Trump is pretty definitively losing his Iran war by this point. We're now over a month into the supposed ceasefire between the two parties, and the Strait of Hormuz is still effectively closed to commercial shipping. Iran retains the ability to frighten ships and insurance companies off with just a few random strikes; which means they retain enormous leverage in the ongoing negotiations with the United States.
And Trump, I'm sorry to say, has no moral standing to complain about this. I don't say it's good for any government—let alone a brutally repressive theocratic one—to deliberately shut down a major economic artery of the globe. But Trump was the one who first announced the principle of the right of the stronger. And according to that rule—if you suddenly find yourself the weaker party, you have no moral claim against one's opponent.
Trump's own top henchman Stephen Miller was the one who notoriously declared: "We live in a world, in the real world [...] that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power." And that is indeed the worldview that has consistently informed Trump's imperial policies—in Venezuela, in Cuba, and now, in Iran.
Okay, so if Iran suddenly finds itself with strength, force, and power enough to bring the global economy to its knees—the U.S. has no right to complain at that fact, by its own logic.
In his extraordinary and unclassifiable novel The White Stone—a book that mixes philosophical dialogues, ancient history, political diatribes, and speculative fiction—Anatole France notes at one point that "brute force, up to now the sole judge of human actions, indulges occasionally in unexpected pranks. [...] And its pranks, which are ever the work of some hidden rule, bring about interesting results." (Roche trans. throughout.)
He refers, for instance, to the fact that European powers arrogated to themselves the absolute right of conquest over the rest of non-European humanity—a right they claimed on the presumed basis of superior strength, force, and power, as Miller would put it—only to find themselves suddenly unable to prevail (in the Russo-Japanese war) against an Asian civilization that had mastered the weaponry and technique of modern war.
"[T]he fundamental princip[le] of every colonial war is that the European should be more powerful than the peoples whom he is fighting; this is as clear as noonday. It is understood that in these kinds of wars the European is to attack with artillery, while the Asiatic or African is of course to defend himself with arrows, clubs, assegais and tomahawks."
Japan threw all Europe for a loop by actually fighting off the Russians with modern weapons—and winning. "The Japanese cross the Yalu and defeat the Russians in good form. [...] Immediately do we discern that a danger threatens us. If it indeed exists, who created it? It was not the Japanese who sought out the Russians. It was not the yellow men who hunted up the whites," writes France.
"We there and then make the discovery of a Yellow Peril. For many long years have Asiatics been familiar with the White Peril."
So it was with Iran. They were meant to be invaded and promptly decimated—destroyed, decapitated, annihilated, as U.S. officials regularly boasted throughout the early bombing campaigns of the war.
But instead—curiously, outrageously—they fought back. And seem to have basically won.
"Tis in vain that serious individuals like Monsieur Edmond Théry demonstrated to them that they were bound to be beaten, in the superior interest of the European market and in conformity with the most firmly established economic laws," as Anatole France puts it, with withering irony. They appear to have prevailed anyway.
And if anyone should say: but they are an evil, immoral government who slaughtered their own citizens for protesting peacefully, I would not in any way dispute the characterization.
But the U.S. government has lost any right to cry about this fact—since they were the ones who first said: there is no such thing anymore as international morality; there are no such things as human rights; the only law of the world is "strength, force, and power."
And so, if another party should happen to find one day it suddenly has the strength, force, and power to do you harm in retaliation—you suddenly lose any right to object, by the logic of your own Social Darwinism.
As France wrote: "Of what use are our lamentations? That might is right is our god. If Tokio is the weaker, it shall be in the wrong and it shall be made to feel it; if it is the stronger, right will be on its side, and we shall have no reproach to cast at it."
It is the same contradiction that Jorge Luis Borges discerned among some of his contemporaries during the second world war: "He who denounces the English for being pirates is the same one who ardently declares that Adolf Hitler is acting in the spirit of Zarathustra, beyond good and evil." You cannot have it both ways. You cannot declare the absolute right of the stronger and then whimper about injustice against you and the other side not fighting fair.
I of course think we should aim for a world of laws, of approximate justice, of due process, of minimal standards of civilized behavior.
But those who are the first to cast these things aside by declaring unilateral, unprovoked wars of aggression—and bombing to death thousands of human beings who did nothing wrong—are the last with any right to then crawl back beneath the mantle of these standards, as soon as they find themselves losing the fight, and cry: "but international waterways are supposed to be free and open to all!"
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