No Dust, No Dollars: The Exhausting Leveraged Buyout Of Iran’s Resistance Empire
And the role of Arab strategic patience in a full-spectrum deal
As I write these words, a peace deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz may or may not happen, but is reportedly in some quantum state of happening very soon.
Last week also saw the IRGC message cycle repeat. Iranian demands were leaked to the world as if they were terms the Americans had already agreed to observe. A Hormuz Strait authority loomed large. These rumors were inevitably quashed by the American side, which nevertheless maintained that a deal was close.
Very, very close.
Then a few things exploded.
Two IRGC boats were observed attempting to mine the Strait of Hormuz and got rudely interrupted. US Navy and Air Force planes struck key IRGC targets around Bandar Abbas. Brig. Gen. Ali Azmaei, commander of the IRGC Navy and a hardline Hormuz-hostage taker, was reportedly targeted and killed in his vehicle.
US forces disabled the Gambia-flagged bulk carrier M/V Lian Star over the weekend. After 20 warnings, an aircraft fired a Hellfire missile that disabled the ship, according to CENTCOM. The vessel was reportedly left adrift with no casualties. By that point, the US Navy had already prevented over 100 vessels from passage through the strait.
Yesterday, CENTCOM disabled an unladen oil tanker, the Botswana-flagged M/T Lexie, with a Hellfire missile to the engine room. Iran is desperate to get empty oil tankers into its ports to take on crude oil.
Over the weekend, CENTCOM reported a “measured and deliberate” series of air strikes “eliminating Iranian air defenses, a ground control station, and two one-way attack drones that posed clear threats to ships transiting regional waters” in response to the shootdown of an MQ-1 drone.
This week Iran launched salvoes of ballistic missiles and drones targeting American bases and forces in Kuwait. Terminal 1 at Kuwait International Airport was hit, causing fires, 63 injuries, and one death. Flights were suspended. Kuwait took the brunt of the damage, as US and other allied defenses apparently destroyed the rest of the incoming weapons. CENTCOM is calling these salvoes “attempted attacks”.
Spiritual resistance has material limits
Meanwhile, Israeli forces currently occupy parts of Lebanon that Hezbollah used to launch attacks against Israel. The IDF is clearing tunnels and removing infrastructure that Hezbollah built up right under the noses of UNIFIL, the peacekeeping force that has failed to demilitarize southern Lebanon since the 1970s.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps does not want to give up Lebanon. Masoud Pezeshkian, the pathetic civilian president of Iran, denies reports that he wants to give up and resign because the IRGC keeps undercutting his negotiating authority.
Iran cannot win the war in its current state. Unable to countenance defeat, the IRGC wants to continue an economic contest that Arabs must inevitably win because they hold all the economic leverage. To avoid shame, the fantasy hardliners left in the regime are still taking losses and performing wins.
The salvoes that Iran has fired at Arab neighbors since Monday morning have not overwhelmed their Arab neighbors, or shattered Arab unity. OPEC membership notwithstanding, all the Arab states from Iraq to Oman are cooperating in economic projects to circumvent the Strait of Hormuz. I wrote about this recently:
What Trump wants would topple the pillars of IRGC power in Iran. The IRGC needs uranium, and uranium enrichment, to justify its own existence. The IRGC needs the proxies in Lebanon and Yemen to justify its existence. The IRGC has piratical notions about the international waterway at their doorstep, and these ambitions justify their existence. The IRGC created the ‘resistance economy’ (read: shadow economy) of Iran to justify their own existence.
Removing these pillars of IRGC power would alter the regime of Iran. The flurries of missiles and drones are their acts of defiant, performative resistance to regime change. An airport has been shut down and civilians have been terrorized, but this is not enough damage to force Americans out of the region.
We were assured in recent weeks that Iran had restored their full capabilities to fire missiles and drones at their neighbors. If so, the IRGC is holding back. I am sure the IRGC would love everyone to believe they are just holding back. I suspect that the damage of Operation Epic Fury was greater than the IRGC wants the world to believe.
Some technical details
The IRGC Navy is different from the regular Iranian Navy, Artesh, which operated the larger vessels that are now spectacular wrecks. The IRGC Navy is composed of small craft, most of which are intact. This ‘mosquito fleet’ helped justify the existence of the IRGC. Destroying it in detail is eminently feasible, if tedious, work for the US Navy and Air Force.
CENTCOM has referred to the strikes on the radars, drone command and control stations, communications towers, and related facilities of Qeshm Island and Goruk as self-defense responses. CENTCOM also says they have helped dozens of vessels transit the strait in recent weeks, including a Greek supertanker. While this is far reduced from pre-war levels, it is a notable uptick.
Of course, CENTCOM are not calling this “escort duty”. That would in fact be the wrong term, because they are suppressing the IRGC boats rather than escorting the traffic. Most of this activity is conducted at radar range, so strikes on shore radars aim to blind the IRGC and achieve sensor dominance.
Talks reportedly continue, or not, depending on the source, while this purely defensive battle carries on. It is a strange posture from such a warlike Pentagon.
Conflict temperature management
Donald Trump differs from previous presidents in his unwillingness to put up with frozen conflicts. He differs from his vice president on this point of opinion. For that matter, second-term Trump differs from his own first presidential term in this dimension. He is ending frozen conflicts and reducing ‘gray zones’ where adversaries thrive. He is already moving on to Cuba. He is not giving up on Iran.
Frozen conflicts require huge bureaucracies of expertise, staffed with experts giving expert advice about how to keep conflicts frozen. Whenever conflicts heat up, these experts recommend a harder freeze. Gray zones are all different shades of gray, so we need experts to explain all the different shades.
Furthermore, all diplomacy is supposed to take place in the Persian rug store. Diplomatic experts tell us that we can only buy one rug at a time. We cannot buy the Lebanon carpet and the uranium carpet at the same time as the Hormuz carpet and the normalized economic relations carpet. Peace is supposed to be the end state of a process, diplomatic experts tell us. In the Middle East, a ‘peace process’ can last decades, all the way through several intifadas.
Rather than use American and allied power to leverage a general buyout of Iran’s regional insecurity architecture, the diplomatic experts have used the retail approach, for decades, through several intifadas, nicely buying one rug at a time from the nice man at the nice used carpet store in the bazaar in order to build up trust that can someday lead to getting the carpets with the uranium dust option.
If we are patient and generous we will eventually have a chance to buy the regional peace carpet from Iran, the experts in Middle East diplomacy say. Trump is not following those rules. His Arab allies are helping him force a leveraged buyout of the whole carpet bazaar.
The real test of the resulting peace, the quiet act of submission, is whether Iran respects the new rules, whatever they are. Even a performative submission to the Great Satan is too much for the IRGC to contemplate, however, for it would be a humiliation on top of their destruction.
Imagine Masoud Pezeshkian flying to Washington to sign a treaty with the Great Satan. I for one cannot imagine him flying home again, after that. Not as long as the IRGC remains in its present, largely intact state.
Dismantling the Iranian empire
Getting Iran to ‘yes’ requires one of three potential decisions from Donald Trump right now.
He can display strategic impatience, restart the war, risk the blowback, and take the domestic political hit.
He could accept a bad deal, for example one that leaves out the uranium carpet to get the Hormuz carpet.
Or he could just hold on until after the November midterm elections while economic pressure continues to crush the Islamic Republic, and then apply whatever force is needed.
This third option would require Trump to acknowledge that a deal is not simply days away, but weeks or months away, to signal that he is fine with a long delay. The IRGC must find this threat credible for it to work.
This option would require CENTCOM to sustain pressure, and Arab unity to continue. Trump would still take a domestic political hit, but the longer Iranian resistance continues, the more long-term economic damage the Islamic Republic will endure, limiting their future ambitions.
Not by coincidence, the IDF has made steady progress in their campaign to remove Hezbollah infrastructure from south Lebanon. An evacuation order for Tyre and its environs this week puts Iran’s proxy army under severe pressure. Iran’s fantasy hardliners in the IRGC are likely holding out because of Lebanon, but they seem to be losing what they physically built in Lebanon the hard way, anyway.
Negotiations are always a process, and negotiating with Iran is fraught with the contrarian internal political dynamics of the Islamic Republic. Rules can be remade on the ground, however. Getting Iran to ‘yes’ may ultimately be easier with Hezbollah reduced as a force. In the meantime, a quantum state of war and peace continues.
Process as punishment
The current negotiations are about the order and process of buying out the various carpets. Referring to enriched uranium, “No Dust, No Dollars” is the current position of the Pentagon. This one part of the larger leveraged buyout process is going to last a while, yet, in any case, because it is complex.
Trump wants to leave the Middle East behind without a near-nuclear Iran. Americans generally want America out of the Middle East, too. If Trump secures a peace deal with Iran that allows America to leave Gulf bases behind instead of rebuilding the damage that missiles and drones did to those facilities, Americans ought not to miss the loss of distressed properties.
Getting Iran to agree to new rules that satisfy the Great Satan will require time and pressure and further force. This new peace process will take as long as it takes, kill as many IRGC leadership as it takes, repel as many IRGC speedboats as it takes, and strike as many IRGC bases as it takes to coerce an agreement out of Tehran.
But it will not last for any number of intifadas, because the Arab world has no interest in uprisings anymore. Try as they might, the IRGC has failed to stimulate the responses they wanted from the Arab street or the Arab states.
Holding on until November, and then exerting new military pressure when the regime is already cooked and Hezbollah is physically dismantled, will seem the lowest-risk option with the highest minimal payoff, to Trump. It comes with risks, such as global fertilizer distribution, that will have to be managed. But they are manageable.
The risks are far less manageable for Tehran. Whether or not Trump ever succeeds in coercing the IRGC to let their leaders say ‘yes’, the process will be their punishment.