A Cease-Fire for Now in Iran, but a Blow to American Credibility
Critics wonder if this is America’s “Suez moment,” when a leading power signals the start of its international decline.
Steven Erlanger writes about European, Middle Eastern and American diplomacy and security.
The Suez crisis took place in October 1956, when Britain, France and Israel attacked Egypt to force open the Suez Canal. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, with an election days away, ordered them to stop. Prime Minister Anthony Eden of Britain resigned. President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt became a hero of anti-colonialism.
Suez became shorthand for the moment that Britain, exhausted from World War II, gave way as a global power to the United States.
There are differences from that time. The Suez Canal is man-made and wholly in Egyptian territory, unlike the international waterway of the Strait of Hormuz. There is no other global power capable of replacing America in the region, let alone ordering President Trump around.
But the two-week cease-fire leaves the Islamic Republic in place and still in command of the future of the Strait of Hormuz, with Iran’s nuclear stockpile and ballistic missile program unresolved. After Mr. Trump’s declaration of victory, however hollow, it is difficult to imagine a resumption of full-scale war.
For the rest of the world, the war “is starting to look like a military defeat, more serious than Iraq or Afghanistan,” said Bruno Maçães, former secretary of state for European affairs for Portugal.
“The myth of America as all-powerful is important,” he added, “and it’s the basic requirement of a global hegemon to keep the oil flowing, to open up the strait and keep it open. This belief in an all-powerful America that can solve anything is disappearing.”
Keeping sea lanes open for American goods and global trade is one of the few permanent interests the United States has in the Middle East, as well as in Asia.
The war in Iran shut down the strait. Now, the Iranian military is still in control of the passageway and is likely to demand large tolls. “The strategic rationale for the American military presence in the region has taken a huge hit,” said Stephen Wertheim, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment in Washington.
The Suez analogy works, Mr. Wertheim said, in that the war in Iran demonstrated “in a single incident the danger of American misgovernance and poor judgment.”
The war itself and its uncertain outcome, he said, “just accelerates an existing worry shared by countries around the world about what America’s declining quality of governance means for what they can expect from the United States.”
America’s allies may be unhappy, perplexed and even angry about Trump administration policies, but many of them, especially those in the Persian Gulf and Asia suffering the impact of energy shortages and restrictions, have few other options for security partners.
But the war and cease-fire deal have diminished American influence and will affect how the allies of the United States view its reliability, said Charles A. Kupchan, a political scientist and director of European studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
The war against Iran was not begun in consultation with allies. And it came after a series of events that have confounded them. Mr. Trump’s tariff wars were an unpleasant shock, but his threat to take Greenland by force if necessary from Denmark, a European and NATO ally, is seen as an inflection point about American predation, unreliability and contempt for traditional friends.
“The Iran war and its economic impact are piling on and reinforce this sense that the U.S. right now has become unpredictable and undependable,” Mr. Kupchan said.
International relations and alliances work on trust. But as Francis Fukuyama of Stanford University wrote on Tuesday, “There has never been a time when the United States was more distrusted, by both traditional friends and by rivals, as at the present.”
A successful dealmaker, he said, needs to generate a minimal amount of trust that he will uphold his end of the bargain. “But reciprocity is a virtue that Trump has never understood or practiced,” he said.
The war had challenged Washington’s argument that its global primacy was vital to the safety of international trade and the world order. This has been the main justification for the many American bases around the world, and especially in the Middle East.
But the war has shown the United States instead acting as a force of disorder and disruption.
“By engaging in a war of choice in a critical region for global trade and utterly ignoring the probable consequences for the economies of its closest allies, the Trump administration has destroyed the legitimacy of American power,” asserted Anatol Lieven of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
The impact of a diminished United States is strongest in Europe, which has relied on NATO and the American security guarantee implicit in membership, including the U.S. nuclear umbrella. But Europeans drew a distinction between faith in America and faith in Mr. Trump. The former remains because it is vital for European security.
Still, Mr. Trump’s policies are inevitably producing a response that will outlast him. The rest of the world is trying to organize itself and derisk from an America that treats its allies as enemies and its traditional enemies, like Russia and China, as friends.
Asked if American hegemony has been diminished, the foreign minister of Poland, Radoslaw Sikorski, said, “We hope not, but we fear it might be.”
NATO has taken a hit from Mr. Trump’s overall policies. He continually calls it “a paper tiger,” despite successfully pushing its members to spend considerably more money on the military. During the war in Iran, he lashed out at the Europeans for not acting to open the strait even though the more powerful U.S. Navy was unable to do so.
Allied resistance to his desires rankles him the most. “It all began with, you want to know the truth, Greenland,” Mr. Trump told reporters on Monday. “They don’t want to give it to us, and I said, ‘Bye-bye.’”
The cumulative impact on NATO is significant, said Rajan Menon, professor emeritus of political science at City University of New York. In the long run, China looks to be the bigger winner.
“While we look crazed and talk about bombing a country back to the stone age, China looks like a peacemaker and agent of stability,” he said. All the while, Beijing got a chance to watch how the U.S. Navy operates.
“China is looking on with a great deal of glee, and when Trump goes there” for a summit meeting now scheduled for mid-May, “he will be much diminished.”
China, which gets so much of its oil through the Strait of Hormuz, pushed Iran to agree to the cease-fire, and it is expected to participate in keeping the strait open and guaranteeing safe passage for others.
Much depends on how the war ends, cautioned Mr. Kupchan of the Council on Foreign Relations.
If the cease-fire leads to a deal that imposes significant constraints on Iran’s nuclear program and its ability to cause trouble, he said, that would be much better in the longer run than a frozen conflict or one that “just burns on month after month,” with all the accompanying impact on the energy market and American allies.
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Steven Erlanger is the chief diplomatic correspondent in Europe and is based in Berlin. He has reported from over 120 countries, including Thailand, France, Israel, Germany and the former Soviet Union.