Commentary: America has betrayed its global mission

For many years, the U.S. foreign and security establishment has made the safety of international trade a key argument for the benefits that U.S. global primacy brings to the world, and the need to maintain that primacy. This argument has often been made with specific reference to the security of energy flows from the Persian Gulf — which was also among the reasons given for the need to maintain U.S. military bases in the region.

The Trump administration is now destroying this pillar of U.S. primacy and its international legitimacy — and it’s doing so with a majority of support from Republicans in Congress and those in the think tank world. That the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the attacks on Gulf Arab energy production come from Iran is true. It is also irrelevant.

This was a pure war of choice on the part of the administration. There was no imminent or even feasible threat from Iran to the United States. The administration previously claimed that last year’s attacks by the U.S. and Israel had destroyed Iran’s nuclear installations. However, neither those attacks nor the Trump administration’s assassination of Iranian Gen. Qasem Suleimani in January of 2020 had led to Iranian retaliation against Gulf energy exports.

The Iranian government and innumerable Western experts — and, it seems, several Gulf Arab governments— had however repeatedly warned that a full-scale attack on Iran by the U.S. and Israel would lead to such retaliation. This warning shouldn’t have been remotely difficult for the Trump administration to understand.

Given the difficulty of targeting U.S. and Israeli warships, it was the only effective way that Iran could retaliate. It’s also an easy strategy, due to the narrowness of the Strait of Hormuz and the vulnerability of Gulf Arab energy production infrastructure. Apart from the obvious illegality of launching this war, the Trump administration’s decision also displayed profound recklessness, incompetence, irresponsibility and lack of foresight.

It is in consequence both natural and entirely correct for countries around the world — including key U.S. allies in Europe and Asia — to blame President Trump for this crisis of world trade and the looming disaster to their economies. In its disregard for the world economy and the economic security of its own closest allies, the Trump administration has therefore wrecked a central pillar supporting the international legitimacy of U.S. power.

Since the U.S. inherited its role as the guarantor of global and Persian Gulf trade from Britain in the decades after World War II, it is interesting to contrast Trump’s approach with that of the British Empire. During the 19th century, the Royal Navy imposed trade embargoes in order to put pressure on various small states, but it never threatened any vital area of world trade as a whole.

It would have been crazy for the British government to do so, since Britain was the leading trade and financial world power. The only time Britain ever imposed a blockade in a vital region of world trade was against Germany and its allies during the First and Second World Wars — and these were genuinely existential struggles that Britain had not sought, rather than wars of choice for unclear, ill-considered and unrealistic aims.

One aspect of the British Empire’s custodianship of international trade was the Royal Navy’s suppression of piracy, a role also inherited by the U.S. Navy. In the southeastern Persian Gulf — known to the British in the 18th and early 19th centuries as the “ Pirate Coast” — this strategy involved forcing local Arab sheikhdoms to sign treaties with Britain and each other, which included the abandonment of piracy.

These “truces” led to the region under British supervision being called the “ Trucial States” or “Trucial Oman.” After the British protectorate ended in 1971, these states came together to form the United Arab Emirates (UAE). They have not however returned to their piratical past (unless money laundering in Dubai is included under this heading).

The British Empire therefore used force and the threat of force to create regional order in the gulf. The U.S., both by its own actions and by the license it has given to Israel, has become a force of disorder in the Persian Gulf and the Middle East as a whole — and the resulting economic damage is not regional but global.

China by contrast is beginning to look like a model of prudence and responsibility. The only region where it has acted aggressively has been in its own immediate neighborhood — and even there, it inherited its territorial claims from previous Chinese governments. The only one that can be called truly illegitimate by global and historical standards is the claim to the whole of the South China Sea.

No state in Africa, Europe or Latin America should fear attack by China or a Chinese ally. In the Middle East, despite all the talk in Washington of an “ Alliance of Autocracies” or an “ Axis of Upheaval,” Beijing has so far been careful not to arm Iran, and not to stir up regional conflicts or to exploit America’s difficulties in the region.

As the Chinese like to emphasize in private, their only vital interest in the Middle East is the free and secure flow of energy and other vital goods like fertilizers, a trade to be secured by regional peace. This is an interest they share with the Middle East and the rest of the world. China’s greatest political initiative in the region was an attempt in 2023 to enhance gulf security by promoting normalization of relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia.

In the words of the former Indian Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar in 2020, “For the last 20 years, the United States has been fighting but not winning in the Middle East, and China has been winning but not fighting in the Middle East.”

China is presenting itself as a force for stability in the world, and much of the world is listening. Commentators and analysts in Washington have been increasingly obsessed with the question of when and how China aims to replace the U.S. global hegemon. It doesn’t, at least not in the form of the hyper-militarized primacy recently exercised by Washington. It is also the wrong question to ask. What the U.S. foreign and security establishment should be asking itself is not whether China aims to take away U.S. primacy, but whether the U.S. deserves to keep it.

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Anatol Lieven is the Eurasia director at Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.