Tehran launches revenge attacks on US bases
Tehran has delivered its first round of much-anticipated revenge, after Iran's Revolutionary Guards launched missiles at American air bases in Qatar and Iraq this evening.
Iranian state media has described the missile operation as the beginning of Tehran’s “mighty and victorious” response to Donald Trump’s decision to bomb three Iranian nuclear sites over the weekend. A US decision that Iran’s foreign ministry insists will have “everlasting consequences”.
Evidence of the “victorious” nature of this first round of revenge is, at the time of writing, lacking. While explosions have been heard in Doha, the Qatari government insists that its air defence systems "successfully thwarted the attack and intercepted the Iranian missiles".
"We confirm that no injuries or human casualties resulted from the attack”, it added, while offering its "strong condemnation" of the attack on the Al-Udeid Air Base, labelling it “a flagrant violation of the sovereignty of the State of Qatar”.
Al-Udeid is the largest American base in the Middle East, which houses around 10,000 troops. The base had already been evacuated and a western diplomat told Reuters earlier today that there has been a credible Iranian threat against the US-run air base in Qatar since noon.
There are no reports yet of damage, if any, from the alleged missile attack in Iraq.
What will be Tehran’s next retaliatory move?
Attention is turning to the world’s busiest oil shipping channel. Iran’s parliament has approved a measure to close the Strait of Hormuz, a 90-mile sea passage that lies between Oman and Iran through which more than a fifth of the world’s oil supply, and much of its liquified gas, passes daily.
According to vessel tracking data from MarineTraffic, six supertankers have already performed U-turns in the strait today as they prepare for an Iranian retaliation to Israeli and US strikes.
While the Iranian parliament has approved a blockade of this vital global trade route, ultimately the decision on whether to press ahead with such action will come down to Tehran’s top leaders. It is undoubtedly a high-risk strategy.
Blocking this narrow shipping lane would destabilise a world economy still considerably dependent on the flow of oil. According to ING-Barings estimates, a prolonged closure of the strait could raise the oil price to over $150 a barrel.
As far as Tehran is concerned, delivering an inflationary shock to the global energy market serves the advantage of imposing an almost immediate cost on Donald Trump. Though the Iranian government would simultaneously be inflicting an act of economic self-harm.
What’s more, Tehran would risk alienating its oil and gas-producing Gulf neighbours, at a moment of great vulnerability.
Iranian oil aside, crude oil exports from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Iraq, Kuwait and Qatar pass almost exclusively through the Strait of Hormuz.
Saudi Arabia, for instance, uses the strait to export around six million barrels of crude oil per day - more than any neighbouring country and a far greater sum than the 1.7 million barrels exported per day by Tehran.
Disrupting traffic in this shipping lane wouldn’t just go down badly with countries in the Gulf. Around 84 percent of oil passing through the Strait of Hormuz is destined for Asia, and a blockade would have a major impact on the economies of India, South Korea and China.
Tehran would be particularly foolish to invoke the ire of its ally Beijing, and not just because of its superpower status. China alone is estimated to buy almost 90% of the oil that Iran exports to the global market. Hence why America’s top diplomat, Marco Rubio, has called on Beijing to intervene to persuade Iran to abandon any plans to close off the corridor.
It is also worth remembering that Iran has repeatedly threatened to blockade the Strait of Hormuz in past conflicts over the last 40 years, but it has never properly followed through. This begs another question: is it even capable of doing so?
There’s little doubt that Iran has the capacity to disrupt traffic, for instance by laying mines, seizing vessels and firing missiles at western supertankers.
But, as Ian Stewart argued in Reaction last week, “Closing, as opposed to disrupting, the strait would be a formidable task given the weakened state of Iranian forces”.
And we could anticipate that a US-led international naval coalition would swiftly attempt to re-establish the flow of maritime traffic, via military means.
It’s also true that the world today is better placed to deal with disruptions to oil supply than it was in the past.
Conflict in the Middle East, and the ensuing spike in oil prices, have been harbingers of western recessions in 1973, 1979 and 1990.
While a sabotage of oil shipping lanes would certainly help to keep energy prices elevated, global GDP is less oil-dependent than it once was. It takes less than half the amount of oil to produce a unit of GDP than it did in 1970.
Caitlin Allen
Deputy Editor
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