To his immense satisfaction, Donald Trump knows that all the other leaders on the planet, advised by countless accredited specialists in the strategic, political and commercial issues that concern them, in addition to hundreds of millions of ordinary mortals, are waiting for his words. Do you understand them? Since Trump loves to mislead his interlocutors by assuming that it is in his interest to keep them in suspense and therefore rarely alludes to his real intentions, not even senior members of the administration he heads believe they are capable of faithfully interpreting all of his statements.
To make matters worse, Trump is by far the most talkative president in American history, perhaps in universal history. Few days go by without you giving a long speech full of funny improvisations, participating in a press conference and, before going to sleep, writing some powerful rants for your favorite social media outlet. It is a kind of internal monologue or an endless Joycean stream of consciousness that, if it were a matter of the ramblings of a less eminent figure, would be unimportant, but it happens that Trump is, as his compatriots often remind us, “the most powerful man in the world.” Good or bad, his words weigh.
Unlike his predecessors in the White House, Trump aspires to redesign the international order. He behaves like a demiurge who has been summoned by destiny not only to restore “the greatness” of the United States, if not that of the West as a whole, but also to put rivals like China in their place and, meanwhile, frustrate the aspirations of very dangerous rebels against what remains of the old world order like the ultra-Islamists of Iran, hence the war he is waging in the Middle East.
Although the United States and Israel have clearly legitimate reasons for wanting to tear apart the regime of ayatollahs who claim to be determined to annihilate them, and their efforts to do so are more than likely to have the determined support of the overwhelming majority of Iranians, Trump’s being such an implausibly controversial figure is contaminating all debates surrounding the conflict. His haters often overlook the crimes against humanity committed by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Basij paramilitaries, while many American and European politicians and commentators have been tempted to attribute the unforeseen offensive he unleashed to nothing more than the impulsiveness of a despicable narcissist and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s desire to put his political and legal problems behind him. For reasons of internal politics, some clearly want the theocratic dictatorship to succeed.
Thus, the world is witnessing a war in which very few try to understand the real motives of the protagonists. Convinced that Trump is an imbecile from the mafia world of New York real estate, they treat him as an illiterate man with violent instincts who understands nothing about geopolitics and who has allowed himself to be deceived by his Israeli partner.
As for the Iranian ayatollahs, their beliefs are so foreign to Western ones that they motivate more disbelief than interest among supposed experts in international affairs. Do the Iranian theocrats who are still alive really take seriously the saving return of the twelfth imam, Muhammad al-Mahdi, who according to them has been hidden by divine decree since the 9th century? It’s hard to believe, but over the centuries movements based on ideas that are equally bizarre to modern man have caused many bloodthirsty convulsions, so that it is at least feasible that some Iranians do imagine themselves on the eve of the apocalyptic battles that, according to the most fanatical religious people, will precede the long-awaited day of final judgment.
The refusal of the survivors of the Islamist regime to acknowledge that they have been militarily defeated and should therefore surrender unconditionally, as the German Nazis and Japanese imperialists did in similar circumstances nearly eighty years ago, has baffled Trump. Like so many other Americans, the tycoon is baffled that deep down all the inhabitants of the Earth want the same things – peace, well-being and so on – and in their own way share the same values, which is why in his opinion it makes no sense for the Iranians who support the dictatorship “of God” to continue fighting against military forces that are so superior to their own that they would be fully capable of reducing all their cities to smoking rubble. According to current North American logic, the behavior of the theocrats could hardly be more irrational, but it happens that, for them, dying as martyrs would be infinitely better than betraying the cause with which they feel identified and thus contributing to its definitive elimination.
Iranian Islamists reacted to Trump’s onslaught by firing ballistic missiles and drones at neighboring Arab countries, without discriminating between alleged friends and declared enemies, and in effect closing the Strait of Hormuz to drive up the world price of crude oil. Because the pocket is “the most sensitive viscera of man,” as Perón once said, causing nervousness in world markets, the Iranians forced Trump to think about the eventual merits of declaring the war over before achieving the objectives he had set for himself when starting it.
According to opinion polls, with few exceptions, Americans worry much more about the price of gasoline at the local gas station than about what might happen if the ayatollahs finally managed to equip themselves with a nuclear arsenal or about the fate of the Persian people under a vengeful regime that has never hesitated to massacre those who oppose it. Another card in the hands of the Islamists is the proximity of the legislative elections; If there are American boots on Iranian soil in the fall, Trump’s Republicans, who in the electoral campaign that brought him back to the White House said time and again that he would never dream of starting a war abroad, could lose many votes, but unless the American government is willing to do what is necessary to keep the Strait of Hormuz open, a deep global economic crisis attributable to the war would cost it the already lukewarm support of all the traditional allies of the United States.
Trump’s outstanding personality has such an impact on the opinion of the members of the governments of all the countries of the world, and on that of ordinary citizens, that since the beginning of hostilities, many have been trying to minimize the dimensions of the threat posed by the Islamic Republic, which, in addition to being determined to acquire nuclear bombs and already possessing the necessary means to allow them to be used not only against Israel and its neighbors but also against Europe, has invested a lot of money in terrorist cells spread far and wide. of the planet. Although many accuse Trump of acting prematurely because, they say, there is no firm evidence that Iran was about to become a nuclear power within a couple of weeks, it would be more realistic to regret that those who preceded him in power did not do the same years earlier.
Be that as it may, because the current Iranian regime is one whose legitimacy is not due to popular will or a constitutional arrangement but to what its adherents believe is the indisputable law of God, it can lose temporal power without thereby renouncing its attributed duty of determining the behavior of all others. Like the fighters of the so-called Islamic State, its adherents believe they are divinely authorized to carry out acts of terrorism both in Iran and in other parts of the world. So, even if the Americans – or, what would be much better, the Iranian people – manage to overthrow him, he will continue fighting for a long time. Despite the victims of jihadist savagery, the power of resistance of militant Islam is much greater than that of communism or other political and economic faiths because it does not depend on material factors.
Like other religious faiths, radical Islam can re-emerge after suffering crushing defeats in the political arena or on the battlefield as long as it retains the ability to attract those who seek alternatives to the cultural or, so to speak, spiritual norms prevailing in the society in which they live. However, this does not mean that Islamic extremism is invulnerable to pressures that would bring down a secular government. Just three months ago, a substantial proportion of Iran’s population rose up in rebellion not only against a murderous regime but also against the occupation of public space by clerical madmen. And although apostasy is a capital crime in the Muslim world, according to some supposedly impartial researchers, Christianity is gaining more and more followers among those fed up with Islamic arrogance.
