Recording your thoughts on current events is a perilous undertaking. Without the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to get things wrong. And because, on the occasions you manage to get something right, your predictions are often drowned out by the noise of consequence or else simply forgotten, there is little upside to doing so. Yet current-event blogging is important, because it is a way of keeping yourself intellectually honest. Like validation exercises for modelling, it is the best test of whether your world view has any actual predictive power.
With that preamble in mind, here are my thoughts on the four-day-old war the American Empire has just begun against the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Why did the Empire strike? And why now? Four reasons I can see…
As I see it, the cause of this war sits at the intersection of four distinct motivations. First, the Trump Administration is eager to win a hand of poker. And if a win isn’t possible, at least distract from the last few bets they’ve lost: the US economy, the Epstein files, the summary execution of ICE protestors in Minneapolis…This may sound like a banal, petty and ridiculous reason to risk US lives and take foreign ones, but my experience of how decisions get made is that they are often far less statesmanlike than people suppose.
The second motivation for war is almost as banal, and more sinister. It is that the American Empire has unparalleled military strength via the largest military industrial complex in human history. If you have all those chips on the table, you gotta play a few hands of poker. This means that even if Trump had the most pacifist instincts in the world, he sits on top of an executive power that wants war the way a 10 year old boy wants to run around outside and kick a ball.
The third reason is less banal, yet far, far more sinister. It is that the cancer of the American Empire does not reflect the wishes – or even the interests – of the citizens of the Republic it has grown out of. In the case of the Iran war, this should be patently obvious: an overwhelming majority of Americans oppose the war, yet yesterday their Congressmembers were unable to curb the President’s blatantly unconstitutional act of aggression. Instead, the Empire represents a web of interests that are diffuse across the globe, but are somehow strongly aligned with the interests of Israel. And Israel has a clear incentive to topple the Iranian regime – not to replace it with some kind of functioning democracy that will improve the lot of the Iranian people, but to do what they have done in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq: create a dysfunctional chaos state that cannot challenge their regional hegemony.
The fourth and final reason is the most important for determining the effects of this conflict on geopolitics. It is the connection Iran has to Asian Powers and in particular China. In a sense, the Empire is not attacking Iran as much as chipping away at China’s network of interests in the region. Iran has oil that it sells independently to China. My bet is that when the dust settles on this conflict, that will no longer be true.
The Empire’s army really does kick donkey
It might seem like an obvious point to those who understand the game of war better than I do, but to me, it is somewhat surprising to see how one-sided the combat has been so far. It’s not just that Iran has no cards to defend itself against American/Israeli aerial and ballistic assaults, but its regional allies, China and Russia, have clearly prejudged the outcome of this conflict and understand that there is no point in backing a loser. This, despite the clear incentives they have to keep the Iranian Regime in power.
Contrast this with Russia’s campaign against Ukraine. To be clear, Russia has enough chips in its stack that, as the blinds get raised, it will eventually grind out some kind of victory (however Pyrrhic). But Russia is utterly unable to dominate the skies the way the Empire has – not even the skies over its own territory, as we saw when the AFU staged an incursion into the Kursk region two years ago. This is worth reflecting on. For all the talk of a ‘multipolar moment’, no one, not even China or Russia, has the power to stand against the Empire’s armies.
Europe is an irrelevant patchwork of vassal states...with nice architecture
This is also not a particularly insightful or novel observation, yet the level of hand-wringing and ‘close monitoring’ coming out of Brussels is truly a sight to behold. With the notable exception of Spain, the Member States of the EU are breathtakingly unable to formulate a coherent position in the face of, not only flagrant violation of international law and the aims which it is constitutionally bound to uphold (i.e. promotion of peace), but also of their own self-interest. After orchestrating the bombing of the EU’s pipeline gas supply from Russia, the Empire has now bombed its way into a situation whereby America’s only competitor for selling LNG to Europe (Qatar) has left the table. Coincidentally.
Rumours of the Empire’s demise are greatly exaggerated
The lesson the Empire’s forces learned from Iraq and Afghanistan is that you don’t need boots on the ground to achieve your aims, if your aims are to destroy, fragment and keep weak. Libya and Syria have shown that there exists such a strategy as ‘managed chaos’, in which a regime can be cheaply overthrown through a clever combination of precision warheads and intelligence. You might not be able to pinpoint what will arise from the ashes, but it will likely be weaker than the thing you toppled – and if not, you can always bomb, wait and repeat.
This appears to be Iran’s fate. And if I’m right, China will see itself weakened by this. It’s a small but significant unravelling of the nascent coalition that was rising to challenge the Empire’s global hegemony. Seen like this, the better poker move for Beijing would have been to go all-in on backing Iran, risking full-scale war with the Empire in order to force Washington and Tel Aviv to fold. But as I said before, the evidence from the rubble so far is that China didn’t have the cards, the chips or frankly the moxie to back that bet.
So despite all the chatter about de-dollarisation, the fractured transatlantic relationship, BRICS, the past few days have shown that we still live in a unipolar moment. US citizens might lose, the Iranian people are almost sure to lose. China and Europe will also likely lose. But the American Empire will remain the clear chip leader.
