Why are America’s rulers allowing this?

Two things long axiomatic to me have been shaken by the criminally insane war on Iran. One is that US presidents preside on sufferance of their country’s ruling elites; primarily the corporate oligarchies – big oil, finance, big pharma, insurance, real estate, military industrial complex and so on – whose amassing of eyewatering wealth, in an economy which more than four decades ago began morphing from value-seeking capitalism to rent-seeking neofeudalism, buys untold access to the three arms of official power: legislative, executive and judiciary.

By this reckoning it should be impossible for a POTUS to take America to war without a green light from those oligarchies. Given their decades old unity in seeking regime change in Iran for reasons set out in US Neocons & Israel’s far Right, had President Trump, flushed with success in Venezuela and in all likelihood Cuba …

… delivered a fait accompli  between the night of February 28 and the US markets reopening on March 2, they’d have been delighted.

He didn’t though. So the question is why those corporate oligarchies, collectively the US ruling class, are allowing him to continue a war many say is unwinnable and is proving ruinous for the world’s economies, America’s not excepted.

Possible answers, not necessarily acting in isolation:

1. I’m wrong, the mainstream understanding right. A POTUS freely and fairly elected really does at all times wield power checked only by Congress, Senate, Constitution and laws of physics.
2. Times of crisis – in this case the multipolar threat to America’s triple hegemony of armed supremacy, fiat dollar and narrative control via soft power – can sow such disarray amid those elites as to allow a president, even one as stupid as Mr Trump, unusual latitude.
3. For all the danger to US hegemony, its ruling elites really are as one with Trump – and in for the long haul.
4. Even as I write this the oligarchy may be mobilising to remove Trump. One off-ramp still open is to replace him on ground of mental decay, blame the entire clusterfuck on Bibi, and accept – with Tehran in no mood to settle for anything short of powerful guarantees – that for the foreseeable future regime change in Tehran is off the menu.

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The first is easily dismissed. Both generally, and specifically over Iran, the few who look beyond the circus theatrics through which a billionaire duopoly poses as a democracy cannot fail to see a striking continuity of foreign policy. Obama couldn’t close Guantanamo, refrain from bombing the brown-skinned of seven countries or allow the criminals responsible for the 2007/8 crash to reap as they had sown. Nor could Trump end the forever wars or “bring American jobs home”. ¹

All of these things and much besides would necessitate taking on the plutocratic forces without whose backing it is impossible to get within a million miles of the Oval Office.

The paper alluded to at the top step is the Brookings Institute’s Which Path to Persia? of 2009. It set out ways to reclaim Iran for the US empire, the 1979 fall of the Shah having been a severe blow.

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And the second answer? America’s crisis-riven oligarchs incapable of mounting a unified course correction? I can’t rule out that they, like you and I, watch in impotent because divided horror as an epoch shaping war of choice races up the escalation ladder, before our incredulous eyes and theirs, with Mach 10 velocity.

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As to the third, that America’s oligarchs really do stand shoulder to shoulder with Trump, reader Dave Hansell has alerted me to an intriguing piece six days ago by Maximilian, translated from Italian by Ismaele. In a footnote to the previous post I wrote:

There are those … who say that since the USA has morphed from value-seeking capitalism to rent-seeking neo-feudalism premised on what Giscard d’Eistang called the dollar’s ‘exorbitant privilege’ – Bretton Woods with the gold standard removed by Nixon, and with artificial demand created by the petrodollar – the US plutocracy can no more U-turn on this criminal war than Trump can. This could form one explanation – there are others – of its having let the tangerine narcissist and/or Bibi continue so disastrous a course even after it became evident that their “regime change in a weekend” had failed massively. One such voice can be found here. The arguments get technical – some might say sophist – but at root build on the ideas of Michael Hudson and Richard Wolff on the one hand, Yanis Varoufakis on the other; that US capitalism is now a form of what Yanis calls a ‘technofeudalism’ overseen by creditor oligarchies.

You could call this the nuclear argument – possibly literally – in that it suggests that for the planet’s most powerful ruling class, this war is as existential as it is for Iran. ² As Bryan noted below the line of the previous post:

There’s too much existentialism around. All major parties to this war (Israel, Iran and the Trump administration) view its outcome to be of existential significance – and it seems right that they do so. (NB I’m not suggesting any moral equivalence or plague on all your houses – it’s obvious who are the aggressors) What about the US / Collective West Ruling Class? Do they see this as existential or do they have some self serving wriggle room?

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As for the fourth possible answer, we’ll wait and see. It would be easy enough for the Beltway kingmakers to have Trump declared mentally unfit or JFK-ed but the consequences, his sorely betrayed MAGA notwithstanding, might still, in an America more polarised than at any point since the first one, ignite a second civil war.*

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Closing remarks …

I’ve floated a number of reasons, only one of which can be summarily dismissed, as to why the US ruling class is allowing this disaster to unfold without intervening. In a forthcoming review of Aaron Good’s thought provoking American Exception: Empire and the Deep State, I will apply his general model of a three-way relationship between oligarchy, government, and deep state to the particular question set out here.

Being smart you likely noticed that, two fleeting references to ‘Bibi’ aside, I’ve said nothing of Israel. That leads me to the second longstanding axiom of mine to be, as I put it in my opening sentence, “shaken by the criminally insane war on Iran”. I’ve long held the view that Israel does not dictate US policy, and that the argument most often advanced by those – many of whom I hold in high esteem, including John Mearsheimer and Jewish anti-Zionists like Jeffrey Sachs, Max Blumenthal and Aaron Maté – who say that it does; viz, that the USA fights Israel’s wars, fails to disentangle the interests of America’s labour sellers from those of its rentier  elites.

While I stand broadly by that view, articulated most forcefully (minus overt references to class) by Brian Berletic, the war on Iran now casts light on that debate in ways which show it to be too rigidly and binarily entrenched. In my next post, if events don’t dictate otherwise, I will examine a third position on this vexatious matter.

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1. As Vladimir Putin put it:

   I have already spoken to three US Presidents. They come and go but politics stay the same at all times. Do you know why? Because of the powerful bureaucracy. When a person is elected, they may have some ideas. Then people with briefcases arrive, well dressed, wearing dark suits just like mine except for the red tie, since they wear black or dark blue ones. These people start explaining how things are done. And instantly, everything changes. This is what happens with every administration.

2. A few hours after posting I had this from one of the friends, made through this site, I’ve yet to have the pleasure of meeting face to face. Says American writer Edward Curtin:

   Philip,

   Number 3. Trump is not an anomaly except with his mouth, which is planned.  He is carrying out orders.  That is his job.  US troops (officially) will soon be in Iran. The US imperial ruling forces that run the country believe in the long run they will win.  I think I sent you this and have been arguing it for a long time. Craig Murry seems to be coming to agree with me.

   Pax, Ed