Photo courtesy of Euractiv
After decades (if not colonial centuries) of labelling Iran-Persia as barbaric, evil and un-civilised by successive US leaders, last week the world suddenly heard the current “leader of the free world” actually refer to Iran as a civilisation. The brutal irony in that now infamous (and incriminating) X message by US president Donald Trump is that the US has belatedly acknowledged Iran’s cultural credentials in the very act of threatening its deliberate genocidal erasure.
The world now holds its breath as Iran and the US yesterday seemingly suspended their highest level talks in decades in Islamabad. US delegation leader Vice President J.D. Vance and Iranian delegation head Parliament Speaker Mohammad Baqher Ghalibaf have both returned to their capitals but the host Pakistani government insists that the negotiation process is not over.
However, President Trump himself seems to be creating an atmosphere to sustain the current pause in hostilities when he commented to media on Friday that it did not matter to him if a deal with Iran is reached or not. “We win, regardless,” he said. “We’ve defeated them militarily.”
After suddenly pausing their bombardment of Iran, will the US-Israel combine now resume attacks? Can they put up with more Iranian retaliation, however small scale?
After resisting some of the worst military aggression humanity has ever seen and forcing the US-led Western power bloc to negotiate, can “civilised” Iran’s military and economy sustain this ancient nation’s spirited defiance of the West’s revived imperialism? Will this last belligerent wave of a receding European colonial empire be blunted, at least for now?
The answer to that world-historic question partly lies in another cultural acknowledgment by the current imperialist hegemon: Iran is not only one of humanity’s oldest civilisations but it is also one of the world’s longest lasting empires. Indeed, Persia was a set of kingdoms and an empire beginning with Bronze Age Elam, a millennium before Macedonia’s short-lived empire of King Alexander briefly conquered that vast, prosperous region.
Persia-Iran prevailed over all Western invaders in the following millennia.
And now, probably the world’s most foul-mouthed national leader is mouthing victory as he seemingly persists with negotiations with his intended genocidal-imperialist victim.
Last week the world had to face up to bizarre brinkmanship when the US president officially threatened to wipe out a whole civilisation, referring to Iran, which his forces have been ferociously attacking for the past month. The guns are now suddenly silent and the US and Iran are at talks in Islamabad at the invitation of the Pakistani government, one of America’s oldest client regimes.
While the world’s billions of poor are hoping for an easing of food and livelihood insecurity caused by the US-Israeli war on Iran, aside from the current pause in Western military strikes, there is much doubt whether the talks will actually be sustained beyond the fortnight of suspended attacks conceded by Washington and Tel Aviv.
In his explicit threat on his official social media account to physically eliminate the entire Iranian nation, President Trump, notorious for his usually vague bombast, sounded far more definitive in carrying out that threat than Washington’s current commitment to pursuing talks.
Demanding that Iran immediately re-open the Strait of Hormuz (the “f….g Strait”, the US president called it), he wrote on his Truth Social account on April 7 that, “A whole civilisation will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”
That, the US is eminently capable of doing as the whole world knows since it wiped out the large Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in just seconds using a single atom bomb per city at the end of World War 2. Indeed, that same full scale annihilation of cities or swathes of countryside has also been perpetrated using purely conventional explosives during World War 2 and in subsequent wars in Vietnam and Iraq.
Both the Gaza Strip and Afghanistan have already experienced the mind-boggling destructive effects of giant sized US conventional bombs and Iran is currently experiencing the same. These are munitions of calibre ranging from one tonne to over a terrifying 10 tonne impact.
With Iran’s small, ageing, air force already knocked out of the skies by the overwhelmingly superior US and Israeli air forces and its air defence batteries also similarly degraded, the US alone boasts of over 11,000 strike missions on Iran in these past four weeks of attacks. Israel boasts of only a slightly smaller number of missions.
With such air superiority, the two attacking countries now claim the destruction of over a dozen key railway bridges (including Iran’s biggest) as well as many road bridges. President Trump had also been threatening fully focused targeting of Iran’s entire road and rail infrastructure in other messaging last week.
In fact, the two attacking allies – utilising various services of many of America’s 32 NATO allied member states as well as eight Persian Gulf region monarchies – have also severely damaged Iran’s once strong economy and social infrastructure. They proudly claim destruction of two major Iranian steel plants, pharmaceutical plants, universities, libraries, mosques and cultural centres. It is possible to argue that the destruction of Iranian civilisation is already partially achieved.
Indeed, the US president’s blood-curdling threat of a whole civilisation dying made last week should be seen as cruel, crafty hyperbole that actually hides harsh reality. In distracting world attention away from ongoing operations with such an announcement of all-encompassing implications, this message is actually covering up the partial achievement of precisely that genocidal project.
But in addition to Iran’s civilisational resilience, what other factors are operative in the current pause by the US offensives?
Analysts also point out that the attrition resulting from Iran’s resistance and, if piecemeal, retaliation have made both the Washington and Tel Aviv regimes seriously unpopular. Israelis are beginning to panic over actual war conditions and casualties and the anti-war campaigns are strengthening.
In the US, the worsening market volatility, rising living costs and the clear failure of the Trump government to quickly defeat Iran as promised is making Trump personally unpopular and his backing Republican Party uneasy about their electoral prospects. The Western alliance, while quietly facilitating the US-Israeli operations without direct military participation, which fools no one, is known to be pressing for an end to the actual war in order to ease worsening pressures on their own economies.
Europe is far more vulnerable to the current energy crisis and shipping and trade disruption. In the Global South, there has never been any support for the war, even if most nations are silent due to their heavy dependence on actors on both sides of the conflict.
The war may resume since both the Israeli and US regimes are well known for their wanton belligerence and unrealistic arrogance over their military superiority. But given all the factors listed above, war is unlikely to resume immediately.
Shipping remains at a standstill in the Strait of Hormuz despite the ceasefire, dampening hopes for a resolution to one of the worst global energy disruptions in history. Only a handful of vessels have transited the critical strait since Washington and Tehran announced a two week pause in fighting, according to ship tracking data. Usually there is a daily transit of about 150 vessels.
More than 600 vessels including 325 tankers are still stranded in the Gulf due to the blockage of the strait, according to Lloyd’s List Intelligence.
The waterway usually carries about one-fifth of global oil and liquefied natural gas supplies.
The US negotiating team heading to Islamabad includes familiar faces: Jared Kushner, special envoy Steve Witkoff, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and CENTCOM Commander Admiral Brad Cooper, several of whom took part in earlier indirect negotiations with Iran.
Vice President Vance was reportedly added to the team at the last minute. With both the Iranian Speaker and Foreign Minister in their delegation, this made the weekend talks in Islamabad the highest level meeting between the two countries since the nuclear pact on Iran’s nuclearisation decades ago.
There is much speculation that Vice President Vance wanted to lead because he has hopes of a Republican presidential candidacy in the future. The White House has denied that domestic political pressure played any role in the president’s decision to negotiate.
But the Republican Party is losing popularity parallel to President Trump’s own unpopularity and the mid- term full congressional elections loom in November. The whole House of Representatives and half of Senate seats must be contested and elected. With narrow majorities in both chambers, the Republicans worry over defeat.
Thus, domestic interests as usual decide geopolitics. There is no doubt that Tehran had also anticipated Washington’s concerns. Iran is the mature civilisation after all.
Thus, do civilisations clash and geopolitics proceed. Trump should have read the Babur Nama or at least the even more sophisticated Arthashastra.