America First hammers into the night. It is a nonsense according to many analysts, the great star-studded behemoth once again becoming the world’s gendarme beyond Trump’s election promises: national interest first, no unnecessary wars around the world let alone exporting the unexported, that is, democratic governance to be given by the peoples themselves and not by the marines.
So why bomb Iran in the wake of the aggression of its increasingly iron-clad ally, namely Netanyahu? First, it should be pointed out that the foreign policy of a major power is not a Euclidean schematic of cause and effect. Nor is it predictable. Developments of crises also have to be followed moment by moment, in their empirical evolution and in the historical sense they delineate.
After Carter’s disappointments (the disastrous 1980 hostage release raid) and after inconclusive, obscure and very long nuclear negotiations, the opportunity was there: Israel had weakened Hamas, beheaded Hezbollah, toppled the pro-Iranian regime in Syria, bombed the ayatollahs’ regime to the hilt (Khamenei is in hiding to defend his life more than to run the country), a surgical and spectacular military operation could be done.
Not an outright war but a planetary show of force that served to shut down Tehran’s ambitions on the atomic bomb and as a deterrent to everyone else, Russia and China foremost. Russia and China admittedly very cautious in their initial reactions, almost suggesting (badly) that an agreement on the new world order has been reached, at least for now.
The ayatollahs’ regime is expendable. In the Middle East the (non-Israeli) interlocutors are the very rich Sunni Arabs. There are still many questions, however: will there be terrorist backlash, will there be economic retribution with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz where oil for the whole world passes through? And then really have Iran’s nuclear sites been damaged forever?
As we said at the beginning, geopolitics at high levels is not a convenient Pythagorean theorem. Everything is always relative (Einstein docet), and what is certain is that equilibrium in that ever-burning part of the world is still a long, long way off.
The article America first (even in strength) comes from TheNewyorker.
