I guess I like putting the word ‘stupid’ in post titles. Here’s my reply to a comment by Anne on that of April 14, Blockade: US empire is evil, not stupid! For brevity I’ve omitted her comment, while retaining in block quotes the passages most pertinent here:
… the bombing of Iran’s transport infrastructure is to disrupt the rail and land transport that China is developing for oil in order China is less dependent upon more vulnerable sea routes …
Yes! Though a pipeline – a more ambitious project than the rail and road links of the New Silk Road arm of Belt & Road – could not only bypass the Malacca and Hormuz choke points, but allow oil transits in comparable volumes at comparable costs. On a brighter note Beijing’s awareness of its Achilles heel adds urgency to its pursuit of renewable energy, in which it leads the world – but also makes that world more dangerous given empire determination to stop the rise of China before it becomes independent of fossil fuels. (For energy I mean. We’ve no way of feeding 8 billion people without soil fertilisers derived from hydrocarbons.)
Even some of my favourite commentators like Jeffrey Sachs points to the psychopathic madness of Trump and his henchmen rather than seeing the evil goes much deeper.
I too have a soft spot for Professor Sachs, a man of good heart and brain, even as I note his balking at going the full shilling on the root of this darkness being empire refusal to let go of unipolarity.
Is it an inevitability that the rise of individualism and personal freedom leads to a profound dislocation from our mutual interdependence with ‘other’?
Homo sapiens sapiens is a social but individuated animal. We must produce and daily reproduce the material conditions of existence and, ill equipped to do so alone, enter into social relations for that purpose. Our systems of law, morality and etiquette are imperfect ways of managing tensions, between ‘me’ and ‘we’, attendant on this stubborn truth. Under capitalism, especially its advanced, rentier driven imperialist forms, 1 the ‘me’ aspect is emphasised to a degree no previous society ever attempted.
… Leading inexorably into a psychopathy that denies our collective responsibilities for each other – including animals, plants and the Earth itself. I don’t know. But it’s heartbreaking.
Yes again, utterly …
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I’ve frequently voiced on this site my belief that:
- A waning US empire not only poses, through its lawless and increasingly reckless efforts to halt or even reverse its decline, far and away the greatest threat to world peace.
- The neoliberal, creditor driven economics said empire seeks to advance now place a tiny elite in existential opposition to the vast majority of humankind. This holds whether we look at it economically, ecologically or humanistically. Not that any of these things are at the end of the day separable.
- The best hope for humanity lies in China’s sane and responsible challenge to that empire.
For a one-stop shop on my reasoning, see my post of five years ago, An open letter: isn’t China just as bad?
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More than a century of Western meddling in Iran has been mostly but not always about oil, 2 and either way the immediate motives have shifted:
- The fall of the Ottoman Empire after WW1, coinciding with the rising importance of oil, saw the Middle East carved up by Britain and France in ways calculated – Sykes-Picot separation of Lebanon from Syria, and Kuwait from Iraq, attest to this – to sow division among the Arab nation. 3
- As for its non-Arab neighbour, in 1925 the British installed a soldier, Reza Khan Pahlavi, as Shah of Iran – only to depose him in 1941, fearing his closeness to Germany might open up Iran’s bounteous oil fields to Rommel’s tanks. RKP was forced to step down in favour of his son, a Mohammad Reza Pahlavi whose harsh rule kept his people in dire poverty 4 while his Western underwriters continued to extra their oil at bargain basement prices.
- In 1953 a popular leader, Mohammad Mossadegh, was elected prime minister of Iran on a platform of nationalising Anglo-Persian Oil (now British Petroleum). With help from Iran’s clerics, who feared his liberal humanism, the British and Americans ousted Mossadegh.
- In 1979 the Iranian Revolution, a mass uprising appropriated by a clergy which went on to liquidate its secularist currents, deprived the US – which a decade earlier had emerged as supreme power in the Middle East 5 – of one of its two regional gendarmes. Only Israel remained, though the OPEC crises of the early seventies, and the petrodollar deal struck with Riyadh, allowed Saudi Arabia to plug the gap.
The rest of Iran’s ordeal at the hands of the West is too well known to require summary, though its suffering – less at the hands of the ayatollahs than at America’s economically crippling and literally murderous sanctions – prior to the war crimes inflicted from June last year onwards are documented on this site and countless others.
Burying 170 schoolgirls in Minab
For current purposes the main takeaway is that for the American Empire, its metropolis energy self-sufficient, the ‘business case’ for controlling oil is not for its own needs. Nor is it primarily about profits in the narrow sense.
It’s about throttling China, stupid!
Not for nothing is the Strait of Hormuz called a choke point …
And for the why of that, let me hand over to Brian Berletic. You do got twenty-four minutes to spare, no? I deem this man one of the two or three most important voices on the alt-media scene and, if we further narrow the focus to planet-wide geostrategy, put him at numero uno.
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- “… especially in its advanced, rentier driven imperialist forms …” There are those, such as Yanis Varoufakis, who say that capitalism has morphed, via the immense power accrued by non value creating creditor oligarchies, into what he calls “technofeudalism”. I buy that but only with this qualifier. Surplus value continues to be extracted from wage labour, in the manner analysed with irrefutable brilliance by Marx, primarily in Asia. Indeed, a part definition of modern imperialism is the export of capital by global north to global south, and repatriation of surplus value (to be valorised as profits) in the reverse direction. The missing part is what Yanis is getting at: the recycling of those profits in Western states now fundamentally driven by monopoly rent-seeking FIRE – finance, insurance and real estate – sectors.
- I can’t recommend too highly the British comedian Robert Newman’s History of Oil. If you can’t find the 45 minutes needed for the full version, here’s a 5 minute taster.
- Arabs form the world’s second largest ethnic group, after China’s Han. It was necessary for post Ottoman colonial rule to sow disunity, and face down the pan Arab nationalism of Colonel Nasser and, ultimately, the Ba’athism of the next generation of leaders he inspired; Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Libya’s Colonel Gadaffi and Syria’s Hafez al-Assad.
- I visited Iran in 1974 and again in 1975, five and four years before the Shah fled. While the major cities approached European standards of development – with a sizeable middle class quite unlike Afghanistan or even post Raj India – the countryside showed the same abject poverty and malnourished peasantry.
- In his 2019 book, Israel: a beachhead in the Middle East, reviewed here, Stephen Gowans shows that the USA, though the world’s undisputed economic and military superpower by 1945, showed little desire to control the region (that British initiated 1953 ouster aside) for the next quarter of a century.