It remains risky trying to anticipate what President Donald Trump may do next. Thus, it is impossible to say that war with Iran may not restart at any moment — indeed, with US shelling resumed on Tuesday morning it may already have done so.
Nevertheless, one characteristic of the despot in the White House has become clear — when he meets firm resistance, he usually starts looking for a way out.
And well he might. The war of aggression — entirely also a war of choice — he launched with Israel against Iran three months ago has been a failure by every conceivable measure.
Trump now looks like being left lauding an interim deal which does little more than restore the status quo as it was before that unprovoked attack.
His immediate ambition is to reopen the Straits of Hormuz to commercial traffic — as the waterway was before his war led to its closing.
This after the expenditure of so much blood — mainly of Iranian civilians — and treasure and the unleashing of an economic tsunami, the waves of which are hitting every shore across the globe, including our own.
Soaring food prices in the poorest countries, more expensive energy almost everywhere, with the full impact yet to be felt. These are the consequences of Trump’s imperialist folly.
In its way, the US empire is suffering a defeat as significant as that in Afghanistan or Iraq — a more qualified setback — and a good deal faster.
This is rhetorically obscured by Trump’s impetuous bombast, uttering dire threats as he waves the world’s largest military at all and sundry. Yet few are now fooled.
Wars are political acts before they are military ones. Their course and outcome is determined by many factors, of which bombs are but one.
If it were otherwise, the victor’s laurels would almost always go to the party with the greatest capacity for violence.
That was not the Vietnamese people, nor was it the Taliban. Nor, today, is it the Iranian state.
It was a Taliban spokesman who is believed to have said: “The Americans have the watches, we have the time.” They also had the space — home advantage is a major factor. The US’s armadas can and will always go elsewhere but the Iranian government has nowhere to retreat to.
The Trump plan, sold to him by Benjamin Netanyahu by many accounts, called for that government to oblige him by either collapsing within 72 hours of the war starting, or suing for peace on any terms he chose to demand.
The world’s most powerful ignoramus demanded UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER (his capitals, of course). The deal now being negotiated does not seem a bit like that.
Once the Iranian state had proved to be a good deal more resilient than anticipated, there was no Plan B.
Israel thought it would solve the problem by assassinating anyone in Tehran capable of taking a decision. This is a favoured Israeli tactic, long-practised on Hamas, Hezbollah and before them the Palestine Liberation Organisation, with a singular lack of any discernible political pay-off.
One must assume that they keep doing it because they enjoy it, or like showing off. At any event, the forces of resistance across the Middle East — derided as Iranian “proxies” by imperialist propaganda — remain standing too.
Politically speaking, the corpses are in the camp of imperialism.
First, the war has ruptured relations within the main imperialist bloc, with almost no Nato powers endorsing Trump’s aggression.
Sometimes — step forward, Keir Starmer — that is simply the tribute vice pays to virtue. His loudly trumpeted opposition to the war has in no way hindered Britain’s practical military participation, both direct with RAF action in the Gulf, and indirect through the provision of British bases to the US aggressors.
Still, following the divisions over the plan to annex Greenland, the adventure in the Gulf has, more even than the 2003 Iraq war, sundered Washington’s network of alliances — not irreparably, but severely.
European leaders appear to have given up the policy of trying to appease Trump and are instead looking at alternative strategies for their future. Working people will surely pay for those, too, since greater military spending is at the core of them.
But there is no way this split is advantageous to Washington’s position in the world.
The war has also been bad for the business model of imperialism’s satraps in the Gulf. Not only have energy exports, the foundation of their economies, been drastically curtailed, but the Dubai expat lifestyle has been compromised.
The brochures speak of sun, sand and no taxes. But even the attractions of a zero rate on expatriate incomes seem less compelling when a missile is slamming into your apartment block.
The blundering handling of the conflict has also undermined Trump’s domestic position. His base has split three ways. One element opposed the adventure from the outset as a betrayal of his commitments to prioritise domestic issues at the expense of foreign wars, and have in some cases blamed Israeli influence for the deviation.
Another wing, largely composed of Republican warlords — excuse me, senators — are angry at the prospect of peace without the categorical victory Trump promised them. More war is their invariable motto.
And a third contrive to support whatever it is that the president says he is doing, come what may. Electoral defeat menaces all factions.
Nor has the war favoured the neofascist international that Trump and his acolytes, JD Vance much to the fore, have been trying to develop across Europe. His closest ally, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, has moved into the anti-war camp.
And nearer to home, Nigel Farage has been obliged to perform a screeching U-turn on his initial backing for the war, as has Kemi Badenoch come to that. Trumpism is not good news at the ballot box, it has dawned on him and his co-thinkers — drinkers? — across the continent.
China has emerged looking more stable and forward-looking through the crisis, while Trump’s US seems obsessed with the energy sources, and geopolitics, of the 20th century. If the Pentagon stumbles, might the end of the almighty dollar’s hegemony be coming into distant view?
The madness of King Donald will not likely abate in the near future. The exit of Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s intelligence chief — one of the more challenging job titles in his administration — removes one of the few figures opposed to wild overseas military interventions.
However, the over-reach she identified as a menace will remain. The US may fight more wars, but it cannot count on winning them. That is a good thing, whoever it is doing the defeating.
It may be right to be sceptical of the benefits of multipolarity, which cannot be confused with socialism, but it is the world we are moving into. The bloody fiasco in the Gulf has given it an additional shove.
Where does Labour stand in all this? Can it finally break from the Establishment pieties of the “special relationship” and set an independent course for Britain? We know the answer while Starmer remains at least nominally in charge.
But perhaps Labour leadership contenders should dwell more on this as a question of urgency and set out where they stand unless the succession is to be a much-ballyhooed nullity.
Source: Morning Star