The Last Thing America Needs Is Yet Another Open-Ended War In The Middle East

U.S. Air Force Gen. Paul Selva, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a rare voice of sanity and realism, told reporters recently that buck-passing the world’s security burden onto America (and Britain, while we are at it) should be a thing of the past. Other great powers that are more interested in preserving their oil and trade routes should play a more active part in securing those routes, he said, with their own blood and treasure.

While freedom of navigation and trade in the global commons is the primary task of the U.S. Navy ever since the United States took superpower status from the Royal Navy post-1945, the situation is changing as unipolarity is coming to an end.

“We have maintained across the sea lanes of the world a position of defending freedom of navigation,” Selva said, but “that doesn’t mean it’s a US-only problem. If we take this on as a US-only responsibility, nations that benefit from that movement of oil through the Persian Gulf are bearing little or no responsibility for the economic benefit they gain from the movement of that oil.”

This should be obvious to anyone who follows geopolitics in the Gulf region, especially to the armchair commentators and politicians who are trying to portray this as a challenge Ronald Reagan faced in the 1980s. Then the Iran-Iraq war was ongoing, amid the threat of Soviets capitalizing on the chaos and choking Western energy routes. The simple reality is that this is not the 1980s.

As Selva added, “If you think back to the reflagging operation, the Tanker War as it was nicknamed, where we reflagged and escorted tankers so that they could flow in and out of the Strait of Hormuz, we got a substantial amount of our oil from the Persian Gulf…We are now in a position where the bulk of that oil goes to … countries in Asia, and none of those countries have shown any predilection to pressing Iran to stop what they are doing. What was true in the 1980s, is not true today. We are not wholly dependent on the movement of Saudi, Kuwaiti Qatari and Emirati oil in and out of the Gulf to sustain our economy.”