So the fate of the world depends on how much North American motorists are willing to pay for the petrol – sorry, gasoline – that their cars need to keep going. It is widely taken for granted that if it rises by more than a few cents, the Republicans will get a nasty mauling in November’s mid-term legislative elections and the Democrats could take over the House of Representatives and even the Senate, but if it is held down, nothing much will change. Like its counterparts in most other countries, the US electorate is more interested in consumer goods than in geopolitical questions that, sooner or later, could have devastating consequences for a great many people.
We are told that Donald Trump desperately wants to put an end to the war the United States is waging against what he says are the “vicious, violent people,” the “scum” still ruling Iran, because he fears that the economic impact the conflict is having could turn him into a “lame-duck” president who would be unable to do much more than rage against his adversaries. Few of those who are gloating over Trump’s discomfiture seem to be particularly worried by what a soon to be nuclear-armed Islamic Republic in a vengeful mood would mean not just for the Middle East but also for the world as a whole.
Many who despise Trump say that attacking Iran when he did was a dreadful mistake and want to see him pay a heavy price for his alleged folly. Such a view would be reasonable enough were the Islamic Republic’s regime not hell-bent on acquiring a nuclear arsenal and, to judge from the amount of enriched uranium it has squirrelled away, is fast approaching its goal even if the Israeli and US attempts to slow it down have had some success. Of course, just how much weapons-grade uranium they have and what they intend to do with it can be disputed, but given the theocrats’ record and their repeated insistence that their main aim in life is to annihilate Israel because its very existence offends their Islamic sensibilities, it would be unwise to assume that their purposes are benign.
This is why preventing the ayatollahs and their Revolutionary Guard helpers from getting their hands on any kind of nuclear device and the means to deliver it should be a priority not just for Israel and the US, but also for the Europeans, the Arabs who live in the same neighbourhood and the Chinese. Were they all to act in concert, they could solve the problem very quickly but most seem to be only too happy to treat what is going on in the Middle East as an almost private matter involving two internationally unpopular characters, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Trump.
After in effect having unilaterally disarmed their countries because they imagined soft power to be nobler than the hard variety and because, in any event, the North Americans would always be there to protect them from harm, the Europeans are simply too weak to do much more than wring their hands and offer to help after a simulacrum of peace is restored. As for the Chinese, while they will want to take advantage of their big rival’s inability to bring down the Iranian regime using air power alone, they would surely be happy to see such a dangerous trouble-maker definitively removed from a region in which they have many strategic interests.
Almost half a century ago, few people in the West understood that the fall of the Shah and his replacement by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini could have some far-reaching implications. Most progressives assumed it was just another positive development in the rebellion against cultural imperialism by what was then called “the Third World” and that it would not affect them personally in any way. They certainly did not see it as evidence that Islamic militancy was beginning to gain strength and that, as time went by, it would pose a serious challenge to Western societies.
After all, as those interested in such exotic matters pointed out, Khomeini was a Shiite and therefore a sworn enemy of the Sunnites, so his influence would surely be limited to Iran and parts of Iraq. Few were impressed by the ritual screaming of “death to Israel” and “death to America” by huge crowds mobilised by the regime. The majority assumption was, and remains, that holy war or Jihad is an out-dated medieval concept that nobody living today could possibly take seriously.
That was the case for a long time when the superiority of Western ways seemed part of the natural order of things, but those days now belong to the past. In much of Europe, apologetic governments led by politicians who take pride in their willingness to express contempt for the societies they were born in have grown accustomed to making concession after concession to supposedly representative Muslim groups in the belief that pandering to grievance-mongers will foster social harmony. In some places it may, but it also makes many people feel that Islam is on the march, an impression that naturally encourages the faithful, especially the more aggressive among them, to demand far more, but alarms unbelievers and by doing so raises inter-communal tensions.
For many years, the Iranian regime and, in a slightly subtler manner, some Sunnite governments, have taken advantage of the West’s eagerness to embrace multiculturalism by, among other things, investing in the world’s most prestigious universities. They have lavishly endowed study programmes designed to promote the idea that only racists think that Islam is such an all-encompassing and authoritarian creed that it cannot be made compatible with democracy.
In this endeavour they have been remarkably successful. It was not because Trump failed to consult them before bombarding Iran that European governments refused to help the United States remove a regime that at home slaughters protestors by the tens of thousands and vigorously promotes terrorism abroad, as well as openly seeking to wipe out another sovereign country, but because they all feared the predictably furious reaction of their Muslim populations and their many left-wing allies who for years have been staging in major cities large demonstrations in which they protest against the continued existence of Israel.
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