America’s Great SatanNovember/December 2019 57A COUNTRY OR A CAUSE?
In balance-of-power terms, Washington’s
obsession with Tehran is absurd. Iran’s
population is one-fourth the size o¡ the
United States’, and its economy is barely
two percent as large. The United States
and its closest allies in the Middle East—
Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab
Emirates—together spend at least $750
billion annually on their armed forces,
about 50 times as much as what Iran
spends. Both Israel and the United States
can produce state-of-the-art weapons, as
well as reconnaissance, surveillance, and
battle-management technologies. Iran
cannot. Its industrial base is aged. Its air
force and navy ̄eld outdated weapons
systems. It possesses ballistic and cruise
missiles and long-range drones that
could strike Israel or the Gul¡ states, but
it cannot use them without inviting
devastating retaliation (although,
admittedly, it appears to have run thisrisk with its September attacks on Saudi
Aramco facilities).
Despite Iran’s paltry conventional
capabilities, U.S. policymakers—who
have long sought to prevent any regional
state from exercising hegemony in the
Persian Gulf—have seen Iran as a threat
for two interlocking reasons. The ̄rst
is geography: Iran has a long shoreline
on the Persian Gulf, through which
about one- ̄fth o¡ the world’s oil ¥ows.
In theory, it could attempt to block the
¥ow o¡ oil by closing the Strait o¡
Hormuz, with potentially disastrous
eects on the global economy. Yet practi-
cally speaking, this threat is remote. At no
time in the last 40 years has Iran man-
aged to close the strait, and even i¡ it did,
Iraq, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United
Arab Emirates could all use or develop
alternative export routes. Iran could not.
The second cause for U.S. concern is
Iran’s nuclear program. I ́ Iran producedDon’t believe the hype: Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps troops, July 2018SIPA
USA
/ AP