With its failure to defeat Iran or force the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, the US war on Iran has been labelled a "strategy of desperation", a "historic blunder" and a "strategic defeat".
A recent Washington Post analysis of satellite imagery concluded that the damage to US military assets in the region has been "far larger than publicly acknowledged by the US government or previously reported".
The war has revealed the limits of US firepower for all the world to see, with neoconservative thinker Robert Kagan even describing it as an Iranian checkmate of the US, and others calling it "America's Suez moment".
Such talk, however, misreads what is happening – both Trump's aims in the conflict and the significance of the original Suez crisis in the first place.
In 1956, a British-French-Israeli conspiracy to occupy Egypt and overthrow its leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, was thwarted by a combination of Egyptian arms, US financial pressure and Soviet nuclear brinkmanship. With its weakness exposed, Britain began the process of formal political decolonisation the following year.
The game was up for the British Empire. But a new game was afoot.
In his history of offshore finance, Treasure Islands, Nicholas Shaxson notes of this period that "there is a financial side to this story which almost nobody knows about, for out of the dust and fire of Suez something new emerged in London, which would eventually grow to replace the old empire, and raise the City of London to even greater financial glories".
By the mid-1950s, the costs of direct colonial rule were starting to outweigh the revenues it was bringing in. Britain's military spending, due to its colonial commitments, "has broken our backs", as then-Prime Minister Harold Macmillan put it, with conscription in particular a huge drain on resources.
The big danger of withdrawal, however, was that anti-colonial movements would reclaim their land and resources.
What Britain sought was to hand over – or at least share – responsibility for the repression necessary to avoid this outcome; a role it largely succeeded in ultimately passing on to the US, the Gulf monarchies and other handpicked military rulers across the former empire.
Just like Britain after Suez, the US is reconsolidating its imperial domination through a systemic transformation of the global financial order
At the same time, this new, streamlined "burden-sharing" form of imperialism allowed Britain to cut its expenses while adding new revenue streams through a reboot of the City of London. With the UK government introducing tighter restrictions on international sterling trade, London's merchant banks simply shifted to lending in dollars. And with an incredible sleight of hand, these dollar transactions were deemed, for regulatory purposes, not to be taking place in the UK.
But as they were obviously not taking place in any other jurisdiction, no other state was able to regulate the new market, either.
The result was a bankster's paradise of speculation, loans and investments free from any regulatory oversight, which became known as the "euromarket".
According to Shaxson, "it was at this point" – within months of Suez – "that the modern offshore system really began… Britain's formal empire gave way to something more subtle... At the moment of its apparent destruction, the British empire began to rise from the dead."
It was, says economic historian Gary Burn, "the most monumental financial innovation since the banknote".
Over the decade that followed, the euromarket spread out from London to a string of island territories that Britain had clung on to, creating a global network of tax havens – from the Channel Islands to the Caribbean to the Pacific atolls – that are still draining the Global South today, to the tune of trillions of dollars, much of which is then channelled back to London.
London had found a way not only to maintain its financial dominance but to render the colonial world system far more profitable than it had been at the height of empire.
Like Britain in 1956, the US may be facing military humiliation – but it too is creating a new form of financial domination in the process.
The war on Iran, as commentator Richard Medhurst has pointed out, is part of a broader war to monopolise global energy supplies, and a transformation of the US into what he calls a "pirate state".
