Juan Cole Informed Comment
The 19th century American naval theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan stressed that a great maritime empire needn’t control the seas but rather must establish dominance over what he called “the narrows.” We would now say “chokepoints.”
The United States and its allies, principally Israel and Saudi Arabia, have in the past three days lost the battle for the narrows. Whether they have lost the war is still unclear, though it certainly appears that way.
Iran has demonstrated its ability to much reduce the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz, from 20 million barrels a day to, likely, more like 5 to 7 million barrels a day, despite exaggerated Trump administration claims.
The Helpers of God (Ansarullah or Houthi) government that controls 80 percent of the Yemen population added 17 districts to its control this weekend, capturing much of the southwest coast from the port of Mocha toward the Bab al-Mandeb (the turbulent Strait of Tears between the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea). Since Houthi missiles and drones could already target shipping in the Bab al-Mandeb, these territorial advances do not much add to that capability. They do, however, signal that the Saudi-Yemeni war that has started back up is going poorly for the Saudis. The Houthis captured massive amounts of sophisticated US military equipment that had been given to the Saudi-backed forces of the rump internationally recognized government of Yemen (which is mainly confined to south Yemen and controls only 20% of the population, or, now, less).
Photo of market in Sanaa, Yemen, by Thomas Foertsch on Unsplash
So those two narrows could not be said to be under US control, as they were under British control in the late nineteenth century. Then on Saturday Iraqi Shiite militias allied with Iran struck out at the Saudi East-West oil pipeline that the Saudis had been using to ship out petroleum that cannot any longer transit Hormuz. The Saudis have had to shut it down for now, which puts them up the dune without a camel. They were down to exporting only 6 million barrels a day of crude before the pipeline strike. Have they gone to zero? The boasts of figures such as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Trump administration officials that Hormuz would be made irrelevant by a new network of oil and gas pipelines has been shown to be a pipe dream (pun intended). Pipelines are just as vulnerable to drone and missile strikes as ships transiting a strait are.
By using an Iraqi Shiite militia for this hit on the Saudi pipeline, Iran avoided direct responsibility and avoided retaliation. The Saudis say they aren’t even going to strike Maysan Province in Iraq, from which the missiles were launched, preferring to pressure Baghdad instead.
Trump seems unwilling to get involved.
The sixteenth-century Portuguese Empire concentrated on the Strait of Hormuz, Goa on the west coast of India, and the Strait of Malacca that traverse what is now Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore. Portugal, a small poor country of a million peasants, did not have the resources to master the vast Indian Ocean. But it did not need to do so. By concentrating on a few strategic points, it could monopolize the trade in black pepper from the Malabar coast (today’s Kerala). It could bring this Indian Ocean trade via the Cape of Good Hope around the west coast of Africa to Portugal, from which it was distributed to Europe. Until you’ve had early sixteenth-century European gruel, you cannot imagine what a godsend black pepper was. But Portugal’s monopoly on pepper was broken by 1550, Fernand Braudel argued, because the Ottomans dominated the Red Sea and defeated Portuguese attempts to blockade the Bab al-Mandeb at its mouth, and opened the Red Sea route to Venetian merchants. Since Asian pepper could reach Venice more cheaply and more quickly via the Red Sea than via West Africa, Portugal’s monopoly faced steep competition.
Just as Venice and the Ottomans outflanked Portugal in the battle of the narrows in the mid-1500s, so Iran and its allies in Yemen and Iraq are outflanking the US and its regional allies.
The US had been the sole superpower since 1991 when the Soviet Union fell. The French called it a hyper-power. It was not a compliment. It seems to me that this weekend’s developments raise the question of whether we shouldn’t close out the parenthesis now on the hyper-power designation. You’re not a hyper-power if you don’t have the narrows.
Editor’s Note: At a moment when the once vaunted model of responsible journalism is overwhelmingly the play thing of self-serving billionaires and their corporate scribes, alternatives of integrity are desperately needed, and ScheerPost is one of them. Please support our independent journalism by contributing to our online donation platform, Network for Good, or send a check to our new PO Box. We can’t thank you enough, and promise to keep bringing you this kind of vital news.
You can also make a donation to our PayPal or subscribe to our Patreon.