Nathan Gardels is the editor-in-chief of Noema Magazine. He is also the co-founder of and a senior adviser to the Berggruen Institute.
From the time of Thucydides and the Peloponnesian Wars through the advent of World War I to Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq and now Iran, historians have had a better grasp of the confounding crosscurrents and unintended consequences likely to result from armed conflicts than the over-confident leaders who prosecute them.
In a recent essay in The Free Press titled “This Is How The Iran War Goes Global,” the conservative historian Niall Ferguson recounts once again the lessons of “applied history” that decision-makers in Washington would be wise to heed now that they have leapt headlong into the fog of war.
Ferguson begins his exhaustive inventory of historical failures to anticipate the undesired outcomes of military campaigns by noting that, while the war with Iran will go down in history as the first “AI war,” replete with drones and automated precision targeting, it is the physical geographical feature of the Strait of Hormuz that will be more determinative.
“Nowhere is the law of unintended consequences more binding than when crucial commercial choke points become casualties of war,” he writes. “Although it is fashionable nowadays to focus on financial choke points that can be exploited by sanctions, the oldest choke points are natural geographical features such as the Strait of Hormuz, the Black Sea Straits, and the Strait of Malacca, as well as man-made trade corridors such as the Suez and Panama Canals. These waterways often become critical in times of war.”
Churchill’s Curse
In a comparison that will surely rankle an administration that is already accusing the mainstream media of being unpatriotic in their war coverage, Ferguson brings up the widespread economic disruption caused by the British campaign against the Ottomans in 1914-15 and Winston Churchill’s disastrous assault on the Gallipoli Peninsula when he sought to force open the Dardanelles Strait leading to the Black Sea that the Ottomans had closed down.
As the celebrated historian points out, the first globalization of the late 19th century made the United Kingdom dependent on commodity flows from the rest of the world that had to pass through the chokepoint of the Dardanelles and Black Sea Straits. At the time, Britain imported some 80% of its wheat, 40% of its meat and 100% of its sugar.
The closing of the Strait resulted in food shortages and high prices. Fear of destabilizing social unrest swept the British Empire, from Canada to Australia and India, and the home front. In response, the British cabinet approved hefty state subsidies for war-risk insurance on British merchant shipping. Food exports were prohibited. The government created a state sugar monopoly and subsidized the importation of meat.
To break the blockade, Churchill championed a military solution. As First Lord of the Admiralty, he ordered the Royal Navy to “commence hostilities at once against Turkey.”
“Churchill was oblivious to the economic consequences of his order,” Ferguson writes. “War with the Ottomans not only further strained the global grain market — it also exposed the financial underbelly of Britain’s wartime ally, Russia. Russia derived 85 percent of its foreign earnings from agricultural and mineral exports, mostly via the Black Sea. These were essential for servicing the czarist regime’s rising external debt. With the gold standard suspended and the ruble falling sharply, Russia scrambled for loans in Paris and London, raising fears of a broader allied fiscal crisis.”
Opening the Dardanelles by force was tried first through a “low-risk, navy only” assault that the British cabinet also hoped would induce regime change. When UK naval forces could not remove mines from harm’s way and came under punishing artillery fire, ground troops were sent in by Churchill to take Gallipoli, a name that has become synonymous with catastrophe in warfare. Casualties in the bitter clash between Turkey and the United Kingdom and its allies reached 500,000, with more than 100,000 dead, which was followed by the ignominious retreat of British-led forces.
Six Lessons
Ferguson enumerates six lessons from the episode, all of which he sees applying to the problem of the Strait of Hormuz today:
- Policymakers struggle to foresee second- and third-order consequences of their decisions. Enemy actions are hard to predict, even with good intelligence, and the complexity of the global economic system means even modest perturbations can produce nonlinear ‘butterfly’ effects.
- The structure of decision-making at the strategic and operational levels often creates competing arguments about what actions should be taken, reflecting not only the personalities of the principals but also their departmental priorities.
- In representative governments, military expertise is often overridden by domestic-political calculations.
- Decision-makers also cannot ignore the different priorities of allied governments or the interests of neutral governments, for fear of turning them into adversaries.
- In crises that have adverse economic effects, governments are almost always tempted to intervene in markets. These interventions tend to have unintended consequences because even talented politicians and bureaucrats do not fully understand the mechanisms of, say, insurance and futures markets.
- In a crisis, the tempo of decision-making rises, exacerbating the inherent difficulty of acting under uncertainty.”
Boots On The Ground
For Ferguson, the situation in 2026 for America resembles that of Britain in 1914: The Trump administration entered the war confident, expecting regime collapse; it underestimated the economic reverberations and the resilience of the adversary and must now reconcile avoiding a “humiliating climbdown” with mounting public discontent over rising costs and allies pressing for the normal return of commerce in the Straits of Hormuz.
“Under these pressures,” says Ferguson, “decision-makers in Washington have been torn between persisting with their aerial strategy in hope of a better outcome, and adopting the seemingly riskier option of deploying ‘boots on the ground’ to accelerate the destruction of Iran’s drone and mine-laying capabilities. This explains the decision to send an amphibious-ready group and an attached expeditionary unit of Marines from Japan to the Persian Gulf.
“The danger is that, as in 1915, decision-makers do not consider the downside risks of pursuing military solutions to economic and diplomatic problems,” Ferguson notes.
The fateful resolution of similar dilemmas in modern American history, when one foot was already stuck in a quagmire, is all too familiar. The temptation is to double down in order to avoid loss of face by throwing everything you have at an enemy that won’t cry uncle.
If this is what the “best and brightest” of America did in the Vietnam War, only to later fruitlessly concede defeat after tens of thousands of more deaths, can anything different be expected from those whom they would have regarded as the dimmer crowd in Washington today? Let’s hope the new elites who have long been wary of getting drawn into “forever wars” harbor a wisdom the old ones, for all their Ivy League credentials, didn’t.
China & Russia Benefit Most
Ferguson agrees with what we have written in Noema, that the main beneficiaries of the Iran war will be Russia and China. In the short term, Russia is profiting handsomely from the stiff rise in global oil and gas prices, now that sanctions have been temporarily lifted, while China has protected itself by pre-emptively building massive oil reserves and shifting its economy, particularly in transportation, toward renewable energy.
The strategic benefit for the two revisionist powers is more consequential. As powerful as it may be, the United States can’t fight wars and maintain military readiness on three fronts — in the Middle East, Ukraine and East Asia — at once. Whatever resources, time, attention and political capital are spent on the Iran war, there will be a commensurate loss in Ukraine and around the Taiwan Strait.
The leading lights of the Trump administration, including the president himself, are unlikely to settle down with a history book amid the frantic scramble of the Situation Room as things don’t go according to plan. If they could garner the concentration to read Ferguson’s essay, they would at least absorb the gist of the well-chronicled mistakes committed time and again by those before them who were also seduced by their own hubris.