The Sino-Iranian-Russia Alliance: How an Attrition Trap Locked the United States in an Unwinnable War (Part 2 of 2)

As global choke points close and the national debt bleeds trillions, Washington discovers it can no longer afford its own empire.

"I never wan't to be the late, great Herbert Hoover," thus said President Trump.

If the collapse of American military dominance across the Middle East marked a major tactical retreat, the economic fallout has proved far more devastating. While Washington has stayed focused on daily territorial exchanges, the real crisis has materialized through the rapid financial exhaustion of the United States.

​This exhaustion is partially driven by a massive daily burn rate estimated at $1.5 billion. Forced to utilize a $2 million missile to intercept a $20,000 missile from Iran, for example, the American economy is finding itself trapped in an unwinnable circular war where the stockpiles are disappearing faster than the industrial base can physically replace them.

To make matters worse, the baseline cost of replacing these munitions has surged significantly since the cost of building new equipment carries a massively inflated price tag. Ensuring every new order has led to further financial hemorrhage.

​​This financial hemorrhage expanded rapidly as the crisis moved into the Strait of Hormuz. By targeting the primary artery of global energy liquidity, Iran successfully choked the transit of oil and commercial goods. As a result, maritime insurance rates surged to unpayable levels, thereby forcing major shipping lines to pull their fleets from the corridor entirely. The few commercial vessels that chose to navigate the waters were hit with a massive premium penalty, which in turn led to millions of additional dollars to the cost of a single voyage.

However, if limiting the ability to transit goods was a major economic dilemma for the U.S. and the world economy, the physical reality of preventing the export of oil to the global market was a catastrophic disaster.

With oil supplies being choked at the source, the Strait of Hormuz, global oil prices skyrocketed, creating a massive inflationary shock that the American domestic economy was not prepared to handle. From rising costs of food to clothing to commercial supplies to everything in between, the United States found itself trapped in an inflationary spiral that immediately broke its economic stability and exposed the deep vulnerability of its debt-driven system.

​To stave off an immediate industrial shock caused by the shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz, Washington ordered the aggressive depletion of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. However, this emergency mechanism not only failed to permanently stabilize the market, but in reality, it exposed a finite safety net that was running dry. Indicating that Washington’s heavy reliance on the strategic reserve has backfired, thereby leaving the entire system vulnerable to a prolonged blockade.

​However, if the shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz is an economic disaster, the potential closure of the Bab-el-Mandeb by the Iranians and their ally, the Houthis, would be a total catastrophe. A threat made strikingly clear by Russian official Dmitry Medvedev, who warned that Western escalation would inevitably drive Tehran to shut down shipping through the Bab-el-Mandeb next, effectively giving Iran a second choke point with leverage comparable to a “nuclear weapon.”

To understand the impact of such a threat, one would only have to look at the global shipping maps. Today, roughly 12% of total global trade and 30% or so of all global container traffic must pass through the Bab-el-Mandeb to reach Western markets. Thus, with the Strait of Hormuz mainly closed, a parallel blockade at the Bab-el-Mandeb would effectively neutralize the Suez Canal, thereby impacting global trade in ways previously unimaginable.

​For Washington, the problem has become even more acute when China decided to apply its own leverage against the United States. From restricting critical rare earth materials to its current retaliatory measures following the U.S. attack on the railroad infrastructure in northern Iran, Beijing has effectively positioned itself to choke the flow of critical goods directly at the source. When combined with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and a compromise at Bab-el-Mandeb, the U.S. has now found itself in a synchronized global supply chain crisis that it is entirely unequipped to handle.

​Yet, despite the catastrophic fallout of these naval blockades, nothing is creating a greater crisis for the United States perhaps than a $39 trillion national debt that has fundamentally consumed the greater part of its fiscal policy.

Today, Washington is spending nearly $1 trillion a year solely to cover the interest on what it owes. A daunting reality for a nation whose reputation as a global safe haven is now being severely tested as international investors increasingly become reluctant to finance America’s unsustainable deficit.

​Ultimately, this catastrophic convergence reveals the true nature of this conflict: a war of economic attrition by Iran to bankrupt the U.S. into submission. For Washington, that strategy has borne fruit, despite its continuous military bombing campaign. From a ballooning national debt to a weakening dollar to high oil prices, just to name a few, Washington can no longer sustain its hegemony in the region, since it simply can no longer afford it.

Under the crushing weight of this compounding crisis, it would appear that Iran’s campaign of asymmetric attrition is achieving exactly what it set out to do.