An ‘off-ramp’ or a forever war? Mark Seddon on Trump’s dilemma as isolation beckons and world economy plunges
Raging against the dying of the light, two elderly men, the pair of them malignant narcissists, have conspired to set the Middle East alight, no matter the consequences.
For the best part of thirty years, Benjamin Netanyahu has been seeking a US President biddable enough to launch a war against Iran. In Trump, he found that President. Netanyahu told him, as he has told all of his predecessors, that Iran was on the verge of possessing nuclear weapons. There has never actually been evidence for this, and of course, Iran is a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, unlike Israel, which refuses to sign and which has at least 90 nuclear weapons. Iran allows UN weapons inspectors into the country; Israel does not. Tulsi Gabbard, the US Director of National Intelligence, who left the Democrats because she was convinced that Trump and MAGA were the anti-war party, is one of the very few in the administration possessed with a brain. She knows, because she told the Senate, that Iran had posed no direct threat to the United States. At some point soon, she may walk and talk.
Just as when Netanyahu finally over-stepped the mark with Trump by bombing Hamas negotiators based in Qatar during the sacking of Gaza, it is just possible that Israel’s bombing of Iran’s largest gas field, which Trump now claims he did not know about, could be a catalyst to what the myriad of armchair generals and military strategists currently littering our airwaves call an “off-ramp”.
In other words, at some point soon, Trump declares victory and tells Israel to desist from continuing. He could say that the US and Israel have destroyed Iran’s nuclear programme, even though he said exactly the same after the last round of US attacks on Iran. He could say that they have destroyed Iran’s ballistic missile programme. He could say that the Israelis have killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, which, even for those who loathe the Ayatollahs, was an extraordinary thing to do, given that he was the spiritual leader of the Shia branch of Islam. He could say all of this, but it is more than possible that Iran will now want to end this disastrous war on its own terms unless it believes that it will not be attacked again.
Iran has successfully managed to destroy much of the US air defence systems in the Gulf and has closed the Straits of Hormuz, apparently to Trump’s surprise. On top of this, every NATO member state has refused to get drawn into both the Straits and direct war with Iran. Keir Starmer has, unsurprisingly, managed to face both ways, first saying the US could not use RAF bases in Britain and at Diego Garcia and then saying that it could for “defensive reasons”. As I write, I am struggling to recall seeing any of the footage or film of US B52 bombers taking off from RAF Fairford ever having been shown on the BBC or any other mainstream media.
This is America’s Suez moment. That point of inflexion, when the Empire breathed its last for Britain and is beginning in the Gulf to do the same for the United States, but in a more bloody and unpredictable way. Trump, having not informed Starmer or the Europeans that he was going to attack Iran, who then told them that he didn’t need them until he did, now moans that NATO won’t go and help him. He has got personal with Starmer and threatened the Spanish Prime Minister. He forgets, or probably doesn’t know, that the US kept well away from the joining British, French and Israeli attempt to take the Suez Canal back from General Nasser in 1956. The US did so because it knew that the military operation was likely to end in failure, but also because it wanted to court the soon-to-be oil-rich countries of the Middle East.
Today, it has become painfully obvious that the United States not only ignored most of the Arab World in going to war at the behest of Israel, but having done so, was then in no real position to defend the Gulf States. In the longer run, will those same States really want US bases on their territories? In the long run, will future US administrations be led by the nose by Israel? And in the longer run, and with a faltering Israeli lobby in the US and Europe, will Israel be able or be permitted to occupy the Palestinian territories, southern Lebanon and tracts of Syria? “Greater Israel” may not last too long without the US.
The boot may one day soon be on the other foot. The rest of the World is aghast at the naked bullying of the Trump administration. Threats to Mexico, to Canada and Greenland have all followed on from one another. The strangling of Cuba and the kidnapping of Maduro, and now this entirely avoidable conflagration, all conspire to remind people that the United Nations and an international rules-based system, however imperfect, have been ripped up. This didn’t begin with Trump; it began with Bush and Blair in Iraq and then Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, but Trump has done so much more damage. And as a marker to the increasing irrelevance of the UN Security Council, Melania Trump was recently dispatched there to voice barely intelligible homilies. Did delegates walk out in protest?
No, they posed with her afterwards for selfies.
Thank you for putting it in words so coherently. I am beyond angry with Trump and Netanyahu and their supporting casts of Invertebrates. Psychopaths and Post War Pararadym Cling-ons.