Oil on Troubled Waters

If you read nothing but the serious economics journals, newspapers and blogs you’d think that the big tragedy of Trump’s War is the price of oil. The individual human beings under the bombs get mentioned, of course, and the refugees, and anxious folk who can’t contact relatives inside Iran, Lebanon and elsewhere in the region. Watching a jet fighter-bomber launching from an aircraft carrier, you see an anonymous helmeted head in the cockpit: what is that pilot thinking? But the Big News story is the price of oil. And other non-war non-economic news scarcely figures: what is coming out of the Epstein horror-story is fast getting closer to a smoking gun aimed at Trump, in any other time or world something that would be terminal for him. But the god of distraction is hard at work.

Unfortunately, however, the price of oil is indeed a big story – because it is the story of ordinary people’s shopping baskets, mortgages, jobs. And that’s the story also of how things are inside a cash-strapped family, of things little and big that infect life with their stresses. It is also the story of the next few years as the world reorganises yet again into new patterns and relationships not as a result of rational calculation but as a result of an incredibly stupid unthought-out act by the king of braggadocio and machismo, in whose lexicon the words and phrases ‘patience’, ‘work-arounds’, ‘consequences’, ‘human suffering’, a real ‘art of the deal’, do not figure.

No – just a sledgehammer smashing down on a glass table-top on which delicate china-ware is arrayed.

It is eternally astonishing that the world sill resorts to killing and destroying to resolve disputes. It is psychopathically childish. And because someone will resort to doing this, everyone has to. Huge resources are stolen from life to manufacture the means of killing and destroying, justified by the brute necessity of defence, yet too often by the malignant desire to aggress. One of the reasons suggested for the outbreak of the First World War is that all parties were overstuffed with weapons and armies that just had to be used, like a bubble beyond bursting point. There are enough Trump idiots and Hegseth-lowbrow types in politics too close to dangerous buttons, itching to use, for real, the piles of missiles and bullets, as a supposed short-cut to dealing with a problem.

But what Trump and his minions are learning anew, as if the history of the US’s wars in the last half-century had not taught them already, and so painfully, is that having the world’s biggest arsenal is not by itself enough. Bullets and bombs do not kill thoughts. Among these thoughts are resentments, the desire for revenge. Asymmetric war, from David and Goliath to today, tends to be won by the little guy in the long-term. Trump proposes annihilation; to repeat, you cannot annihilate thoughts. Even in the wastelands created by bombing, after a time the little shoots wriggle up among the ruins, and grow, and sprout their toxic fruits. They were, after all, fertilised by toxicity.

The truth is as it has always been: war must be outlawed from humanity. Every rational, humane person throughout history from earliest recorded times has said so, has urged it, and some have striven for it: they are among the true high heroes of our species. History itself remembers more poets than generals, illustrating a speaking fact. But the other and more tragic truth is that a single bomb can destroy in an instant what great effort and time produced. Museums, schools, art galleries, parks, repositories of creativity and things of beauty, and above all people, individual men, women and children full of plans, in relationships, building lives, can be vaporised in a split-second because a button was pushed. It is unspeakable.

These remarks are all obvious enough. They are in fact commonplaces of better thought. But iterating them in the midst of a ghastly spectacle such as is unfolding in the Gulf region right now, the shock-waves shivering out across the world to petrol-pumps and shopping-baskets, leaving behind images – like the one of all those graves lined up in rows for the schoolgirls of Minab – which add to all the similar images from all wars, is necessary. People self-defend by forgetting, turning away, putting it behind them, when the present hastens into the past, so the immediate urgency of stopping not just this war but War Itself is no longer felt. You feel it when you see it in all its insanity right before your eyes, then when the bombs stop falling you turn away – if you are not there among the craters, mourning your dead – and think of something else.

There has to be a moment at which finally and once for all, with one voice, all humankind rises up and shouts so loudly that the very stars quiver in their spheres: No more war!

And to get it to stop? That means rooting out its causes. Injustice, inequality, greed, money, profit, more money, power-hunger, ‘faith’, religion, ignorance, fear, Othering, discrimination…the list is long, seemingly intractable. The Titanic is filling up with Atlantic waters and we each have only a plastic teaspoon to bail with, if we have one at all. The seemingly-fatuous bien pensant nostrum provided by the thought that a hundred million plastic teaspoons might save the ship is, for that very reason, disdained. But you know what? - it happens to be true.

Where does one start? At home, with oneself. The ambition to make the stars quiver in their spheres is enough of a spur already.