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Aspiring to Regional Domination, Iran Is Ready to Escalate over Hormuz
(Wall Street Journal) Yaroslav Trofimov - For the Iranian regime, keeping a chokehold over the Strait of Hormuz has turned out to be more important than the tens of billions of dollars in sanctions relief from the Trump administration. Iranian officials believe the country has finally emerged as a regional hegemon and is seeking to cement its new status by securing permanent arrangements to control the vital waterway - and dominating the Persian Gulf economies along with it. "This is the only way: recognize the new Iranian order in the Strait of Hormuz," warned Ebrahim Azizi, the head of the Iranian parliament's national security commission. "The Strait of Hormuz will only open with 'Iranian arrangements,' not American threats," added the parliament's speaker and the lead negotiator with the U.S., Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf. This attitude heralds a rocky future, with continuing uncertainty for global energy markets and a Damoclean Sword of renewed strikes hanging over the Gulf monarchies. "The Islamic Republic will become even more of a gangster regime. Its takeaway from the war is that concessions are won through coercion - by attacking its neighbors, threatening the Strait of Hormuz, and driving up the price of oil," said Karim Sadjadpour, Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The Iranian regime views the oil-rich Gulf monarchies as belonging to its own natural sphere of influence - a sphere denied to it by America ever since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Tehran's drive to institutionalize Iranian control over the Strait of Hormuz reflects its ambition to establish a new Pax Iranica in the Middle East. Iran's perception of itself as a new regional hegemon is delusional given how much its military has been degraded, how much its network of proxy forces in the Middle East has been weakened, and how much its economy has been suffocated in recent months, said Salman Al-Ansari, a Saudi geopolitical analyst. "All it has left is bullying, piracy, noise and the ability to act as a spoiler. These are not the qualities of a hegemon, but of a thug." For now, the Iranians have limited themselves to largely ineffective attacks on American military facilities in Bahrain, Kuwait and Jordan. "Fundamentally, the Iranians don't believe that Trump wants to go back to war, so they are going to just push and push. They are really thinking that he is not going to wallop them at all," said Marc Polymeropoulos, a former senior CIA official.