Does we or doesn’t we have an M.O.U?

There is a staggering chasm between the braggadocio with which the war was launched and the reality of its outcome. Trump promised the war would end with Iran’s “unconditional surrender.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared on March 2 that the United States was waging “the most lethal … air power campaign in history” with “no stupid rules of engagement.” Days later he promised reporters “death and destruction from the sky, all day long.”

Having spent the year trying to bring the Iranian government down and calling on Iranians in February to “take over your government,” Trump told the Wall Street Journal on Sunday: “I never cared about regime change.”

Socialist Equality Party on its WSWS website, June 16

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My clothes are wet, tight on my skin
Not as tight as the corner that I painted myself in.

Bob Dylan, Mississippi

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The latest question exercising observers of a US-Israeli war on Iran as stupendously ill judged as it was criminal under the Nuremberg ruling eighty years ago is whether a ceasefire is at all attainable given (a) the oceanic divide between even the minimalist publicly stated demands of Washington on the one hand, Tehran on the other; (b) Israel’s no less publicly stated insistence, backed by its ongoing atrocities in Palestine, Lebanon and (though you wouldn’t know this from corporate media which spent years telling us nothing could be worse than Assad) Syria, that it will not be bound by the terms of any such bilateral agreement.

(John Mearsheimer’s Offensive Realism, though far superior to mainstream understandings, is not one I sign up to for reasons set out in many posts on this site. ¹ But that needn’t blind us to what he gets right. Speaking (I think) to an unseen Glenn Diesen, John points out that Trump is not the only one boxed in by his own folly in underestimating Iran. If Trump is prepared in ways previously unthinkable to face down Netanyahu, it reflects the reality that so doing – to the fury of fellow Zionists in Washington and Tel Aviv, and regardless of whatever Epstein dirt they hold on him ² – may now be the least bad of a dire set of options, but Bibi’s are hardly less so as the entire gamut of Israeli opinion is turning on him on grounds far ranging – funding Hamas as a stick to beat Fatah; October 7 on his watch; his lead role in the February 28 miscalculation and now, however paradoxically, the alleged kowtowing to his fellow in hapless hubris, Donald John Trump. Another parallel being that the one will very probably ³ and the other quite possibly face criminal prosecution on losing office.)

Since the answer is likely to be forthcoming no later than Friday, I won’t dwell on it – my title is shameless clickbait – other than to note that WSWS is not alone in declaring both a humiliating defeat for Trump and a traumatic setback, some say eclipsing Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan combined, for Neocons, ⁴ Christian Zionists and, let’s not forget, the stakeholders of a military industrial complex always keen to test out its latest weapons on the global south.

The uncertain terms of a Memorandum of Understanding (on which a more final settlement is conditional) duly noted, today’s post is intended as a bridge to fulfilment of a promise made to myself and already broken many times ⁵ as I recover from the pneumonia which, with poetic justice given my contrarian ways, struck in the middle of a heat wave. That promise being to move temporarily from reactive posts and take a step back to focus my depleted energies on fundamentals of the state we’re in.

Such as the possibility that, far from suffering the strategic defeat lamented by Mr Kagan as per footnote 4, what the US empire has experienced in Iran is no more than a setback on a wider chessboard of diversely interacting parts. A question currently exciting anti-imperialist circles – is the US capable of achieving an energy dominance sufficient to rein in China’s rise? – will be considered in the very near future.

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1. A post yesterday by Stephen Gowans opines that Mearsheimer’s insistence that Israel dictates US policy – an idea I see as rooted in blindness to empire and class, hence to the close (not total) alignment of US elites with Greater Israel expansion – serves as band-aid to a glaring flaw of ‘realism’. That flaw being that in its view of things, Washington’s eye-wateringly expensive support for Israel defies the Realist thesis of nations pursuing their “national interest” in a world of post Westphalian anarchy. This seeming paradox, in my view the product of a conflation of Wall Street interests with those of Americans at large, Steve sees as obliging Offensive Realists to invoke an extrinsic explanation in the shape of an all powerful Israel lobby. His critique is not at odds with mine; rather, it offers a second insight on Realism’s overstating of AIPAC‘s grip (metonym for that of the Israel lobby as a whole) on Washington.
2. As I wrote in Zugzwang for Israel:

   Given the man’s known proclivities and frequent trips on Epstein’s plane to Little Saint James; given too what we know – media downplaying of this aspect notwithstanding – of his host, friend and fellow sex predator’s penchant for blackmail coupled with extensive ties to the Mossad and senior Israeli politicians, only the most die-hard coincidence theorist can rule out the possibility near certainty that Zionists have serious kompromat  on POTUS 47. Whether those Zionists are gentile or Jew, American or Israeli, makes little difference. What matters is that Donald Trump, to an even greater extent than all US presidents, is owned by America’s ruling class.

3. Even if Trump were still minded to strongarm or wheedle Israeli President Isaac Herzog into a pardon for Bibi in respect of corruption charges, and even if he has the leverage, there’s the sticking point that under Israeli law a pardon is conditional on admission of guilt. That’s a step Netanyahu has shown no inclination to take.
4. Not only have the MAGA seen such high profile defections over Israel as Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Marjorie Taylor-Green and a Charlie Kirk murdered in circumstances reminiscent of Dallas ’63. From a different direction Robert Kagan – husband to Victoria “fuck the EU” Nuland, and architect of a Project for the New American Century which nigh on thirty years ago brought Wolfowitz, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush Junior onboard – recently took to Neocon in-house talking shop, The Atlantic, to vent his despair over a United States he sees as heading for “checkmate” and “total strategic defeat” thanks to February 28:

   “There will be no return to the status quo ante, no ultimate American triumph that will undo or overcome the harm done.”

   The US ruling class at large and, indeed, the tangerine narcissist are as one in their thirst for regime change in Iran as not only a huge victory in and of itself and forty-seven years overdue – the 1979 fall of the Shah having removed a regional asset no less valuable than Israel. Since China’s spectacular ascendance, pulling Iran back into the imperial orbit now assumes global significance in dealing the PRC, half of whose oil passes through Hormuz, a crippling blow. Moreover, and looking north towards the Caspian Sea, it would not only sever a vital two way supply line between Iran and Russia but boost US ability to disrupt – through capture of government, colour revolutions and/or use of Islamist proxies in Central Asia and Caucasus – the New Silk Road arm of Belt & Road …

   

   … and with that, China’s capacity to bypass sea blockade both at the Hormuz and, three thousand miles southeast, Malacca choke points.

   

   US blockade of Malacca would raise costs significantly for China bound oil

   One of several aspects of the illusion that America is a democracy is widespread failure to see that disputes within its ruling class over means distract from an underlying unity over ends.

5. I’m minded not for the first time of a Conservative prime minister over sixty years ago. Asked why his government had been repeatedly blown off the course it had set itself, a patrician Harold MacMillan replied, “events, dear boy. Events.”