America’s Gulf security system is turning inside out

For decades, the American security architecture in the Gulf rested on a simple bargain. The United States stationed troops, aircraft, naval forces, missile defences and surveillance systems across the region. In return, the Gulf monarchies received protection for their governments, oil installations, ports and trading routes.

That system is now turning inside out.

The bases constructed to deter Iran have become targets for Iranian missiles. Ports built to bypass the Strait of Hormuz remain within range of Iranian weapons. Pipelines intended to guarantee the export of oil end at exposed coastal terminals. The desalination and electricity plants sustaining the Gulf’s great cities have become potential instruments of coercion.

Iran did not initiate the present war by attacking the United States or Israel. The conflict began on February 28 with American and Israeli attacks on Iran. The campaign killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, struck nuclear and military installations and attempted to destroy Iran’s missile forces and political leadership.

Supporters of the operation argued that sufficient pressure could eliminate Iran’s nuclear and missile capabilities, separate Tehran from its regional allies and possibly bring about regime change. Iran’s government was portrayed as brittle, isolated and so unpopular that a determined external assault might encourage internal revolt.

None of those objectives has been achieved.

The Islamic Republic remains intact. Iran continues to fire missiles and drones. Its nuclear knowledge has not disappeared, its regional relationships have not been eliminated and its population did not rise in support of the countries bombing it.

The original theory of victory has consequently given way to a more dangerous contest: which side can impose the greater cost without crossing a threshold from which neither can retreat?

The bases that became targets

The United States established its Gulf network to project power without having to fight from its own territory. Airfields in Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan allowed American aircraft and command systems to operate close to Iran.

That proximity was once considered an advantage. It has become a vulnerability.

When American assets were moved from increasingly exposed positions in Kuwait and Bahrain to Jordan, Iran widened its target map. On July 17, Iranian ballistic missiles and drones attacked US and partner forces in Jordan. Two American service members were killed and another was reported missing, according to US Central Command.

Jordan had not previously occupied the same position in the exchanges. It became a target because American forces and equipment had been transferred there.

Professor John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago argues that the bases now attract Iranian attacks rather than shielding their host countries from them. Instead of merely providing protection, they expose those countries to retaliation for military decisions made in Washington.

Moving aircraft, interceptors and personnel from one installation to another does not necessarily protect them. It may merely enlarge the geographical boundaries of the conflict.

Iran’s message to the Gulf governments is stark. If American forces use their territory to attack Iran, Tehran will regard the military infrastructure supporting those forces as part of the battlefield.

That places the Gulf monarchies in an increasingly difficult position. They depend upon the United States for protection, but the American presence may now be one of the principal reasons their territory is being attacked.

The infrastructure threshold

The most consequential development has been the movement from military targets towards the systems that sustain civilian and economic life.

American forces have struck bridges, energy installations, oil facilities and transport links inside Iran. One target was reported to be a strategically important bridge on the northern railway corridor towards Mashhad.

Mostafa Khoshcheshm, a well-connected Iranian analyst and journalist interviewed in Tehran by The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal, described the bridge attack as a change in the nature of the war. In his assessment, the United States was no longer simply trying to weaken Iranian military capacity. It was widening the theatre from southern Iran to the north and attacking the physical connections holding the country together.

This analysis draws in part on Blumenthal’s interview with Khoshcheshm. His military assertions represent an Iranian assessment of the conflict and have not all been independently verified.

Khoshcheshm predicted a gradual escalation into what he called a full-fledged war. If the United States struck Iran’s civilian infrastructure, he said, Tehran would no longer confine its retaliation to the previous scale or geographical limits.

That retaliation has already begun to move towards electricity and desalination infrastructure in Kuwait and Bahrain. Iran has threatened further attacks on Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates if American operations against Iranian infrastructure continue.

Desalination plants are uniquely dangerous targets. Several Gulf states depend upon them for most of their usable water. They in turn depend on electricity, pumping equipment and concentrated distribution networks.

A country may ration fuel. It cannot indefinitely ration drinking water in extreme heat.

The wealth and technological sophistication of the Gulf cities can obscure their physical fragility. Oil revenues cannot immediately replace a destroyed water plant. Gold reserves cannot operate a pumping station. A government may possess hundreds of billions of dollars and still face a humanitarian emergency if electricity and desalination fail together.

Attacks deliberately directed at indispensable civilian infrastructure would also raise grave questions under the laws of armed conflict. An installation does not become a lawful target merely because destroying it would pressure an enemy government. The attacker must identify a military objective and comply with the principles of distinction, proportionality and precaution.

Those rules bind Iran as much as the United States. One side’s unlawful attack would not legally justify retaliation against civilians by the other.

Strategically, however, Iran believes these vulnerabilities give it an asymmetric form of leverage. It does not need to defeat the United States in the air. It needs to persuade the Gulf governments that continued American attacks will impose intolerable consequences upon them.

Hormuz is only the beginning

The Strait of Hormuz remains at the centre of Iran’s strategy. Before the war, approximately a fifth of internationally traded petroleum passed through the waterway. Iran’s ability to interrupt that traffic gives it global influence far beyond the conventional reach of its armed forces.

The Gulf states have spent years constructing alternatives. Saudi Arabia can send oil westwards through pipelines to Yanbu on the Red Sea. The United Arab Emirates has developed a pipeline to Fujairah on the Gulf of Oman, allowing exports to avoid Hormuz.

These routes reduce dependence upon the Strait. They do not remove Iran’s leverage.

A pipeline has value only while its pumping stations, storage tanks and export terminals remain operational. Yanbu and Fujairah may bypass Hormuz, but both are fixed installations. Both remain potentially vulnerable to Iranian missiles and drones.

Iran has threatened to attack them if the United States continues striking infrastructure inside Iran. The Houthis in Yemen could also threaten traffic through the Bab el-Mandeb, although the extent of direct operational coordination between them and Tehran remains uncertain.

The result is a network of overlapping pressure points. Restricting Hormuz disrupts the principal Gulf route. An attack on Fujairah threatens the Emirati alternative. An attack on Yanbu threatens the Saudi outlet, while disruption around the Bab el-Mandeb places the Red Sea route under pressure from the south.

Pipelines do not make Gulf energy exports invulnerable. They merely relocate the points at which Iran can attempt to disrupt them.

Has Iran preserved its arsenal?

Khoshcheshm made extensive claims about the survivability of Iran’s military production.

Iran’s missile, drone and cruise-missile technologies were developed domestically, he said, allowing production to continue despite sanctions and bombardment. Western intelligence found and destroyed some facilities, according to his account, but failed to locate the entire network. He claimed that much of Iran’s manufacturing capacity remained intact and continued producing missiles and drones while the country was under attack.

He went further. Iran, he said, had not yet opened its main missile and drone stockpiles. The weapons fired during the present conflict and the earlier war had largely come from continuing production rather than the deepest strategic reserves.

Khoshcheshm also claimed that Iran had withheld its three newest generations of missiles and its most sophisticated drones, relying instead upon older Shahed systems and established ballistic weapons. If the war intensified, he predicted, more advanced systems would appear progressively.

These are Iranian claims, not independently established facts. Tehran has an evident interest in exaggerating the size and survivability of its arsenal. Washington and Israel have an equally evident interest in overstating the damage caused by their bombing campaign.

What is demonstrable is that Iran continues to launch missiles and drones months after the war began. Assertions that almost all its weapons and production facilities had been destroyed are incompatible with the continuing attacks across the region.

Mearsheimer believes the resulting arithmetic favours Iran in a prolonged exchange. Iran can use comparatively inexpensive missiles and drones to force the United States and its allies to consume scarce and expensive interceptors. Even when an Iranian weapon is destroyed, it may have imposed a disproportionate financial and logistical cost upon the defender.

American inventories are not inexhaustible. Nor can the same interceptor simultaneously defend Israel, Jordan, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and American forces elsewhere.

That does not mean Iran possesses unlimited weapons. It means Washington has not demonstrated that bombing can eliminate Iran’s capacity to produce, conceal and launch enough of them to keep the regional system under pressure.

The failure of regime change

The war was encouraged by the proposition that the Islamic Republic had little genuine domestic support. Years of sanctions, political repression, economic mismanagement and social restrictions had unquestionably created profound dissatisfaction.

But domestic dissatisfaction is not the same as willingness to accept foreign attack.

The killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei transformed the political atmosphere. When his delayed funeral procession was finally held, enormous crowds filled Tehran and other cities.

It demonstrated that the government possessed a substantial base of support and, more importantly, that opposition to the Islamic Republic could coexist with determination to defend Iran.

Khamenei’s killing enraged the population and produced a mobilisation that had not occurred on the same scale during the previous conflict.

A partisan and may understate dissent. But the rally-around-the-flag effect is entirely plausible. The United States and Israel appear to have mistaken anger at the Iranian government for readiness to support the bombing or disintegration of the country.

The Iranians define victory differently from their attackers.

Washington and Israel sought to destroy Iran’s missile and nuclear capabilities, separate it from Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis, and create conditions for a change of government.

Iran did not need to conquer American or Israeli territory to defeat those objectives. Its immediate goals were survival, preservation of the state and retention of sufficient retaliatory power to prevent the enemy from dictating the political settlement.

Measured against those narrower objectives, Tehran can credibly claim that it has so far prevailed.

The illusion of a ground option

The inability of air power to produce surrender has encouraged discussion of a limited ground operation: seizing an Iranian island, landing near Chabahar or using Kurdish forces along Iran’s western frontier.

None provides a convincing route to victory.

Iran is much larger and more populous than Iraq. A full occupation would require forces far beyond anything the United States has assembled in the region.

Mearsheimer estimates that although the United States may have approximately 50,000 military personnel across the region, no more than about 8,000 are immediately usable ground combat forces.

Such a force might seize an island or coastal position. Holding and supplying it under Iranian missile, drone, artillery and infantry attacks would be another matter.

Khoshcheshm said Iran could combine the regular army, Revolutionary Guards, special forces, Basij volunteers and trained reserves against an isolated landing force. Iranian commanders, he claimed, would welcome such an operation because it would move American personnel from distant aircraft and ships into close combat on Iranian territory.

That is partly wartime bravado. Yet it identifies the central weakness in the proposal. A limited landing would not compel Tehran to surrender. It could instead trap American troops in an exposed enclave and produce the casualties Washington has tried to avoid.

Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern reached a similar conclusion. The problem would not necessarily be landing troops, he argued, but sustaining them. An isolated American force would require continuous sea or air resupply while operating within range of Iran’s land-based weapons.

A ground operation could therefore give Iran something it presently lacks: a concentrated American target that could neither withdraw easily nor achieve a decisive political objective.

The nuclear agreement Washington abandoned

Iran’s assertion that it did not intend to manufacture nuclear weapons once rested on more than religious doctrine.

On July 14, 2015, Iran concluded the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Russia, China and the European Union. Barack Obama was then the American president.

Iran formally reaffirmed that it would never seek, develop or acquire a nuclear weapon. In return for sanctions relief, it accepted stringent restrictions on its nuclear programme.

Enrichment was limited to 3.67 per cent. The enriched-uranium stockpile was reduced to 300 kilograms. Approximately two-thirds of installed centrifuges were removed. Enrichment at the underground Fordow facility was halted, and the Arak heavy-water reactor was redesigned to prevent it from producing significant quantities of weapons-grade plutonium.

The International Atomic Energy Agency was given extensive monitoring powers. Inspectors observed declared nuclear facilities, centrifuge production, uranium stocks and enrichment levels. The arrangement was designed to extend the time Iran would need to produce enough weapons-grade material for one bomb from a few months to approximately one year.

The IAEA repeatedly verified Iran’s implementation of its central nuclear commitments.

Trump argued that the agreement’s limitations were inadequate, that some would expire and that it failed to address Iran’s missiles and regional alliances.

These were objections to the scope of the bargain, not proof that Iran was then building a bomb.

Washington restored sanctions while Iran was still complying with the agreement’s main nuclear restrictions. Because of the reach of the American financial system, European governments proved unable to provide the economic benefits Iran had been promised.

Iran remained within the principal limits for approximately another year. In May 2019, it began reducing compliance in stages, eventually increasing enrichment, using more advanced centrifuges and limiting important elements of IAEA monitoring.

Iran’s later enrichment to 60 per cent created a legitimate proliferation concern. But the chronology remains important. The inspected agreement did not collapse because Iran was discovered manufacturing a nuclear weapon. The United States abandoned the political bargain first. Iran’s progressive departure from its restrictions followed.

The weapon Iran says it will not make

Iran’s rejection of nuclear weapons long predates the JCPOA.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei declared the production, stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons forbidden under Islam. Iran formally communicated that position to the IAEA in 2005 and repeated it throughout the subsequent negotiations.

The religious argument is based on the indiscriminate character of weapons of mass destruction. Nuclear, chemical and biological weapons cannot reliably distinguish combatants from civilians and would inevitably kill people who were not lawful military targets.

Iran also points to its experience during the war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Iranian troops and civilians suffered repeated chemical attacks, but Tehran did not retaliate in kind. Iranian accounts maintain that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini prohibited the development and use of chemical weapons on religious grounds.

Khoshcheshm told Blumenthal that Iran had not enriched uranium to weapons grade or completed the detonation mechanisms required for a nuclear warhead. The decisive obstacle, he argued, was not technological incapacity. It was political choice and religious prohibition.

That distinction is essential. In Khoshcheshm’s account, Iran has not built a bomb because it decided not to—not because it lacks the scientific capacity.

A religious ruling is not a substitute for inspection. Foreign governments are entitled to demand verifiable safeguards rather than rely upon declarations of intent. But the JCPOA provided precisely such a system until the United States withdrew from it.

Iran had therefore tried both forms of restraint: an Islamic prohibition against weapons of mass destruction and an international agreement enforced through physical inspections.

Neither prevented it from being attacked.

If conventional defeat leads to a nuclear decision

The darkest scenario arises if the United States and Israel conclude that they are losing the conventional war.

Mearsheimer argues that Washington lacks a successful military alternative. It cannot destroy all Iran’s missiles, cannot sustain endless expenditure of advanced munitions, cannot occupy the country and cannot compel Tehran to surrender by conventional bombing without also provoking devastating retaliation across the Gulf.

McGovern fears that a president faced with the choice between humiliating retreat and defeat might be tempted by claims that a small tactical nuclear weapon could destroy a deeply buried missile or nuclear facility and shock Iran into submission.

There is no evidence that such a decision has been made. Nor should discussion of it be confused with a prediction that nuclear use is inevitable.

But Khoshcheshm was explicit about how Tehran might interpret such an attack.

If the United States or Israel used a tactical nuclear weapon, a low-yield device, a nuclear earth penetrator or any other nuclear munition against Iran, he argued, it would fundamentally change Iran’s religious and strategic calculation. In his assessment, such an attack would remove the political and religious restraint preventing Iran from moving towards a military nuclear capability.

The existing prohibition might survive as a ban on indiscriminate use. It might no longer survive as a ban on acquiring a deterrent.

Iran could argue that a weapon possessed solely to prevent another nuclear attack was morally distinguishable from a weapon intended for first use. The question placed before the supreme leader would then be whether Islamic jurisprudence forbids not only nuclear mass killing but also possession for deterrence.

Khoshcheshm did not claim that Iran already possessed a nuclear weapon. Nor could Iran retaliate immediately with a nuclear strike if it had none. Its first response would probably remain conventional: missile and drone attacks against American forces, Israeli military targets and the infrastructure supporting the campaign.

The longer-term consequence could be more profound. Iran could enrich uranium to weapons grade, accelerate weaponisation research and attempt to construct a deliverable deterrent. It might withdraw from remaining non-proliferation commitments and close what was left of international inspection.

Khoshcheshm’s warning went further. Iran is geographically vast, while Israel is small and highly concentrated. He argued that the United States or Israel might be able to destroy one or two Iranian sites or cities with nuclear weapons but could not erase Iran without producing a global catastrophe.

An eventual Iranian nuclear deterrent, by contrast, would place Israel’s densely populated urban and economic centres at existential risk. Khoshcheshm specifically invoked Tel Aviv and Haifa when describing where Iran’s retaliatory logic would lead.

That should not be read as evidence that Iran possesses the capability or has decided to pursue such an attack. It is a warning from an Iranian commentator about the strategic consequences he believes nuclear use would unleash.

A nuclear strike intended to end the war could therefore begin a new and permanent nuclear confrontation. Iran would seek a bomb. Israel might threaten further preventive attacks. Saudi Arabia, Turkey and perhaps other regional powers would reconsider their own options. Every future crisis would carry the possibility of escalation between nuclear-armed adversaries.

That is the final paradox of the war.

Iran publicly renounced nuclear weapons on religious grounds. It signed an international agreement promising never to seek, develop or acquire them. It restricted enrichment, removed centrifuges, reduced its stockpile and admitted IAEA inspectors.

The United States withdrew from that agreement. Sanctions returned. Diplomacy collapsed. Iran was then attacked by the United States and Israel, its supreme leader was killed and its political system was threatened with destruction.

If no nuclear weapon is used, Iran may still conclude that only an actual deterrent can prevent another attempt at regime change.

If a nuclear device is used, the remaining barrier may collapse altogether.

America’s Gulf security system was created to contain Iran. It has instead placed American bases, Arab capitals, oil terminals, pipelines, power stations and water supplies inside a single Iranian theatre of retaliation.

The security umbrella has become a web of targets. The infrastructure built to demonstrate American power has become the means by which Iran can impose its price.

And a war launched in the name of preventing an Iranian nuclear weapon may yet create the political, strategic and religious conditions in which Tehran decides that it must build one.