Gas

Trump says that he did not know that Israel was going to bomb Iran’s South Pars gas field. Either he is lying, or he is not on top of things. Both are natural Trumpian likelihoods. And both are beyond irresponsible, because the attack is a dangerous escalation of an already dangerous situation. Iran responded by attacking Qatar’s share of the same gas field, the North Dome, causing large-scale damage to the country’s Laffan Industrial City, a vital processing hub from which Europe and the US receive significant supplies.

Netanyahu’s assault on South Pars has at least two objectives: to increase the destruction of Iran’s economic capabilities – in the process undermining what it can exchange for help from its allies – and forcing a wider conflict to drag in other players, at the minimum Qatar itself and Saudi Arabia, which suffered attacks on refineries and its capital Riyadh as part of the Iranian retaliation. But the immediate consequence is to threaten the economies of uninvolved countries on the other side of the world, where higher energy costs add to economic difficulties themselves partly caused by Trump’s erratic trade policies. Tough times for ordinary people give far-right parties extra leverage – the consequences ramify. For example: in Australia cost of living pressures, anxieties over fuel supplies and high spikes in their cost, inflation dangers causing the Reserve Bank to raise interest rates to add to mortgage burdens, contribute to a rise int he polls of the far-right One Nation party - a ‘shoot the messenger’ response replicated in many places elsewhere.

This is a no-gloves war. In response to Iran’s threats to annihilate Israel, Israel is set on annihilating not Iran as such but the Islamic Republic of Iran, though the means – bombs and missiles – does not leave much of a distinction between the two. For the Iranian people, caught between a vicious clerofascist regime and its powerful enemies, the situation is beyond hideous. For Israelis and the Iranian regime the struggle is existential. Their respective gritted determination to survive by extirpating the other makes victims of the Iranian people trapped under the police batons of one and the missiles of the other. Awful.

Collateral damage from this conflict ripples right round the world. Ever since Trump returned to the White House all boats have been rocking; now they are in danger of being swamped and sunk. It reinforces the lesson that a too-powerful state in the hands of a malignant fool is a menace to us all. In the hands of someone with enough knowledge of history and enough understanding of the value of friends, a powerful state can be a form of surety at least for the lucky ones it partners with.

The US benefitted from being the arms supplier to the Allies in the Second World War, and from Soviet Russia’s profligate expenditure of human bodies in gaining victory over Nazi Germany. The US accordingly emerged as the leader of the West and a formidable superior to the USSR. That role was not without hubris: the mighty US attempted to impose itself but was thrice defeated, in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, in painful lessons about the unwinnability of asymmetric wars. Trump seems not to have learned the lessons, unless he practices his bullying on the likes of Venzuela and Cuba. He, treating the US military as a toy to wind up and point in a direction of his whim, knows neither history nor the value of friendship – he likes only worshippers – and seems to think that the impunity of the Venzuelan adventure licenses the same attitude to Iran. This is already proving a dreadfully costly mistake.

There are many good people in the US, and many good things about the US. Trump is representative of a minority persuasion there, an arrogant gangsterish exceptionalism fed on ignorance of what others think and feel. He runs counter to a broad streak of American decency which one finds it hard to believe will tolerate him long. He has been on his rampage for a year; I’m already amazed that it has lasted this long. When that limit is reached and Trump is dumped, the mantra constantly iterated in these posts – that the US has to reform its institutions: abolish the Electoral College, make the Supreme Court independent of politics, reform the representational system of both houses of Congress, erase the Second Amendment, increase Congressional constraint on the executive power, get big money out of politics – has to be turned into reality. If a well-wishing outside observer can see these as minimal requirements for the health of the US and the world, it can surely be seen by any reflective person domestically. What had begun with good intentions on the part of the Founding Fathers has passed its sell-by date, and the failure to reform is hemlock to the state – a state whose dying, because of its sheer size and weight, is death to many others elsewhere who have no vote on what happens there. By the processes of history the US occupies a position that affects the world as a whole, and has to step up to the entailed responsibility accordingly. We are all watching, and judging; by their fruits they shall be known.