Opinion | The Trump administration’s demonisation of Iran benefits Saudi Arabia and Israel more than the US

Not content with stoking a trade war with China and skirmishes with other partners, US President Donald Trump seems in the mood to threaten real war, this time with Iran.

Are the recent reports of tanker sabotage in the Persian Gulf to become another Gulf of Tonkin incident, the contrived crisis which enlarged the Vietnam war by persuading Congress to enable US president Lyndon B. Johnson to “take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression”?

It is hard to know where Trump’s tweets and bombast will lead. His better instincts have been for quiet disengagement from the Afghan and Syrian conflicts. But his National Security Adviser John Bolton has no such inhibitions and seems to relish the prospect of one more try at “regime change” to reverse what have now been 40 years of failure of US policy towards Iran and which now make it necessary to present that country, weakened by years of sanctions, as a real and present threat to the US and its allies.

Actually, most of those allies – Germany, the UK, Japan – are more afraid of US sabre-rattling than they are of Iran, which is far from having nuclear weapons. It is targeted even though no fuss is made about the actual nuclear capability of three near neighbours, Pakistan, Israel and Russia.

As for US rivals Russia and China, they worry that things could get out of hand while being amused at the way Trump continues to unpick the alliances so patiently made over decades. Washington still has not got over the humiliations of the 1979 populist overthrow of their authoritarian Shah, installed by a CIA-backed coup in 1953, by the revolution which eventually brought clerics to power. That was followed by a humiliating failure to rescue US diplomats held hostage in their Tehran embassy.

However unpleasant their own regime, Iranians resented the US and other Western states cheering on Saddam Hussein’s 1980 invasion of their country, a war which cost upwards of 100,000 Iranian lives and consolidated the power of the clerics and Revolutionary Guard. No wonder it hankered after nuclear capability while neighbours had it already.