Trump’s Gulf allies may be left to face Iran alone as US looks for an exit

By Matthew Chance, CNN

Doha (CNN) — Even as President Donald Trump took to the White House podium to tout the military successes of his war on Wednesday night, Iranian drones and missiles rained down on a region bearing the brunt of the Islamic Republic’s stubborn retaliation.

The United Arab Emirates – its image as a glamorous safe haven already dented by a month-long barrage of nearly five hundred Iranian missiles and more than two thousand attack drones – was once again in Tehran’s firing line.

Just minutes before Trump highlighted the “swift, overwhelming” victories that he plausibly claims have degraded Iranian military capabilities, defense officials in the Gulf country reported their air defense systems were again fighting off multiple missiles and drone threats.

Clearly, despite more than a month of intensive pounding by US and Israeli strikes, Iran’s battered regime can still effectively lash out at both Israel – which has faced waves of Iranian attacks – and its Gulf Arab neighbors.

Nor was there much reassurance for the energy-rich Gulf region, nursing losses of hundreds of millions of dollars a day in blocked oil and gas exports, in Trump’s insistence that his “core strategic objectives” were “nearing completion” and that the Iran war could end within the next two or three weeks.

That vision of the war’s end, it is slowly dawning on Gulf states and the rest of the world, is likely to leave a belligerent Iranian regime, with ballistic missile and drone capabilities, as well as nuclear potential, that would continue to threaten, if not target, the region’s vulnerable energy infrastructure.

Trump’s call for other nations to “take the lead” in securing the narrow Strait of Hormuz – that essential energy shipping lane Iran has effectively blockaded since the start of US and Israeli strikes at the end of February – is a tacit admission that Tehran would also be left in control of that waterway once the US war is over.

Such a scenario would represent a huge strategic win for the Islamic Republic, and a potentially lucrative one.

Already, the Iranian regime – which Trump insists is “less radical and much more reasonable” than previously – has approved controversial plans to regulate and impose tolls on selected shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.

If the plans are implemented, it would reinforce Tehran’s control and open a vast and much-needed revenue stream for the Islamic Republic, of as much as a few million dollars per tanker, that Iran did not enjoy before the US and Israeli war was launched.

Across the Gulf Arab states, many of which cautioned Washington about the consequences of waging war on Iran, there are differing views on how the US and Israeli campaign should now proceed.

Officials in long-standing Iranian regional rival Saudi Arabia have been pressing for Iranian missile and drone capabilities to be degraded as much as possible before a US exit, to remove any future Iranian threat. Meanwhile, the United Arab Emirates believes it would be “difficult” for the region to continue to live with an Iranian missile and drone program, an official told CNN earlier.

Meanwhile, the wealthy monarchy of Qatar, which sits on some of the world’s biggest natural gas reserves and maintains a vast and fragile infrastructure to extract it, has taken a much more conciliatory position, calling for immediate de-escalation and a quick return to business.

Neither side on that debate between US Gulf allies looks like it will now get what it wants.

In his White House address, Trump stated that the bombing of Iran will continue for now, to further degrade its military. But it is hard to imagine how another few weeks of strikes can entirely deprive a resilient Islamic Republic of its missile and drone stocks or production capability.

Equally, the extension of the Iran war by weeks, which Trump insists could “bomb them back to the Stone Age,” keeps the threat of escalation and damaging retaliation by Iran on its Gulf neighbors looming over the region.

Meanwhile, faced with growing US public disapproval and pressure from anxious financial markets, a defensive Trump with no clear exit strategy appears to be looking for a face-saving way out of his Iranian adventure, even if that means leaving behind a regional mess for others to try and clean up.

The-CNN-Wire
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