All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and our next guest on the show today is Michael T. Clare.
He's a professor of peace and world security studies, oh, pardon me, world security studies at Hampshire College, a Tom Dispatch regular, and the author most recently of Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet.
His newest book, The Race for What's Left, The Global Scramble for the World's Last Resources, will be published in March.
And his newest article is called No Exit in the Persian Gulf, and it's running under Tom Englehart's name, of course, in his archive at antiwar.com.
It's in the highlights section at the top of our page today.
Hormuzmania, why closure of the Strait of Hormuz could ignite a war and a global depression.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
My pleasure, Scott.
Been a little while.
Glad to have you back here.
Sure thing.
So, I don't like this.
I mean, I think you did a good job on it, but I don't like it because you're talking about these people really are not just a crying wolf, but apparently they're doing their best to somehow find a way to stumble into a war with Iran, it looks like.
The Persian Gulf of Tonkin could happen at any moment.
Yep.
Well, that's because you have people on both sides, on the US side and the Iranian side, leaders, that is, who see that, you know, it's in their best interest to talk tough and to put forces in the way.
So, with that kind of momentum, it's very hard to turn things back, and this has a long history of posturing and talking tough and conducting very provocative military maneuvers.
And when you have two very provocative forces in motion like that, bad things happen.
Bad things happen.
Well, you know, in Tom's little custom-made introduction that he wrote for your article here, he talks about how, sort of reminiscent of an essay Pepe Escobar wrote last week or a couple of weeks ago, about how Iran is actually not isolated by these sanctions.
We're simply pushing them into closer relationships with other powers in the world, like Russia and China, as though this is still the Cold War going on, but we just can't, you know, do any better than the Keystone Cops at any of this imperialism.
Really, all we're doing is, as Tom says, we're strengthening the relationship between Iran and China directly, and we're strengthening Russia's position in selling oil to Europe and making Europe dependent on Russian oil, which is what Vladimir Putin wants and which is what, presumably, the American imperialists don't want but are accomplishing anyway.
Well, of course, I think that's a very sound analysis.
What I think one has to add to that is that a lot of this is very irrational on both sides, and it reflects the way in which elite thinking in Washington and in other world capitals tends to acquire a momentum of its own.
That is, in our case, it has been doctrine, the prevailing doctrine in Washington, that the United States has to be the overlord of the Persian Gulf area and that we can't allow any other challengers.
And maybe that made sense at one time when we were so heavily dependent on Middle Eastern oil.
That's not the case anymore, but that policy is unquestionable.
You can't challenge that in Washington, and so it goes on year after year after year.
And the Iranian leadership rose to power on an anti-American agenda, and they can't let go of that.
So these are policies that get set in stone, and nobody's allowed to question them, even though they're mutually suicidal.
And you're speaking there, I guess, specifically as you write in your article, the Carter Doctrine, which, as you note, was really established in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
At least that was the excuse at the time, was that if the Soviets are in Afghanistan, next thing you know, they're going to rule the entire Persian Gulf and, I guess, Arabian Sea.
What?
Well, this is what President Carter said in his State of the Union address in 1980.
So that was, what, 20, 30, 32 years ago in his State of the Union address.
This was just after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, and he said that put them 300 miles from the mouth of the Strait of Hormuz and, therefore, in a position to threaten the flow of oil from the Persian Gulf to the rest of the world.
And that, in turn, would threaten the survival of Western economies.
And we can't let that happen.
Therefore, we have to use military force, if necessary, to keep safe the flow of oil from the Persian Gulf.
So we call that the Carter Doctrine.
Now, at the time, the U.S. didn't actually have any military forces specifically earmarked for that purpose.
So he created the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force, which, in turn, became the U.S. Central Command.
And the Central Command, from its very beginning, had the job of defending the sea lanes in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz.
Now, they're much bigger.
They're fighting a war in Iraq and Afghanistan and so on.
But that was their original purpose.
And so now you have a whole military organization created to defend or to carry out the Carter Doctrine.
Now, part of the frame of my original question had it that it was they've set us up to stumble into this thing.
It's not like just the buildup in Kuwait before the Iraq War or something like that, but maybe more like option B, rolling start in the Downing Street memo, that maybe we could just have them shoot down one of our planes colored baby blue like the U.N.
And we use that as a pretext to go ahead.
We have enough assets in the region to get it started.
And then it'll just be a matter of escalating to whatever degree from there.
Because, well, for example, the way it's working, it seems to be pretty slow motion where these horrible sanctions are to kick in at their fullest in the European part of it in July.
Right.
So we have still six months to go of both sides beating their chest about what might happen in the Straits of Hormuz, you know, when all of this kicks in and when it's already happened, where when the Iranians say, well, we'll retaliate by not selling any more oil to Europe at all and we'll boycott you more than you're trying to boycott us.
We're saying, well, we'll see that as an act of aggression and war against the West.
And I mean, they're they're already got this set up to trip wire in one way or another by August or something.
No.
Well, it sure looks that way to me.
And then you have to add to this, Scott, you have to add geography and the way things go wrong in tense times, what Clausewitz call the fog of war.
The Strait of Hormuz is very narrow waterway.
The ship channel itself is only three miles wide and one fifth of the world's oil goes through there every day, a very narrow channel.
And it would just take one mind to explode and blow up an oil tanker or one motorboat with an anti ship vessel to blow up oil tanker to create an international crisis, you know, with oil prices zooming skyward and triggering a whole chain of events.
That's what worries me, that this could take on a, you know, spiral events that gets out of control because there's so many military forces in the area and so many ships that a little incident could explode overnight with before wiser heads could step in and stop this.
That's that's what makes it so dangerous.
Right now, very quickly before this break, I'll have just about a minute.
Do you make much of things like the Director of National Intelligence going before the Senate and saying, oh, they haven't made the decision to begin making nuclear weapons or the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff going over there to meet with the Israelis and then talking about Oh, yeah, they're not making nukes.
We didn't say that they're making nukes now.
And that kind of things that mean that maybe they're trying to back off a little bit from this.
I mean, I guess they're still trying to implement the sanctions.
Yeah, I think it's a little bit hard to tell.
I think maybe, maybe, maybe the administration got a little bit nervous about how rapidly this created war fever around the world and theoretically and conceivably endangered his reelection because if oil prices begin spiraling upward, that could threaten the economic recovery such as it is as as tenuous it is.
So maybe they're trying to scale back.
I don't know the level of tension.
Well, I sure hope so.
And then again, I'm not certain that whatever the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or anybody else tells Benjamin Netanyahu really counts for what he wants to do.
I mean, I guess it has to weigh something, but I wouldn't bet on how much.
But I'll have to ask you to hold it right there.
We'll go out to this break.
And we'll be back with Michael T. Clare from TomDispatch.com running under Tom's name at Antiwar.com today.
No exit in the Persian Gulf.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton and I'm talking with Michael T. Clare.
He is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College, a Tom Dispatch regular and the author of Rising Power, Shrinking Planet and the Race for What's Left, the Global Scramble for the World's Last Resources, coming out in March.
And his recent piece at Tom Dispatch, which of course is running under Tom's name at Antiwar.com, Tom Englehart's name that is, at Antiwar.com today, right there at the top of the page in the highlights section.
It's called No Exit in the Persian Gulf.
And it's about the goings-on in the Straits of Hormuz and the danger of real war breaking out.
Of course, there's so many different news stories on this topic, such as the IAEA apparently had a bunch of meetings in Iran, Michael, and they didn't bother doing inspections.
They just had some meetings with the Iranians and then they left.
But apparently everybody was happy.
It's not that they were turned away or anything like that.
Do you have any idea what's going on there?
I don't know exactly what happened at those meetings of the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency does go periodically and they're trying to find out what the Iranians are doing with their enriched uranium and whether it's being used as the Iranians claim exclusively for peaceful purposes, medical purposes, or whether it's being used for military purposes.
And there's a lot of question about that.
And presumably, there was some discussion about it.
But what the outcome of those discussions are, I don't know, because the IAEA people haven't yet released their report, I suspect we'll know more in the next day or so.
Well, yeah, it's interesting about that.
I hope there's some more articles along those lines, because of course, every time the IAEA does visit, no matter what they say about, you know, claims that cannot be completely disproven and mandates by the UN Security Council, when it comes to enforcing the safeguards agreement, they always verify the non diversion of declared nuclear material to the military or other special purpose.
That'll be the same just like the last million times in a row.
Yeah, I think it's becoming pretty clear what's going on in Iran, which is to say that the Iranian leadership wants a capacity to make nuclear weapons at some point in the future, if they should decide to do so, but then not actually making nuclear weapons now.
And we need to be clear of the distinction between making nuclear material, making fissile materials and rich uranium.
You can't make a bomb without a bomb is a very specialized piece of equipment.
It has to be compact, it has to detonate under certain circumstance.
There's no evidence that the Iranians have that capability, but they are enriching uranium.
So it's well, you know, in fact, if you read James Risen from the New York Times journalism, probably the best plans they have to make a bomb they got from the CIA trying to entrap them in to having some bomb plans in their files.
Well, well, that I don't know, they did get possibly Operation Merlin.
I'm not familiar with that one.
Oh, it was James Risen years ago.
Anyway.
One should point out, by the way, that Japan is equally capable of this capacity.
Nobody wants to talk about that.
But Japan's nuclear program is reprocesses spent uranium and converts it into plutonium.
And they have enough plutonium on hand to make far, far more bombs than Iran ever aspires to.
And they clearly have the capacity, they have a space program, and they have the capacity to manufacture nuclear weapons, if they chose much more rapidly than Iran does.
And everybody in the region knows they have that capacity, just nobody wants to talk about it.
Yeah, well, and they sure have a more violent, aggressive history than the Iranians do.
Persian Empire fell down a long, long time ago.
It's been a while.
People remain very frightened of Japan today, in that part of the world.
Every time, you know, anybody goes to the shrine of the World War Two war criminals, when Japanese leaders go, there are riots throughout Asia, because they have long memory of that empire you described.
So now, I was wondering if we could go back over a little bit about just exactly the numbers, the amount of oil.
Of course, it's a liquid resource, America doesn't import all that much percentage wise of our daily supply from Saudi Arabia or the Arabian Peninsula, for example.
But it is a very important part of the global supply on any given day.
So just what kind of catastrophe are we talking about if the, you know, economic wise for the world, if in fact, the Persian Gulf, the mouth of the Persian Gulf was to be closed to those oil tankers?
Okay, well, this really is critical, because the Strait of Hormuz sees every day, about 17 million barrels of oil go through.
Now, that's about one fifth of the total world's oil supply.
But it's much more significant than that, because it's about a third of the oil that's traded on international markets.
That is, you know, the United States produces some of its own oil, and China produces some of its own oil.
But the stuff that comes from the Persian Gulf, that's about a third of all of the stuff that everybody needs to buy to make up for the difference of what they produce locally.
So one third of the world's traded oil, without which the world's economy can't operate.
So if that were to come off the market for any extended period of time, oil would probably double in price to $200 a barrel, who knows how much.
And under those circumstances, I think we could kiss goodbye to any economic recovery in Europe, or the United States, or Japan.
So the consequences are quite astonishing.
Now, the U.S. says, well, we could clear the Strait of Hormuz in a matter of days, but who knows how long that would take.
And who knows the consequences for the soldiers in Iraq, still, and in Afghanistan, at the Fifth Fleet in Bahrain?
Well, we don't know.
The Iranians have been practicing what are called asymmetrical means of warfare, using mines, using small submarines, using small boats equipped with anti-ship missiles.
These might overpower U.S. forces, at least temporarily.
They're not going to defeat the U.S. Navy.
But that's not the purpose.
The purpose is to disrupt the oil traffic long enough to create a global economic panic, and that might be within their capacity.
All right, everybody.
The article is called No Exit in the Persian Gulf.
It's under Tom Englehart's name at antiwar.com.
Today, it's by Tom and Michael T. Clare, Professor of Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College.
His last book is Rising Power, Shrinking Planet, and the newest one, The Race for What's Left, The Global Scramble for the World's Last Resources.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today.
I really appreciate it.
Nice talking with you, Scott.
