This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman in New York, with Democracy Now!‘s Juan González — not in Chicago today, but right next to me here in New York. It’s wonderful to be sitting next to you, Juan.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yes, Amy, and it’s been now six years since I walked in the doors of our studio here, since before the COVID pandemic. It’s great to see everyone in person, in the flesh, rather than just over the internet or by phone, so it’s great to be here.
President Trump announced today that the U.S. and Iran have had, quote, “very productive talks” that could lead to what he called, quote, “the complete and total resolution of our hostilities in the Middle East.” In a social media post, Trump said he had instructed the Pentagon to postpone all airstrikes against Iranian power plants and energy infrastructure for a five-day period. Over the weekend, Trump had threatened to bomb power plants in Iran beginning today if the Strait of Hormuz is not reopened. Iran responded to Trump’s earlier threat by warning it would retaliate by destroying essential infrastructure, including water systems, across the region. A spokesman for Iran’s Ministry of Health wrote on social media, quote, “As a doctor, I warn the organizers of the imposed war against Iran, that attacking the infrastructure of my country, including water and electricity, means the indirect killing of thousands of innocent people lying on Iranian hospital beds.”
AMY GOODMAN: Iran’s de facto closure of the Strait of Hormuz has created the world’s biggest energy crisis in decades, as shipments of oil, natural gas, fertilizer have been drastically curtailed. A fifth of the world’s oil supply transits through the strait.
For more on the U.S. and Israel war on Iran and the significance of the Strait of Hormuz, we’re joined now by Alfred McCoy, professor of history at University of Wisconsin-Madison. His most recent book is titled Cold War on Five Continents: A Global History of Empire and Espionage, his recent piece for TomDispatch headlined “Imperial Decline in the Straits of Hormuz.”
Professor McCoy, we welcome you back to Democracy Now! If you can talk about the significance of this moment, even since we booked you yesterday? You have President Trump in a social media post indicating that there could be the end of hostilities; he is declaring a five-day extension of his deadline before the U.S. attacks civilian infrastructure — clearly a war crime. Can you talk about what this all means, and particularly your focus on the Strait of Hormuz, why you talk about “imperial decline”?
ALFRED McCOY: Sure, Amy. In this wide world, there are only seven major maritime chokepoints. Two of them lie in the Middle East: the Suez Canal and the Straits of Hormuz. So, let’s look at what happened in the Suez Canal. Back in 1956, the president of Egypt, Gamal Abdel Nasser, nationalized the Suez Canal, which up to that time had been British property. And the British government was so outraged, under Sir Anthony Eden, that they conspired with the French and the Israelis and mounted a major attack on Egypt. And in the first week of war, an armada of six French and British aircraft carriers seemed to be achieving almost total victory. They shot down about a hundred Egyptian aircraft. They destroyed the Egyptian Air Force. And in the sands of the Sinai Peninsula, the Israeli Defense Forces smashed the Egyptian tanks. And within that first week of war, Egypt had lost all of its strategic weapons. It was powerless, helpless before the might of this imperial juggernaut. And then Nasser did — practicing the geopolitics that the British had seemingly forgotten, he just got together a couple of dozen rusting freighters, filled them with rocks, sank them at the north end of the Suez Canal, and by the time the British and French commandos came storming ashore at Suez, victory had been snatched from their grasp. And within a couple of months, Britain’s pound sterling was the subject of the first IMF bailout. Britain’s aura of imperial might, its majesty, had evaporated. Britain had been sanctioned by the U.N., and the British Empire was on the road to rapid dissolution. OK?
Now let’s turn to the Straits of Hormuz. Again, during the first week of war, Washington was very proud of the terrible, swift sword of American air power. We killed Ayatollah Khamenei. We wiped out most of the Iranian command. We seemed to have smashed their air defenses — indeed, we did. We could operate unchecked across the whole of Iran. Iran seemed helpless beneath the might of our imperial juggernaut. And so, Iran did a very simple thing. They used their very cheap, $20,000 a copy, Shahed drones, and they started striking at infrastructure on the south shore of the Persian Gulf, because they struck five freighters in the Persian Gulf. And they closed, they shut down, the Straits of Hormuz.
And when you think about it, you know, there is no other place on the planet that is so absolutely central, so absolutely critical for the functioning of the entire global economy. I mean, the Persian Gulf has 50% of the world’s oil reserves, worth about $86 trillion. The busiest airport in the world is in Dubai. The Persian Gulf supplies 20% of the world’s natural gas. And very importantly, about half of the ingredients for fertilizer transit through the Straits of Hormuz.
And when you think about it, OK, all right, what’s going on right now? It’s spring. Farmers in the entire Northern Hemisphere, the entire northern half of the globe, are planting their crops, and they need fertilizer in order to either cover the costs of their planting the seed stock and to guarantee a good crop to feed the world’s millions. And the flow of fertilizer out the Straits of Hormuz is absolutely stopped. In the Nile River Valley, the price of fertilizer is already up by 40%. In the United States, the price of fertilizer has nearly doubled, from $350 a ton to $600 a ton. And this means that farmers worldwide, if they plant, are going to be faced with reduced crops.
I mean, this was completely irresponsible. If you want to attack the Straits of Hormuz, there are eight months in which you can do it without disrupting fertilizer supply for spring planting. The Trump administration, in its genius, found exactly the right month to attack Iran and effectively shut down the Straits of Hormuz and completely disrupt global agriculture. It’s beyond belief, ill-advised, shall we say.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Professor McCoy —
ALFRED McCOY: So, these are not serious people.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Professor McCoy, I wanted to ask you — the analogy you used of the Suez crisis of 1956, the United States played a particular role, not necessarily supportive of Britain and Israel at that time, the Eisenhower administration. Could you talk about that, especially in the context of other great nations right now, such as China and Russia and others, also playing a very distinct role in terms of this crisis?
ALFRED McCOY: Sure. Dwight Eisenhower, having been the commander of Allied forces in Europe during World War II, understood geopolitics. And right from the beginning, he actually phoned the prime minister of Britain and said to him, “Anthony, are you mad?” And he didn’t mean angry; he meant crazy. All right? And Eisenhower said, “If we support the British, the whole world, from Dakar to the Philippine islands, will turn against us.” He recognized that this was geopolitical insanity, that it was arousing Asian and African nationalism, that Britain’s global leadership would evaporate as a result of this. Eisenhower knew it instinctively, intuitively, because he understood the geopolitics.
And this is a geopolitics which Washington seems to be forgetting, OK? There is a — how can I put it? The epicenter of global geopolitical power is Eurasia. And in the dynamics, the geopolitical dynamics of Eurasia, there’s something called the Rimland, or the zone of conflict, that stretches from Poland through the Middle East, Southeast Asia, all the way to the Korean Peninsula. And as the United States pulls back from its geopolitical position in Eurasia, weakening the NATO alliance at the western axial end of Eurasia and weakening its bilateral alliances from Japan to Australia down the eastern axis of Eurasia, and, under the Trump administration, pulling back geopolitically into the Western Hemisphere, our position is weakening across the whole of the Eurasian landmass.
And you mentioned China. China is taking note. One of the key features that has emerged in this war is we’re discovering that the United States has a very limited stock of interceptor missiles. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs has refused to talk about numbers. OK? By my count, we had something like 4,000 interceptor missiles. Iran had something like 80,000 Shahed drones. It takes one interceptor missile to shoot down one drone. So, if the war drags on, we’re going to exhaust our stocks. And, you know, Shahed drones, they cost $20,000. Iran can produce them at about the rate of 10,000 a month. Our high-tech missiles, that cost between $3 [million] and $12 million each, are very sophisticated technologically and are not subject to mass production. We can produce them in the dozens every year.
So, China is watching, and they’re seeing us exhaust our supply of interceptor missiles. And this means, for the next 18 months, before the United States, through procurements, can increase its supply of interceptor missiles, this is a time on that arc of the Rimland across Eurasia, OK, and that other sensitive area, the Straits of Malacca, leading to the South China Sea and the Taiwan Straits, that this is the prime opportunity for China to strike at Taiwan, because the United States cannot send its carrier fleets, because in the exchange of missiles, you know, our interceptors — and China has something called a carrier killer missile — in that exchange of missiles, we will exhaust our supply of interceptors before they exhaust their supply of about 2,000 of the carrier killer missiles. And so, we can’t intercede to block China from taking Taiwan at this moment.
In short, you add up all these trends, and what you realize is that we’re in a situation akin to Britain, OK? Our aura of power has been diminished. It’s evaporated. We’ve shown our limits. The United States, the world’s greatest power, up against a weakened, medium-size country like Iran, cannot prevail. Iran wanted negotiations. And guess what: We are now negotiating, basically on Iran’s terms. OK? And this is a signal to the world that the era of U.S. hegemony is fading, not as fast maybe as happened to Britain back in 1956, but fast enough.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Professor, in terms of these talks, do you envision any settlement? Of course, there are sources, Iranian sources, that are denying that these talks are even occurring. But I wanted to ask you: Do you envision any settlement of this war that will not require, as Iran has insisted, the removal of all military bases from the Gulf states and from that area of the Middle East?
ALFRED McCOY: No, I think that’s [inaudible]. At the start of negotiations, everybody states their maximalist position and accepts something less. I think what Iran really wants is a cessation of hostilities and some kind of agreement about the suspension of hostilities for a fixed period of time, several years, or perhaps a permanent cessation of hostilities, in order to maintain an open Straits of Hormuz. That’s basically what Iran has got as its negotiating card, is it can close the Straits of Hormuz, which it’s done, and it can keep them closed and completely disrupt the global economy. Look, Juan, there is no place on the planet that is so sensitive to the operation of the global economy as the Persian Gulf, all right? This is the one area that, for so many reasons — the fertilizer, the air transport, the liquefied natural gas, the oil — all of that makes this region very sensitive and absolutely central to the global economy. And so, if Iran can shut down the Straits of Hormuz and keep them shut, which they have demonstrated their ability to do so, they can then hold Washington to ransom until Washington settles it on at least minimal terms to satisfy Iran.
In other words, as in the Suez Canal in 1956 — Nasser, from a seemingly helpless position, closed the canal and won the war — Iran is bidding fair to do the same. And again, in another parallel, just as British global power evaporated after the Suez crisis, we’re looking to a substantial diminution of U.S. global leadership, of U.S. global hegemony, in the aftermath of this crisis. And there’s likely to be trouble in the Straits of Taiwan over Taiwan in the aftermath of this.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor McCoy, does it surprise you that BBC is reporting an Iranian news agency quotes an unnamed source saying there have been no talks between Tehran and Trump, again, following this announcement this morning of President Trump saying he’s extending his threat to strike Iranian power and energy infrastructure, claiming on Truth Social that Iran and the U.S. have had, quote, “very good and productive conversations regarding a total resolution of our hostilities in the Middle East”?
ALFRED McCOY: Iran is, I think, at this point, in a better position. Look, we have struck most of the accessible facilities in Iran with our airstrikes. We’ve done what we can do. But on the south side of the Persian Gulf, there are these massive desalination plants, massive liquefied natural gas plants and oil fields, that are sprawling infrastructure, all of which — every pipe, every tank, every tube is loaded with some of the most volatile compounds on the planet, and even a misfired Shahed drone can barely miss. And so, this entire infrastructure is lying there unhardened, completely exposed to these strikes by $20,000 drones, that result in eruptions of fire and flames and do long-term damage to the infrastructure. So, we’ve exhausted our threat, and Iran has limited threats available — sorry, limitless threats available to them going forward. So, in a strategic analysis, Iran right now is in the dominant position.
Look, they’re doing what all powers do in an asymmetric war, OK? All Iran has to do is absorb the beating and then just wait us out, and they will win. And that’s what they’ve done, and that’s what they’ll continue to do. And from a strategic perspective, we’ve shot our bolt, we’ve smashed their infrastructure. But on our side, the south side of the Persian Gulf, there is a world of infrastructure waiting to be destroyed, and Iran has the means to do that. That means that strategically, just like Nasser in 1956 to the Suez Canal, Iran is in the whip — has the whip hand. They’re in control of the situation now, seemingly powerless, seemingly vulnerable to our strikes on the surface, but strategically and geostrategically, they hold the winning cards.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Professor, I wanted to ask you about the spread of this conflict to other countries in the region, specifically the efforts of the Trump administration, the fiasco of attempting to get the Kurds in Iraq and Syria to join in and to attack Iran. Your thoughts on that, on the refusal of many of the different Kurdish groups to get involved, and also, how the impact of this war on the large Shia population of Iraq as the mobilization forces in Iraq have also begun to attack U.S. sites in Iraq?
ALFRED McCOY: Yeah, remember, at the start of this conflict, President Trump, first of all, called on the Iranian people to rise up, as they had done in their recent eruption of mass protests. They didn’t do that. They couldn’t do that, because, under attack, Iran’s government managed to clamp down controls. And also, when you’re being attacked from the outside, peoples tend to pull together, under air attack. Moreover, the Iranian Basij militia, the regular army and the Revolutionary Guards represent a force of about 1.5 million armed and trained military and paramilitary. So, it’s an enormous coercive force, so there could be no uprising.
The second card that President Trump tried to play was the Kurdish card. Iran is about 40% minority, and there are three major minorities that have been used geopolitically in the past, OK? The Baloch in the southeast are too far from Tehran to make a difference. The Azeris in the north are close to Azerbaijan, which is sort of neutral in this, so they’re not going to move. That means that the only card that America had to play in order to get boots on the ground were the Kurds.
And for 50 years, the United States has betrayed the Kurds. Back in 1975, Henry Kissinger, having used the Kurds, the Iraqi Kurds, betrayed them, testified in front of Congress when he ordered the CIA to cut off their aid to the Kurds. He told Congress that covert action should not be confused with missionary work. And Donald Trump, my good heavens, in an absolutely abysmal decision in January of this year, betrayed the Syrian Kurds, after a 10-year alliance between the United States and the Syrian Kurds. He just dumped them to curry favor with the government of Iraq, and the Syrian Kurds have lost 80% of their territory. And so, when Trump called the leaders of Iraq’s Kurdistan and asked them to support, to start mobilizing, to have the Iranian Kurds, who have bases inside Iraqi Kurdistan, to mobilize, they said no. And so, basically, you know, we can’t play the Kurdish card. We’ve betrayed them one too many times, as recently as January by the Trump administration.
And so, basically, the only way the United States can influence events on the ground and shift that strategic imbalance that I talked about earlier is to send in U.S. ground forces. And with 1.5 million armed and trained troops, paramilitary and military, that is something I don’t think the United States is going to do, because the casualties would be substantial.
AMY GOODMAN: Alfred McCoy, we want to thank you so much for being with us, history professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His first book was titled The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade. His most recent book, Cold War on Five Continents: A Global History of Empire and Espionage. His recent piece, we’ll link to at TomDispatch, headlined “Imperial Decline in the Straits of Hormuz.”
Next up, we go to Italy to talk about how European leaders have responded to the war, and what this means for the EU itself and for NATO. Stay with us.
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AMY GOODMAN: “Freedom Is Free” by Chicano Batman, performing in our Democracy Now! studio. This is Democracy Now! , democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González, and we’re both in the New York studio because tonight we’re celebrating our 30th anniversary of Democracy Now!, independent media. We’ll all be together at Riverside Church at 7:00. And for people around the country and around the world, you can be part of that live stream at democracynow.org. You can watch the live stream. Patti Smith will be there. Michael Stipe will be there. Angela Davis will be there. The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mosab Abu Toha will be there. V., the renowned playwright, will be there, and so many others. Juan?
