AROUND the world, since World War II (WW2) people have recognised the superpower status of the United States. The US since WW2 has been the richest country in the world with enormous military reach that sometimes appear coterminous with the world.

This hegemony has had enormous influence, though mistakenly, on the way people saw the US. It had thousands of analysts working in many state institutions and people came to accept that these analysts, especially in the State Department and the CIA, as knowledgeable people who know what was taking place in every country in the world.

American academics came to be the authority on International Relations simply because the US dominated the global economy and American scholars, well-funded, churned journals and books that people saw as the guide to understanding international affairs.

But this perception was based more on the popularity of the American Government in the world rather than substance. Most of the prestigious journals carried International Relations essays that glorified US global presence rather than sound scholarship. These scholars were ignorant about the nature of the Global South and didn’t care to research the Global South

The security analysts at the CIA, the Pentagon and the State Department, armed with the fact that the US is the globe’s hegemon didn’t see it as necessary to do real research on what the world was like.

When the USSR fell, not one of these experts had even the remotest idea what was taking place in the USSR. This is despite the fact that all America’s state security institutions had a certain type of experts named Kremlinologists. And there were hundreds of them. Their role was to study the USSR.

We come to Iran. Based on the perception that the US can conquer any country it wants to, the US attacked Iran. No doubt the hundreds of geopolitical experts in the US government advised their government that Iran was easy pickings. It turned out that the hundreds of geopolitical experts were mediocre analysts. Iran proved it was no walk-over and could use war strategies to damage US presence in the Middle East.

The war is over and any competent analyst would know that Iran was not defeated but in fact came out stronger. Briefly here are the factors that led to the US accepting a ceasefire.

One- the US was ignorant of Iran’s capability to destroy Israel. In fact, the US experts believe that Israel is such a formidable war machine that it could destroy the Middle East if it wants to. That is abominable ignorance.

Israel is not a formidable war machine. What Iran did was to signal to the US that if the war continues, it will destroy Israel (a country of a mere 8,000 square miles). Iran was so good that it bombed Israel for violating the ceasefire in attacking Lebanon. This is the first time since the Yom Kippur war between the Arabs and Israel in 1973 that a country attacked Israel not as a defensive reaction but as an offensive strategy. Israel did not respond. So, the first consideration to note is that if the war had continued then Israel may not have survived.

Secondly, the US mediocre geopolitical experts are to be blamed for what happened to the US military installations in Gulf nations and the devastation the Gulf countries themselves endured. No US strategist believed that Iran was capable of attacking US bases in the Gulf.

None of these experts ever thought that infrastructural damage could be inflicted on the Gulf State. What Iran did is that not only it liquidated many structures in Israel but destroyed US bases in the Gulf and severely damaged all the Gulf countries. What has not been made public is the enormous pressure the Gulf leaders, including the influential Saudi Arabia, put on the US to end the war. If the war had continued, Bahrain with its 290 square miles would have been obliterated from the face of the earth.

Thirdly, the US did not have a clue before the war started of Iran’s strategic control of the Strait of Hormuz. What Iran did is that it blockaded the strait thereby putting pressure on the world economy and once the world economy runs into problem the US economy gets into trouble.

The US had only one strategy, and that was to loosen Iran’s stranglehold on the strait – bomb the hell out of Iran. But the more the bombing of Iran had continued the more the existence of Israel and the Gulf nations would have been in jeopardy. Whoever started the war with Iran failed to internalise the wise saying of Henry Kissinger after the US lost in Vietnam: “Power has never been so great yet so useless.”

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Guyana National Newspapers Limited.