by Vincenzo Petrone (*)
ROMA (ITALPRESS) – The American naval army is crossing in these hours the Indian Ocean and already on the weekend will be in position at the mouth of the Strait of Hormuz, the gateway to the Persian Gulf that Iran has repeatedly threatened to close.
I would bring Abraham Lincoln and the naval team that accompanies her have an impressive firepower that only the American Navy can put in the field. But those beautiful ships are also gigantic targets difficult to defend against the asymmetrical, but credible threat of drones and missiles that in a few hours the Guards of the Islamic Revolution of Khamenei can launch them against hundreds. And so the naval team can’t stay on fire for weeks.
That means that President Trump will not be able to wipe, after promising many days ago to the Iranians that American aid was “on the way”. And now he seems to have arrived.
After Lincoln left the South China Sea, Trump’s goals, at least those he claims he wants to pursue, have now become at least three, and everyone has a high strategic profile. Are these goals accessible without bombs and through ongoing negotiations for weeks through the Oman?
The problem is that if they do not want to permanently compromise their survival, Ayatollah Khamenei and its people cannot agree to any of them, and it is therefore possible that they prefer to suffer a new American attack.
Trump’s first goal is the end of the Iranian uranium enrichment program and military nuclear ambitions that Iran has never been able to deny.
The Israeli intelligence, the most pervasively infiltrated in Iran, has ensured that the Wars of the Revolution are preparing even deeper and armored sites than those bombed by the Americans last summer, to break the uranium. And protect him from a new American or Israeli intervention. Trump’s statement that the Iranian nuclear program had been “obliterated” by him was therefore unfounded at least in part, if it is true as it is true that they remain somewhere in Iran 300 kg of uranium already enriched almost to the level necessary to produce some nuclear bombs.
The second objective announced by the American President is the immediate stop of Iran’s production of medium and long-range missiles, which new plants have resumed on a large scale to produce literally the day after the end of the Israeli bombing last June.
The sea a few weeks ago, of a Russian ship carrying from China to Iran large quantities of ammonium perchlorate is served to confirm this certainty, being a substance used to produce the solid fuel that feeds the engines of Iranian short and medium-range missiles. And it is missiles that in June have repeatedly penetrated the Israeli “iron dome” without being intercepted, producing significant damage on the ground. The Americans are particularly interested in eliminating the mid-range ballistic missiles, which are now very precise and have a capacity greater than 2000 kilometres. The corollary of this limited disarmament would be the commitment to let extinguish what remains of the Hezbollahs in Lebanon and the Militians of Hamas in Gaza.
The end of the indiscriminate killing of demonstrative inerts has now become only the third of Trump’s declared goals but is functional to the first two if nothing else for a presentation on the international level, for the little that counts. On the other hand, Trump no longer talks about eliminating Khamenei, if not physically at least as a leader in the country. And in fact, he does not need to talk about it, in the sense that all three goals, if achieved, would lead to the same result, that is the fall of the regime already ‘ strongly weakened by the really determining factor of these last Iranian events. The economic factor.
More than the demand for freedom, the economy is at the root of the explosion of manifestations in the streets of Tehran. After years and years of sanctions, the Ayatollahs no longer have the money to provide the gigantic amount of subsidies that from 1979 to today in some way enacted popular discontent, making it controllable by the violent means of all dictatorships.
So that the Iranian power structure is sitting on a volcano is even banal to emphasize it. But will the Lincoln Carrier give the final shoulder and dissolve the theocratic regime with something better for Iranians and the world? Hard to say.
Iran does not seem suitable for a “regime change” operation that has some analogy with what Trump has achieved with the arrest of Maduro or the political operation he is trying to do now in Venezuela liberalizing the economy but keeping up the security system to ensure stability. In Tehran we are in a far different context of feasibility. The arsenal available to the corps of the Pasdaran, 180,000 armed men from all point and trained to manage war and repression with complex technological systems, makes it unlikely that a heavy bombing of the Americans and the possible exile of Khamenei can suffice to bring to power a leader and regime more tireless from USA and Israel.
The real and demonstrable renunciation of the nuclear weapon, the end of the production of missiles that threaten Israel and the American bases, the closure of the terrorist financing channels and a attenuation of repression. They are all goals shared by Europe as well. And even more from Israel, which so far has done the “dirty work”, as the German Chancellor Merz has correctly defined it. But they are also the pillars of the power of the Iranian regime along with anti-Semitism and the purpose of destroying the Israeli presence in the Middle East. Those three goals are a revolution for Iran and the Middle East. It is necessary to ask whether Trump can and wishes to conceive in the Gulf and Iran a strategy of American participation in the whole field in the future of that part of the world to achieve that revolution.
We are talking about a long-term commitment, provided America can still afford it with or without Trump. It may not be enough to perform military power and even wave of bombs and missiles on Iranian targets. The MAGA and the United States National Security Strategy of the White House, for the Middle East as for Europe, preconceived forms of disengagement, that is almost the opposite of that long-term strategy.
(*) ambassador a.r.
– Photo IPA Agency –
(ITALPRESS).
