Running Scared

Trump, scrambling like a frightened rabbit, is trying to extricate himself from the mess he caused in the Middle East and the world by starting a war. He will claim the war he started is another war he stopped, the usual Trumpian lie: for the war he started was stopped by reality, by severe global disapproval, by how much cost it loaded on people and peoples who had nothing to do with the mad venture, by the gift to Iran of a weapon almost as effective as nuclear bombs, viz. the leverage it can use over the Strait of Hormuz. Trump has been given a bloody nose, and has been sent ‘homeward tae think again’.

For decades containment has been the chief instrument used by Iran’s opponents anxious about the fundamentalist theocratic danger it represents in the Middle East. Trump’s outburst about obliterating Iran mirrors the longstanding Iranian aim of obliterating Israel, for which its ambitions to build nuclear weapons were a key part. To put it mildly, lowering yourself to the same level of vicious intent as your enemy is scarcely a good look, not that Trump had any good looks to start with. Obliterations, however, are the ugly resort of choice in that region - as it was in their immediately preceding history - in the futile tradition of revenge, predicated on exterminating an Other as a solution proposed as final. Yet after the expensive and destructive efforts made by the US and Israel in these last weeks, containment returns; de facto the deal with Iran that Trump tore up in his first term will be reinstated. What, therefore, was the point of doing something that every rational consideration warned against, that every moral sentiment is revolted by?

Of course the war has changed a lot of things. It has brought a staggering load of human grief and suffering, mourning and loss, violent disruption to lives. The Pope was right: ‘a handful of tyrants is ravaging the world’. You would think that the gross unacceptability of this would make humanity rise up and change things so that ravaging by tyrants can neither continue nor repeat. Alas, humanity will almost immediately hurry to forget and think of other things, leaving all the conditions for ravaging in place.

Without doubt Iran is severely weakened militarily in the sense of conventional materiel, and is faced with a sky-high bill for reconstruction, as high as the sky from which bombs and missiles fell on it. But all evidence suggests that Iran’s theocrats retain their grip, likely to be even more savage to its own people than ever, and more determined than ever to find ways of getting back at the US and Israel as soon as it is able. Trump has made an enemy that hates the US hate the US even more.

Trump had already alienated allies and forced a realignment in trade and treaties, reshaping geopolitics, weakening and isolating the US itself, by a succession of stupidities that began on day one of his second term and added new incredibilities every day thereafter. But this event is proving to be the final straw. The US has finally lost all trust, the most crucial of currencies, and Trump’s successor – however hard he or she works to restore relationships – will find that new relationships have been established which the US will either not be part of, or only partially admitted to. The US era is over. Trump has given away US global leadership to others, and history is starting over.

If the future looked uncertain and in too many ways bleak before the US installed a lunatic in the White House, it looks worse now. Take just one example: the vigorous efforts by the Gulf states to reinvent themselves as destinations for business and tourism and as a global travel hub, now face a major setback because the states’ geography has reasserted itself as a stubborn negative. While the world has been mesmerised by the antics of the buffoon in Washington, realignments among India, Saudi, Turkey, Pakistan and Egypt have been in process, producing two new rival blocs in the region to add to the destabilising presence of Iran and its proxies in Lebanon and Yemen, with a very powerful and highly reactive Israel right in the midst of all.

Meanwhile the chief gainers from the present conflict are Russia and China (despite the latter’s emphatic disapproval of interruption to its supplies of Middle Eastern oil). Russia’s economy has received a windfall, China has further evidence of US weakness and added ideas about what, when tensions return or new ones arise, it can exploit. Were I in Zhong Nan Hai today I’d be putting plans together to cosy up more closely to Iran, looking into the piggy-bank for how much to offer Iran for reconstruction. It is a toggle to pull when China wants to distract and enmire the US, while it continues its rapid transition to renewable energy, grows further as the Asia-Pacific hegemon, and builds towards its goal of reassimilating Taiwan.

As I write this I listen to an incoherent ramble by Trump about ‘nuclear dust’ and animadversions on NATO and claims of winning the war – cue canned applause – all business as usual in what passes for the Trumpian mind. The truth is that he has lost the war, enticed into it by Netanyahu into thinking it would be a Venezuela moment; he made a dreadful mess, and with everything tumbling round his ears is scrambling to backtrack. Whatever bloviations he falsely offers about winning this war, history – that new history now beginning – will reinforce the already-formed judgement of him as an arrant fool.

That is little solace to mourning, homeless, traumatised victims in the region, to the Gulf states, to NATO betrayed by Trump even as Putin wages his own war on Europe’s borders. Still: complacent over-reliance on the US until Trump was a mistake, for which a heavy price is now being paid. Envisioning a scenario in which a bad actor captures the White House might have averted some of this mess. One hope is that the Middle Powers will, a la Carney, convene a new consensus to replace the old, and bring back the tenuous stand-offs and trade-offs that have, more or less, sufficed since 1945. That this is the most to be hoped is not very complimentary to we humans and the way we conduct our affairs; to do better than that – actually to make things good, actually peaceful and cooperative – is an aspiration that our best institutions strive for, not least among them the UN and its component bodies, though they are overwhelmed by the Westphalian toxin of national self-interests, irrational ideologies, and money. As we see, to drop a Trump into this explosive mix is like dropping a match into a petrol tanker, releasing its handbrake, and letting it roll down a slope towards a hospital attached to an ammunition dump.