Leon Panetta, who ran the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Pentagon under former president Barack Obama, has singled out US President Donald Trump as the only man responsible for the current situation
Three weeks after launching strikes on Iran, the US finds itself staring at a strait it cannot open, allies it cannot call in, and a ceasefire it cannot negotiate. Leon Panetta, who ran the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Pentagon under former president Barack Obama, has singled out US President Donald Trump as the only man responsible for the current situation.
In an interview with The Guardian, Panetta explained how the world’s most powerful military walked into a predicament its own commander-in-chief appears unprepared to walk out of. Panetta had overseen the operation that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011.
The Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly a fifth of the world’s traded oil passes, is now effectively closed. Iran, after losing its supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to an Israeli strike on February 28, the opening blow of what Trump called an “excursion”, has used the waterway as leverage. Oil prices have surged, but Trump’s approval numbers have not.
Panetta told the British publication this was not an unforeseeable consequence.
“In every national security council I’ve been a part of where we’ve talked about Iran, that subject always came up.” That the Trump administration apparently never prepared for it amounted to a failure of basic strategic planning, he said.
The war has produced outcomes the opposite of what was intended. Khamenei’s successor is his son, Mojtaba, who is younger, harder and less likely to negotiate. “We have a younger supreme leader who’s going to be there a while,” Panetta said. “He’s much more of a hardliner than the first supreme leader.”
Trump appears to be isolated. While he has spent much of his presidency treating NATO as a burden and allies as freeloaders, he is discovering that alliances are not built on demand. No major NATO country has publicly committed to sending ships after Trump asked other nations to help reopen the strait. Trump has since branded NATO a “paper tiger” and its members “cowards”, while at the same time needing them.
Panetta told The Guardian that going to war without consulting allies was self-defeating as Trump found himself appealing to the very countries he had alienated. The US president today threatened to “obliterate” Iran’s power plants unless the strait is fully reopened within 48 hours. The war in its fourth week shows no sign of resolution and no clear exit ramp.
