Middle East: Stop this madness

Who will shout: “Stop – this is madness”? The Middle East resembles two runaway trains hurtling towards each other on the same track, seconds from a catastrophe. They are heading nowhere.

 In the desire of some of its leaders to exterminate Israel, there is no way Iran has an achievable goal. Seven million Jews cannot be made to vanish just by launching missiles at them, nor indeed by any other means. Similarly, in their desire to smash Iran into ruins, Israel’s leaders have set an objective that can never be realised. Persian civilisation is too deeply and proudly embedded ever to be overthrown by bombing from the air, or even by invasion on land or sea. There are more than 90 million Iranians. The population of Nazi Germany in 1939 was 70 million. The population of imperial Japan in 1941 was about the same. The land area of Iran is vastly larger than that of Germany and Japan added together. By the spring of 1945 their major cities had virtually been obliterated. Yet they did not give in. The conclusion is obvious.

The third train on this track to nowhere is the United States, controlled by a man whose mind is visibly degenerating, with no grasp of strategy and scarcely any tactics, and which has allowed itself to be manoeuvred into an impossible position which will cost it dearly. In this crisis the future of the American Republic itself is at stake, blinded by the possession of the most powerful military apparatus the world has ever seen. Powerful and yet pointless. It cannot impose its will on others by force alone. A policy relying wholly on “bluster, blackmail and bombing”, as one military analyst described it, cannot succeed; never has and never will. To reverse Von Clausewitz’s famous dictum, all wars end in politics sooner or later. The Korean War ended in a messy armistice in 1953; the US and the Taliban signed an “agreement for bringing peace” to Afghanistan in 2020 which culminated in the chaotic evacuation of over 120,000 people and the fall of Kabul in 2021. Diplomacy is often a necessary device to save face. The United States lost those wars. They were unwinnable. The US war against Iran is no different.

What are the signs of hope, that sanity might assert itself? The hopeless logic of the situation is glaringly obvious to all who are watching. Iran has deployed the weapon of blockade on a vital shipping route, while mounting devastating attacks on its Gulf neighbours. This is ostensibly because they house American military bases but in reality is to pressure them to persuade the United States to cease its intervention in support of Israel. That is never going to happen. Public opinion in the United States may be turning against its close alliance with Israel, in the worst cases driven by antisemitism, but the US is still far too deeply invested in that relationship to abandon it. Nor would the rest of the world stand by and watch Israel be annihilated. If the blockage of the Strait of Hormuz is designed to destroy Israel, it is an exercise in deluded futility. Sooner or later, Iran itself must see this.

Nevertheless, it is becoming imperative in Washington to watch the opinion poll trends closely, not least the growing divisions regarding Israel in the ranks of Donald Trump’s MAGA support base. When Trump loses the prospect of a lucrative deal, he backs off. His deal with the American people was that he would make them “great again” – by which he meant he would make them richer. As petrol pump prices surge, with food prices not far behind, he is in fact making them poorer. So this is one direction where the cry “Stop this madness” may come from.

Meanwhile, the dynamic equilibrium of the world economy depends on energy supplies, which at this stage in human history still means fossil fuels – oil and natural gas. The cost depends on the balance between supply and demand. Scarcity drives up prices and drives down living standards. But such economies are generally in an unstable balance. There is a limit to the shocks they can absorb. Pushed too far, they fall over. Only after much pain and much turbulence does a new balance emerge. Inevitably and invariably, it is those at the bottom of the pile who are least resilient and who suffer most. They must be given a voice. And their cry too is “Stop this madness”. Every citizen, the majority of whom are neither rich nor poor, has a voice. In a democracy governments rely on consent. Even totalitarian regimes have to win over the crowds. There comes a point where if governments do not bend, they break, and the madness has to stop.

A lot of money has been made from fossil fuel energy supplies, and the standard of living in the Gulf States depends on them. Yet the key commodity here is not oil and gas, but water. Escalation of the conflict towards all-out war, which could be only days away, would threaten not just their oil refineries but their desalination plants, vital for life support. Iran is vulnerable too, but not to the same extent. Without clean water from desalination plants tens of thousands in the Gulf may die. So this is another direction where the cry, “Stop this madness” may come from.

And it is time for this cry to be heard in Israel too. Despite heavy censorship it is known that Israelis have suffered much damage from Iranian bombardment. The real danger to them comes not from outside aggression but from the logic of Jewish nationalism. This ideology impels Israel towards conquest and annexation, both of Gaza and the West Bank and maybe also of southern Lebanon. But it is self-defeating. If it succeeded it would bring within its enlarged borders a population of Arabs greater than its population of Jews. If Israel refused its Arab citizens their democratic rights in order to preserve its Jewish character, it would no longer be a democracy but a theocracy. It could only survive by repression. It would begin to resemble Iran. And that is the destination towards which the current US and Israeli leadership is driving it. Unless this madness stops.