“America’s impatience in this war has brought the US into the conflict without coherent policy, without clear strategy, and without even trying to create a coalition to support the operation,” Dr. Lynette Nusbacher, a military historian and former head of the Strategic Horizons Unit in the UK Cabinet Office, told The Jerusalem Post on Wednesday.
Nusbacher spoke with the Post after Axios reported that US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told foreign counterparts in recent days that "for the time being" the US was not expected to continue striking Iran, instead focusing on sanctions and economic pressure.
"The Iranian economy is in free fall, and the regime's military has been decimated," State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott told Axios, "and we are cutting off every financial lifeline the regime has remaining." Iran’s currency plummeted earlier this week in response to Washington’s Operation Economic Outcast, hitting a record-low open-market rate of 2.
02 million rials to the dollar. Numerous reports, despite the denial of Iran’s Central Bank Governor Abdolnasser Hemmati, have claimed Iran is in a state of severe or even hyperinflation. Despite the apparent success of the US’s blockade and sanctions campaign, Iranian officials have repeatedly expressed that they would not falter in their demand to maintain control over the vital Strait of Hormuz.
The Iranian Parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Committee even advanced plans to charge fees to vessels crossing the waterway earlier this week. Assessment: Financial pressure not leading to compromise The Institute for the Study of War has repeatedly assessed that financial pressure was not convincing Iranian officials to compromise.
With that assessment in mind, Nusbacher was asked whether the shift from kinetic action to financial pressure was part of a legitimate strategy or a way for the United States to quietly phase itself out of the war. Nusbacher was blunt in her assessment that Washington was “desperate” to leave the “quagmire,” a desperation she claimed the Islamic regime was very much aware of.
The war has been largely a battle of patience, of whether the world’s economy could tolerate the interruption of 20% of its oil supply longer than the Islamic Republic could tolerate a blockade and airstrikes, she explained. Given that the Islamic regime is no stranger to war, she said it was obvious Tehran would persevere through the latest conflict, where Washington’s strategic aims and mechanisms were not fully conceived from the outset.
“The Iranian regime was baptized in blood during the Iran-Iraq War, and from an Iranian point of view the desultory American missile attacks of the past few months have been a pale shadow,” she said. “This is why America is not winning its war against Iran.
” According to the National Library of Medicine’s National Center for Biotechnology Information, between 188,015 and 217,489 Iranians were killed during the Iran-Iraq War, around 70 people. The brutal eight-year war, starting only a year after the Islamic Revolution, has meant that short spouts of conflict with the US are bearable for the regime and its supporters, Nusbacher suggested.
“The US has lavishly expended ordnance against Iran, and based on the lack of strategic aims achieved, they’ve been spraying it all up against a wall. Now that American stocks of missiles are so depleted, the White House has gone back to the drawing board,” she continued.
Though Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell told the Wall Street Journal last Wednesday that reports of a munitions shortage were false, multiple reports from Reuters and the Washington Post have claimed that the war against Iran has burned through supplies, including interceptors.
Multiple sources told CNN earlier this month that the US military has exhausted nearly 80% of its THAAD missile inventory. Nusbacher said that the Trump administration had “finally figured out that the Iranians can’t be coerced without a significantly greater force package than the Americans are willing to send to the Gulf.
” Trump may give Obama nuclear agreement 'a try' Though former US president Barack Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran had been highly controversial, Nusbacher said that with the Kinetic failure, US President Donald Trump will “at last give it a try.
” Nusbacher added that, “if the National Security shop in the White House hadn’t been gutted and sidelined,” the Trump administration would have tried economic means to rein in the regime “without firing a shot” and could have won. Asserting that the financial warfare should have been Trump’s first move, not the airstrikes, Nusbacher suggested he was spurred ”to shoot first and negotiate later” by the knowledge that neither Russia nor China were interested in putting intense pressure on Iran and by the unfounded belief that he could “depose the Iranian regime with a couple of weeks of attack from the air.
” “As the US looks for a way out of its Iran quagmire, the Administration isn’t impatient: it’s desperate; and the Iranians can smell it,” she concluded. Professor Chuck Freilich, an expert on US Middle East policy, told the Post he also thought the shift to financial pressure was “very long overdue” and “should have preceded military action, [as] part of a phased approach.
” “It is another example of Trump's utter lack of strategy. Having failed militarily and diplomatically and with the upcoming midterms weighing heavily, he finally realized that this was a highly effective mechanism at his disposal,” Freilich said, though he admitted Iranians have “learned to live with sanctions” and such a move would only increase pressure on the regime, not solve the problem entirely.
“The pressure now is becoming very heavy and at some point it may bring the people back out into the streets,” he said. If nothing else, Freilich said that the financial strategy “buys time” for Trump, who will eventually have to face the decision of “whether to leave it just with sanctions and failure or to resume military action” to achieve the US’s objectives.