The strategic defeat of the United States in the Persian Gulf

“Geography is the chessboard on which the struggle for global primacy continues to be played.” — Zbigniew Brzezinski From Suez to Hormuz: History’s two biggest geopolitical debacles History offers few perfect parallels, but the Suez Crisis of 1956 and the United States’ defeat in the Strait of Hormuz form a near-perfect diptych of imperial overreach. In […]

“Geography is the chessboard on which the struggle for global primacy continues to be played.” — Zbigniew Brzezinski

From Suez to Hormuz: History’s two biggest geopolitical debacles

History offers few perfect parallels, but the Suez Crisis of 1956 and the United States’ defeat in the Strait of Hormuz form a near-perfect diptych of imperial overreach. In both cases, a dominant global power, clinging to a decaying world order, was humbled at a strategic maritime chokepoint—not by a superior military force, but by a smaller, resolute adversary and the immutable geography of power. If the trajectory holds, TACO Tuesday will be remembered as the moment the illusion of American omnipotence shattered, dragging down the petrodollar system and exposing the hollow foundations of a superpower.

In 1956, British Prime Minister Anthony Eden, haunted by the appeasement policies of the 1930s, saw Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser as another Mussolini and conspired with France and Israel to seize the Suez Canal. It was a colonial-era solution to a post-colonial problem—an attempt to enforce an older order that had already crumbled. By December 1956, British and French forces were forced to withdraw, not by Nasser’s army, but by the economic pressure of the United States. “Our closest ally pulled the plug,” historian Corelli Barnett noted. Suez was not a military defeat; it was a structural one. It laid bare the fundamental reality that Britain could no longer wage a major war against Washington’s will.

Today, the United States finds itself in an analogous position. Its war with Iran has become a quagmire centred on the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint through which roughly 20% of the world’s oil passes. After decades of threatening military action against Iran and following a massive joint US-Israeli war of aggression against Tehran, the U.S. has failed to defeat Iran. Despite decades of planning, the Pentagon’s assumption that it could clear the waterway within weeks has proven disastrously wrong. Iranian drones, mines, and asymmetric tactics have neutralised American naval supremacy, forcing a humiliating stalemate at best. The Pentagon’s predicament is hauntingly similar to Britain’s as it discovered that it was no longer able to wage a major war against Washington’s will.” Now, Washington finds itself unable to wage a major war against Tehran’s will. What a debacle.

The unravelling of the petrodollar

At the heart of American power lies the petrodollar system—an arrangement born in 1974 whereby Saudi Arabia agreed to price oil exclusively in dollars and invest its surpluses in U.S. Treasury securities in exchange for American security guarantees. This system “forced every nation on Earth to hold dollars just to buy oil,” providing the foundation for U.S. financial dominance and its “exorbitant privilege” of borrowing cheaply.

But the Strait of Hormuz closure has cracked this foundation. Deutsche Bank strategist Mallika Sachdeva warns that the conflict may be remembered as “a key catalyst for erosion in petrodollar dominance and the beginnings of the petroyuan.” Iran has already offered Europe a deal: guaranteed transit through the strait in exchange for payment in euros, not dollars. If Europe accepts, “the global power of the petrodollar will collapse for the first time since the 1970s.” Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia now sells four times as much oil to China as to the United States and has been experimenting with non-dollar payment infrastructures. The security-for-petrodollar bargain is unravelling because Washington has proven unable to protect the very Gulf states that underpin global energy trade.

Violence as strategy, coercion as leverage, hubris as statecraft

The core of this failure lies in America’s reliance on violence as a default strategy and coercion as its primary diplomatic lever. The United States has long approached global friction with a “crusader mentality,” where the possession of a trillion-dollar war machine makes intervention the automatic solution. The Department of War is now approximately forty times larger than the Department of State, transforming diplomacy into a mere rhetorical prelude to military action. In the current conflict, this strategy has failed spectacularly. Dumb mass is defeating cutting-edge quality. US warships would empty their interceptor cells and anti-missile magazines more rapidly and expensively than Iranian arsenals, while a single successful strike on a laden supertanker would force mercantile insurers to abandon the waterway entirely. The U.S. has sought to coerce Iran through sanctions and military threats, but as this geostrategic debacle demonstrates, coercion without credibility is merely noise.

The hubris behind this miscalculation is staggering. The Strait of Hormuz is not merely a naval challenge; it is a geographic fact. Iran commands a permanent and unyielding geographic advantage. Yet American strategic thinking, corrupted by decades of corruption and unchecked primacy, blithely assumed that technology could override topography. This is the same arrogance that led Eden to believe a secret colonial plot could restore British prestige. In both cases, the architects of policy were looking backwards, not forward, trapped by a decaying internal culture that confused projection of power with the power itself.

The strategic blindness of the American empire is rooted in the hubris and moral decay of its ruling class. The Jeffrey Epstein scandal is not an isolated aberration but a symptom of systemic corruption. The Epstein files revealed a “systemic ‘elite privilege apparatus’” where power is wielded as a shield and the law reduced to a “malleable instrument.” Such moral decay inevitably infects strategic decision-making. Leaders who believe themselves above the law also believe themselves above the constraints of geopolitics, leading to reckless adventures like the Iran war.

Compounding this decay is the transformation of foreign policy into spectacle. Donald Trump’s approach to international relations has been described as “geopolitical clickbait”—a strategy designed “to dominate the news cycle, push other governments into reactive mode and crowd out longer-term strategic thinking.” The constant churn of outrageous statements, policy reversals, and manufactured crises serves not a coherent strategy but attention capture. In an era where “attention is power,” the substance of foreign policy is sacrificed for the dopamine hit of breaking news.

This environment is inhospitable to the long-term strategic thinking required to navigate complex challenges like Iran’s asymmetric warfare or the petrodollar’s fragility.

Conclusion

At Suez, the British Empire was unveiled: not as conquered, but as having simply ceased to be a self-sustaining power. At Hormuz, the same unveiling is underway. The illusion of American might, sustained for decades by a combination of military spectacle and financial coercion, is dissolving in the saltwater of a narrow strait. The American Empire, like the British one before it, is discovering that even the most powerful fleets cannot sail against the tide of history. For the wealthy monarchies of the Gulf, it would be a sobering reminder that glass towers and sovereign wealth funds cannot substitute for geography, history, or strategic autonomy.