|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
The agreement (called a “Memorandum of Understanding”) signed between the United States and Iran in mid-June needs careful study in order to understand its real implications for the future of the Middle East, the United States, and the global economy that rests on the relationship between the two.
Basically, America accepted that Iran would control the global oil choke point that is the Strait of Hormuz, that the country would be compensated for all the damage caused by American and Israeli bombs and other military action over the last several months, and that it would be allowed to resume global trading in oil and have its assets that are currently frozen in the West returned to it. In exchange, Iran agreed to not pursue a nuclear military programme (which is theologically banned in Iran anyway), and to allow a temporary free passage through the Strait of Hormuz so as to clear the shipping backlog.
The situation remains fluid. The agreement began to fall apart almost immediately, with the American side (that is, the USA being held responsible for the actions of Israel) failing to control itself on the battlefields and also making unnecessary threats.
This is a very old American habit. A settler mindset. The collection of surviving indigenous Native American communities has this in their cultural memory. Of the nearly four hundred treaties the arriving white settler-state signed with the “Native Americans” between 1778 and 1871, not one was ever fully honoured. Attacks and genocide were what came instead.
In this case, the American side first tried to wriggle out of the Iranian agreement by changing facts on the ground. They achieved a “side quest” of getting Lebanon’s weak government to come to its own agreement with the invading Israelis the substance of which is to accept the fact of the Israeli military occupation of southern Lebanon, and to oblige the Lebanese government to disarm the Iranian-allied Hezbollah, which is basically the armed resistance embedded among the communities of south Lebanon, and which has been an enormous obstacle to Israeli ambitions there.
This move is aimed directly at undermining that part of the American-Iranian MoU that obliged the Americans to make their friend Israel withdraw militarily from Lebanon.
But such gambits are actually the secondary issue. What really matters is the fact that America found itself in a position where it had to agree to such terms, even for twenty-four hours, and also, therefore, had to relate to a Middle Eastern country as a complete equal.
American president Donald Trump even dejectedly admitted in a press conference shortly thereafter that there was nothing else his country could have done except agree to such terms. Trump even went as far as acknowledging Iran’s right to a nuclear energy programme, its right to self-defence and, therefore, to a missile programme.
The Middle East, as the centre of the world’s new energy source, emerged as the Jewel in the Crown of the emerging American global empire beginning in 1946, following the exhaustion of the global Western European powers from too much war.
America became exceptionally wealthy partly through making its currency the basis of world savings and then backing it up twenty years later as the compulsory currency for trade in oil. This led to financial irresponsibility. Over the decades, America began issuing more and more dollars as if they were as valuable as the original ones.
A situation emerged whereby the amount of dollars in use globally now far exceeds the actual physical value of the American economy that is supposed to back them up. This gap can be understood in figures. The public debt of the United States stands at a record thirty-one trillion dollars. This represents an over 100 per cent debt-to-GDP ratio and attracts an annual interest bill of about one billion dollars.
If this situation is not resolved, or seen to be being resolved, then a time will come when global money markets will lose faith in the United States’ stock market, treasury bills and, ultimately, even the dollar itself as a currency. Investment money will migrate to other currency marketsand other forms of wealth.
As original Wailer Peter Tosh prophesized:
“The day the dollar die
Things are gonna be better
The day the dollar die
No more corruption
The day the dollar die
People will respect each other
The day the dollar die..
This situation is bad for the ordinary American too. Ordinary Americans are already overstretched with the cost of living. The average US citizen or resident struggles to meet health, rent, transport, and tax costs. Now, if the world were to hand the United States back its dollars and asks for gold and other precious metals in exchange, there would be an immediate economic meltdown.
In Iran’s case, America reached for its traditional “solution” to such problems: grab some more of someone else’s wealth and add it to your asset ledger so as to improve your debt figures. As a result of the 1979 revolution that brought its current regime to power, Iran is the only part of the entire Middle East energy economy basket that sits outside American geopolitical control.
By the time America took over the Western European empires in the Middle East after the end of the 1939–1945 war, the project to create a Zionist colony in the Middle East was already long underway. America worked with Britain to make it a reality in 1948.
But Israel was not the first expression of this. Before the global rise of the United States, the Western European powers (basically Britain and France) had already identified the Middle East as the main source of the energy of the future. Unfortunately (for Turkey), the whole area was what made up the then Turkish Empire. The “solution” was to cause the breakup of that empire by encouraging rebellions among its Arab subjects who then went on to form the artificial kingdoms and sheikhdoms (some of which later became republics) across the region we now call the Middle East. In this way, Saudi Arabia was the first “Israel”: a European invention artificially planted among the peoples of the Middle East using a weaponized cultural narrative.
The arguments justifying Zionism and the state of Israel are actually a political weapon designed to keep the whole Western political class in line with Western (not “Israeli”) imperialist plans and programmes.
The current American regime did not create this situation; it merely inherited it. The visual spectacle and diplomatic awkwardness of the Trump government are not his creation. Rather, they are a reflection of the impossible situation the custodians of the American state now find themselves in.
They, and the cliques of oligarchs that they represent, are faced with three equally counter-productive options: to apply even more force to the current path of war against Iran, the Lebanese resistance (Hezbollah), and the Palestinians; or to create a whole new source of wealth to support the American economy (so as to compensate for the loss of the Middle East to Iran), or to simply try to oversee the decline of the global American empire in a managed way.
On the one hand, there are the needs and understandable expectations of the ordinary American citizen: security, prosperity, and political freedom. This is the essence of the American Constitutional Republic. On the other hand, there is that collection of wealthy corporations and corrupt, venal politicians who dominate the high finance and politics of the country at the national level. They are the ones who have used the patriotism of the ordinary American as the human energy to build an economic empire starting in the South American neo-colonies and on to Asia and later the Middle East. In this 180-year process, they have revealed themselves to be utterly contemptuous of ordinary Americans and very cynical about their naivety.
If the idea of the American republic is to survive, it must be politically, culturally and economically separated from the idea and workings of the American empire. As for the empire, its survival is dependent on its capacity to keep hijacking and mobilizing American patriotism towards the goal of dominating the resources of the Middle East and elsewhere. The more this is questioned by the ordinary American, the more it becomes necessary to derail the domestic political process by corrupting and co-opting the media, the elected officials and their offices, and civil society. This is where the historical racism aimed at Jewish people was reframed and then put to use as a defence of Zionism, and therefore Israel, and therefore the American presence in the Middle East, ends up as a commitment to rationalizing an idea of having “Zionist” interests operating above and outside the formal constitutional American political system.
This then is the crossroads of American national politics. To get elected, Trump had to appeal to the aspirations that ordinary Americans hold by promising to restore and safeguard the ideals of the Republic. But once in power, he has to increasingly bend to the will of the real owners of Washington, with their Zionist project designed to maintain the jewel in the crown of the American empire. His populism obliges one set of policies from him, but his love of money and the power to obtain it, make him do the opposite.
This is why Trump has had to eventually warn the US establishment that not signing the deal with Iran, and keeping the Iranian blockade alive, risked the banishment of the American presence in the Middle East, and therefore the trashing the dollar economy and the world economy around which it is built.
So, America is damned if it does comply with the terms of its treaty with Iran, and damned if it does not. What is clear is that the world no longer has one centre of power, as was the case between 1990 and today.
Iran has become the global example to this generation of formerly colonized peoples that Vietnam was to the 1960s generation before them.
Iran has demonstrated that it is possible to think and plan hard enough when studying one’s situation in the world so as to organize a proper defeat of your enemy, no matter how powerful. Iran remains battered but free of foreign domination.
Iran’s leaders did two things in one go: they understood that possibility and made it a reality.
The only part of the world not appearing to assert itself on this new global arena is Africa as a whole and as individual countries. We are neither a regional military power like Iran, nor a global economic behemoth like China, nor a continental power like Russia, nor a technological nerve centre like Western Europe, and certainly not a military giant like the United States still is.
Africa seems to be the only continent where the powers of the world have military bases, while Africa has none of its own anywhere outside the continent. This will be the reason why all the actual and potential conflicts between the multipolar powers are going to be fought on African soil, as a kind of “no-man’s land” between them.
We are not ready. We need to get ready.
