Actors Trapped In A Drama Scripted by History

A Quick Summary of the Situation

Everything is moving so fast now that anything said today might be redundant tomorrow. Where we seem to be is that Israel and Iran are mismatched militarily yet each is well matched for a particular type of war that the other is not. Israel has undoubted technological superiority fuelled by the capacity and support of the ‘West’ which may not be directly involved in the conflict but has an interest in stopping nuclear proliferation (in essence its own monopoly of force in the Middle East) and preserving Israel for a variety of pragmatic and emotional reasons. Iran, on the other hand, has ‘scale’ and the implicit indirect support of all those with an interest in exhausting or weakening the ‘West’ without themselves getting directly embroiled. In other words, Israel has the advantage in a war of ‘strike’ in which its technological superiority can be used to degrade Iran as a power and a society and perhaps trigger regime change. Iran may have the advantage in a war of attrition if its population remains committed to the defence not so much of the regime as of the nation.

The Israeli strategy is to have a perceived as much as an actual dominance over the military situation, perhaps in order to trigger a reformist or military coup against the regime. It has become clear that Israel has become adept at subversion and may be hoping for an ‘Operation Valkyrie’ to remove the Ayatollah. Certainly a great deal of effort is going into targeted assassination and trying to create panic in the urban middle class population. It is also clear that the elected Presidency and the clerical establishment backed by the IRGC have different perspectives. Driving a wedge between them is regarded as possible, no doubt encouraged by the flow of intelligence coming from Iranian reformist and Gulf Arab contacts. If all else fails (and it is probable that such a political or military coup must take place in days or weeks rather than months or years), Netanyahu, increasingly an ‘old man in a hurry’, has to bring the US and its allies into the struggle by using bunker busters and levels of air power that even Israel cannot muster. The problems with this hope are covered below.

The Iranian strategy depends on who actually controls Iran. As with Hezbollah and Hamas, the targeted assassinations by Israel are designed to weaken the ‘resistance structure’ but in neither of those two cases nor in that of the Houthis has air power decisively destroyed the enemy. The strategy may be based on the belief that targeted assassination of Nazi leaders might have been more effective in destroying that regime than the mass bombing strategies that were actually deployed but that is another story. If a calculation is made that Iran is the weaker party and needs to fight another day, then the reformist position of renewing negotiation and shifting to the model of regional settlement promoted by the Gulf States may win out if Trump (possibly in discussion with Putin as much as MBS and Netanyahu) can get Israel to back off sufficiently for talks to start. Israel has discovered to its cost that it may claim aerial dominance but that it has not stopped a number of significant ballistic attacks on its soil. No doubt there will be more to come.

On the other hand, the hard line elements in the Iranian regime (much the same applies to the right-wing Netanyahu regime) may believe that compromise too early may be part of a slippery slope to effective regime change as liberalisation takes hold in the wake of negotiations. Compromise collapsed the Soviet regime and weakness allowed a relatively small group of Western-backed former terrorists to capture control of Syria in a matter of days. Those with an ideological commitment to ‘resistance’ will not have much reason to trust that Russia or China or can will come to their aid (although nuclear Pakistan is making strong supporting ‘noises’) and may develop their own version of the Israeli ‘Samson option’ (see below). It seems that the Ayatollah has seized control of military decision-making already. Those inside Iran wanting negotiation will be fighting their own war on two fronts, against perceptions of ‘treachery’ (given the flow of high level intelligence clearly flowing towards Israel) and to maintain sufficient negotiating power in getting some sort of settlement.

As of this morning, we can say that neither side has won or lost. Israel is a small state with significant hard power that is fighting wars on too many fronts (see below) and where its behaviours are causing serious problems to the Western elites who share its values. It has brilliantly disrupted Iran but it has not destroyed it. Iron Dome failed to shield its population from Iranian missile attacks and the brilliant subversive tactics of its security apparat may, as with Budanov’s operations in Russia, create good media copy but not change anything fundamental if a political change does not happen soon. A US intervention targeted at the nuclear facilities may change nothing in the long run but simply inflame resistance within the West as much as outside it. But let us go a little deeper into the crisis, not repeating historical causes (which are well known), but looking instead at the current entrapment of politicians by their own histories.

The US as Tragic Hero

There are three main players, the US, Israel and Iran, and three sets of subsidiary players with frequent walk-on parts – the European members of NATO, the other largely Islamic players in the Middle East and the increasingly co-ordinated ‘Axis of Resistance’ of which China is the most important but Russia the most active. These latter subsidiary players are not unified forces but have, within each set, actors with competing motivations that can have a minor but not unimportant impact on the drama. And there is, as in any decent Greek tragedy, the Chorus or rather many choruses – the impotent populations of all the players performing their tale of death and woe. Beyond that, playing the role of Fate or the gods, are the hard realities of trade flows, capital movements, energy resources and humanitarian collapse in which Mammon himself might eventually act as ‘Deus Ex Machina’ with a market crash.

The central player of course is the tragic hero, the US, the mighty imperium whose own fragmentations may be decisive. The situation is complex but we can perhaps say that the Trump Administration is trapped between worlds. Israel is acting now in good part because it sees huge risks for itself (or rather for the Netanyahu vision of Israel’s existential position) in the transition. We have noted many times before that the US under Trump is consciously and openly shifting from a global policeman role seeking to contain other powers through a very expensive military establishment to a ‘Festung Amerika’ based on negotiating spheres of influence, a policy centred on its access to reliable resources, allows the country to deal with its massive debt burden and builds a 21^st century defence capacity that would secure the US under all possible threat scenarios. The Trump-Putin conversation yesterday indicated that this intent to a co-operative IR strategy of big powers managing smaller ones is still in place.

The problem is that there is an inherent tension between this and another vision of what the sphere of influence approach might mean in the Middle East. The ‘given’ of American elite opinion (largely due to the political dominance of California and New York) is that the defence of Israel is an absolute, a position that emerged during the Truman Presidency as a result of adroit Zionist communications. It settled down into almost religious dogma within a couple of decades. Zionist views of Palestinians as (essentially) a primitive non-people who were cat’s paws of the Soviet bloc combined with an equally primitive Christian Zionism on the Right and the sheer weight of Wall Street Jewish capital and cultural influence built a constituency for Israel that merged with and shaped what later came to develop as Neoconservatism. Neoconservatism became an ideology of liberal values expansion by force that actively sought the dissolution of ‘regimes’ that did not share those values.

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Neo-Conservatism’s Last Strike?

The complexity of neo-conservativism which came to include formerly left-wing anti-Stalinists as much as radical right European ‘Nouvelle Droite’ thinkers (who added Islamophobia to the mix) is not for this note to explain but it is important because Trumpism is a direct threat to that ideology in the long run. A massive effort is now being directed to re-establish neo-conservative control over Presidential policy-making and Israel has a stake in this. Two aspects of this emerged in recent days. First, the strong position taken by Netanyahu on military action being directed at driving the Iranian people to rise against their ‘oppressors’ with the Shah-in-exile taking a lead role in offering an alternative ‘democratic’ model (not that the previous Shah had an ounce of democratic blood flowing through his veins). Second, we saw a huge back-lash within the MAGA movement in America when it appeared that the Presidency might have been complicit in the Israeli attack on Iran and might draw the US into another Middle Eastern conflict.

The first (regime overthrow) is classic neo-conservative strategy but also part of liberal progressive ideological strategy. Liberal internationalism split over the Iraq War in the way it did not over the attack on Serbia. The component that adopted expansion of liberal values in the wake of the collapse of communism soon found itself in positions of power in centre-left Western administrations with policies barely distinguishable from those of neo-conservatives. Its high points were the colour revolutions of the first two decades of the century which have now gone into reverse as widespread disillusionment with both these techniques and direct armed intervention (Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya) has developed. Katchanovski’s academic investigation of the Maidan Coup of 2014 is the thin end of a huge wedge of criticism which briefly reached a high point with the embarrassing revelations presented to the world of DOGE. This last is important because only weeks ago the Trump Administration was driving its commitment to non-interference in the politics of other nations and yet here he is seemingly in thrall to just such a strategy being promoted by Israel. The ‘internal contradictions’ are uncomfortable to say the least.

Over two decades the progressive Left has split into an identity politics-driven loathing for traditional regimes (notable from LGBTQ+, feminist and environmental activists) who adopted the regime change approach even if they preferred ‘peaceful’ protest and a smaller but now rising ‘real’ anti-capitalist Left that has been re-energised by the horrors of Palestine and has started to question the narrative around Ukraine. This latter will tend to be more socially-conservative and sometimes appears like the left wing of populism. 15% of British 18-24 year olds actively support Iran in the current conflict. This is much more than support Israel in that age range (most Britons [77%] are indifferent) and probably represents an uncomfortable truth – Muslims are players in Western politics now and will increasingly become so. The Ukraine War also exposed more people to narratives about the manipulative aspects of colour revolution strategies, lawfare techniques and attempts to halt democratic choice from centres like the EU as well as (prior to this year) the State Department.

Thus a countervailing narrative analysis has shifted towards considering the degree to which indigenous and foreign security apparats have been manipulating their own populations. In the light of Israeli proven success at subversion against immediate enemies, eyes have increasingly turned to Israeli influence over elected politicians and policy in the West as the only explanation (in the eyes of critics) for certain Western policy choices. Less widely noted, the influence of families with historic connections to anti-Soviet and anti-Communist Cold War era operations in guiding security, foreign and defence policies towards Russia and increasingly China is slowly becoming more apparent especially in West-Central Europe and the Anglo-Saxon world. The narrative, which sometimes veers into conspiracy theory but conspiracy theory which comes uncomfortably close to salient facts, is one of ‘subversion from above’ that is, democratic countries having fallen into the hands not merely of internationally connected elite networks but of elite networks linked to particular countries and ethnicities.

Exactly how true this is and how much is invented by ‘resistance’ psychological operations is unclear by the nature of things but the suspicion is growing that democratic populations are being led to possibly terminal warfare by special interests with sociopathic characteristics. This belief system is slowly becoming politically significant with no effective totalitarian means of crushing it amongst elites. If false on some facts, it becomes ‘true’ as a reaction to the risks and dangers of the historic role of neoconservative and liberal internationalism in creating the mayhem of recent years. The Israel-Iran conflict plugs directly into these competing narratives. At the same time, the neo-conservative movement is seeing its alliance with liberal progressives begin to fray (less so in Europe than in the Anglo-Saxon world) just when the countervailing right wing MAGA movement has moderated its pro-Israeli position in favour of armed non-engagement in foreign wars.

Existentially, given certain assumptions in the mind of Netanyahu’s Government, the window for Israeli action against Iran was looking as if it might close especially as the ‘spheres of influence’ strategy in the White House implied improved relations with multi-ethnic Russia (whereas ethno-nationalist Israel and Ukraine were being drawn together) and a degree of priority being given to the relationship with MBS in Saudi Arabia withi the region. Riyadh had seemed minded to engage with Iran and encourage the US to negotiate a general settlement for the Middle East that included it. As a footnote, one of the complications amongst many in contemporary international relations is the tense ideological relationship between ethno-nationalist and multi-ethnic imperial regimes where the alliances that emerge are often illogical because historic ideological differences intrude. This is an age of ideological transition. No player in the game is thinking from first principles any more. All are stuck on those historical tramlines.

US Confusions of Purpose

The Trump Administration was thus caught between a rock and a hard place by Israel. The latter is at peak support within the ‘elite structures’ of the West yet is steadily losing ground in PR terms and amongst the general public because of its behaviours in Gaza. On the one hand, Trump is politically committed in absolute terms to the defence of Israel. He was prepared to sacrifice the MAGA absolute free speech agenda domestically: he got away with it in order to accept the somewhat spurious association of criticism of Israel with anti-semitism. On the other hand, his MAGA base does not want involvement in another war (certainly not boots on the ground). It is becoming increasingly resistant to the idea that Israel’s and the US’ interests are the same. This appears online in a great deal in suspicion about the control of the political elite implied in some interpretations of the Epstein scandal. These are tragically beginning to develop into a form of neo-antisemitism and a lot of people no longer care.

What Trump tried to do in relation to the current crisis was so blatant last week that it was doomed to fail. He tried to behave like a Mafia Godfather and pretend that he had no idea of the impending attack on Iran, that he was disappointed and wanted everyone to get back to the negotiating table. Unfortunately this play looked far too similar to the play adopted in the case of the Ukrainian attack on Russian strategic capacity. The actual movements of American military assets, Israeli claims and common sense in regard to the US’ intelligence capacity made him look, shall we say, as if engaged in ‘terminological inexactitudes’. Looking weak in this way could not have come at a worse time for Trump because his political assault on the radical Left and Democrats over the ICE Riots had appeared to be working to raise his domestic political standing. Here he was appearing ‘tricky’ and watching half his MAGA support explode in resentment of his neocon and pro-Israel establishment wing. Left wing social media criticism of Trump’s position on Israel was being ‘liked’ by the MAGA and crypto mob while the liberal left remained less vocal. His tone has wobbled subsequently.

As we write a whole fleet of US refuelling air tankers is heading to the Middle East as well as naval assets. This can only be interpreted as being in place to defend Israel if necessary but it could equally be interpreted as a) placing psychological pressure on the Iranian regime with a potential threat of a massive air and missile onslaught in support of Israel or b) preparation to engage in regime change by military means regardless of election promises (which we still think unlikely). If Trump has gambled here, it is almost certainly on an assessment that US hardware in the hands of Israel is sufficient to do the job without requiring any intervention from the US so the tragedy of this becomes that, as Iran shows itself more formidable than expected in doing damage to Israel, the US has to increase its background involvement to support its manipulative proxy doing even more damage to Iran (escalation) with the growing risk of having to get involved itself to save its ‘asset’ if things go wrong.

Israel and the Conception of the West

This brings in the probable different strategic aims of Israel and the US. Israel is operating ‘existentially’ at two levels. First, there is an intense fear in a small country of Iran getting nuclear weaponry. We explore this again below. Second, and equally to the point, this is about the survival not of Israel but of the Netanyahu Government (a ‘regime’) which has trapped itself into a strategy of attack on all fronts under a man who may be physically ill and whose overthrow may result in vengeful criminal proceedings. Netanyahu is using accumulated military assets superior to anything else in the region, the threat of the ‘Samson Option’ (based on its own nuclear arsenal), calculated madman tactics, the hugely experienced special operations capacity of its security apparat and the fears of his population in order to try to deal with the Iranian ‘regime’ decisively before it is too late (viz. US strategy stops him or a nuclear ballistic capability actually appears).

In doing this, he is taking huge risks that threaten to destroy the hard won claim to some sort of moral superiority for the Judaic people and so might create a new basis for antisemitism. Wars where narratives are not tightly controlled (narratives can no longer be tightly controlled in the modern digital world) now ‘educate’ populations in the origins of wars and this can unravel propaganda narratives quite quickly. The disproportionate response of Israel in Gaza, the behaviours of Israel on the West Bank, questions about treatment of Arabs within Israel and the alliances with Islamists in Syria, perceptions of undue political influence in Western political establishments (see above) and now the unilateral bombardment of Iran have not so much created direct advantage for Israel’s enemies as they have forced the pro-Israel forces in the West on the defensive and made populations increasingly indifferent to the fate of Israel. In other words, an assumption of general unthinking support for Israeli existence has shifted to not caring over much and increasng disdain for elite politicians who do.

In this situation, the problem for elites in the West is that they are still working on a model of support for Israel that is intimately connected to their conception of the ‘West’ which had emerged out of the end of the Cold War. Their populations, already doubtful about the competence and morality of their own political class, have developed a different position – one of increasing concern that elites will drag them into wars with existential aspects where an exchange of nuclear weaponry becomes the final solution. The critique is thus less of Israel (which ‘is what it is’) or of Iran (‘not our business’) as of domestic political establishments whose general competence is in doubt for other domestic reasons. This is most obvious in the UK where establishment media and the political class are having great difficulty holding the line not so much against anti-war sentiment as the probability that anti-war feeling could merge quickly with other discontents to cause a serious public order problem further down the line.

Is Anyone in Control?

This concern about war in the Middle East (where the risk is of terrorism and false flags rather than any direct military risk to Western populations) might be manageable except that it is becoming linked with fear of matters getting out of control in Ukraine where there is similar growing indifference emerging in much although not all of Europe and certainly in the Anglo-Saxon world. Again, elites still speak of things like ‘resolve’ and populations ignore them. The Israel issue has only added to European political fragmentation. In this case, the major elites are overtly sympathetic to Israel (see the G7 statement) but still want negotiations. Behind the scenes they continue to support Israel where it matters (arms and intelligence) while undertaking fairly trivial and legalistic sanctions operations in a failed attempt to control dissent at home. Some dissidents on Ukraine like Hungary’s Orban are clearly pro-Israel on Islamophobic and ethno-nationalist grounds. Finland unusually, given its hard stance on Russia, has leaped forward to condemn Israeli actions.

So where is this leading us? What is clear is that no one other than Netanyahu and perhaps the Iranian regime is in control. The Netanyahu regime requires that this campaign be driven to whatever bitter end is required for its own survival. Just as it has positioned Gaza as an absolute matter of the extirpation of Hamas (partially its own historic creation) so making negotiations simply a matter of buying time until some final ethnic cleansing and just as its settlement programme on the West Bank is tantamount to killing off all hope of a viable Palestinian State in favour of the creation of an Eretz Israel that also implies eventual ethnic cleansing, so the Netanyahu ‘regime’ cannot accept anything less than the complete destruction of Iran’s nuclear and ballistic military capacity or destruction of its nuclear military capacity and regime change. Any negotiations must (in Israel’s eyes) result in one or the other.

This is where it gets even more difficult because, fighting maniacally on six fronts (we can add incursions into Lebanon and Syria as well as the risks from Yemen to the three core struggles), Israel has substantial advantages (as we have noted) over Iran but a) it is still a small country dependent on ‘capitalist’ confidence in its survival and b) the guarantor of that confidence is the US. If the US wobbles in fear of consequences, the entire strategy collapses. It gets increasingly difficult for the West because the West might soon be defending the indefensible not only in the context of public distaste for apparent complicity in a humanitarian disaster in Gaza but because of a growing realisation that Israel’s assault (against all international law) looks a little odd in relation to the West’s position on Russia and that the nuclear claims are starting to look a little rocky on fundamentals. As with silly claims about Russia invading Europe so it is with equally silly claims that Iran actively threatens Europe with its ballistic missiles.

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Iran – Nuclear Capacity and the Isolation That Is Not

At this point in history Iran does not have a single nuclear weapon. Israel has 70. The question arises as to why it is tolerable for Israel to have 70 such weapons and no one else in the region to have any. The answer, of course, is one that no one dare say too loudly any more – Israel is ‘one of us’ but ‘one of us’ meant until recently adherence to certain shared standards of behaviour (mostly breached by the ‘West’ at some stage or another but still an ‘ideal’). The humanitarian disaster in Gaza is a breach of course but a bigger breach is Israel repeating what Russia has done – engaged in an existentially-driven pre-emptive strike against a threat. The West is caught in a trap – either all such breaches of international law should be condemned and sanctioned or international law is shown to be a paper tiger. It is now clear that international law is a paper tiger.

As to Iran, its decision-making is opaque. It also has a habit of making portentous statements that are not followed through with as much action as the statements imply. There are three factors to bear in mind here. First, when you attack a country, its dissidents tend to collapse into a small minority and everyone else becomes a patriot. In this case and that of Russia and Belarus, the link between the enemy and dissident groups is likely to position regime change dissent as ‘treacherous’. Similarly, the proven (and surprising to many but not to us) ability of Iran to break through Iron Dome and strike Israel directly may well maintain morale. Second, Iran is not isolated. Third, pulling out violently radical anti-Israel statements of some years ago does not represent the negotiating position of the last year. Lines of communication still exist between Tehran, Riyadh, Moscow and Washington that act as constraints on Jerusalem. This is why no definitive position on outcome can be taken – one part of Iranian political decision-making is moving towards total war and has the means while another is working towards negotiations and has the means.

Iran’s lack of isolation needs to be emphasised albeit that the network of alliances is less decisive than that supporting Israel. On the other hand, Iran’s network does not have a resistance ‘enemy within’ ready at any moment to become an anti-war movement. The strategic agreement with Russia was fast-tracked by the Iranian Parliament as a result of Israeli action, the Saudis have not been taking the strong anti-Iranian line of a few years ago, pro-Palestinians in the West have found it easy to shft into a pro-Iranian position and the Pakistanis have been extremely robust in support of Iran against Israel. There is double and distrurbing dynamic here. The practical issue is that Tehran and Islamabad both have common interests in managing foreign-backed separatist operations (notably the Baluchis) where Israel and India may be entangled. Second, and more dangerous, regime change strategies directed at minority ethno-nationalist revolt (we see these targeted at Russia) are neo-con strategies and neo-con strategies are closely linked to Israeli strategies. Pakistan faces its own internal existential threats and the recent brief war with India may have done wonders for Pakistan national cohesion.

A Tentative Conclusion

War as means of promoting national cohesion (which is where Netanyahu’s strategy may be out of time, dated, in the West), parallelling the desperate attempt to kick start weakening economies through the adoption of military Keynesianism regardless of the indebtedness and taxation pressures this creates, suggests just how many of the bit players in the drama are losing control. We have absolutely no idea how things are going to turn out but the chances of regime change in Iran are only high if Iran faces a humiliating defeat that results in it suing for peace on Western terms or Israel can assist in engineering an internal coup. There is no evidence of either yet but the latter is possible. If Iran does collapse, the nuclear proliferation problem may worsen as regimes work out that a nuclear deterrence may be the only means of ensuring that the West does not come for it one day. Pyongyang has already drawn that conclusion not only from observing the Israeli attack but the quick collapse under foreign-backed intervention in Syria. Negotiations are seen now by many as mere cover for regime change strategies – the Chinese will note with care.

The worst likely scenario is a situation where Netanyahu has engineered the situation so that Israel needs saving and its saviour (the US) demands complicity from weak NATO and Arab allies. The Arabs will do what they always do – stand back, sell out the Palestinians and provide what is requested, making it clear that only the minimum should be requested (certainly those who are closest to Iran’ s missile range). The NATO allies will face internal dissatisfaction and dissent especially from Muslim minorities that could add to the fragmentation of their societies. The very worst case scenario is that the Iranians adopt their own Samson Option – not nuclear but a ballistic attack on the entire oil sector infrastructure in the Gulf and on American military bases. As we write, it is reported that three oil tanker are ablaze near the Straits of Hormuz although who is responsible is unclear and it might just be a collision. Such a scenario would not be World War III but the effect on the global economy could be very serious. Europe would get a second energy hit with incalculable internal effects. But all this is speculation … the US may still find itself with Russia’s help establishing some sort of settlement and the oil price still seems to reflect this hope.