Bill Tallen

Since the beginning of hostilities in the Middle East at the end of February, congressional blowhards and the media have been threatening action based on the War Powers Resolution of 1973, which was an attempt to require congressional approval for presidential use of military force. The president’s enemies introduced resolutions in the Senate calling for an end to actions against Iran long before the 60-day mark where the WPR granted them any such authority. Each resolution has failed, because Republican senators have stood united (except for the usual defectors). Democrats cannot muster the votes and have themselves been abandoned by the one Democrat with a lick of sense, and the vice president stands ready to break any tie vote. 

No one can even agree — no one has ever agreed — on significant details of the WPR, such as when the 60-day clock starts, whether it stops during ceasefires (shooting starts, the clock starts; shooting stops, the clock stops), and whether (just for instance) drug interdiction and blockades are even included. Four out of five U.S. conflicts since the founding have seen either presidential action regardless of Congress, or Ccer various terms, conditions and durations short of a formal declaration of war. The War Powers Resolution has been seen as an inconvenience by every president since 1973. It has been consistently repudiated and ignored by most of them: Clinton in Somalia (293 days) and Kosovo (226 days); Bush and Obama both for the “War on Terror” worldwide; Obama in Libya (266 days) and Syria (2013 through 2017); Trump in Syria, Yemen, Iran, Niger and Venezuela variously in his two terms. No armed conflict has ever been terminated by invocation of the War Powers Resolution, its constitutionality has been challenged but never resolved by the Supreme Court, and it does not appear likely to affect the prosecution of the current conflict with Iran. 

My last column defined the current ceasefire in the Iran war, now extended beyond its original 14 days, as an operational pause for the U.S. and Israel and their growing coalition, which have rested, resupplied, reinforced and redeployed forces across the region, so that their military potential is now greater than it was when the war began in February. Iran is far weaker, having been isolated internationally and defeated militarily in the preceding campaign. It lost an arsenal, a force structure, and a proxy network that took decades to build and cannot be rebuilt under current conditions. 

The ceasefire has now become an exercise of strategic patience. The war is not ended, and can be renewed at a moment’s notice. Its goals are being advanced every day now, with hardly a shot being fired, by the U.S. naval blockade of Iranian ports and maritime traffic. This is a different side of asymmetric warfare, a side that favors us for once: The unchallenged global power of the U.S. Navy is shutting down Iranian oil and gas exports, its only significant source of wealth. The immediate effect is the loss of sales income, close to half a billion U.S. dollars a day. The long-term effects are much more devastating for Iran, and are just beginning to be felt. There is an engineering component and a political/economic component.

Roughly half of Iran’s oil fields are low- or mid-pressure fields. What that means, briefly, is that the oil must continue to flow without pause, into tankers or pipelines for trade, or into storage, because the fields themselves will be damaged, sometimes beyond recovery, by “shut-in” when the valves are closed. Iran’s oil is going nowhere, stopped by the U.S. blockade; and its remaining storage capacity is filling up rapidly. The longer the thugs of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps delay the inevitable, the more of the wealth, actual and potential, that has funded five decades of terrorism and proxy war will be lost. 

The other piece is the global response. Saudi Arabia and the UAE are diverting significant quantities of their oil exports through overland pipelines that bypass the contested Strait of Hormuz; those and other pipelines are being rapidly expanded and extended. One, with sweet irony, will reach the Mediterranean at the Israeli port of Haifa. The UAE has announced that it is leaving OPEC, which means freedom from its imposed limits on oil production and sales. Venezuela may well become the second major defector from OPEC, which along with the ongoing rapid expansion of U.S. production, would result in a swift correction and stabilization in oil prices and availability worldwide.

The IRGC hopes that its “closure” of the Strait of Hormuz will still force its enemies to negotiate a solution it can survive. But hope is not a strategy. We might see, any day now, just how many days or hours that “closure” will last if we again let slip the dogs of war. The threat should be enough.