For whom is the cauldron boiling in the Gulf?

The waters of the Gulf are heating up again, and the cauldrons are on the boil. It is not at all clear, though, who will be scalded in the waters heated in these cauldrons. The target appears to be Iran, but so far Iran has never been scalded in any cauldron the US has set up against it; the cauldrons prepared for Iran have ended up scalding others.

Since the day the Iranian Revolution took place, there has been a cold war between the US and Iran, and this war has repeatedly come to the brink of open conflict, yet the war everyone expected has never broken out between them. In the atmosphere of this cold war, all the Gulf countries, led by SA and the UAE, have always felt a threat to themselves, and in the face of this threat they have remained locked in an arms race, buying from the US and European countries.

Paradoxically, every threat felt from an anti-American Iran has benefited its enemy, the US, even more, because the US has kept collecting the heavy price of protecting these Gulf countries against Iran. For that reason, the Iranian threat has ultimately been something that profits the US.

That no effective step has been taken so far to eliminate the Iranian threat for good is because this hostility is so profitable. In return, the US has never left this enemy, which earns it so much, without a reward. The US intervention in Afghanistan created an important sphere of expansion and influence for Iran.

After it occupied Iraq, which it had supported for 8 years against Iran, and then left, Iraq had become a country almost entirely under Iranian control. Iran had both been rid of its age-old enemy Saddam Hussein and added his country to its own sphere of influence.

It is now apparent that the US intervention in the civil war that broke out in Syria is aimed today not so much at toppling Assad as at keeping Assad standing and destroying his real opponents. It has been seen that this is, in fact, a process that has allowed Iran to become even more entrenched and stronger in Syria. As for the war launched in Yemen against the Houthis by the coalition formed four years ago, nothing has come of it so far other than an increase in Iran's influence.

Now the waters are heating up again. The first firewood under this new cauldron was Trump's withdrawal from the nuclear agreement with Iran and his decision, by putting forward new conditions, to impose sanctions until Iran complies with them. Iran was complying with the terms of the nuclear agreement, which the Obama administration described as a great diplomatic victory and which was regarded as a contribution to world peace.

However, while doing so, Iran was at the same time continuing its expansionist and sectarian activities against the Gulf countries in Yemen and Syria. Iran, which was approaching a certain level of agreement with the West, was continuing to escalate the cold war within the Islamic countries. Israel is also one of the countries against which it keeps the cold war going. The Trump administration, under the joint pressure of both Saudi Arabia and the UAE and of Israel, launched a new cold war against Iran, backed by heavy sanctions.

When the sanctions waiver granted in the first phase of these sanctions to 8 countries, Turkey among them, expired after 6 months, conditions of a major siege arose in which Iran cannot produce and export its own oil in any way. Yet the great majority of Iran's revenues depend on oil. Being unable to export its oil means cutting off all of the country's material resources.

Iran issued a challenge, saying that if it cannot export its own oil, it will not allow anyone to export in the Gulf either, and that it will close the Gulf if necessary. The US, for its part, heated the waters even further by sending to the Gulf the "USS Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group" together with the bombers known as "B-52s."

Yesterday, the Houthis, backed by Iran, raised their hand considerably by striking with unmanned aerial vehicles, in the Yanbu region, the pipeline carrying oil from SA's east coast to its west coast.

With this attack, the capacity of the Houthis, a small group against which a powerful international coalition, including America, has been fighting for 4 years, to still carry out attacks deep inside Saudi Arabia when necessary was revealed as a startling surprise.

The message was also delivered that if its own oil exports are blocked, Iran could target the oil pipelines of SA and the UAE as members of the alliance opposing it.

More important than this is that SA, which for years has been channeling the world's money to the US through arms purchases for defense against the Iranian threat, was caught so defenseless against a drone attack coming from the Houthis.

This situation is a subject of serious debate in the present climate. We have listened to Trump boasting about how he protects SA. In this incident, did the US not provide defense support to Saudi Arabia, or did that support prove insufficient? Both questions are of the kind that require SA to review its relations with the US in the current situation.

If it proved insufficient, what is the point of channeling so much money to the US?

And if there is a defense system and it is adequate, then it must mean that no response was given deliberately, perhaps to open the way to showing the Iranian threat as greater than it is and extracting more money.

Or it means that the US, as it has done at the end of every previous crisis by bringing out a gift for Iran, is preparing to present to Iran a Yemen in which the SA-UAE-Egypt coalition has made no headway in 4 years.

If I were in this coalition's place, I would not rejoice at all that the US is boiling a cauldron for Iran, because it is still not clear who will be scalded in that cauldron.