Photograph Source: U.S. Secretary of Defense – Public Domain
The lesson of the U.S. defeat in the Iran War is that there’ll be no U.S. war on China over Taiwan and Russia will win, on its own terms, in Ukraine. All Donald “Blockade Everybody” Trump has left is economic war. Expect him ultimately to go for it. Expect BRICS, at long last, to retaliate and the dollar to get ditched as the major world reserve currency, with standard-of-living-shattering earthquakes for average Americans scarcely outweighed by justified exultation at the prospect of no more hot wars. How do you know all this is likely – well, the pentagon already says it will reduce its dark footprint in the Middle East. That’s because the U.S. military could not defend its bases from Tehran’s missiles; and those bases made the luckless host countries targets for Iran. This is what defeat means. Humiliating? Yes. In the long-run salutary for a very over-extended Empire? Again, yes. Possible even to help end that bloated Empire and return to the long discarded, more modest status of a republic with fewer foreign entanglements? Maybe a stretch, but certainly an eminently patriotic goal.
The Eurasian alliance operates largely and cleverly under the radar. According to expert China hand Brian Berletic on X August 21, rumors that North Korea supplies Russia with loads of KN-23 ballistic missiles have implications for the “possible future of China’s involvement in pushing back against U.S. wars and proxy wars.” Uh-oh – unless that pushback remains in the shadows. Berletic cites China’s economic support for North Korea, China enabling arms and ammunition production going to Russia, China still covering its tracks but, ominously: “imagine what will happen if/when the U.S. crosses the line and China no longer cares who knows how it is boosting the military capabilities of its partners.” Imagine indeed. Trump’s erratic outbursts could easily precipitate such a lethally confused night. At best, all that happens is el jefe will have a meltdown, but there will be fundamentally nothing the white house can do about it. Tariffs? Trump played that card and lost. Sanctions? Ditto and the same way – namely, China struck back and played ITS rare earth card. And since U.S. weapons makers can’t function without rare earths and Beijing has cornered the world market on mining and processing them, well, China won that one, too. Then what? One can only pray that Donald “Wrecking Ball” Trump will have inadvertently deprived the national security state elite fanatics of their power.
One imagines the sachems in Beijing having glanced from the carnage in Ukraine to the war between Iran and U.S. proxies, to Israeli slaughter in Lebanon and genocide in Gaza, to NATO’s drones buzzing over civilian targets in Russia and, most keenly, listening to U.S. bombast re Taiwan and, inevitably, having concluded that they have a big, fat problem in Washington. No doubt China’s leaders did this when Barack “Assassin in Chief” Obama proclaimed his “pivot to Asia,” as in “China’s who we hit next” (hypothetical quote), and have paid very close attention ever since. How else to explain Beijing’s steady, methodical dumping of U.S. Treasuries? China evidently does not intend to be blackmailed financially by the U.S. Beijing leaves that distinction to Tokyo and any other fools who want it.
On August 21 came news that China landed another space launch system, thus successfully competing with the U.S. in this arena. So if Washington wants to militarize space, specifically the moon, Beijing has thrown down the gauntlet. In all other facets of militarization China and Russia (and now Iran, with their aid) have begun – of necessity, because we have compelled them to – to surpass the U.S. Their weapons factories go 24/7; Russia boasts the best air defense and most nukes of any country on the planet, bar none; China meanwhile gathers in its hands the supply chains upon which the American defense industry depends.
In West Asis, the U.S. and Israel nearly drained their silos of interceptor missiles – the China/Russia/Iran alliance has no such problem, because a vital sector, defense (all the more vital as these Eurasian behemoths find themselves ringed by hostile U.S. military bases), is not left to the diseased whimsy of a decayed, swollen, financialized late capitalism that is, as far as actual sustained production goes, in its death throes and that is also devouring the nation, ours, whose blood it has drained. Long story short, the U.S. already is or in the very near future will be inferior militarily to the Eurasian alliance. Washington’s navy, for instance, relies heavily on aircraft carriers; but we saw how that went with Iran (it didn’t), and it’s quite clear that in any hot war with China, American aircraft carriers would be sitting ducks and sunk, pronto.
So that brings us to the previously mentioned point – economic war. It’s the only trick left in a billionaire president’s bankrupt bag. And yet, while Trump buzzes like a crazed hornet about tariffs here and sanctions there, the fact is, the only victims he can credibly sting with these are so-called allies (actually vassals). Meanwhile, the proxies he personally favors, in the Persian Gulf, have sunk into the muck of his unnecessary, criminal, unprovoked war on Iran. Latest news is, per military expert Will Schryver on X August 21, “the Ansarullah drone operators are wrecking the Saudi mercenaries in Yemen.” That’s the part of the world where oil flow from Saudi Arabia via the Red Sea has been, uh, limited by the Houthis, though you won’t see much mention of this in western corporate media, just like you won’t see much fact-checking of Trump’s prevarications about 15 million barrels of oil transiting Hormuz. Instead, that supine corporate press, like the true stenographer to power it is, vomits up his every lie to manipulate the markets, lies which he has fabricated for months, every since it became clear that the stupendous effort to prove Washington top dog in the Middle East had ignominiously collapsed, when Iran defeated the U.S. and Israel.
It is a fateful coincidence that U.S. military might has been exposed as hollow in the exact same time and part of the globe where its moral authority crashed and burned. Those two places would be Iran and Gaza. Washington has been unable to cow Tehran, just as it has been unable to paper over the horrors inflicted by its attack dog Israel on Gaza. Those horrors amount to a genocide, which despite furious efforts, neither Jerusalem nor Washington can get the world to shut up about. The latest for instance involves a photo of footballers in Gaza, their little field surrounded by horrific ruin, a photo Israel boosters insisted not be posted by a French sports photography festival.
Indeed, with headlines like “The unborn are dying in the siege of Gaza,” (RT, August 20) having become routine across the planet, there can be no U.S. propaganda victory. “Miscarriages and stillbirths surge as Israel’s siege, malnutrition and toxic exposure and displacement ravage mothers” in Gaza, wrote Eva Bartlett. How do you “spin” a story like that? Well, corporate media can’t, so they simply ignore it (leaving the truth to…Russian state media!). This is, after all, the very definition of a genocide: murdering the next generation before it can get born, something you’d expect would outrage Trump-supporting abortion foes. But of course, not a peep from them. I guess the privilege of getting born, the “right to life” does not, in a Christian Zionist’s mind, extend to Palestinians in Gaza. One of the many contradictions clouding the brains of Trump’s screwy base.
And it’s not just Trump’s base whose thinking is muddled. On August 26 came more news of an earlier Iran/Russia nuclear deal, something the dimwits in the white house evidently did not see coming. Those two nations, according to The Hormuz Letter on X, “signed a $25 billion agreement to build new nuclear power plants, including Iran’s largest nuclear power plant to date…The deal is between Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization and Russia’s Rosatom, covering construction of 4 advanced third-generation nuclear power reactors…This is Iran’s largest nuclear power project to date, fitting into Iran’s long-term goal of ~20 GW nuclear capacity, with Russia already contracted for up to 8 reactors in Iran overall. This comes after Russia rejected the U.S. request delivered by CIA Director Ratcliffe’s visit yesterday to press Iran into reopening the Strait of Hormuz…” Did not the mega-brains in the white house foresee that greenlighting CIA targeting of Kiev’s drones at Russian civilian sites might, just might result in something like this picking up steam? That they did not see this snowballing as an inevitable outgrowth of Washington’s atrocious attacks, not just recently but over years, on both Moscow and Tehran testifies to white house idiocy.
Meanwhile, we have useful idiots in the American left-wing aristocracy demonstrating their perfidy with an open letter, printed in the faux-left Guardian newspaper, in the context of an atrocious, unprovoked U.S. military assault on Iran, in solidarity with Iranian political prisoners. Granted the position of those prisoners is awful, but why a letter like this just now? Precisely at this moment of imperial U.S and Israeli aggression? The intro to the letter reveals much about its purpose: “August marks the anniversary of the 1988 mass executions in Iran, a horror that echoes in the country’s current surge in death sentences…” Capital punishment is criminal pretty much wherever it occurs. Why doesn’t the Guardian run a companion letter about the new Israeli law that condemns Palestinians to death with abbreviated legal recourse? Dehumanized thug Itamar Ben Gvir has ghoulishly celebrated this law. Would the signatories of this letter condemning Iran also sign one against the new Israeli law? Or is whoever threw this letter together not concerned with such depredations? Coming when it does, directed selectively at whom it is directed, this letter does little besides fan the already burning flames of war.
In short and overall, this Washington regime’s bellicosity has had the unintended consequence of exposing U.S. military weakness. If that exposure causes a retraction of some – or, hopefully many – foreign military bases, then it’s all to the good for foreigners as well as for ordinary Americans. But most indications and rumors are that the U.S. national security elite is furious about this exposure, as journalist Mark Ames posted on X August 23, in response to a bitter Barry McCaffrey tweet that the U.S. military “probably permanently lost access to 15 Persian Gulf bases.” McCaffrey, Ames reminds us, “was responsible for the Highway of Death slaughter in 1991.” That someone like this nat-sec-state fixture publicly laments the loss of 15 bases suggest that his discomfort is widely felt among Washington elites. What they will do about it is anybody’s guess, but let me go out on a limb here – nothing good.
