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his key strategic goals, says the RAND Corp.’s Tabatabai.

      Moreover, these experts say, such support is relatively cheap compared to the hundreds of billions of dollars Saudi Arabia has spent on weapons and the estimated $200 million a day it is spending to pursue its war in Yemen.¹⁷ A 2018 U.S. State Department report estimated that since 2012 Iran spent some $16 billion supporting its proxies in Iraq, Syria and Yemen and provides $800 million a year to Hezbollah and Palestinian groups.¹⁸

      Meanwhile, recent anti-government protests in Lebanon and Iraq against government corruption and the lack of economic reforms are challenging Iran’s standing among the Shiite communities in those countries. In Iraq, Iran-supported militias and predominantly Shiite government forces have fired on the protesters in recent weeks, killing at least 319, according to an Iraqi parliamentary committee.¹⁹ And in Lebanon, Iran-aligned Hezbollah has sided with the government against the demonstrators, even though many of the protesters are Shiites.

      The result, analysts say, is an unprecedented confrontation with the same Shiite communities that had looked to Iran for arms and training but are now rising up against their pro-Iran leaders, who did not translate Tehran’s military and political successes into economic gains.

      “Simply puts, Iran’s resistance narrative did not put food on the table,” said Hanin Ghaddar, an expert on the Shiites at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think tank.²⁰ Ghaddar and other Middle East analysts say it is unclear whether Iran’s proxies can restore order and Tehran’s standing in Lebanon and Iraq.

      Israel poses the biggest challenge to Iran’s regional dominance, regularly bombing proxy-controlled Iranian missile stores in Syria and Iraq. And Israeli military intelligence closely tracks Iranian convoys moving arms overland to Iraq, Syria and Lebanon and pre-emptively strikes any looming threat.

      “If someone rises up to kill you, rise earlier and kill him first,” said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, quoting an ancient dictum from the Talmud.²¹

      Is war inevitable between the United States and Iran?

      It is impossible to predict whether war will break out between the United States and Iran. But growing fears on the part of world leaders, regional experts and oil industry analysts demonstrate that they see such a conflict as likely unless something dramatic changes the course of events.

      As tensions mount over Trump’s crippling sanctions and Iran’s escalating belligerency, desperate diplomatic efforts have been initiated to halt an apparently inexorable march toward a major conflict in the Persian Gulf, where nearly a quarter of global oil supplies originate.

      First, European leaders last year created a barter mechanism to allow businesses to sell Iran food, medicine and other humanitarian supplies without going through the dollar-dominated global financial system. But companies, fearing U.S. sanctions nonetheless, have backed away. Then French President Emmanuel Macron tried unsuccessfully to arrange a meeting between Trump and Iranian President Rouhani on the sidelines of the recent United Nations General Assembly in New York.

      Experienced former diplomats and Iran experts say a dangerous escalatory spiral is now in motion. Trump insists he wants to avoid a military clash, fearful that it would sink his 2020 re-election chances. So he has responded to Iran’s provocations with more sanctions and nonlethal cyberattacks.

      But the sanctions pose what former IMF senior executive and diplomatic troubleshooter Hossein Askari calls an “existential threat” to thousands of impoverished Iranians. Among the Iranian leadership and ordinary citizens, experts say, that threat has stirred the country’s centuries-old Shiite code of resistance and martyrdom, all but guaranteeing more provocative Iranian behavior and growing chances of a war.

      “The idea that you can conduct economic warfare against Iran without that leading to military confrontation and costs to the United States is unrealistic,” says Iran expert Parsi, noting that Secretary of State Pompeo last year advised Tehran to bow to U.S. demands “if your people want to eat.”²²

      “You can’t conduct that degree of economic warfare and expect nothing will happen,” Parsi says.

      Many Iran experts regard Iran’s harassment and seizure of several foreign tankers this past spring as warning shots. And the highly destructive attack on Saudi oil facilities, they say, was meant to provide Washington and its Arab allies a taste of what Iran is willing to do if war breaks out. To make sure the Trump administration got the message, Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif pledged “all-out war” if Iran is attacked, putting at risk the rest of Saudi Arabia’s oil infrastructure and the roughly 70,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and the Arab sheikdoms in the Persian Gulf.²³

      Patrick Theros, a former U.S. ambassador to Qatar, said the attack on the Saudi oil facilities was consistent with Iran’s asymmetrical warfare doctrine. Unable to defeat U.S. forces using conventional means, Iran aims to hurt the United States indirectly by targeting the world economy’s dependence on Persian Gulf oil and gas.

      As the standoff with Iran intensifies, some military analysts say the Trump administration still has several options short of war to pressure Iran into compliance. Sabahat Khan, a senior analyst at Dubai’s Institute for Near East and Gulf Military Analysis, said these include Trump’s standing offer for negotiations, a proposal Iran adamantly refuses to accept unless sanctions are lifted first. Another is more sanctions, Khan said, and a third is cyberattacks targeting Iran’s oil production and critical economic infrastructure.²⁴

      But Chas Freeman, a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, says without a diplomatic breakthrough, punitive measures will only draw increasingly belligerent responses from Iran, especially now that they believe Trump will not respond militarily. At some point, Freeman worries, Iran’s actions will cross a line that will leave Trump no option but a military response.

      Freeman compares Trump’s maximum pressure strategy against Iran to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s embargo on oil and rubber sales to Japan in the 1930s, aimed at halting Tokyo’s military expansionism in East Asia. As with Iran, Freeman points out, the sanctions hardened Japan’s resolve to resist U.S. intervention in regional affairs. Eventually, in a desperate bid to remain a major Asian power, Japan attacked the U.S. Navy in Hawaii, drawing the United States into World War II.

      Freeman calls Iran’s escalating provocations against Trump’s sanctions “a very clear warning of what we know from past history—namely that if you corner a country, even if it’s not your military equal, at some point you pay a price for that.” At some point, he adds, “You get attacked.”

      Background

      Repeated Invasions

      The United States has never fully understood modern Iran, neither as a monarchy nor as the Islamic Republic. The most glaring example is the unquestioning faith that successive U.S. administrations placed in the durability of the Iranian monarchy and its role as America’s policeman in the Middle East.

      In December 1977, President Jimmy Carter memorably praised Iran as “an island of stability” in the turbulent region. Within days the first demonstrations erupted in what became a revolution that eventually would end the monarchy, send Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi into exile and transform Iran into the virulently anti-American Islamic Republic.

      Iran scholars rank the Iranian revolution as one of the three most consequential events in the Middle East during the 20th century, the other two being the collapse of the 500-year-old Ottoman Empire after World War I and the creation of Israel in 1948. And like those events, the shock waves from Iran’s revolution continue to reverberate across the globe.

      “Virtually no part of the world has been untouched by the revolution’s repercussions because of its effect on oil prices, on the patterns of terrorism and modern warfare, on Third World politics and on the emergence of religious fundamentalism, not only within Islam,” wrote Robin Wright in her 1989 book on post-revolutionary Iran, In The Name of God: The Khomeini Decade.²⁵

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