaring tantrums and spontaneous interpretations of world politics mingle in ugly consummation.  Views are contradicted in the same slurry of words.  The allies can only nod.

Of late, he is showing greater concern towards the increasing distance shown by the Pax Americana family.  Initially, almost all of them made sure not to call his administration or that of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu brigands for having violated the United Nations Charter in attacking Iran.  Australia bolted out puffing with a condemnation of Iran for having, supposedly, a viable nuclear weapons program that needed to be eliminated.  Canada and various countries in the European Union all adopted variations of the same theme, taking care to demonise Tehran for its ambitions and not, for a moment, considering what Israel and the US had done.  The United Kingdom, after initial hesitation, offered the US use of its bases in bombing Iran. The grand retreat from international law seemed complete, the jungle dwellers very much in charge.

This initial enthusiasm for US-Israeli adventurism began to cool.  It is becoming increasingly clear that those devilish Persians are holding out with white knuckled determination, causing much global mayhem with their targeting of infrastructure in the Gulf states and a closure of the Strait of Hormuz.  Planners in the Pentagon, State Department and White House must have been aware about the dangers of Iran effectively closing the vital waterway responsible for the transit of a fifth of the world’s oil.  To this can be added a laundry list of essentials: gas, fertilisers, critical minerals. Yet these wiseacres find themselves scrambling to find allies and willing contributors to escorting vessels through the Strait.

Trump, for his part, has a fantasist’s view of the war, one peppered by contradiction.  In posts on Truth Social, he describes “a Nation that has been totally decapitated” that still, mysteriously, has the means to close the waterway and inflict damage.  Yet he hopes for assistance from such countries as China, France, Japan and South Korea, who might “send Ships to the sea that that the Hormuz Strait”.  But not to worry, as the US “will be bombing the hell out of the shoreline, and continually shooting Iranian Boats and Ships of the water.”  (How is that going, Mr President?)

The wish for escorting commercial traffic, however, is not likely to be met – at least as things stand.  Washington’s allies are baulking.  Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, had seen the pre-emptive attack on Iran and the assassination of Iran’s Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as a heaven-sent opportunity.  Now, she was gruffly insisting that, “This is not Europe’s war.  We didn’t start the war.  We were not consulted.”

UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer merely conceded that a “viable plan” to deal with the Strait was being sought, while Energy Secretary Ed Miliband stated that “any options that can help to get the strait reopened are being looked at in concern with our allies.”  France’s President Emmanuel Macron was of the view that any mission to escort container ships and tankers through the Strait “must be entirely separate from the ongoing war operations and bombings”.  But most stinging of all was German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius: “What does Trump expect from a handful of European frigates that the powerful US navy cannot do?”  This was not NATO’s war.  “We have not started it.”

On Truth Social, Trump vented with usual spiky petulance.  He noted that “most” of America’s NATO allies had informed Washington that they did not wish to get involved “against the Terrorist Regime of Iran, in the Middle East, despite the fact that almost every Country strongly agreed with what we were doing, and that Iran cannot, in any way, shape or form, be allowed to have a Nuclear Weapon.”  He is, on that score, partially correct, in so far as a gaggle of liberal democratic states had few reservations cheering on extra-judicial murder and regime change in Tehran.

He is far from correct in assuming that countries such as Australia and the United Kingdom have refused to get involved: contributions to the war in what has been shiftily described as a “defensive” capacity have been made.  And a country like Australia is always implicated in any bombing campaign the US ever embarks upon, given the indispensable role played by the highly secretive Pine Gap joint satellite and signals intelligence facility, located just outside Alice Springs.

As for those same allies, the President declared a lack of surprise at their reluctance “because I always considered NATO, where we spend Hundreds of Billions of Dollars per year protecting these same Countries, to be a one way street – We will protect them, but they will do nothing for us, in a time of need.”  But did Trump require their assistance?  No, as it turns out, as “we have had such Military Success, we no longer ‘need’, or desire, the NATO Countries’ assistance – WE NEVER DID!  Likewise, Japan, Australia, or South Korea.”  The question begs itself: Why ask in the first place?

The post No Naval Escort for Trump: US Allies and the Strait of Hormuz appeared first on CounterPunch.org.