1.From Baghdad to Caracas
I have heard it said a number of times that when the USA attacked Venezuela on 3rd January 2026 and abducted its internationally recognised head of state and government, Nicolas Maduro, the world changed, bringing to an end the international rules based order which had been put in place after the end of the second world war. If so, this sea change in international relations had been signalled well in advance by several other American ‘regime change’ operations, which strongly suggests that the ultimate cause of this rise in international lawlessness lies in something far more fundamental than the rogue actions of America’s current president.
In fact, the historical journey which has brought us to this point began shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, which, somewhat counterintuitively, led to the rise of what is generally known in US politics as ‘neoconservatism’, the origins of which are to be found in a policy paper written in 1992 by Paul Wolfowitz, then Under Secretary of Defence for Policy, and his deputy, Scooter Libby, who argued that, far from marking the end of history, as was suggested by American political scientist Francis Fukuyama that same year, the collapse of the Soviet Union marked the beginning of a new monopolar era in which the USA needed to actively defend its status as the world’s sole superpower, not only by ensuring that Russia was never allowed to rise to this status again, but by taking pre-emptive military action against any country or regime which challenged or resisted its global hegemony.
As this policy clearly contravenes Article 2 Clause 4 of the United Nations Charter, which states that ‘all Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state’, most if not all of the regime change operations which the USA has actually carried out since then have therefore been disguised as lawful interventions intended to actually defend the rule of law and, in many cases, are still not recognised for what they truly were even today. As Professor John Mearsheimer has pointed out, however, they have all more or less followed the same four step process, which, once one has recognised the pattern, make them unmistakable.
During the first phase of the operation, the regime is simply subjected to sustained economic pressure, usually in the form of sanctions imposed on it for some real or claimed infringement of the international rules based order. This then exposes the population to severe economic hardship, which results in protests and even riots which the regime is then obliged to suppress. This, in itself, can then be used in a propaganda campaign designed to make the regime seem so brutal and repressive that it needs to be removed for this reason alone. If this doesn’t work, however, the propaganda campaign can then by intensified by claiming that the threat which the regime poses to its own citizens extends to its neighbours, usually because it is developing some kind of weapon of mass destruction (WMD), to which politicians throughout the West can then respond by demanding that the USA intervene militarily.
The most conspicuous example of this kind of treatment occurred, of course, in the case of Iraq, which was initially placed under international sanctions at the end of the first Gulf War in 1991 as a punishment for its invasion of Kuwait the previous year. With severe restrictions placed on its exports of oil, this meant that it was also severely limited with respect to what it could import, which meant that nearly everything was in short supply, including medicines. This led to profound unrest, especially among the majority Shia population, which, between 1991 and 1999, launched a number of failed uprisings, to which the Ba’athist regime of Sunni president Saddam Hussein responded with brutal efficiency.
Throughout the 1990s, however, even this could not persuade either President George Bush Snr. or President Clinton to intervene further, partly, one suspects, because both knew that any such intervention would lead to decades of costly occupation, but also because, at that stage, neoconservatism had not yet become the prevailing political philosophy in Washington and because both administrations still retained a vestige of respect for the UN Charter. It was therefore left to President George W. Bush and his thoroughly neo-con administration to ‘finish the job’ his father had begun by claiming that Saddam Hussein was amassing WMD, including both nuclear and chemical weapons: a claim which, while it did not satisfy the UN, whose own weapons inspectors had found no trace of WMD, was enough to justify a US led invasion of Iraq in the eyes of the international community.
Since then we have seen the same pattern played out in both Libya and Syria, whose leaders were said to be murdering sections of their own population, in one case using chemical weapons. Now, in the most recent case, the process was brought to a similar conclusion in Venezuela, on which sanctions had first been imposed in 2005, ostensibly for human rights abuses, corruption and the anti-democratic actions of the Hugo Chavez administration. Along with the corruption itself, which led to widespread technical incompetence within the state owned oil company, PDVSA, and a devastating period of financial mismanagement, these sanctions famously produced years of hyperinflation and near economic collapse, which led to the usual protests and riots to which the Venezuelan government responded in the customary way. Even this, however, was not enough to persuade either the UN or US public opinion that military intervention was required, especially as it was generally thought that Venezuela would either tear itself apart or regress into some kind of pre-industrial state all on its own.
That neither of these things happened is largely due to the Chinese, who have not only been Venezuela’s largest customer in recent years, buying up to 70% of its annual oil production, but have also made significant investments in its oil infrastructure, bringing technical proficiency back to its oil industry. Indeed, it is for this reason that Donald Trump very probably decided to take action: not to secure Venezuela’s oil for the USA, or even to deprive China of it – for even after China’s substantial investment, Venezuela’s annual oil production was still only just 19% of what it was in 2005 – but to roll back China’s influence in the region.
The problem Trump had, of course, was that, while China’s presence in Latin America may pose a clear and present danger to both the economy and security of the USA, under international law, this hardly justifies attacking Venezuela’s capital and abducting its president. As in the case of Iraq, Libya and Syria therefore, some other reason for taking military action had to be devised. And given that Latin America is the biggest source of illegal drugs in the western hemisphere, which kill around 75,000 Americans every year, the obvious answer was to accuse Venezuela of being a major source of these drugs and its president of actually being the head of a drug cartel.
Of course, it may be argued that these accusations were in fact true. And I am sure that there are plenty of people who actually believe this. But given that the US Drug Enforcement Administration’s 2025 threat assessment hardly even mentions Venezuela, while devoting dozens of pages to Mexico and the Sinaloa cartel, this is somewhat less than credible. What’s more, no drugs were ever found on the boats that were supposed to be shipping them from Venezuela to Florida. For instead of intercepting, boarding and searching these boats, which is what the US Coastguard would have done if they had been allowed to reach US territorial waters, the US Navy rather conveniently blew them up, which is, itself, an illegal act under international maritime law. More to the point, the parallels between Iraq, Libya, Syria and now Venezuela are so obvious that it is clear that this was just another regime change operation for which drug trafficking was merely the most convenient pretext.
The question this raises, however, is why we think that the attack on Caracas on 3rd January 2026 has somehow changed the world, bringing the international rules based order to an end. What made it so different? The answer, however, is fairly straightforward. For while, during the build up to the second gulf war, George W. Bush did everything he could to get the UN to officially sanction the invasion of Iraq, and while Barak Obama took similar steps before taking action in both Libya and Syria, during the build up to the US attack on Venezuela, Donald Trump sought no such UN sanction.
Admittedly, George W. Bush ultimately failed to obtain UN approval for his action and therefore had to resort to forming a ‘coalition of the willing’ to mount his invasion, but he didn’t just dismiss international law as irrelevant in the way Donald Trump did.
Again, of course, it may be asked why this makes a difference. To answer this question, however, one first has to understand the circumstances under which the UN Charter was created in April 1945, at a conference in San Francisco to which 850 official delegates were invited, along with 3,500 advisers and more than 2,000 journalists from around the world. Even more important than the size of the event, however, was the mood. For having just defeated Nazi Germany in what was the biggest, most terrible war in history, everyone believed that what they were building was a new and better world in which good would finally prevail over evil, not just because that was what every right-thinking person wanted but because it was believed that history, itself, was a process of betterment, flowing inexorably towards a brighter future.
In a mood of such optimistic idealism, it is hardly surprising, therefore, that while the participants at the conference concentrated on defining what that better world would look like, no one really paid much attention to what should happen to member states who did not comply with the rules that were being formulated. Nor did they specify any procedures or mechanisms that would help ensure members’ compliance.
No one suggested, for instance, that the offices of the UN should include something like an Arbitration Council, where professional diplomats from neutral countries would try to resolve conflicts between members by seeking compromise solutions. Nor did anyone propose that the Security Council should refuse to sanction military action by any member state until all other avenues of conflict resolution had been exhausted. They just seem to have assumed that those who signed the Charter, presumably in good faith, would continue to abide by it in similar fashion.
In fact, the term ‘good faith’ is littered throughout the document, very probably because the delegates also knew that the UN, itself, did not have the power to enforce its rules and had to rely, therefore, on good faith from all its members to make it work. Yes, the Charter was drafted as an international treaty, which meant that, once it had been ratified by a member state’s legislature, it had the force of domestic law. If a future government of that member state decided to no longer abide by it, however, there was nothing much that the UN could really do about it.
What is truly amazing, therefore, is the fact that, for a long time, it more or less worked. The tensions of the Cold War meant that the Security Council often descended into a mere forum for diplomatic warfare; but when it did manage to agree on a resolution, most national governments abided by it. More to the point, most national governments regarded the UN, itself, as a legitimate and essential institution in maintaining an ordered and peaceful world. The problem was that it could only provide this function as long as everyone believed in it. As soon as they stopped believing in it, or as soon as one very powerful member state stopped believing in it, it became an empty shell. And this is what Donald Trump caused to happen. By dismissing international law and not even paying lip service to the UN before attacking Venezuela, he destroyed the illusion that international law existed beyond the good faith with which everyone had previously abided by it and without which it simply ceased to exist.
2.Propaganda & Censorship
Of course, it could be argued that, by making us see the world as it really is rather than how we would like it to be, all Donald Trump really did was tell the truth. The problem with this argument, however, is that he didn’t tell the truth; he concocted a story about Nicholas Maduro being a drug trafficker. And why did he do this? Because ‘neo-conservatism’ is simply another name for ‘imperialism’ and because all imperialism is always about the powerful imposing their will on the powerless, which is always morally questionable and which always, therefore, has to be justified, if not in a court of law – if such law exists – then in the court of public opinion.
What’s more, there are only three ways in which this justification has ever been historically attempted, all of which involve us either lying to ourselves or to the rest of the world. The first way is to tell ourselves that our imperialism is benign and that we are actually a force for good in the world. The Romans, for instance, told themselves that they were civilising the barbarians, while we British told ourselves that we were bringing the benefits of civilisation to the backward and uneducated. The problem with this form of justification, however – and the reason it now cannot be used – is that it is not only patronising and paternalistic but very probably racist and is now seen as such.
The second way, therefore, is to be a bit more honest and openly state that we are superior, if not physically then intellectually, culturally and morally, and that it is morally right, therefore, that we should rule over those who are inferior, in that this is the natural order of things. The problem with this, however, is that the last time this justification was tried was in Nazi Germany and it didn’t go down very well with the rest of the world, especially the Slavic peoples of the east who were to be made Germany’s slaves.
The currently preferred form of justification, therefore, is not to claim anything about our own superiority or beneficent effect upon the world, but to focus attention on the evil ways of those we wish to remove so as to impose our will on the leaderless masses that will be left. Muammar Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein and Bashar al-Assad were all thus evil dictators who murdered their own people and had to be removed for the good of the world at large. There are, however, two problems with this approach. The first is that pointing the finger at someone bad does not necessarily make us feel good about ourselves, whereas praising ourselves for all the good we are doing most assuredly does. When Britain had an empire, for instance, we were proud to be British, not because of how powerful we were, but because of how much good we brought to world. Indeed, we not only taught this to our children at school but basked in our uprightness and decency, which, in turn, actually made us behave better.
The second problem is that painting someone as purely evil is just too black and white. No one is that one-dimensional. I’m sure even Hitler had his good side, which means that when trying to convince the public that someone has to be removed, one cannot allow people to look too closely into that person’s actions, personality or character. In portraying Bashar al-Assad as an evil dictator who used chemical weapons on his own people, for instance, it would not have been a good idea to publicise the fact that he is a British educated ophthalmologist, who was described at university as being rather geeky. That doesn’t mean that he is not evil, of course, but anyone who has ever heard him speak is likely to be somewhat sceptical.
What this means, therefore, is that when demonising someone one wants to remove, it is not enough to constantly repeat the same lies and propaganda in the mainstream media, it is also necessary to prevent any widespread dissemination of the truth through other channels, either by bullying, bribing or otherwise coercing the owners and managers of those channels or by censoring their contributors.
One contributor who is all too painfully aware of this kind of pressure is Col. Jacques Baud, a former Swiss Army intelligence officer with an unparalleled record in international peacekeeping. This began in 1995, when he was appointed by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees as head of security for Rwandan refugee camps in Zaire, his principal task being that of preventing ethnic cleansing. He was then asked to set up a project to deal with anti-personnel mines in the region, which subsequently led to him being sent to the Mine Action Service of the United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations in New York.
Because of his knowledge of Africa, the UN then asked him to direct the first multidisciplinary civilian-military intelligence centre of the United Nations Mission in Sudan, on the basis of which he was then recalled to New York as Head of Policy and Doctrine in the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO). In 2011, he was consequently recruited by the African Union to head up its Research Department in Nairobi, before finally being appointed as Chief of Small Arms, Light Weapons and Mine Control in the Political Affairs and Security Policy Division at NATO headquarters in Brussels.
Since retiring, he has largely devoted himself to writing articles on military matters and geopolitics, including a number of articles on Syria in which he argued that the West’s determination to remove President Assad was not only unjust but foolish, in that, without the Ba’ath party to hold the country’s ethnically and religiously diverse population together, Syria was bound to become as ungovernable and chaotic as Libya after the toppling of Colonel Gaddafi. If this greatly displeased his former bosses in the West’s defence establishment, however, in November 2022 he committed what is probably the most unforgivable sin possible for someone with his background. What did he do? He published a book entitled ‘Putin, Master of the Game?’ which told the real story behind the Russo-Ukrainian war.
For those who do not know what the real story behind the Russo-Ukrainian war is, you can find my own version of it in ‘Ending the War in Ukraine’, which is far too long to repeat in any detail here, but has one aspect which is ironically relevant in the current context. For in its dealings with Ukraine, it could be argued that Russia’s behaviour was far closer to the spirit of the UN Charter than Donald Trump’s behaviour with respect to Venezuela. I say this because, along with France and Germany, Russia was a guarantor of the Minsk 2 Agreement, signed in February 2015, which, contrary to what is generally believed, was not an agreement between Russia and Ukraine, but an agreement between Ukraine, on the one hand, and the breakaway provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk, on the other. What is really important, however, is the fact that it was immediately endorsed by the UN Security Council under Resolution 2202, which called for the agreement’s immediate implementation.
This meant that, under international law, Russia, as a guarantor of the agreement, was obliged to do everything within its power to ensure that it was implemented. There was, however, one very large obstacle to it doing this, in that the first actions to be carried out under the agreement had to be carried out by Ukraine. I say this because, apart from an immediate ceasefire, with which both sides had to comply, what the Minsk 2 Agreement primarily stipulated was that Luhansk and Donetsk would return to Ukraine on condition that Ukraine amended its constitution so as to safeguard the rights of minorities, including the majority Russian-speaking populations of Luhansk and Donetsk, which had declared independence from Ukraine in 2014 due to the fact that the government of Petro Poroshenko, which the Americans had installed in Kiev earlier that year, had banned the use of Russian in government departments, the media and schools throughout the country, thereby prohibiting the people of Luhansk and Donetsk from educating their children in their own language.
Had the western public been made aware of this background, in fact, it is to be greatly doubted whether they would have regarded the demands of the people of Luhansk and Donetsk as unreasonable. As it was, the western media portrayed the breakaway provinces and their Russian sponsors as actually being at fault, with the result that no pressure was ever put on Ukraine to amend its constitution in the way Minsk 2 had stipulated. According to Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande, in fact, the respective German and French co-signatories to the agreement, the Ukrainians never had any intention of complying with Minsk 2 and had only signed it in order to buy time to build up their military so as to take back Luhansk and Donetsk by force, driving or wiping out the majority Russian population in the process.
Indeed, the Ukrainians signalled their intention in this regard almost from the very beginning. For not only did they not abide by the ceasefire, but over the next seven years, they bombed and shelled towns and cities in the Donbas on an almost daily basis, killing more than 14,000 civilians and injuring many more. Yes, the Luhansk and Donetsk militias fired back in what rapidly turned into a civil war conducted by artillery; but all the Ukrainians had to do to put an end to the fighting was desist from further exchanges and implement Minsk 2, which they never did
Meanwhile the Russians continually attempted to resolve the impasse diplomatically at the UN. In this, however, they were continually thwarted by three permanent members of the Security Council – the USA, the UK and France – who knew that, in order to enforce Minsk 2 and stop the killing, the Russians would eventually have to intervene militarily, which the West could then spin as a breach of the UN Charter, thereby justifying the imposition of further sanctions, the sole purpose of which was to break the Russian Federation economically in what was effectively, therefore, the first phase of another regime change operation.
Having been constantly fed the lie that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was unprovoked, most people in the West, of course, are totally unaware of any of this. They simply believe what they have been told: that the invasion was solely motivated by the territorial ambitions of a tyrannical dictator, who would not stop at Ukraine but would go on until he conquered all the lands previously controlled by the Soviet Union. In order to maintain this lie, however, it is not enough that it constantly be repeated, anyone who disputes it, especially anyone with a record as distinguished as that of Jacques Baud, has to be silenced.
In December 2025, as a consequence, his name was duly included on a list of 63 individuals who were to be sanctioned by the EU for spreading Russian disinformation. Without warning, his bank accounts were frozen and he was forbidden from travelling within the EU, which, given the fact that he lives in Brussels, meant that he could not return to his native Switzerland where he might have been able to circumvent the sanctions. In effect, he was stuck in Belgium without any money and dependent upon the charity of friends to provide him with cash and pay his bills. Worse still, he had no way of mounting any kind of legal appeal to get the sanctions lifted. For there is no court in Europe with the power to overturn punitive EU sanctions of this kind. In fact, he is, at the time of writing, quite literally an outlaw: someone who is beyond the protection of the law.
That this can happen is, in my view, even more shocking than that a president of the USA should order an unsanctioned attack on the capital of another sovereign state and abduct its president. I say this because, to most people in the West, the rule of law is not just that for which we fought the second world war but the reason why we gathered in San Francisco in April 1945 to ensure that we would never return to a lawless world, governed only by the dictum that ‘might is right’ again. To now find that we have done so, both in the international sphere and at home, is therefore the most regressive development imaginable. What is even more alarming, however, is the discovery that the two spheres – the international and domestic – are inextricably linked. For if those in power want to act in ways which contravene international law but don’t want this to be known or understood, they have to effectively shut the mouths of anyone who might spill the beans, which means that lawlessness abroad ultimately and inevitably leads to totalitarianism at home.
This, however, is not the end of the evils which abandoning international law and lying to ourselves about it can bring down on our heads. For if we lie to ourselves long enough and forbid others to bring up the truth, even in private, eventually we can come to believe our own propaganda and make some very bad decisions as a consequence.
3.Self-Deception & Miscalculation
One of the best examples of this concerns Iran, about which we have been lying to ourselves ever since the Islamic revolution in 1979. The two principal lies we tell ourselves are that Iran is a theocracy run by radical Islamist extremists, who use the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to rule the country by terror in much the same way as the Shah’s secret police SAVAK did prior to 1979, and that its people are therefore an oppressed, downtrodden mass who yearn for freedom and western style democracy. In this way, we thus justify having imposed sanctions on these people for the last 47 years while continually plotting ‘regime change’ against their government.
This, however, is a totally false image of the country. For the fact is that, apart from the judiciary, all three tiers or branches of the Iranian government are elected, including the Supreme Leader. True, the Supreme Leader is elected for life but, when he dies, his successor is chosen by an electoral college called the Assembly of Experts, which has 80 members, who are themselves elected for 8 year terms by the popular vote. Admittedly, the members of the Assembly of Experts are vetted by something called the Guardian Council, the twelve members of which – six clerics and six lawyers – are appointed respectively by the Supreme Leader and the Chief Justice, which rather dilutes the purity of the democratic process. The actual process of vetting candidates for the Assembly of Experts, however, is not unlike the Senate Confirmation Hearings held to scrutinise presidential appointments in the USA.
What is even more important is the fact that, while the Supreme Leader sets the tone and direction of his government, he is neither the Head of Government nor the Head of State and does not usually involve himself in the day to day running of the country. That role falls to the president, who is elected every four years by a simple majority of the popular vote and whose powers are clearly delimited by the constitution. While he nominates the members of his cabinet, for instance, their appointment must be ratified by both the Supreme Leader and the Iranian Parliament, which has 290 directly elected members from 368 counties, making it highly representative of the country as a whole. As the government’s legislative branch, the Parliament’s primary task, of course, is to scrutinise and approve whatever legislative programme the executive branch puts before it, but it cannot institute legislation of its own. In this way, its role is restricted to providing a further check and balance on executive power. In fact, the whole Iranian constitution has been carefully designed so as to prevent any one man gaining the absolute power once wielded by the Shah, making it a wonder to many observers that anything ever gets done at all. It does, however, make Iran one of the most democratic countries in the Middle East if not the entire world.
It also makes Iran one of the least susceptible countries to American style regime change, especially when attempted through decapitation strikes. For the system is essentially self-repairing. If the Supreme Leader is killed, for instance, as happened on 28th February this year, the already elected Assembly of Experts is immediately called into session to elect his successor. If the President is killed, then the Vice-president takes over until new presidential elections can be organised. And something similar is the case with respect to the Speaker of the Parliament, whose role is more like that of the Speaker of the House of Representatives in the USA than that of the Speaker of the House of Commons in the UK and who has two deputies to help him manage parliamentary business and liaise with the executive branch over its legislative programme, the more senior of whom would take over in the event of the Speaker’s death.
The most important thing to take away from all this, however, is not just that the Iranian government is not susceptible to regime change in the way the US government usually likes to perform it but that it is not actually a ‘regime’ at all in the pejorative sense in which this term is usually used to indicate a government’s lack of legitimate foundation. Iran, to the contrary, is a highly developed constitutional republic with a robust government apparatus which more or less runs itself.
What this also means is that the Iranian people are not disposed towards popular uprisings, or have not been so since 1979, when they cast out the Shah. For why would one go to all the trouble of removing a government by force when one can simply vote it out of office at the next round of elections?
Of course, it will be argued that what this actually demonstrates is that my analysis is flawed. For in January this year, it does appear that there was an attempted insurrection by a wide section of the Iranian population. This interpretation of the protests that started in December 2025, however, completely ignores what caused them. For they were precipitated by a sudden 40% fall in the value of the Iranian rial, which almost doubled the cost of Iran’s foreign imports and caused a massive spike in the cost of living. Assuming that this was the result of some mismanagement of the economy by the government, people quite naturally, therefore, took to the streets to complain. What they didn’t realise was that the fall in the value of the currency had been externally instigated by US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who actually boasted on TV that he had caused the currency collapse by gradually buying large quantities of it during the second half of 2025 and then selling it all at once.
What it is also important to note about the original, spontaneous protests is that they were initially entirely peaceful and that the police merely marshalled the crowds without intervening in any way. It was only in early January that the protests started to become violent, when crowds were infiltrated by people who were also externally organised.
We know this because, in mid January, the government shut down the internet and all mobile phone services, which meant that the activities of the rioters could only be coordinated using Starlink terminals, which the police were able to locate using their distinctive satellite signals. As a result, the police were able to arrest many of the culprits and, on 16th January, the riots abruptly stopped.
Of course, it will be argued that this does not excuse the police firing on and killing between thirty and forty thousand of their own people. According to the Iranian authorities, however – who may of course have been lying but who actually released the names and social security numbers of those who had been killed so that journalists could corroborate their tally – the actual number of those who died was 3,170, most of whom were killed by the rioters, who not only fire-bombed government buildings but attacked and set fire to innocent bystanders. Indeed, it was only at this point that the police finally intervened, going into the crowds with batons and shields in order to disperse them, only to be shot at from roof tops by snipers, who killed more than a hundred police officers.
Another group that was subjected to this kind of sniper fire were the fire fighters and paramedics who attended the riots to put out fires and aid the wounded, providing further evidence that the riots were externally organised. For at that time, we in the West still believed that the Iranians were an oppressed population held down by a dictatorial but fragile regime, and that if the people were sufficiently enraged by the atrocities which foreign agents were systematically attributing to the police, they would rise up, remove their leaders and embrace western civilisation and values.
In fact, it is fairly clear that on 28th February 2026, Donald Trump still believed this. For he clearly thought that by assassinating Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and a few generals, the government would simply collapse and that the people would take to the streets to welcome their American saviours with open arms. When this didn’t happen, therefore, he had no idea what to do other than to go on bombing and killing people in the hope that what was left of Iran’s leadership would eventually surrender. When this didn’t happen and when, moreover, the Iranians proceeded to destroy thirteen out the sixteen US military bases in the region, along with large parts of Israel and critical facilities throughout the Arab gulf states, he was then faced with the stark choice of mounting a ground invasion or suing for peace.
4.A Turning Point in History
Not, of course, that he really had a choice. I say this because Iran covers an area of around 1,650,000 square kilometres – about the size of western Europe – and is as mountainous as Afghanistan, making it very unsuited to conventional military tactics. It has a population of 93 million and an army which, including reservists and the IRGC, is about a million strong. Most military analysts therefore estimate that to conquer and occupy it would require an army of at least 2 million men, which the USA doesn’t have and would not be able to concentrate in enough suitable staging areas even if it did, making a ground and/or amphibious invasion out of the question.
Nor would continuing the air campaign have done much good. Iran’s ballistic missile and drone sites are all underground, beneath hundreds of metres of solid rock, as are its air defence systems, nuclear sites and much of its industrial capacity. One could therefore bomb it for years and hardly make a dent in its operational infrastructure. What’s more, US munitions stockpiles are running critically low, which means that the Americans could not have maintained even this campaign for very much longer, rendering any continuation of the air war not just futile but an actual threat to US security.
The most critical issue, however, was opening the Strait of Hormuz. For had it remained closed for very much longer, the world may well have suffered the worst economic disaster in history for which history would have almost certainly held Donald Trump responsible.
That’s not to say, of course, that even having signed the now infamous Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), thereby setting in train what many people hope is a path towards peace, Donald Trump was yet out of the woods. For he still had three main problems to solve, none of which has yet been fully put to bed. The first was convincing the American public that the MoU, which is largely based on the fourteen point peace plan which the Iranians first put forward at the beginning of May, is not a total capitulation to their demands – which it is.
The way in which the Trump administration seems to have decided to circumvent this problem, however, is by simply prolonging peace negotiations for as long as possible and, in all probability, never actually turning the MoU into into international treaty, which would have to be ratified by Senate and read into US law. The advantage of this approach is that by keeping any future agreement in the rather nebulous state of a work in progress, the administration is able to claim whatever it wants to claim about it while simply rejecting any negative criticisms. In fact, it started doing this from the very beginning, claiming, for instance, that the Iranians had agreed to allow IAEA inspectors to inspect their nuclear sites and to only use the Iranian assets being released by US banks to purchase US agricultural products and pharmaceuticals, both of which the Iranians deny. As long as the Strait of Hormuz remains open and the Trump administration continues to report solid progress in the talks, however, nobody will take Iranian denials seriously and, eventually, people will simply forget that the agreement is largely to their advantage.
The second problem, of course, is the Strait of Hormuz, which, for very good reasons, the Iranians are intent on controlling but which a lot of other people are equally intent on keeping out of their hands, ostensibly for reasons which seem reasonable and well-intentioned but are actually both spurious and disingenuous. The most commonly voiced of these is the claim that the strait is an international waterway which must be kept free for all to use without restriction. Not only does this overlook the fact that there is a large section of the strait which is entirely within the territorial waters of either Iran or Oman, however, but it also ignores the rather inconvenient precedent set by Turkey, which, under the Montreux Convention of 1936, was granted the right to levy a service charge on ships passing through the Bosphorus and Dardanelles, which currently stands at $5.83 per ton, which is very similar to the amount which Iran and Oman have proposed charging.
The real reason so many people are opposed to allowing Iran to have control of the strait, therefore, is almost certainly political. For not only would it place an enormous amount of power in Iran’s hands but it would also constitute an acceptance of Iran as part of the international community, from which it has been excluded since 1979: something which some people are even willing to continue the war to prevent.
On Thursday 25th June, for instance, the UK maritime security agency, UKMTO, which is assisting the UN evacuate ships trapped inside the Persian Gulf since February, instructed a Singapore registered freighter called the ‘Ever Lovely’ to depart the gulf using the strait’s southern sea lane along the coast of Oman, which is in direct contravention of the rules set out by Iran under Article 5 of the MoU that ships leaving the gulf should use the northern sea lane, along the coast of Iran, leaving the southern sea lane free for ships entering the gulf, thus preventing collisions. When, having been told to turn around, the ‘Ever Lovely’ refused to do so, the Iranians then attempted to enforce their rule by firing on it, causing some minor damage, to which the Americans responded by attacking radar stations and missiles launch sites on the Iranian coast, briefly setting off the war again.
Nor is this the only such breach of the ceasefire that is likely to occur over the next few weeks and months. For as long as third-party organisations such as UKMTO are involved in clearing the backlog, there will be some who will do everything they can to sabotage the strait’s orderly functioning and blame it on the Iranians. The good news is that, in addition to Oman, other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), principally Qatar, are now actively involved in planning how the strait will operate in future, which means that, once the backlog has been cleared and a toll or service charge agreed, there is every chance that Iran, Oman and the rest of GCC will keep the strait operating as efficiently as possible so as to maximise their own revenues.
The biggest problem that remains to be solved, however, is Israel, which is unlikely to end its military offensive in Lebanon as stipulated under Article 1 of the MoU, not least because its invasion of southern Lebanon remains extremely popular with Israeli voters. Indeed, it is highly likely that were Prime Minister Netanyahu to withdraw Israeli troops from those areas of the country they currently occupy, he would be ousted from power and forced to stand trial on the corruption charges he already faces. Even if wanted to, therefore, the chances of him actually doing so are very slight.
This therefore raises three crucial questions. Given that the Israelis did not actually sign the MoU and that the Americans would find it difficult to enforce their compliance, the first is whether continued attacks on Lebanon by Israel would actually constitute a breach of the agreement and whether the Iranians would therefore be justified in re-closing the Strait of Hormuz and resuming their attacks on Israel. The second is whether Donald Trump would be either willing or able to talk the Iranians out of taking either of these courses of action by promising them not to aid Israel in any further attacks on Iran, which, in fact, the Israelis could not actually undertake without US support. I say this because while, in order for Israeli fighter jets to attack Iran, they need to be refuelled, both on their outward flight and on their way home, the Israeli air force doesn’t actually have any in-flight refuelling tankers of its own and therefore has to rely on the Americans. By simply denying the Israelis the use of this service, therefore, the US President could effectively prevent them from attacking Iran. The third and most important question, therefore, is whether the Israel lobby and neo-cons in Washington would actually allow him to do this.
Of course, there is also a fourth question, which concerns why, if the Israelis continue attacking Lebanon, the Iranians should forgo attacking Israel. For unless Iran did, indeed, forgo attacking Israel, Donald Trump would find it much more difficult to resist pressure at home to aid Israel in its war against Iran. By forgoing attacks on Israel, however, the Iranians could extract a very heavy price from Donald Trump for so obliging him, including his tacit agreement to allow them to charge a toll on ships going through the Strait of Hormuz. What’s more, agreeing not to attack Israel directly would not prevent the Iranians from helping their Shia brothers in Hezbollah in their attacks, by supplying them with weapons, just as not actively helping the Israelis attack Iran would not prevent Donald Trump supplying Israel with weapons, which the Israel lobby and neo-cons in Washington would surly demand.
That is not to say, of course, that Donald Trump will actually be able to navigate his way through this diplomatic minefield in the way I am here suggesting. My point, however, is rather that the obstacles to peace are not, in fact, insurmountable. The real question, therefore, is whether, if Donald Trump does manage to extricate himself from the mess into which he has got himself, he and the rest of the political class in Washington will actually learn any of the lessons this disaster. Will they abandon their neoconservative philosophy and quest world domination and start treating their neighbours with respect and fairness? The answer, however, is probably not. For that would entail admitting to themselves that, for the last thirty years, they have been acting like gangsters, using military power to bully the world into compliance with their demands, while justifying this behaviour by characterising anyone who resisted their hegemony as evil tyrants and dictators who had to be destroyed. Worse still, they would also have to admit to censoring and vilifying those among their own population who dared to question this narrative and so brainwashing everyone into believing it by constant repetition in the media that they were even brainwashed by it themselves, leading them to so misunderstand the real world that they made serious miscalculations in all their foreign policy decisions, most notably in Iran.
So bitter would such a pill be to swallow, in fact, that I doubt whether anyone would have the moral strength to do so, especially anyone who has become as used to thinking of themselves as morally superior as the US political elite. The chances are, therefore, that they will actually double down on their neo-con philosophy and attempt to reassert themselves by embarking on yet another foolish and very probably illegal adventure, very possibly in Cuba, which, being only a few miles off the US coast, they will no doubt consider a much easier nut to crack. The trouble is that, while the Americans may not have learnt anything from their misadventure in Iran, the rest of the world most certainly has, with the result that no country will ever again fear US military power in the way they once did. A shift has occurred, not just in the world’s perception of America, but in the world’s centre of gravity, moving the balance of power away from the collective west and towards the collective east in a way which I believe will lead future historians to see America’s war against Iran as one of the most critical turning points in history.
