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The ongoing crisis in the Middle East should actually be understood as a new stage in the long-standing crisis of American constitutionalism. The mounting chaos around how American President Trump is attempting to manage it is a physical expression of the permanent tension in America between the civic aspiration towards a democratic republic and the global ambitions of its oligarchic elite.
Iran, the country now under joint American and Israeli attack, is simply the site of where this crisis is playing out.
The ordinary American citizens who own the political idea of the United States through their constitutional rights have been losing ground for centuries to the American elites who own the economy and financial system. Because a significant part of the value of the American economy, from how the USA is positioned abroad, beyond the borders and the strictures of the American constitution, and the basic ways in which that economic system is maintained globally, simply violates all the principles of the American constitution.
It is a universal reality of statecraft that the wealthier any ruling elite make themselves from a resource that only they control, the greater the possibility of them becoming less and less answerable to their domestic populations, as the independent wealth makes them less dependent on domestic tax revenue. This places constitutionalism in jeopardy. This risk has come to affect America in a particular way; namely, that the constitutionally provided political institutions have less sight of, and less say in what the elites do abroad in the name of America. And over time, even the domestic political voice – the Republic – also becomes dependent on the proceeds of American imperialism. In particular, the Republic comes to benefit from a currency kept artificially high by the grip the American elites maintain on the global economy. So the elites’ constitutional obligations to the ordinary citizen are increasingly just on paper only, while at the same time the ordinary citizens and their constitutional bodies become increasingly materially dependent on the proceeds of the elites’ nefarious activities abroad.
With that background, one can see that the immediate trigger for the current bout of America’s political problems is that in its greed, the oligarchic class has overdrawn heavily on the revenue from their global economy and artificially high dollar. This crisis is expressed mainly in the form of America’s public debt, which now stands at 38 trillion of its own dollars, with about US$1 trillion in interest and other payments falling due this year.
The negative effects of this economic arrangement have now become very difficult to contain politically; the American population has become poor, and the rest of the world cannot afford their currency. The sheer size of the debt has led some analysts to say that it is actually now not physically payable. If this becomes a mainstream view among experts, then the currency is under threat, and with it, the entire array of stock markets that are supposed to be the holding of that value. The American empire’s economy risks collapse. All this is what makes war necessary. Some fresh value of something has to be seized and fastened to the economy so as to add value back to the currency of the one doing the seizing. The American oligarchs’ regime simply wants to take back the control of Iran’s oilfields and markets that they lost when the current Iranian regime threw out America’s client regime in 1979.
To understand this constitutional crisis better, we have to first understand where America started from, and how it grew.
America was made by and for white economic refugees who migrated from Europe a few centuries ago, and as the country grew, it brought in a lot of other poorer white Europeans to grow it. The principal means of doing this was land grabbing, ruthless mineral resource exploitation, and the use of enslaved labour.
This meant the genocide of the indigenous peoples, widespread environmental damage, and the importation of kidnapped Africans. Such acts required the development of a body of racist arguments to justify them.
The American project then unfolded in phases.
There were first the elites and scroungers of the thirteen original heavily settled states that made up the original United States of America, deciding to explore and expand westwards, grabbing everything they could and bringing in more vagabonds from Europe to give them ethnically cleansed land for free. This built up a large agrarian and mining economy.
As part of the process, the also exploited ethnically white underclass was politically sedated by being fed ideas of being racially superior to all the other exploited racial groups. This is what is, in essence, the practice of domestic American politics, wherein the economic aspiration is to become socially classified as white.
The next step was for the elite corporations to begin muscling in on the newly independent settler colonies of South America (and Haiti), which had only recently thrown out their own tired European empires. This ran for many decades, with South and Latin America becoming an oil and agribusiness site for rich North American corporations, held in place by a succession of American-backed dictators and more than a few direct military invasions to depose leaders with nationalist ambitions. The Caribbean countries would also be treated this way after their own independence.
The third step came after the globalized 1939–1945 war, which had seen the then great powers of the earth (the Western European empires, Japan, Germany, and the United States) seriously try to destroy one another. The Americans emerged the least damaged and, moreover, the only country armed with a nuclear weapon.
The American elites then seized upon this opportunity and worked to turn the US from the big dog of the Western hemisphere and the Pacific region into a true world power. This again unfolded in a number of steps.
First, they created a new global financial system and headquartered it in the US.
Then they made the global financial system dependent on their American dollar by placing their currency at the heart of the system, and their officials in charge of managing it. So, the US dollar became the global reserve currency for the rest of the existing and emerging countries. The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank were the global bureaucracies created to enforce that. For its part, America then made gold its own reserve currency.
Then America began a process of taking over the overseas territories and markets of the now-exhausted Western European empires. A key part of this was the conversion of wartime military intelligence networks and assets all over the former areas of conflict into a new intelligence and enforcement regime, eventually to be known as the Central Intelligence Agency.
In some cases, this takeover was done by invasion (such as in Vietnam, Korea, and Palestine), in others, by demanding that Europe give those territories “Independence”, with the Americans immediately turning the newly independent countries into neo-colonies by putting them into debt in their new financial system.
To then understand the current attacks on Iran, it is important to understand the fundamental importance of the Middle East to this whole process. And to do this, we must first understand how an empire works.
The often-quoted British description of their former empire as being one “upon which the sun never sets”, is usually mistaken to mean that they believed it to be something that would never come to an end. What they actually meant that the empire was so vast, running from east to west, that by the time the sun was going down in its westernmost parts, it was coming up in the east.
The heart of that empire was not Britain itself. That was the head. The place of greatest value was Britian’s occupation of the Indian subcontinent, known today was India. In those days, it was called The British Raj, and also comprised what is Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar (Burma) and Sri Lanka (Ceylon). This was the place where Britian’s first substantial imports of wealth came from, helping transform it into a modern mercantile-industrial nation. It is estimated that Britain drained forty-five trillion dollars from the region between 1765 and 1938, and also killed India’s cotton milling industry so as to build up the British one. The very word “loot” comes from an Indian language. It was not termed “the Jewel in the Crown” for nothing.
As a result, Indian-related events, politics, and information became of great interest to the British elite and the wider society. Even the other colonies Britain held in Asia (Singapore, Malaysia, etc.) seemed like an extension of The Raj. Epic battles were fought during both the conquest and holding of the region. Again, the word “khaki”, meaning “dust” or “brown-coloured”, comes from an Indian language, because it was in India that the British army was forced to change from bright-red uniforms to camouflaged ones as they battled sharpshooting insurgents.
Some two and a half million Asians were drafted into the British imperial army during the 1939–1945 war.
In all these ways, India as an idea comes to sit at the heart of how the British Empire understood itself globally at a cultural and political level. And the economic bounty lay at the heart of that. Capital and labour raised in India were used to play a critical role in helping Britain conquer the heart of Africa.
The current relationship between the United States and the Middle East must be understood in a similar way. The Gulf is to the American empire what The Raj was to the British one. The British called India “The Jewel in the Crown” of the entire empire; the Gulf region today is the beating heart of the global American empire.
This time it is because of oil. Which is a different kind of resource, because it is one that enables one to acquire other resources. Like the Spanish and Portuguese empires, the British Empire had started life as a wind-driven naval power. It later reached its peak using coal as its strategic energy.
A debate in the industrial countries about which, between coal, oil and electricity, was to be the strategic energy resource of the future was settled in favour of oil between 1890 and 1910. And with that, the Middle East acquired enormous strategic significance, because Western economic intelligence already knew it to be holding huge reserves of relatively easily drillable crude oil. This is why the Europeans dismantled the Turkish empire as part of the 1914–1918 “world” war, created a series of oil-rich neo-colonies and divided them among themselves.
They were to then progressively lose influence over them after 1945, as the Americans began muscling in.
America then builds its wealth on the trade in oil, backing its currency, which it finally formally consolidates as the petrodollar. Life becomes good, as we are all in hock to them currency-wise, and they binge out. This party runs into trouble when the United States suffers the sudden 1975 defeat in Vietnam, and they find that they have nothing to loot from there to pay off the massive debts they incurred in order to finance that war. So, America decides to sell off its gold reserves and make the dollar its own and the world’s reserve currency.
To achieve this, they reach out to the Gulf countries and offer them a historic deal: agree to sell your oil in dollars only, and America will guarantee your security needs, then bring your dollar profits and invest them in the American stock markets. With this double trick, the United States both guaranteed a world demand for its currency and an investment flow to prop up the values of its stocks and treasury bonds.
Welcome to the “petrodollar”.
The cost of all this has been to have to constantly manage Middle Eastern nationalism. Over the next six to eight decades, this was done by bribery, sowing confusion, war, repression, and murder. The political tool to do this was Zionism, which was a European project of elite Jews and their ideologues to persuade any global power interested to give them their own exclusive settler space in their empires.
With the arrival of America as the new world power, the Zionists turned to put their project at its disposal, which would then enable the migrant communities that had been arriving since the 1920s under British rule to stage a full-on land grab.
This is how Palestine becomes the absolute ground zero of Middle Eastern nationalism. Because it found itself at the receiving end of the most extreme of the means by which America planted its footprint on the region: ethnic cleansing.
Zionism became an important element in domestic American politics because it is the means by which the American political class violates the American Constitution on behalf of the oligarchs.
The United States of America has now reached a crossroads with Arab nationalism: it could either cede ground to the forces demanding land, representation, and better economic terms all across the region, or it could double and triple down.
The standard method has been to undermine or destroy any emerging or existing power that could become a focal point for Middle Eastern nationalism, and thus a counterweight to American regional dominance.
Iranians are simply another power structure that wants to continue to exist. One does not have to be consciously ideological as an anti-imperialist to become the enemy of an imperialist. As long as the physical reality of your existence objectively stands in the way of the interests of an imperial power, you will be their enemy. And it is in your existential interest to recognize yourself and them being in a state of mutual enmity. This is what Iran has managed to do.
If the American military footprint is removed, or significantly diminished in the region, then that will be the beginning of the end of the Good Life for the American oligarchs and their hangers-on, whom they prop up to run the various artificial neo-colonies ruled by artificial “monarchs”.
Iran has been their biggest problem here. It is just about the only Middle Eastern country to have broken free from American dominance; it is a huge exporter of good oil, and it is not scared of the Americans. As such, it sets a bad example that must be destroyed ideologically and occupied economically.
This is the reality facing Trump on his return to the American presidency after losing it in 2018. It has become a matter of leverage: Who will determine and control American foreign policy? The well-prepared oligarch empire faction? Or whatever is left of the domestic constitutional institutions?
And this is the situation for any high-level American official in all branches of the state: caught between the expectations of formal power as given to them by the American constitution, on the one hand, and the greater informal power being flexed by the oligarchs on the other.
Zionism is simply a very lethal sock puppet covering the hand of the actual enforcer used to infiltrate and corrupt members of the American political system so they struggle to stick to its republican values. Beginning in the 1950s, this process achieved full public form with the coup d’état against the American system through the 1963 assassination of President John Kennedy.
Since then, it has been wise and necessary to have an idiot as president, or someone clever enough to know how to act like one if he wants to keep his job, and his neck. Be charming, act the fool, help your friends make money, make some yourself, and never, ever, oppose the oligarchs.
This conflict with Iran is a violation of the American War Powers Act. It follows a practice now going back many decades to the American war in Vietnam that was one of the things Kennedy was asking too many questions about. American legislators are now regularly bribed or otherwise compromised. Some of them actually seem to volunteer for it in the hope of joining some inner circle.
Similar trends have long been seen with American judicial decision-making and in their media editorial decisions.
This is how the constitutional tension between constitutional obligations and oligarchical desire is growing into a full-scale domestic political crisis.
The war in Vietnam eventually provoked significant civil unrest at home. The oligarch’s squeeze of the domestic economy caused massive Occupy movement demonstrations against capitalism itself. Once the realities of the attack on Iran filter through to the ordinary Americans, there will be consequences again.
As a compromised product of that political class, Trump tried playing both sides – as he would. His deal-making instincts had him first side with those factions in the American political system that wanted an orderly standing down, and a focus on rebuilding the earlier idea of the American republic of the pre-1914-1918 war, where they simply looted South America and the Far East, and screwed their own working class.
But the factions wedded to empire money are terrified that their stocks and shares will become almost worthless if the “petro” is removed from the “dollar”, thus exposing its real, much lower value. And so, they want to keep going. Their notion is to grab back those oilfields lost to West Asian nationalism (Iran, Azerbaijan, etc.), by breaking Iran (and even the whole Russian Federation) into tiny, gulf-like statelets.
My guess is that, to the extent he thinks at all, Trump’s initial fleeting idea was to “drain the swamp”: step away from Zionism as too chaotic and expensive a means of holding on to the Middle East, but allow the oligarchs to take Iran as a settlement. This attack on Iran was supposed to be a weekend coup to achieve that, but it is now backfiring most spectacularly in the Gulf as we speak.
So now the oligarchs have to make Trump try to hold his nerve as they grind it out. And they have fully broken him in the process. Which was always their plan.
The stakes are extremely high on all sides, even for bystanders.
If Iran loses, it will be occupied, broken up, and looted. This is why they have been preparing for this war from at least the time the United States normalized directly invading Middle Eastern countries with the 2003 toppling of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.
If the Americans don’t win and Iran remains independent (mullahs or not), the Americans will have terms dictated to them, amounting to them being ordered out of the Gulf region.
This will change the world, right down to the currencies we shall use for international trade, the languages we shall speak while doing so, and the prices of the oil-transported commodities we buy.
But short of launching a nuclear attack, the Americans seem to have a very limited chance of actual conventional victory. They have not really won any wars against a determined enemy who enjoys actual support among their population since their 1945 victory over the Japanese Empire. And there, they had to use a nuclear weapon. But nuking Iran would actually defeat the reason for wanting to occupy it.
If American planners still retain the mental capacity to understand this (because it will set off a chain of events whereby Russia nukes Ukraine so as to quickly end that war before getting hit next, and China will decide to reclaim Taiwan before America shows up there with more nukes, and Kim Jong-un’s North Korea will decide to forcibly reunify the Korean peninsula before the nuke madness spreads), they will have to prevent their fanatic bouncers in Tel Aviv from doing so.
In killing Iranians, the United States of America may well be killing itself.
