Knowwhy

(Draft 2)

First of all:

1. The “winners/losers” logic adopts the perspective of states and their war aims; this should be avoided, not least because states construct their war aims ideologically, both for their domestic audiences and for the international community. The fact that, for example, the U.S. war is presented as a war of liberation for the Iranians and for the entire world as liberation from the “mullah regime” is precisely this ideologically constructed geopolitical image that the U.S. has of a state which, from the perspective of “Make America Great Again,” identifies this state as an exemplary troublemaker in the region where the U.S. seeks to reestablish (…great again) U.S. monopoly on world power in this region, and one should not adopt the realization of the war aims constructed from these worldviews in one’s assessment of such a war. Quite apart from the fact that one should not meddle in the question of whether and how a state formulates and then achieves its war aims by acting as some sort of superior war strategist and joining the  discussion over whether the U.S. has miscalculated or something of the sort.

2. From the perspective of an assessment of the situation independent of state interests, one should not adopt this type of assessment of the situation for the very reason that, through the debate on the achievement of war aims, it implicitly accepts not only the war aims but also war itself, if not more. Just how much the assessment of a war from the perspective of war aims not only accepts war as a means of state policy but also adopts war aims—or, through these discussions, projects its own political goals onto the war aims of other states—can be seen in the comments of the Europeans: not only can one share in the most important war aim desired by the Europeans in the war—the elimination of the “mullah regime” that is disobedient even to them— —and let us not forget—the implicit consent to war expressed thereby, which also renders their subjects war-ready once again; through such critical discussions of war aims, states also make their own war aims known to their own citizens and the international community, forge alliances through these debates, and reject others; and with the widely accepted idea that the war is about removing the “mullah regime,” one can also rub it in to the global rival, the U.S., just how much the U.S. is failing in this war with the war aim attributed to it, thus implying that the EU would be the better global power.

3. How, much like in the cases of Cuba and Vietnam, the critical left once again confuses anti-colonialism with anti-capitalism in its particular brand of criticism of the U.S. is another question. Obviously, this confusion—if it is one at all—is highly relevant today for Iranian exiles who manage to view the U.S.’s geopolitical cleanup war against its global rivals as an opportunity for their opposition, however justified, to Iran’s political system. War as a means for this kind of opposition only makes sense if the goal of this opposition is to thereby establish a state political system in Iran that can only be established through war: a pure, i.e., non-religiously inspired, capitalist state. Anti-capitalism through war—that doesn’t add up. And because that is the case, these critics once again regard the sacrifices accepted for this cause—just as with the project of a Palestinian state or a Kurdish state—as the perfectly normal price that such a state-building project simply entails. True, that is the cost, and it thereby discredits itself as an anti-capitalist project.

4. Instead of such considerations through the lens of states and their war projects or through the lens of fantasies of state-building, one would do better to consider how the war in Iran is already redefining world politics—both nationally and internationally—with the peculiarities of this war as a means of politics and the resulting political relations between the states involved and those not involved.

The Interim Assessment 

A) In general: What does this entail? The most important outcome: From now on, states define their national sovereignty under the threat of U.S. tactical nuclear weapons; the world finds itself in a state of peace defined by these wars, amidst the threat of nuclear war posed by the United States.

Also not unimportant: The killing or mass displacement of civilians—that is, citizens without uniforms in a state of war within peace—has become part of the everyday repertoire of war in these conflicts, determined by the alignment of states with the contending world powers. States depriving their people of their military power and, through the “annihilation of a civilization,” of their national identity—this is a new form of conflict resolution between states, which the conflict initiated by the U.S. over its monopoly on world power has turned into the now-accepted means of asserting geopolitical interests in the wars against the second-tier states allied with these world powers and in the wars among those states themselves.   

The world of states below the world powers—the U.S., China, Russia, and Europe—is becoming the object of these world powers’ conflicts over their global dominance.

B) In detail

1) United States

The United States has taught the world a lesson (Vance constantly points this out whenever others criticize the U.S. and its war aims): that global political ambitions—such as Iran’s as a regional power in the Middle East—which do not align with U.S. interests, must now expect war of the most brutal kind, one that no longer shies away from the use of nuclear weapons, that is, the annihilation of entire nations, as it has done in the past. Nuclear wars have thus been placed on the global political agenda as a tool of U.S. policy for all matters of world politics. This is now the norm in global politics; they have made this clear to everyone with this war, and it already applies—not only when states challenge the U.S., but simply and already when, like Iran—hence the example—they refuse to have their state program rubber-stamped by Washington, exactly as was demonstrated militarily against Venezuela, here at the military level of a militarily very potent state, as can be seen from the military conduct of this war.

Not entirely incidentally: international law, those regulations between states which, in their English designation as “international law,” do not even allow the idea to arise that these are regulations concerning the affairs of citizens, but rather regulates matters within the international community, such as how a war compliant with international law is to be waged to avoid the unnecessary killing of citizens; the very idea of this international law has been rendered null and void in global politics by the U.S. through the threat to annihilate an entire society with the necessary weapons—tactical nuclear weapons— thereby rendering it obsolete, as this threat by the leading state of the international community has stripped away the strategic reservation enshrined in international law to avoid unnecessary casualties, and thus genocide—the annihilation of an entire nation’s population, as in the case of Japan—has been established as an optional war objective in global politics by the leading power of the international community, effective immediately.

2) China

While the media maliciously accuses the U.S. of being unable to remove the mullah regime, China knows who this war is really aimed at: namely, a redefinition of world politics by the U.S. Staying out of this world politics—defined by war and its particular nature—is also a shrewd way of intervening precisely there, namely in that China thus presents itself to the international community as a cool, sovereign, and tolerant world power that, through its ally Iran, compels the U.S. to end the war, that is, to bring about a peace engineered by China, to counter the US’s redefinition of world politics through war with a peace brought about by Chinese diplomacy as the Chinese model of world politics, and to do so successfully through the war waged by Iran, which it supports.

3) Russia and Ukraine War

Through the war-driven redefinition of the struggle over which world power commands which nations of the world—by threatening to use nuclear weapons against a state like Iran that is tinkering with such weapons—Russia has, first, secured recognition from the U.S. that states possessing this arsenal of weapons play in the same league as the U.S. among the powers shaping the world order; and second, following the example of the U.S., Russia can now count on the West no longer dismissing its threats to use such weapons in the war in Ukraine as empty threats. Thanks to the fact that the U.S. has removed the moral reservation surrounding the use of these weapons and made them a genuinely deployable means of warfare in global political affairs, Russia’s tactical nuclear weapons have become a weapon whose use everyone must now reckon with. With the minor side effect that the non-use of these weapons allows Russia, much like China, to become a peaceful alternative world power in the international community, thereby serving up a nice propaganda victory for the ideological project of a multipolar world order with multiple world powers.

4) Europe and NATO 

With the war in Iran, Europe has been completely sidelined in global politics. A European foreign policy that cannot intervene in the same way as the United States, China, or Russia—that is, by brandishing nuclear weapons—will henceforth have little say in global affairs. Since Europe will not withdraw from world politics, the already planned expansion of Europe’s nuclear capabilities will thus become an accelerated program.

The old NATO is broken and will be restructured by the Europeans into a European military alliance. 

As we hear, Europe is now tinkering with the idea of how to get its hands back into the oil region after the war—without and against the US—banking on the fact that the US, by using Iran’s neighboring countries as mere military bases, has not fostered friendships there.

5) Iran and the Near/Middle East 

The fact that the “mullah regime” in Iran, a regime they treat as a geopolitical ally elsewhere in the world, hasn’t really bothered them for years, but is now becoming a cause for war with their next war in Venezuela, one realizes that this is not about Iran and certainly not about its Islam-inspired political system, but about Iran as the next target of the geopolitical program “Make America Great Again.”   In terms of global political strategy, Iran has, much like Israel, defended its national sovereignty against the U.S. demand that it henceforth seek its state rationale in Washington—as has been demonstrated in Venezuela—thus serving the global political mission of this war as a U.S. cleanup operation against the world powers—China, Russia, and Europe—which serve as the U.S.’s competitors—as evidenced by the push for peace negotiations by its allies China and Russia. Just as Israel has, Iran has done “the dirty work” for Russia and China, and this is all the more successful the less military intervention there is from the patron states China and Russia. Thanks to Iran, the mere persistence of this war has proven their positions as world powers to be quite resilient against the U.S., which has been attacked by this war. So one can look forward with interest to what the U.S.’s next cleanup steps will look like. Trump is, after all, set to meet with Xi soon, and thanks to the “mullah regime,” he certainly cannot succeed in pushing China out of the energy reservoir of the capitalist world powers. 

As for the rest of the world’s nations in the region: In this war, they are learning what it means for a state—as a post-colonial newcomer to the international community—to gamble on the support of a world power by turning itself into a military base for the U.S., which is fighting for its global monopoly, and thereby incurring the enmity of the states attacked by the U.S. in its wars for world order;  and are now trying to avoid incurring the hostility of the US by testing out offers from the other rival world powers—China, Russia, and Europe. The post-colonial state-building projects in this category have no alternatives other than to juggle the support for their national state programs offered by the competing world powers. That is simply how it is when, in response to colonialism, one enters the world of states with one’s own “independent”—as the idea of anti-colonialism dictates—state.

6) Israel—and Other State-Building Projects Surrounding the War on Iran

Israel serves as an example of how, in these times of global realignment, national political agendas can only be implemented to the extent that they contribute to the foreign policy of a world power—in this case, the United States—whose agenda is to purge regions of the world of states that support Iran’s global political rivals, such as Russia and China. Israel has used its services to U.S. global policy to attempt to militarily disempower its regional rival Iran and to take the next step toward its state-building ideal of a Greater Israel—alongside the ongoing  gradual  annexation of the West Bank and Palestine—by further conquering the territory of another state, namely the conquest of part of Lebanon and the subsequent expulsion of the non-Jewish population there who do not fit into the racist state program. Thus, one can also study Israel as an example of how the successful implementation of such a state-building project proceeds and what price its own population and the peoples of other nations pay for it. 

A similar lesson in state-building projects is currently being delivered by the Kurds—who are also held in high regard in left-wing circles—in the context of the Iran War: first, shoot down a competing state-building project for the U.S., then lock up the remaining population in camps, and finally hope that the U.S. will reward this dirty work, even though the last such offer in the Iran War was apparently not increased….