It is surprising how many articles applaud the mullahs of Iran for their alleged victory against sanctions and the Trump administration’s blockade. According to these same articles, the mullahs braved the Trump administration in the Caribbean by sending oil tankers to support Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro.
The big surprise came to me when I followed how the Iranian tankers got there. They were being flown by American-made fighter jets flying the Venezuelan flag. The tankers’ long journey in international waters could well have been the scene of any covert operation or direct military intelligence to disrupt the tankers.
So to speak of an American failure to respond to the Iranian challenge is hardly realistic. Wishful thinking should not push a few pens as far as to feed unfounded arguments.
All political and media actors in the Arab world know that there is a media lobby sympathetic to the mullahs in many Arab media houses, both in Europe and elsewhere.
This lobby splits into two teams. One holds bland slogans, hovering behind the empty thesis promoted by the Iranian regime on how the Iranian regime is leading the axis of resistance and fighting back US Influence in the Middle East. This group is about window-dressing. It overstates any Iranian initiative and amplifies its effects given the size of its hatred towards the US and its regional policy.
The other team is biased, pro-Iranian, sectarianist and financially affiliated. The latter follows orders and instructions from Tehran. It acts in line with the Iranian project without concern for its own Arab national identity.
And between those and those, there are others who interpret the accelerated events in Iranian-American relations shallowly without looking at the context of these complex relations. Behind the tension and apparent conflict lie deals that pass through very secret channels.
Given this, one can understand the misleading propaganda about the Iranian challenge to the US in its strategic depth.
To tell the truth, neither Iranian tankers have violated President Trump’s ban on Venezuela, nor does he feel defeated and powerless against Iranian provocation. The reason is simple. Iranian oil supplies will not solve anything.
Trouble surrounds the Venezuelan president. The leader has plunged his country for years into a deep political and economic crisis. Last year, the inflation rate reached about 800,000 percent, plus some 4.8 million people have fled the country.
It seems to me that those who see the unimpeded movement of these oil tankers as a break with American maritime dominance are still guided by the logic of the last quarter of the twentieth century, not by today’s rules of the game.
Remember that the US has previously authorised several operations of this type, the latest of which is that of an oil tanker bound for Syria and held by the British authorities in Gibraltar. The US Navy did not intercept it on its journey, even though the Americans could have readily detained it.
The US thus avoided exposing itself to a strategic embarrassment to the extent that Iran would react by intercepting American ships in the Gulf waters. This would have left the US administration with only one unavoidable option. The US government would have been forced to launch a military operation to free the fleet from Iranian hands.
Any negotiation or agreement in this regard would simply have resulted in the collapse of the strategy of strict economic sanctions. Sanctions imposed by President Trump are ultimately aimed at taming the mullahs and getting them to sit at the negotiating table.
My guess is that the mullahs’ maneuvers appeal to a President Trump who is eager to strike deals. He is mindful of the fact that such shenanigans are the gateway to strengthening his position for the upcoming negotiations.
There may now be a strategic match where each game makes precise calculations of the points won and lost. Trump believes that all of this serves the ultimate purpose of achieving the American strategic objectives of besieging the Iranian regime.
The regime has failed to break the siege, despite a series of measures to limit compliance with the terms of the nuclear deal, which has reached its fifth and final stage. The mullahs have decided to pursue unrestricted uranium enrichment. They also continue to announce launching long-range nuclear-capable missiles.
The mullahs have also paid a heavy price for their practices with the assassination of General Qassem Soleimani, Iran’s most prominent Revolutionary Guard leader and the architect of its sectarian expansionist regional plan, in an operation whose motives are hardly understandable outside of the American retaliation for the shooting down of the RQ4 reconnaissance aircraft by a IRGC missile.
Strategic analysts and experts understand that the US does not want to enter into military conflict with Iran or other countries at this time, nor did it want even before the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic.
Arguably, the US is somehow turning a blind eye to Iran’s actions in the Middle East in order to achieve other strategic objectives in the region. So this story has nothing to do with defiance, victory or any of the trumped-up rhetoric that some Arab media have picked up on.
It is best to look at events realistically, without being deceived or driven by such sloganeering. We need to understand what is happening around us with objectivity, so as to develop an awareness that serves the interests of our Arab nations.
