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.
