MADRID – On June 16, the US President signed a memorandum of understanding with the Islamic Republic of Iran. Adopting a triumphalist tone to mask the magnitude of the defeat, Donald Trump urged the ships of the world to start their engines and let the oil flow once again. This epilogue, marked by the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and the lifting of the naval blockade, represents the empirical confirmation of the structural exhaustion of US foreign policy in the region.
By celebrating an agreement with the very country it swore to eradicate just six months prior, Washington has silently renounced its initial demand for regime change. This reversal reveals the bankruptcy of an imperial paradigm that believed it could subjugate geography and history through sheer military coercion.
To comprehend this failure, one must dissect the material foundations of the US presence in the Persian Gulf. For decades, Western understanding of this body of water has been articulated around a strictly extractivist and logistical logic. The Persian Gulf was conceived fundamentally as a transit corridor, a maritime highway designed to guarantee the uninterrupted flow of hydrocarbons to the consumption nodes of global capitalism. Roughly 20% of global oil used to pass through this strait daily, revealing the systemic vulnerability of an economy dependent on a single logistical node. This reductionist vision transformed the region’s geography into a vast spatial engineering project. Entire cities, deep-water ports, artificial islands, and free trade zones were erected to serve as an efficient interface between subsoil rent and international financial markets, compressing time and space in favor of capital accumulation.
This spatial apparatus required a parallel security architecture, a martial urbanism superimposed upon the local landscape. US military bases, anti-missile defense systems, and deep-water ports for aircraft carriers functioned as nodes in a control network designed to protect commercial flows. In practice, it produced a security architecture that turned the region into a permanent target. Military bases, arms sales, sanctions regimes, intelligence cooperation, and Israeli freedom of action formed the central pillars of a Pax Americana in West Asia. Yet, in this war, those very same pillars transmitted violence across the entire region. The Persian Gulf states that initially opposed the conflict were struck precisely because they hosted US forces. A system ostensibly designed to secure the Persian Gulf ultimately turned it into a battlefield.
Faced with this mercantile conception of space, the Islamic Republic has maintained a radically distinct understanding of its environment. For Tehran, the northern coast of the Persian Gulf transcends the condition of a mere commercial chokepoint; it is a territory imbued with civilizational continuity and deep socioeconomic integration. This ontological divergence explains Washington’s strategic blindness. The illusion that the state apparatus would collapse under external pressure materialized on the morning of February 28. In an eight-minute video, Trump announced the launch of Operation Epic Fury, a joint military campaign with Israel’s Operation Roaring Lion. US and Israeli forces struck nuclear facilities, missile sites, military centers, and critical infrastructure. In one of the most devastating attacks, the Leader, Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, was assassinated alongside other top commanders. As the bombs fell, Trump addressed the Iranians, telling them that when it was all over, they should take over their government. The message was unequivocal: America and Israel were seeking regime change.
The Iranian response was swift and devastating. Ballistic missiles and drones struck US military bases across the Persian Gulf, while Tehran announced the restriction of passage through the Strait of Hormuz. By controlling the strait, Iran interrupted the very heart of global capitalist logistics, demonstrating that supply routes can be severed by those who inhabit their shores. The closure of this energy node strained global supply chains and exposed the vulnerability of the US security architecture. Far from producing the institutional disintegration Washington anticipated, the Islamic Republic demonstrated remarkable resilience. This reconfiguration was the material result of decades of investment in autonomous military and social infrastructure. While distant powers rely on vulnerable extraterritorial bases, Iran has built a defense apparatus deeply rooted in its own topographical and human fabric. Underground bunkers, encrypted communication networks, and an asymmetric warfare doctrine transformed the country’s geography into an effective containment device. The command structure was redistributed through an institutional framework forged over forty years of resistance to imperial coercion. This strategic depth demonstrates that national sovereignty, when materialized in tangible infrastructures, possesses a density that hegemonic powers are incapable of destroying.
For weeks, Washington’s rhetoric oscillated between verbal escalation and coercive paralysis. After demanding unconditional surrender on March 6, Trump issued his most severe ultimatum regarding power plants on March 22. Iran did not yield, and before the deadline expired, Washington changed its tone, announcing productive conversations. This pattern of confrontation followed by retreat repeated itself throughout April: pauses in the bombings, claims about Iranian ceasefire requests, and social media messages that contrasted with the reality of a conflict overflowing its operational management capacity. On April 7, when Trump announced that an entire civilization would die that night and decreed complete and total regime change, the disconnect between maximalist rhetoric and actual military possibilities reached its limit of strategic coherence. Hours later, the announcement of a bilateral ceasefire confirmed that Washington had exhausted its coercive options.
However, the material reality of the conflict had already subordinated rhetoric to operational limitations. Throughout April and May, negotiations accelerated. In early June, Trump canceled another planned bombing. The negotiations had expanded beyond the immediate crisis, focusing on maritime access, the nuclear future, sanctions relief, energy security, and long-term guarantees over Hormuz. By mid-June, the memorandum of understanding was reached. The agreement sought to ensure freedom of navigation, establish a framework for the nuclear program, and create a pathway for sanctions relief in exchange for Iranian commitments. On June 16, Trump celebrated the completion of the deal, authorizing the toll-free opening of the strait and the immediate removal of the naval blockade. “Ships of the world, start your engines. Let the oil flow!” he ordered on his social media. While Trump proclaimed that the agreement would bring peace and security, one issue had silently disappeared from Washington’s public messaging: regime change. He began this crisis by encouraging the overthrow of the government, oversaw a military campaign that assassinated the Leader, spoke repeatedly of toppling the Islamic Republic, and warned that hell would break loose. Yet, he ended it by celebrating an agreement with the very Islamic Republic he once appeared determined to overthrow.
This shift transcends mere tactical contradiction to manifest a historical exhaustion. US policy in the Persian Gulf, based on the premise that the region can be managed as a global gas station and a military backyard through military coercion, has reached its limit. The logistical urbanism of the Arab coast and the massive naval presence can no longer guarantee absolute hegemony. By resisting and forcing a negotiation on its own terms, Iran has demonstrated that control of the straits and the capacity to interrupt logistical flows provide a decisive strategic advantage against distant powers. The special relationship with Israel, which drove Operation Roaring Lion and the initial escalation, proved to be a liability rather than a strategic asset for Washington, acting as a chain that dragged the United States into a conflict it could not win. The colonial vision underlying the threat to erase a civilization crashed against the reality of a state with profound historical cohesion and capacity for resistance. Washington is forced to navigate a Persian Gulf that, in its historical and spatial complexity, no longer belongs to it. Ultimately, the Persian Gulf emerges from this conflict as a postcolonial territory in resistance, debunking the fiction of a space pacified by the empire, a scenario where the materiality of geography has ended up imposing itself over the abstractions of military power. The logistical asphyxiation attempted by the empire has become the evidence of its own obsolescence.
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