America has won ‘swift, decisive, overwhelming victories’ against Iran in only four weeks, President Trump told the American people in his nationwide broadcast on Wednesday night.

Iran’s navy was ‘gone’, its air force ‘in ruins’, its missile and drone arsenals smashed, its industrial capacity to replenish its stock of weapons destroyed, the regime’s leadership decapitated.

‘Our enemies are losing and America is winning,’ he repeated for emphasis.

The US had achieved ‘total military dominance’ in just 32 days and the onslaught was ‘nearing completion’, he assured his audience.

Even the enriched uranium Iran needs to make nuclear bombs was now buried deep under rubble.

Just a couple more weeks of air strikes – ‘to bring them back to the stone ages’ – and it would be job done.

Back in the real world, Iran yesterday hit a desalination plant in Kuwait, which depends on extracting salt from sea water for 90 per cent of its water supply.

Another Iranian strike forced Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates, to close its largest natural gas processing plant.

Iranian cluster munitions also struck Haifa, Israel’s major sea port.

Tehran’s grip on the Strait of Hormuz tightened.

The global oil and gas shock sparked by the war, which already has much of Asia reeling from soaring energy prices and shortages, is now rapidly bearing down on Europe, bringing widespread economic disruption and hardship in its wake.

If this is Trump’s idea of victory, it would be interesting to learn what he would regard as a defeat.

Moreover it’s a strange form of victory in which, so far, all the winners are the bad guys – while the losers are mainly America’s erstwhile allies.

If, before April is out, he declares victory and walks away with anything like the current state of play prevailing, then Trump’s War on Iran will prove to be catastrophic – above all for those who have hitherto regarded themselves as America’s friends.

The list of winners, to date, is small and tight: the Iranian regime and its major allies in the axis of autocracy, Russia and China.

The list of losers is long and growing: the global economy; the Gulf States; energy-importing democracies from the Far East to Europe, including Britain; and that bulwark of democracy, the Atlantic Alliance.

For all his bluster and bravado, Trump is already in retreat.

When the first attacks on Iran were launched on February 28, the White House explicitly listed regime change as one of the war aims.

All the signs coming out of Washington indicate that Trump is prepared to end hostilities with the regime in Tehran still intact.

It doesn’t seem to have dawned on the White House that, no matter how bruised, bloodied and battered, just to have survived is effectively a victory for the tyrants of Tehran.

They live to fight another day – and with a lethal weapon they didn’t have when the war started: the Strait of Hormuz.

This gives them a grip on the world’s most important energy choke point.

They’ve already closed it to all but Iran’s closest allies (such as China), although a French container ship was allowed to pass through yesterday, some say because of President Macron’s criticism of Trump.

Whatever the case, that’s far from the end of the matter.

The Iranian parliament, led by Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, is currently passing legislation to allow Iran to charge tolls for all ships using the Strait, much as Egypt charges for ships passing through the Suez Canal.

Of course there’s no legal basis for doing this.

Unlike the Suez Canal, which runs through Egypt’s sovereign territory, the Strait is an international waterway between two sovereign territories (Iran and Oman).

But Tehran is not minded to adhere to the finer points of international law, as touted by the likes of Keir Starmer and his attorney general, Richard Hermer.

Iran will have its tolls – and it will be much more than a fresh source of revenue to finance post-war rearmament.

It will use its grip on the Strait to bar ships of countries the regime regards as ‘unfriendly’.

It will bargain with Europe for access to the Gulf in return for Europe dropping economic sanctions against it.

It will wield its control of what is an essential economic lifeline for the Gulf States, through which most of their exports flow (not just oil and gas but petrochemicals and fertilisers), to give it leverage over these states to do Tehran’s bidding.

This has all the makings of a geopolitical disaster.

Yet Trump is washing his hands of the matter.

It is thanks to Trump’s War that Iran has seized the Strait.

But he says it’s up to others to take it back.

It is almost as though he regards it as just punishment for those US allies in Europe and Asia who refused to join him in attacking Iran.

It is dawning on the Iranian regime that control of the Strait is an even more powerful global weapon than its ability to develop nuclear weapons.

Yet even here Trump is in retreat.

Denying Iran the Bomb was also one of his original war aims.

That’s being junked, too.

Trump now claims the enriched uranium Iran needs to make nuclear bombs remains buried deep under rubble from America’s bombing of its nuclear facilities....