by Richard Schulman
The US and Saudi Arabia have given new meaning to military operations at the theater level — by running a re-enactment of France’s Maginot Line strategy that led to the fall of France in WWII. US and Saudi Arabian radar and missile defenses were pointed toward Houthi positions to the south. But instead of attacking through its Houthi proxies, Iran launched drones and perhaps cruise missiles from Iran in the north, badly damaging Saudi oil facilities.
The coverage limitations of the US’s THAAD and Patriot anti-missile batteries are now apparent. In the past few days, sales persons for Russia’s defense industries must be suffering writer’s cramp from taking orders for their competing and arguably superior S-400 system.
Founders Broadsheet may have erred in its recent article headlined “Missile defense for allies but not US.” Apparently not even US allies enjoy robust protection. US missile defenses, like Boeing’s prematurely certified 737 MAX, are now a certified national disgrace.
Hello, President Trump, Congress, and congressional Democrats! Are we going to have a crash, Sputnik-level mobilization to build a space-based missile defense system for ourselves and our allies, or just accept decline and a world dominated by an Orwellian Chinese-Russian-Iranian “Heartland” axis?
The incoherence of Trump administration Mideast policy
More immediately, the Trump administration needs to face up to the unreality of its Mideast strategy. If President Trump wasn’t prepared for the possibility of war with Iran, he had no business ripping up the Obama Iran deal, the JCPOA. Re-instating and enforcing a punishing economic boycott of an economy’s lifeline is an act of warfare just short of actual military hostilities. Lacking an economic warfare weapon, Iran’s military responses have been steadily escalating: attacks on Persian Gulf shipping, a US drone in international waters, now 5% of world energy supplies. The “next up” will be Iranian proxy attacks — say, by Hezbollah — that could make the murder of 241 US Marines and support personnel in 1983 Beirut seem modest by comparison.
President Trump doesn’t want to get involved in another Mideast war, and much of the US public apparently shares that perspective. Trump had his opportunity to warn off Iran by retaliating after Iran’s attack on an expensive US drone in international waters. Instead he blinked and fired his security adviser, John Bolton. As a consequence he is now facing a crisis that will likely finish off the US as a credible presence in the Mideast. Given that the president doesn’t want a military response, he now has no choice but to settle with the mullahs. This will be humiliating, however much he and his supporters seek to play it. But at least this will result in a consistent Mideast strategy: “We’re not getting involved, it’s your problem from now on, guys.”
Don’t ask us right now to spell out the ripples this will create with US alliances elsewhere in the world. For starters though, it’s clear in the wake of the administration’s Iran and North Korean fiascos that non-proliferation is dead and that Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Australia had better get to work on developing, or purchasing, their own unrestricted ballistic and nuclear weapons capabilities. They should also be lobbying the US to collaborate with it in crash development of that badly needed space-based missile defense system.
[Founders Broadsheet also has a modest presence on Facebook and Twitter.]
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