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It’s quite a feat for Donald Trump to engineer such a spectacularly bad outcome for US interests in the Middle East. But he has done it. Take the war against Iran, launched alongside Benjamin Netanyahu back in February – that is, seven months ago. The war aims – including regime change and ending nuclear enrichment in Iran – have not been met.
Instead, Iran has shown a remarkable level of resistance to this illegal war, attacking US bases across the Middle East and severely curtailing traffic in the Strait of Hormuz. Only this week a UN human rights report said it was reasonable to conclude the US had committed war crimes when bombing a girls’ school in Minab. Despite Trump’s claims to the contrary, he has lost this war, and his US approval ratings – not least because of this issue – have plummeted.
But as bad for Trump has been the offensive launched by the Houthis in Yemen, which is threatening his other major ally in the region, Saudi Arabia. This weekend, the Saudi government had to issue air raid alerts in the capital, Riyadh, as black smoke poured from the city’s airport. The recent military offensive by the Houthis has led to its gaining control of the Bab al-Mandab strait and several strategic islands in the Red Sea.
Trump has refused any assistance to Saudi Arabia in fighting the Houthis – perhaps in a belated recognition that he cannot become further embroiled in another war in the region. He may now change his mind in light of the recent attacks. But whatever he does, two things are clear.
The first is that he and his allies are in trouble. The second is that the impact of the closure or curtailment of two key shipping routes in the Middle East is going to have a devastating impact on economics and politics across the US and Europe.
Trump said last week that the Houthis “don’t want us to go after them…there’s just one country that they’re not too happy with, and we’ll get that straightened out.” Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s ruler, will not see it that way, threatened as he is from Yemen and from Iraq to the north, where militias have forced the closure of a key oil pipeline. As the Financial Times argues:
This has spawned arguably the biggest test for Prince Mohammed since the 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents briefly turned him into a pariah in the west. It threatens both the kingdom’s ability to sell crude and the crown prince’s ambitious, petrodollar-funded drive to develop his nation into a global investment hub.
Oil production there is at its lowest levels for 36 years because of the problems getting tankers through the two straits. The closure of the East-West pipeline will force more cuts in production. The Houthis have shown themselves to be resilient to the armed might of Saudi Arabia, which was defeated in its recent war against Yemen. Trump’s bombing of the Houthis in 2025 also ended without success. Bin Salman has few options and few allies. He has defence pacts with Turkey and Pakistan, and with the US, but we will see if any of them get involved.
These developments are consequences of the failure of war in Iran, but also the failure of Israel’s war against the Palestinians, despite its horrific costs.
The other question hanging over these conflicts is the impact of the war on the world economy and on its political outcomes. Oil and diesel prices are increasing rapidly and will continue to rise further as the impact of production cuts works its way through. This will impact across food prices and those of other goods in Europe and the US. But this is not just about oil prices.
Shipping costs have shot up, including the cost of insurance.
As well as supplying much of the world’s oil, the Gulf is also a key supplier of liquefied natural gas, refined fuels, petrochemicals, feedstock for fertilisers and helium. Qatar, the world’s second-largest producer of LNG, has exported negligible amounts of gas since the war began. While some oil tankers have been shuttling in and out of the strait under US air cover, other shipping traffic has fallen to minimal levels, in part because the rates those vessels can earn — compared with much higher rates for tankers — make it not worth the risk.
All this spells shortages of vital goods and rapid inflation in their costs. Already, US farmers are being badly hit by rising costs of diesel, reinforcing Trump’s unpopularity among erstwhile supporters. The consequences will impact very badly on working-class living standards and will lead to great protests and upheavals. Given the threat of the far right, and the clear inadequacy of the Burnham government to deal with this crisis, the left must take the lead in these struggles. This starts with active opposition to the wars which are bringing such misery to so many.
Marx talked about the mole of history, which burrows away underground even after times of defeat, to suddenly erupt in new struggles. I thought of this in relation to the success of the Palestine movement versus Ed Sheeran. What the whole episode shows is how the movement internationally, especially in the past three years, has changed consciousness to a mass degree. This is often not visible (not least because it is ignored or treated with hostility) across establishment politics and media, but also because it does not always manifest itself in a mass way.
But here it did. Macklemore opened Sheeran’s early September gigs by performing his 2024 protest song ‘Hind’s Hall’, which condemns Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. On stage he added a statement concluding ‘Free Palestine.’
The pro-Israel lobby immediately mobilised. The Israeli-American Council launched a petition asking Sheeran and his management to remove Macklemore from the tour – arguing that the rapper had used a “global concert platform to advance a one-sided political agenda”.
Even more importantly stadium owner and entrepreneur Robert Kraft threatened Sheeran with pulling the venue if Sheeran didn’t drop Macklemore. The 85 year-old CEO of the Kraft Group is a prominent donor to Israel and was awarded the ‘Jewish Nobel Prize’ by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2019. Kraft mobilised other stadium owners who also threatened to cancel Sheeran gigs. Sheeran caved in to the pressure and threw Macklemore off the tour.
But Sheeran obviously didn’t reckon with how deeply the support for the Palestinian cause runs among musicians or among his fan base.
It didn’t take long for the rest of Sheeran’s support acts to withdraw from the tour. He even lost part of his stage band, with Irish folk band Beoga pulling out “following the silencing of Macklemore by Zionist lobbies”.
All credit to them. But no disrespect, I hope, to say this is also a credit to the millions who have marched, boycotted, picketed, and taken every form of action in support of the Palestinians and against the genocide in Gaza. It is this which has led so many musicians and artists, as well as trade unionists, workers, students, people of different religions and nationalities, to decide they cannot stay silent but have to take a stand. Even the TUC last week passed a motion on BDS, despite obvious opposition from some union leaders.
So when people say, ‘what’s the point of protest’, or ‘marches don’t make a difference’ remember the old mole and how we build the struggle.
Source: Counterfire