War and Conflict

They – the Euro 3 – are taking Iran to the JCPOA Disputes Resolution Mechanism at the UN, insisting Iran to be in non-compliance with its obligations under the JCPOA.

Anyone looking with sober eyes upon today’s world and the feeble economic and geopolitical underpinnings holding the system together must accept the fact that a new system WILL be created.

To stay that there has been some strange stuff coming out of the White House lately would be an understatement. If President Donald Trump knew a bit more about history, he would understand that countries that rent out their national armies to serve as mercenaries usually wind up holding the short end of the stick. There is the example of Pyrrhus of Epirus in the third century B.C., for whom the expression “Pyrrhic victory” was coined, and, more recently there was the British employment of 30,000 Hessian and other German soldiers in the American revolution.

The crowing by Donald Trump that he “terminated” the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Quds Force, Major General Qaseem Soleimani, simply because Trump believed, mobster-style, that he had it coming, should remind the world that the United States government stands as the world’s record-holder in either directly carrying out or coordinating with other parties the assassination of political leaders, American and foreign.

The killing of Iranian General Soleimani was big news.  There were a few points made in the Western mainstream media about its legality being dubious, but nobody seems to be concerned that it contravened international law, in addition to be totally amoral.  One wonders if any of the drone operators, the little key-tapping techno-dweebs thousands of miles away, were awarded a medal for their gallantry in prodding buttons to blast human beings to shards of flesh and bone.

Starting from the presidency of George W. Bush to that of Trump, the U.S. has made some missteps that not only reduce its influence in strategic regions of the world but also its ability to project power and thus impose its will on those unwilling to genuflect appropriately.
Some examples from the recent past will suffice to show how a series of strategic errors have only accelerated the U.S.’s hegemonic decline.
ABM + INF = Hypersonic Supremacy

On the 17 September 1656, Oliver Cromwell, a Protestant Puritan, who had won a civil war, and had the English king beheaded in public, railed against England’s enemies. There was, he told Parliament that day, an axis of evil abroad in the world. And this axis – led by Catholic Spain – was, at root, the problem of a people that had placed themselves at the service of ‘evil’.

Not since the 1930s has European appeasement been seen to be so cowardly, so cynical and ultimately so recklessly leading to greater escalation and war.
In the 1930s, British and French appeasement of Nazi fascism led to World War II. Nearly a century later, the same unscrupulous fawning over American imperialism towards Iran is similarly creating the conditions that fuel lawlessness and aggression.

“There is a kind of character in thy life, That to the observer doth thy history, fully unfold.”
– William Shakespeare

The stepping back from the brink of war last week seems to have been achieved by the Trump administration and Iran both working together behind the scenes to coordinate a face-saving de-escalation. Both sides knew war would be disastrous and balked. At least for now.
Iran’s barrage of ballistic missiles on two U.S. bases in Iraq in the early hours of January 8 was more a symbolic show of defiance by the Islamic Republic than any serious attempt to inflict American casualties.