Conrad Black: Tehran’s Miscalculation

President Trump has outsmarted the Iranians, who appear to have counted on their supposedly incontestable mastery of the Hormuz Strait to frighten and intimidate oil-consuming countries, including many that until recently had been assumed to be American allies, and the Americans themselves, with the specter of high oil and gasoline prices. Despite the overwhelming military victory of the United States and Israel in the war, the ruling clique in Tehran had evidently concluded that the American receptivity to peace discussions was, in effect, the Americans suing for peace, and that the conditions stipulated by Trump for peace were just window-dressing for his domestic jingoistic supporters.

The world has largely forgotten what it is like to have a dispute between countries where one side has a systematically inaccurate notion of the motives and level of commitment of the other. It was inconceivable to Adolf Hitler that a pacifistic idealist like Britain’s Neville Chamberlain and an evasive cynic like France’s Edouard Daladier could be so swiftly replaced in belligerent determination and cunning by Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle (even though it was several years before the Free French could have a significant impact on the war).

Hitler had also underestimated Roosevelt, viewing him as an overmedicated and severely handicapped president who relied on White House staff to push him in his wheelchair. When Roosevelt told Congress weeks after the 1941 Pearl Harbor attack that in 1943, the United States would produce 75,000 tanks and 125,000 aircraft—more than 10 times Germany’s aircraft production—Hitler dismissed this as “in no way possible.” (These and the other targets Roosevelt listed were in fact exceeded.) ---More...

In the Cold War, Stalin had been able to measure for himself the determination and astuteness of Churchill and Roosevelt and the practically unlimited military power of the combined Anglo-American countries, including the Commonwealth, which fielded armed forces of 25 million and gigantic navies and air forces. (When Adm. Nimitz’s U.S. Pacific Fleet put to sea in the last months of the Pacific War, with 25 battleships and 100 aircraft carriers, it carried nearly 5,000 aircraft and 400,000 men.) And of course, the United States developed and used the atomic bomb and maintained a substantial lead over the USSR and other countries in military applications of atomic and thermonuclear weapons throughout the Cold War. As Stalin demonstrated in the Greek Civil War, the Berlin Airlift, and the Korean War, he wanted no part of direct combat with the United States, as he knew how ruthlessly he himself would deploy the military power of that country if he had it.