According to The Economist, the war that began on February 28th with the American and Israeli attack on Iran has rightly earned the label third Gulf War
. A clarification is needed: the war between Iran and Iraq, from 1980 to 1988, cost at least half a million lives and left its mark on the Persian Gulf no less than the subsequent conflicts. However, if we consider only the wars initiated by the United States in an attempt to manage its own decline, the current conflict follows on from those of 1991 and 2003. Hence, the third Gulf War.
The conflict has already transcended regional boundaries, involving all countries in the area; the unprecedented assassination of Ali Khamenei, Iran’s religious and political leader, on the first day of the war, was the turning point. The war’s objectives are unclear: it is a war without a strategy
, writes The Economist. Behind the strike on Iran, following the one in Venezuela, lies the claim of conditioning China, the true challenger of the century. But the fruits of the impulsive approach
of Donald Trump and his attack on the global economy
have yet to be reaped. The underlying thread of the three wars is also useful as a point of comparison with the China issue.
In 1991, the strategic context did not involve China, which had only just emerged from the Tiananmen crisis and was not yet engaged in the relaunch of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms and opening-up. The hallmark of the US military action in the Gulf was its response to the multipolarism fuelled by German reunification and the collapse of the USSR; in Asia, this still concerned Japan above all. For Arrigo Cervetto, with the half-war
in the Gulf, the US positioned itself at the centre of every balance of power
, with a view towards new realignments on the world stage
.
The second war, in 2003, was a war for oil, but primarily through oil. At stake in George W. Bush’s political war was the timing of China’s rise and, as a related objective, a renewed response to Europe which, ten years after German reunification, was crossing the threshold of monetary power with the euro. In view of China’s rise, Washington declared its intention to preempt any power seeking to challenge it; securing a foothold in the Gulf, ensuring its open door, was a way of exerting pressure on Beijing.
For our Marxist analysis, this opened up a new strategic phase: if the US needed a war to regulate the balance of power, this showed that it could no longer be maintained by the means sufficient in previous decades. China would emerge as an imperialist power within a generation. This signalled a new strategic phase, which was the twilight of the long cycle identified in our 1957 Theses.
The third Gulf War actually combines two wars. Israel’s war, launched to restore deterrence following the terrorist attacks of October 7th, has now been ongoing for over two years on multiple regional fronts, against pro-Iranian militias in the region and against Iran itself to degrade its missile capabilities and prevent the emergence of a Shiite bomb.
The other war, however, is that of the United States. With the third war, the US is once again striking at the lifeline of the Gulf to exert pressure on China, but in a drastically changed situation. Over the two decades after 2003, within the predicted time-frame of one generation, China emerged as an imperialist power. In this sense, i.e., in terms of power relations, the cycle of the Theses is complete. The 2003 war of choice had not affected the objective course of China’s imperialist maturation, and if anything may have accelerated it on the political-strategic front. The 2008 crisis in global relations, however, accelerated it on the economic front.
The conflicts of 2001 in Afghanistan and 2003 in Iraq became a burden for the US, confirming the difficulty for American political culture of sustaining long-term commitments abroad. This was a key factor in Barack Obama’s decision to withdraw from Iraq, despite the strategic implications of relinquishing its foothold in the Gulf. However, a force of 50,000 troops remained in the region, deployed across various bases in Middle Eastern countries. In turn, those bases are now targets for Iranian missile retaliation, and the US’s ability to defend the Gulf States hosting them is at stake in the new conflict, which has expanded from Iran’s proxies to the US’s proxies. The security guarantees those bases provided, in exchange for energy supplies, are among the collateral casualties.
As for China’s rise, the objectives declared by Beijing in 2017 — a world-class military by 2035 — together with the convulsions of the Atlantic decline, suggest that this decade will be a phase of crises and wars of the crisis in the world order. Of the two possible paths for such a crisis — direct war between the great powers, improbable but not impossible, or a chain of local conflicts amid mounting tensions — the second is now a reality of the imperialist contention rather than the subject of strategic prediction. The third Gulf War fits squarely into this category.
Could the war against Iran, as well as the coup in Venezuela due to its energy supply implications, therefore constrain Beijing? Three clarifications are needed.
The lack of a coherent strategic debate within the administration, and the trait of strategic improvisation characteristic of the US presidency, complicate the assessment. So far, the most fruitful line of thought has been that of Walter Russell Mead, according to whom Trump acts on instinct and without strategic reflection, although ultimately his actions fall within the tradition of American politics and the deep-seated principles of US foreign policy. In America, the political current opposed to Iran’s nuclear proliferation has always been strong within the Republican Party, to the extent of advocating maximum pressure
on Tehran during Trump’s first term and discussing the military option — an option that Henry Kissinger himself did not rule out. The same applies to the Carter Doctrine — the guarantee of an open door in the Gulf against any hostile power — and its extension to the confrontation with China, already adopted by the Bush Jr. administration twenty years ago. Here too, the current administration’s confused approach would follow a longstanding tendency of American foreign policy.
In his own way, then, we would have Trump as the executor of the Kissinger line and the Carter Doctrine. Trump’s means, however, are the crucial issue. It is precisely the methods of execution, and the possibility that these might even undermine the administration’s intended aims, that are the focus of much commentary. The convulsions of American decline and the specific characteristics of this presidency, a product of show politics and television democracy, tend in fact to amplify one another, and to exacerbate the problems of preparation and political-military conduct of the war. In 1991 and 2003, the US acted within alliances, and the war was in any case preceded by political consultation with the other powers. Today, America appears to be acting through unilateral improvisation.
The US has kept its allies in the dark and shown disregard for the global repercussions of the war; the presidency takes satisfaction in the systematic elimination of its potential interlocutors in Iran; Washington’s leaders claim to be surprised by the Iranian reaction and by the blockade of Hormuz. The war makes the US a factor of instability in the Middle East: Europe, Japan, and India are paying the price. Military superiority requires political manoeuvring, which is also an art of war. The unintended consequences of unilateral war affect the powers dependent on Gulf flows to varying degrees. This may fuel, rather than curb, the multipolar trends of American decline. Precisely: unintended consequences.
The second point concerns the changes in the strategic landscape since 2003. We have long highlighted the erosion of the Carter Doctrine due to Chinese penetration into the Gulf. Conversely, one must consider the transformation of the US into an energy superpower, a net exporter of gas since 2017 and of oil since 2020.
Ding Gang, a senior columnist for the People’s Daily and a member of the Chongyang Institute, credits Trump with a rational, if not astute
, calculation in this very sense: in addition to gaining a degree of control over Chinese supplies via Iran and Venezuela, the tycoon is said to be aiming to capture shares of the Asian market for American energy exports.
It is, however, worth noting the key difference to all previous wars which have targeted the energy artery: the US, having become an exporter, no longer depends on it directly. The guarantee of an open door is therefore no longer an immediate interest of American power, and the emphasis shifts to the possibility of intervention in the Gulf as a means of balancing the scales and as a strategic weapon. Washington is leveraging its role as an energy superpower — as well as a military one — in the face of its own decline: it can therefore afford, or believes it can, to throw the Gulf artery into chaos in order to force other powers to negotiate. A tactic that may be considered adventurist or driven by improvisation, but which fits with Trumpian psychology; it is an Epic Gamble
— as the Financial Times puts it — and is also the Trump corollary to the Carter Doctrine: the US does not merely seek to prevent any hostile power from controlling the Gulf — an objective present in the wars against Iraq, and also evident in the effort to prevent an Iranian nuclear bomb — but wields its new position as an energy power and its military capability to plunge the artery into chaos, in order to assert a transactional claim over the powers that depend on the oil of the Middle East.
Just as the defensive repositioning, or castling
, in Venezuela was a sign of the negotiating leverage gained over China, so Trump intends to operate in Iran: the Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine in the Western Hemisphere corresponds to a Trump corollary to the Carter Doctrine in the Persian Gulf, in its connection with the Asia-Pacific. Whether this is the result of a well-conceived strategic plan or not, it would in any case be an outcome of the inter-power confrontation. Moreover, it should be remembered that an operation of the same nature had already been conducted by the Biden administration in Europe, with American opposition to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, precipitated by the war provoked by Russia in 2022. The result was the severing of the Euro-Russian energy artery and Europe’s energy dependence on liquefied gas imported from the US.
The third point concerns the imperialist maturation of the Chinese Dragon. It was one thing to think of constraining China in 2003; it is quite another to envisage doing so with the Asian giant now economically on par with, and militarily capable of deterring the US, at least in the Asia-Pacific theatre, within the decade.
Today, China accounts for 32% of global electricity production, compared to 15% for the US, 12% for Europe, and 3% for Japan. In 2003, it accounted for 11%, compared to 24% for the US, 19% for the EU, and 6.5% for Japan. Our prediction twenty years ago was that China would surpass the combined total of the old powers, and this would make it impossible for the old imperialist cartel to simply co-opt it into the post-war order. Inevitably, the new power dynamics were reflected in the Persian Gulf.
In 2004, 13% of Middle Eastern oil exports still went to the US, 16% to Europe, and only 6% to China. Bush Jr’s war of choice grasped the prospect of Chinese development but, in its immediate implications, still served to constrain Japan (21%). Today, 35% of Middle Eastern exports are destined for China, compared to 3% for the US, 9% for Europe, and 12% each for India and Japan. Seizing control of the energy artery means, first and foremost, focusing strategic attention on the Dragon, which imports a tenth of its oil from Iran, a small but nevertheless significant share.
At the same time, we must assess to what extent China can truly be constrained through its dependence on the Gulf or on Venezuela. Jin Canrong’s calculations, reported in our newspaper in December, now appear more like a substantive analysis than a hypothetical scenario: Beijing was preparing to replace a fifth of its crude oil imports with domestic exploration launched in 2020, a fifth with imports via rail from Central Asia, and eliminate a fifth through transport electrification. The remaining demand would have been met with synthetic coal-based petrol at wartime economy prices. To this must be added the expansion of strategic reserves in recent years and the purchases of oil from Russia in recent months; it remains to be seen to what extent this increases Moscow’s leverage in negotiations with Beijing.
If anything, while China is less susceptible to pressure via oil than in 2003, the novelty is that twenty years of imperialist maturation have made its sphere of influence in the Middle East more susceptible to pressure. The war is affecting China’s strategic relations with Tehran and its diplomatic initiative, which has always been mindful of maintaining a balance with Riyadh and the Arab capitals of the Gulf. Trump is disrupting the balance pursued for years by Beijing, and exposing the limits of Chinese military influence.
Liu Zhongmin, editor of the journal Studies on the Arab World at Shanghai International Studies University (SISU), writes that Trump would like to avoid becoming embroiled in a protracted conflict in the Gulf, but his ability to de-escalate the situation is highly uncertain. The author suggests that one of China’s strategies is to wait for the US to become bogged down in the Middle Eastern quagmire.
According to the ancient Chinese precept sit on the mountain and watch the tigers fight
, Beijing is watching the tycoon undermine US relations with all the major powers. The US remains at the centre of every balance
, but this propagates its fluctuations throughout the old world order. Beijing may benefit from the dispersal of American military and political resources in the Middle East, while suffering from the related partial disruption to, and rising cost of, energy supplies. The art of strategic patience, after all, does not necessarily imply passive waiting, but may include indirect support for the Iranian war effort and the wearing down of the US.
Zineb Riboua, a researcher at the Hudson Institute in Washington, writes that Epic Fury
is the first American military campaign against a regional pillar of China: Beijing has supported and industrialised
the Iranian missile programme for a decade, supplying components and satellite coverage via the BeiDou-3 system. This coverage was not suspended during the war.
At the same time, China is said to have used the Iranian threat to cultivate relations with Arab States and, through the agreement signed in Beijing in 2023 between Iran and Saudi Arabia, to make its own political entry
into the Gulf. For Riboua, the war undermines
this long process of relationship-building and opens up a broader conflict, as it exposes the military vulnerability of the relationship with China. The image of China as a counterweight to American coercion offered to the Global South has been damaged. On the other hand, at present, there is a rapid resurgence of Chinese diplomacy in the region.
The war in the Gulf does not concern China alone. Russia stands to gain, breathing a sigh of relief as it cashes in on rising energy prices and American exemptions from sanctions. India, Japan, South Korea, and Europe are affected, both by the direct energy supply implications and by the global effects of the region’s destabilisation.
The press in Tokyo has not spared Trump from criticism, partly due to the Land of the Rising Sun’s greater direct exposure to supplies from Hormuz. The Nikkei was quick to highlight the use of gas and oil as political weapons in the competition between the United States and China. For the Yomiuri, the war launched by the US is utterly irresponsible
. The Mainichi Shimbun fears that Washington is exploiting its energy dominance [...] in defiance of the difficulties faced by other nations
.
New Delhi has kept its distance and defended the prerogatives of its multi-alignment policy, including its relationship with Tehran. India gets half of its oil and 80% of its gas through the Strait of Hormuz, as well as 40% of its foreign remittances from the diaspora of 10 million Indians in the Gulf. The war has immediate domestic implications, particularly regarding the price of cooking gas cylinders. For Happymon Jacob of the Council for Strategic and Defence Research, Delhi’s multiple ties with all the belligerents are at stake, one of those occasions where no response is the best response
. For K.C. Singh, former foreign secretary and ambassador to Iran, India has struggled to maintain a delicate balance, severely tested by the attack on Tehran just hours after Narendra Modi’s visit to Tel Aviv and by the US torpedoing of the Iranian frigate Dena, returning from an Indian naval exercise. Delhi responded by offering refuge to another vessel from the Iranian delegation and, furthermore, approached the EU, offering to act as an intermediary with Tehran.
Our analysis has consistently highlighted European interests in the multidimensional
artery of the Persian Gulf. Compared to the 2003 war, the main difference lies in European rearmament, which was then frozen for twenty years by the American initiative and has now resumed in response to the war in Ukraine and the deepening of the Atlantic crisis.
In the Gulf, Europe finds itself in a more marginal position, perhaps advantageous for a necessarily reactive strategy, but forced to follow an America which is difficult to fathom in an area of strategic interest to the EU and of immediate interest to its southern neighbours. In some respects, the Union does not seem far removed from the situation described by Helmut Schmidt in Men and Powers in the 1980s: Europeans could at best attempt to mitigate the effects of an American Middle East policy that did not truly understand the region. The Old Continent — Schmidt noted — possessed greater knowledge and certainly more experience. Precisely for this reason, no European government [...] has ever had the idea [of] offering a ‘solution’ to the ‘Middle East problem’
. It was, in truth, a tangle of difficult, unresolved and sometimes insoluble
problems that cannot be tackled in isolation, as Washington’s optimism
would sometimes perceive it. The Europeans, however, were forced to react moderately to the often unstable policies
of the United States, since they knew they could pursue their own vital interests only in concert with the Americans
.
Forty years on, that necessity remains largely confirmed, though its proportions have shifted: decades of integration into the federal and confederal powers of European imperialism, and today the dynamics of rearmament, coupled with London’s rapprochement with the EU, have the potential to elevate those regular patterns of movement to a higher level, and thus to enable an autonomous initiative.
It should be noted that the time horizon of European rearmament and deterrence is 5-10 years, whereas in the timeframe of this crisis the real process of political centralisation, at least initially, has not made it possible to go much beyond non-participation in the war effort.
Europe’s real defeat in its Iran policy dates back to 2018, with Trump’s withdrawal from the JCPOA nuclear deal — negotiated with Europe’s decisive contribution — and the inability to respond to American threats of secondary sanctions via SWIFT, the international financial transactions network. The European attempt at an autonomous mechanism, INSTEX, was never activated, due to fears among European business groups and banks of suffering American retaliation. Today, that potential for a sovereign channel for financial transactions returns with the digital euro, but its timeframes remain to be seen.
As for the European response to the third Gulf War, the initial cacophony of pronouncements has given way to a coordinated reaction centred on the E3 core of London, Paris, and Berlin — a potential European directorate — expanded to include Rome in the E4 group. A format, and a process involving the capitals, which confirms the paradoxical dialectic whereby the weight of the States can prove to be an accelerating factor in the combinations of pragmatic federalism advocated by Mario Draghi. In contrast to 2003, America did not ask Europe in advance to participate in the military action, and Europe, in turn, avoided direct opposition to the war that might have divided it or undermined the rearmament process. Subsequent developments show, moreover, how the American initiative can reunite the EU even as a result of amateurish conduct: the US president demands that the navies of allies and adversaries rush to extinguish the fire he himself started in the Gulf and threatens consequences for the NATO umbrella, already weakened by the Atlantic crisis. A naval mission under American auspices would bear the hallmarks of co-belligerence and has been rejected by European and Asian allies, as well as by China.
The crisis allows Beijing to present itself as a power of stability, the true heir to a reformed world order and, if necessary, a safe haven for Gulf capital. There is an objective space for a European initiative, offered to the Gulf States and, by extension, to those of Asia, as a bulwark against American chaos and the political unreliability of the world’s leading military power: a defence not only against Iranian missiles, but against the uncontrolled consequences of US adventurism. Consider the convergence with Japan on the navigation of the Strait of Hormuz and the security of energy infrastructure, targeted by the belligerents.
The European military initiative thus takes shape around three pillars: the air and naval defence of Cyprus in the eastern Mediterranean; air defence or the supply of weapons to allies in the Middle East; and finally the prospect of an international naval mission in the waters of the Gulf, once military operations have essentially ceased, to guarantee a ceasefire and thus negotiations with Iran — a scenario for which India has also offered its services. European interventionism would therefore have the advantage of presenting itself as defensive and distinct from the American offensive. This is a manifestation of European imperialism’s intervention in the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and the Gulf, which offers a good test for the union sacrée of European rearmament, which goes from Giorgia Meloni to Pedro Sánchez.
This is accompanied by decisive steps in the field of nuclear deterrence in the medium term. Paris has announced an increase in its warhead stockpile, the possible temporary deployment of nuclear forces in eight countries (the UK, Germany, Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, Denmark, and Greece), and the possibility for other European powers to provide conventional backing
to France in the areas of early warning, air defence, and deep-strike missile capability.
Emmanuel Macron’s initiative for a European forward deterrence
marks a major turning point: it confirms that the nuclear domain is the preferred arena for European strategic autonomy, while simultaneously revealing its inherent contradictions. France, the EU’s sole nuclear power following Brexit, aspires to lead the process of Europeanising deterrence, yet maintains the imperative of its own doctrine and ultimate sovereignty over the nuclear button. On the one hand, this ambivalence is the only way to secure domestic consensus for the strategic line charted by Macron. On the other hand, this calculated ambiguity is also the only way to ensure the European integration of French sovereignists, who are faced with strategic choices — yesterday regarding the purse, today regarding the sword. Thus, the Europeanisation of the French deterrent navigates the ambivalences of all the players.
Jean-Dominique Merchet writes that European capitals will wait for the 2027 French presidential election before taking concrete steps. The presidential candidates, and Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella in a joint written statement, offer reassurances that, while significant, cannot in themselves dispel the uncertainty. Counterbalancing this is the German guarantee, with the simultaneous green light for the Franco-German nuclear steering group, which completes the triangle of the Aachen, Kensington, and Northwood treaties between London, Paris, and Berlin. This is a significant confirmation of the possible path to a European nuclear capability. The conventional backing called for by Paris could provide a framework for German rearmament which is acceptable to France. Berlin is a key player in the major European projects — JEWEL, ESSI, and ELSA — concerning specific capabilities for early warning, air defence, and missile defence. Rome is also participating in ELSA and could find in this backing a path towards a more structured involvement in European deterrence.
The third Gulf War is pressing home the delays in continental political centralisation. Imperialist Europe remains lagging behind, yet is ready to seize upon the crises and wars of the crisis in the world order to accelerate. It is a race against time for European Leninism as well.