‘Ceasefire over’: Trump’s Iran predicament shows the twilight of American hegemony in West Asia

There is a cinematic quality to Donald Trump’s pressers. Not really surprising, considering he was a reality TV star and even appeared briefly in a Hollywood flick but even so, the air of contrived finality and theatrical flourish with which he answers reporters’ questions reminds one of his TV shows.

“You are fired”, was his signature boardroom catchphrase on The Apprentice, where he eliminated contestants each week. “It’s over”, said Trump in a similar vein in Ankara on Wednesday while talking about the memorandum of understanding between the United States and Iran, following the worst exchange of fire between the two sides since the interim agreement.

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On Tuesday, the US CENTCOM said it had launched “powerful” strikes in response to Iranian attacks on three oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, hitting more than 80 targets including air defence systems, coastal radar and fast boats, reported BBC.

The US ramped up the attacks Wednesday following Trump’s comments earlier in the day at Ankara on the sidelines of the NATO Summit, where he said: “we hit them very hard last night… Probably hit them hard again tonight.”

The US military followed through. Western media reports, including Iranian State TV, indicated the launch of a new round of American air strikes in parts of the country’s south, including the port cities of Sirik and Bandar Abbas near the Strait of Hormuz. Shortly afterwards, Trump said in a post on Truth Social: “This is in retribution for yesterday’s bombing of ships by Iran. If it happens again, it will get much worse!”

Iran has promised immediate retribution, and while it targeted US military bases in Bahrain and Kuwait on Tuesday, at the time of writing its response has not yet been reported. You can bet your bottom rupee that this latest round of attacks won’t go unanswered. America’s allies in the Gulf are on notice.

It’s supreme folly to assume that a bombing campaign that hasn’t worked for more than 100 days will magically work after a brief pause. Trump is evidently trying to blast his way out of the mess he has created, ignoring international laws and relying solely on unilateralism and massive firepower to unlock a geopolitical puzzle that has eluded his more illustrious predecessors. Mindless exercise of firepower, however, is a sign of weakness, not strength.

Try as he might sound menacing with all the theatrics at his command, Trump’s predicament and helplessness are all too clear. He has led the US to a massive strategic defeat and is now unable to process the magnitude of his loss. His vituperative rants are directly proportional to the frustration underneath.

By threatening to strike Iran “hard” in response to recent maritime incidents, Trump is relying on a familiar playbook of escalatory deterrence. This won’t be helpful, because Trump’s current difficulties are largely self-inflicted. The collapse of the moth-eaten ceasefire is the logical outcome of an ad-hoc approach that prioritises unilateral pressure over a sustainable, long-term diplomatic framework. He should have given diplomacy the chance to do the heavy lifting. He didn’t. Trump’s policy options are severely constrained today because his own choices have narrowed the path to a peaceful resolution. By treating complex geopolitical conflicts as simple transactional standoffs that can be managed through intermittent military operations or rhetorical bombast, the president has led his country into an escalation trap without a viable exit strategy. He can’t admit defeat, and a ‘win’ over Iran is out of reach.

The latest round of hostilities prove that the interim US-Iran agreement was never a true settlement but a tactical pause, stitched up by exhausted sides and an American president impatient for an off-ramp. It was designed merely to suspend the friction rather than resolve the core structural disagreements that drove the underlying conflict.

The June memorandum, presented as a “diplomatic breakthrough”, committed both sides to a 60-day halt in hostilities while a broader agreement was negotiated. But the deal merely deferred the intractable sticking points, for instance, the nuclear enrichment, Iran’s ballistic missile program and who controls the waterway through which roughly a fifth of the world’s crude passes.

The agreement was so ambiguous that Tehran read it as a vanquished US side recognising its right to manage traffic through the strait to designate shipping routes. Washington read the same clauses as a restoration of free navigation, or in other words, the obscurity built into the deal allowed both sides to pursue their respective aims. Predictably, the ceasefire has collapsed after faltering continuously since late June.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard says the three tankers it struck this week had ignored the designated route Tehran has prescribed through the Strait of Hormuz. The US was attempting to increase tanker traffic through Oman’s side of Hormuz, reportedly asking the ships to turn off their transponders. Iran would have none of it. They hit some of those tankers and made a return to pre-war status quo almost impossible.

“There is no other way: recognise the new Iranian regime in the Strait of Hormuz,” Ebrahim Azizi, a senior member of the Iranian parliament who is also the head of parliament’s national security committee, said.

What this means is that the Islamic Republic of Iran is now acting as the traffic guard of one of the world’s most important energy chokepoints. For this powerful instrument, the US, for all its military firepower, has no effective counter.

American forces may strike radar stations, drone depots and naval assets. They have hit more than 80 targets, and then some, without altering the underlying arithmetic. The US Navy cannot escort every tanker through a 21-mile-wide channel for an indefinite period of time.

Military power cannot lower insurance premiums, compel shipowners to sail, or restore confidence in a contested waterway. As Israeli newspaper The Jerusalem Post points out in a report, “Iran has expanded the range and accuracy of drones and missiles. This means that it can launch drones from up to 2,000 km away and strike ships. This gives Iran a huge land area to strike the Strait. It means that any attempt to suppress the drone and missile threat is likely impossible.”

Each Iranian drone that finds a tanker reinforces Tehran’s claim to be the strait’s gatekeeper. The oil market, meanwhile, is translating Iran’s leverage more efficiently than any missile: Brent crude rose past $78 a barrel within hours of Trump’s remarks.

Evidently, Trump, a real estate magnet, cannot process a simple fact. Iran can absorb more economic pain than the global economy can because it is driven by ideological zeal. A materially weaker power that sits astride a chokepoint holds a form of leverage that the stronger power’s arsenal cannot neutralise. Trump is frothing at the mouth over the latest round of hostilities, calling the Iranian leadership “scum”.

“They’re scum. They’re sick people. They’re led by sick people, and they’re vicious, violent people,” a visibly frustrated Trump said earlier Wednesday. “Far as I’m concerned, it’s just a waste of time dealing with them. They’re liars… there’s something wrong with them. They’re cuckoo.”

This is the very profile of an unsettled leader leading an empire in decline — aggressive in appearance and constrained in practice. The US retains a military without peer. Its air force is capable of striking more than 80 Iranian targets in a night. What it lacks is the capacity to translate that force into compliance.

The current impasse, and Trump’s threats of even more kinetic action masks an internal fragility. The US has demolished Iranian naval forces, degraded Tehran’s military capabilities and yet it cannot render military actions into political outcomes.

As professor Stephen M Walt writes in Foreign Policy, “Those dazzled by the technological wizardry of an F-35 or the ability of the US, Israel, and a few others to conduct complicated combined arms operations have failed to recognize that warfare has been slowly shifting in favor of local defenders, even when facing seemingly superior foes. The US had command of the air, the ability to survey complex battle spaces in real time, and overwhelming superiority in firepower in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and it still lost.”

Washington can and has disrupted Iranian logistics and infrastructure, but it is in no position to compel Tehran to alter its strategic objectives, nor can it build an international coalition to underwrite its regional objectives. At least Trump is in no position to do so.

The resilience of the Iranian state under sustained American pressure, however, points to a fundamental reordering of the regional geopolitical architecture. Iran’s emergence as a “major world power”, as professor Robert A. Pape suggests in The New York Times, is the clearest signal that the era of unipolar American hegemony in the region is drawing to a close. For nearly three decades following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US operated as the undisputed arbiter of West Asian security, establishing red lines, enforcing power politics, and maintaining an expansive network of military bases designed to contain any revisionist force.

This reality is now decisively dismantled. Despite facing the most comprehensive sanctions regime in modern history, Iran has developed an integrated domest defence industry, specialised in asymmetric technologies such as cheap drones and ballistic missile systems, and now has de facto control over the Strait of Hormuz. This resilience demonstrates that Washington no longer possesses the leverage required to isolate a major regional actor.

The eruption of the crisis and its trajectory demonstrate that coercive strategies and military dominance are no longer synonymous with hegemonic dominance. By failing to complement its military pressure with an honest diplomatic effort, by resorting to bluffing, by being abusive and renouncing basic norms of diplomacy, Trump and his bumbling administration have achieved neither security for global commerce nor stability for its regional treaty allies.

The ongoing volatility in the Strait of Hormuz is the logical consequence of a policy of self-delusion and a vivid illustration of the limits of American power.

(Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)