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- Toby Jonesassociate professor of Middle East history at Rutgers University.
We speak with Middle East history professor Toby Jones about the ongoing crisis in the Strait of Hormuz, where overlapping blockades by Iran and the United States have disrupted shipping and the wider global economy since the start of the war in late February. Jones says this latest conflict is part of a decadeslong project by the United States to exert imperial control over the oil-rich region, but that it’s now in danger of a strategic loss signaling a deeper imperial decline.
“Through an unprovoked assault on Iran, Trump has accelerated, or at least clarified, the real limits of American imperial power,” says Jones. “He’s definitely put the United States in a much more vulnerable and weakened position globally as a result of this war.”
Transcript
AMY GOODMAN: President Trump has warned that Iran will be “blown off the face of the earth” if U.S. warships are targeted in the Strait of Hormuz. Trump’s renewed threat to destroy Iran came as the Pentagon rebranded its war from “Operation Epic Fury” to “Project Freedom,” turning its focus to reopening the Strait of Hormuz to commercial traffic amidst the widening energy crisis.
On Monday, Iranian state media said the U.S. had fired on small cargo boats carrying goods and passengers, killing five civilians. U.S. Central Command confirmed it attacked several boats, but insisted they were threatening commercial vessels.
Separately, the United Arab Emirates said it had come under attack from drones and missiles that caused a fire at an oil facility at the port of Fujairah. The port is outside the Strait of Hormuz and is one of few export routes that doesn’t require transiting through the strait. Three Indian nationals were injured in the attack. Iran claimed it was not responsible.
The Iranian foreign minister in a social media post warned the U.S. against being dragged back into a quagmire, and dismissed Project Freedom as, quote, “Project Deadlock.”
To discuss all this and more, we’re joined by Toby Jones, associate professor of Middle East history at Rutgers University, writes frequently on oil, war and the Middle East, and is author of Desert Kingdom: How Oil and Water Forged Modern Saudi Arabia, also wrote Running Dry: Essays on Energy, Water, and Environmental Crisis.
We welcome you, Professor Jones, to Democracy Now! If you can talk about, well, what some are calling this “Project Stalemate,” with President Trump once again threatening to blow up Iran, and, overall, your assessment of what’s happening right now?
TOBY JONES: Well, we’re seeing two things. Well, first of all, thank you for having me back on. We’re seeing two things in the region. One is an intensification or an escalation of the saber-rattling that’s become characteristic of Trump’s disposition and sort of approach to tensions in the Gulf, a crisis that he created, along with Israel, in invading — in launching an attack on Iran in February. He can’t control the narrative, and so he escalates. He also can’t control what’s happening on the waters of the Gulf. It’s become clear the limits of American naval power, its military capacity to dictate terms in the Gulf are significantly constrained. Iran, through sort of asymmetric tactics, a minimalist approach to the sort of its own response to threats in the region, has basically handcuffed the United States’s ability to dictate terms.
What now sort of circulates over the Gulf is an environment of uncertainty and fear. Nobody trusts that the United States can stop Iran from carrying out attacks, if they wish to, on commercial shipping. Nobody trusts that Iran won’t, in fact, carry out attacks on cargo or other merchant shipping. And so the region is in the grip of paralysis. Limited American imperial power, an aggressive, or at least a marginally capable, Iranian military force has revealed both the limits of American capacity and has frozen the region in crisis.
I will say one other thing, though, before we sort of carry on the conversation. We should be wary about any claims about what’s happening in the Gulf and what’s not happening in the Gulf, particularly at the strait. We know that ships aren’t moving, in a much diminished capacity. Neither oil or other merchant shipping seems to be moving, according to our normal registers of observation, the normal tools that we use to look. But there is some transit happening. The thing that’s important to keep in mind as we go forward, in trying to make sense of all of this, is how little we actually know. There is an information blackout. Data is largely unavailable. This is true within the states in the region, and it’s largely true on the waters of the Gulf itself. There’s still so much that we don’t know about what’s actually happening, that to some extent, to a large extent, we’re beholden to the extreme rhetoric coming from all sides.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Professor Jones, I wanted to ask you — in less than 10 days, on May 14th, Trump will be traveling to China for a summit with President Xi Jinping. Trump already postponed his trip once because of the war. How do you think his failure to negotiate an end to the conflict will affect those talks in Beijing?
TOBY JONES: Well, it’s hard to know what Trump’s sort of calculation of all of this is or where he sees China fitting in. I think that it’s largely believed that both China and Russia, you know, ostensibly two rivals to American global hegemony, are supporting Iran, either through financial means or through oil consumption or through other forms of material and financial support. It’s unclear whether Trump will challenge China’s role in the region.
Once again, you know, what’s important to take away here, or part of what’s important to take away here, is that through an unprovoked assault on Iran, Trump has accelerated, or at least clarified, the real limits of American imperial power. He has hastened Americans’ hegemonic decline, at least in the Gulf. And as you’ve asked, Juan, I think this spirals out in how Trump and the Americans see the Gulf as a centerpiece of its global power.
Whether China is actively engaged in supporting or propping up Iran, or whether it’s quietly engaged, the reality is Iran has — or, that China has emerged as a significant rival to the United States in the region. That’s not necessarily a new thing, but it’s more clear than ever. And whether Trump is in a capacity to either address that or do anything about it is not only unclear, it seems unlikely to me. Trump has put the United States — I’m no — I’m not one to celebrate American empire, but he’s definitely put the United States in a much more vulnerable and weakened position globally as a result of this war.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And you mentioned this historic trend of the United States, its alignment with Gulf countries and the Middle East, as key to U.S. strategy of domination around the world. How has this war, regardless of how it ends, affected that?
TOBY JONES: Well, think of the United States as having engaged in a 50-year project to secure its primacy in the Gulf. It succeeded the British Empire in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It engaged in the Iran-Iraq War in the middle of the 1980s, which was the first time that it projected its naval military power in the region, in an attempt to escort Kuwaiti and other Arab oil shipping in and out of the Strait of Hormuz. And ever since then, we should understand Desert Storm, the sanctions era of the 1990s, the 2003 invasion of Iraq is partly a response to American attempts to secure its primacy in the region. And it’s done so not only by projecting its power, but also by maintaining relationships with awful authoritarian regimes in the region — the Saudis, the Emiratis, the Kuwaitis, the Bahrainis and others.
What this war has done is it’s called into question the efficacy of that system and that arrangement, and it has created the material conditions in the region, where Iran, through — again, through asymmetric and minimalistic measures, has been able to undermine the primacy, both in real terms and in symbolic ways, of American power. I think, to put it simply, if the United States has been engaged in a 50-year project, a 50-year imperial project, to protect its interests in the region and its allies in the region, which all circulate around oil, this war has rapidly undone the conditions that made that possible in the first place.
AMY GOODMAN: And if you can talk about the particular Gulf countries and their relationship with the United States right now, and is it shifting? You wrote the book Desert Kingdom: How Oil and Water Forged Modern Saudi Arabia. If you could talk about Saudi Arabia? I mean, you have Jared Kushner, the Trump son-in-law, and Steve Witkoff, two developers who are the so-called peace envoys. Jared Kushner got, what, something like $2 billion from the Saudi sovereign fund, very close to MBS, the crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. And then you have the United Arab Emirates, that just pulled out of OPEC and says today that it was hit by a drone, though Iran says this was not their drone, and is now suffering from yet another fire.
TOBY JONES: Yeah, these are — these are steadfast allies of the United States. What’s interesting over the last two-and-a-half decades is that that also means they’re steadfast allies of Israel. So we should understand the Israelis, the Saudis, the Emiratis and the Americans, in particular, as being in full alignment on their approach to the regional dynamic. That largely means they’re in lockstep in confronting and in narrating a particular framework of thinking about Iran as their principal rival in the region. This is one of the products of the 2003 invasion and the Iraq War.
That doesn’t mean that there isn’t rivalry within the region or that there aren’t challenges to how stable this arrangement is. Saudi Arabia, for example, was on the precipice of normalization with Israel prior to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, which compelled a recalculation on their part. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, while both aligning with Israel and the United States, have their own regional rivalry that’s taking shape. As you mentioned, the UAE recently withdrew, or as of this month has withdrawn, from OPEC. That’s largely a reflection of an internal power struggle between Saudi Arabia and UAE over control of global energy markets, and also a reflection of the kind of shifting economic capacities in both countries. There are rivals in South Yemen. There are rivals in Sudan, where they compete, various competing factions militarily and politically. So, we see a regional order that’s more or less in alignment, where Iran stands as the principal problem, but we see fissures within that regional order.
What that means for American sort of rent seekers, like Jared Kushner and those close to the Trump administration, is that, in some ways, that relationship is transactional. How do the Saudis fund or support Kushner in his hedge funds or his real estate projects, how might they benefit economically in the region, is a central concern of some players within the Trump and the Saudi regimes. But beyond that, there are also these political, economic and imperial alignments that act in sort of parallel with those. Sometimes they’re in support of one another, and at other times they’re in tension with one another. But I think that it doesn’t — what’s not called into question is the depth of the relationship between those places. And I’ll say this —
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Professor —
TOBY JONES: One thing that we’re not paying close enough attention — oh, sorry.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: No, Professor, I just wanted to ask you — we only have about a minute or so, but if you could briefly talk — you’ve written extensively on environmental crisis in the region. How has the war exacerbated the environmental crisis?
TOBY JONES: Well, again, there’s a lot of information that we don’t know about the region. We’ve seen some evidence from satellite imagery of oil spills in the Gulf as a result of various attacks at various points earlier in the war.
I think one thing we need to do and keep in mind constantly, although we’ve been talking about Iran and the Gulf today, is that this is very much a multifront war that includes Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank. This is a war on Palestine, Lebanon and Iran. And here we see that the Israeli tactical approach to its territorial maximalism, and American — and in support of American empire, is a tactics of ruin, to destroy landscapes, to destroy communities, to evoke and commit environmental atrocity in order to make the region uninhabitable, or at least precarious, for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people. We saw this with strikes on oil facilities in Tehran in the early stages of the war, on other infrastructure facilities. Trump’s constant bombast threatening infrastructural and sort of targeting the conditions that preserve life, both environmentally and otherwise, are a core precept of the American-Israeli war. We will only reckon with this in the months and years that follow, however this concludes.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, we want to thank you for being with us, Professor Toby Jones, a Middle East history professor at Rutgers University in New Brunswick. And we’ll be back after a brief break.
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AMY GOODMAN: Malian musician Khaira Arby, “Nightingale of the North,” performing in Democracy Now!’s studio.