Donald Trump may be the most powerful man in the known universe, but he still knows very well that his own destiny will depend on the evolution of the price of gasoline at North American service stations. Despite his regret, as the midterm elections approach, he feels constrained to subordinate his ambitious geopolitical projects to the mood of his compatriots. In the United States, the consumer is king and does not hesitate to electorally punish those who forget it. If those who assume that in November the Republicans will lose some seats in the Senate and the House of Representatives are correct, from that moment on the Democrats will dedicate themselves to making life impossible for them.
One can understand, then, the frustration felt by the man who has set out to rebuild the world order in the face of regimes, such as the Cuban and Iranian, that do not have to worry about the merely material. While the inept Castro tyranny may finally be about to fall for, among other things, having reduced almost all of the island’s inhabitants to destitution in the name of social justice, what remains of the Iranian theocratic dictatorship could survive despite the economic collapse that preceded the devastating military offensive by the United States and Israel.
Trump would like the Iranian people to rise up in rebellion against those responsible for their many misfortunes, but without weapons those fed up with the dictatorship “of God” are not in a position to do much more than protest clandestinely. It is estimated that at least eighty percent of the population would like to live in a freer country, but last year the Islamist regime massacred tens of thousands of protesters and dozens of political prisoners are reportedly hanging to death every day.
In both cases, both the Cuban and the Iranian, these are regimes made up of characters who are so in love with an abstraction, be it “the Cuban revolution” or the dream of a world subordinated to a ruthless version of Shiite Islam, that they do not give a damn about the suffering of ordinary people. Unlike North Americans who, for a matter of cents, tend to lose faith in their rulers and then defenestrate them, Cubans and Iranians understand that their well-being is not among the priorities of those who monopolize power. It is for this reason that the evil Iranian tyranny still stands after seeing a good part of its military and economic capacity destroyed. According to the way of thinking of Western strategists, the United States and Israel have already defeated ultra-Islamist Iran, but it happens that another logic governs in the country of the furious ayatollahs.
Because Trump is such a controversial and unfriendly character, and because hatred of the only Jewish State has become fashionable among the supposed progressives of the democratic world, many are celebrating the refusal to give up of the ayatollahs and the heads of the bloodthirsty Islamic Revolutionary Guard. Likewise, the opinion is spreading in Western elite circles that the American president made an extremely serious strategic error when he decided to accompany Israel in an effort to annihilate a regime that, in addition to exporting terrorism to the rest of the world, including Argentina, in the opinion of the director general of the UN atomic body, Rafael Grossi, has already enriched enough uranium for ten nuclear bombs.
Fortunately, it seems that, thanks to the bombing of the facilities that produced it, the uranium is buried underground, but even so, Iranian aspirations in this area remain very dangerous. As many have pointed out, they would be fully capable of taking advantage of an eventual “diplomatic solution” to the problem that has arisen to resume their nuclear program.
Before last year’s “twelve-day war” in which the American air force briefly participated, a band of religious fanatics was on the verge of acquiring weapons of mass destruction that would have allowed them to wipe off the face of the Earth the hated “Zionist entity”, Israel and, incidentally, millions of Palestinians living in the same neighborhood, in addition to blackmailing nearby Arab countries. Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu may be exaggerating when they say that the Iranians were weeks away from reaching their goal, but that does not mean that it was irrational for them to try to eliminate the danger by preemptively attacking Iran. Nor is it irrational that the Israeli is much more interested in the future of his own country, whose existence is at stake, than in the North American electoral panorama that so obsesses the magnate.
Be that as it may, it seems evident that Trump did make a very serious mistake by seeking to put an end to the Iranian threat without putting “boots on the ground.” The thing is, as Trump knows very well, in today’s West the death of a single military personnel could motivate an explosive media reaction. While Vladimir Putin may shrug his shoulders upon learning that half a million Russian soldiers have perished in Ukraine for nothing, Trump, who apparently envies him, fears that the loss of as many as usually die in a plane crash would trigger an unmanageable crisis that would cost him countless votes.
This is why the war against Iran has turned out to be so asymmetrical. The ayatollahs and their sympathizers are not wrong when they calculate that their power of resistance is strikingly superior to that of the North American administration. Those who replaced the leaders who died in the first phase of the war have already begun to sing victory for having survived the attacks of their enemies; They believe that time is on their side and that Trump will end up accepting virtually any agreement that would allow him to escape the uncomfortable situation in which he finds himself with his dignity intact.
Needless to say, Iranian clerics and the heads of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard have an advantage that could be key: the geographical location of the country they dominate. To the bewilderment of Trump, who apparently did not think that they would be able to close the Strait of Hormuz through which approximately twenty percent of the oil and gas needed by the world economy transits in peacetime, they have managed to cause an energy and therefore global economic crisis that harms dozens of countries. Had he realized in time what the Iranians would do, the American president could have ordered the immediate occupation of the surrounding area but, of course, he did not want to take the risks that armed confrontations with well-equipped jihadists who scoff at death would entail. Trump knows that the American electorate will be able to tolerate a blitzkrieg as long as his own forces do not suffer too many casualties, but before returning to the White House he swore again and again that he would never let the United States get trapped in a new endless war like those in Afghanistan and Iraq.
In view of the pacifist sentiments, authentic or simulated, of so many Americans and other Westerners, such an attitude can be understood, but Trump will not be able to find an easy way out of the mess he has gotten himself into by improvising an operation that is undoubtedly necessary, but still not at all simple, which, true to the immediatism that characterizes him, he hoped to carry out in a couple of days. As things stand, he might be tempted to resign himself to suffering what, in retrospect, would be seen as a catastrophic strategic defeat. If so, he would have a place in the history books comparable to that occupied by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain who, for a couple of weeks, was able to take pride in the peace treaty he signed with Hitler in Munich.
It should go without saying that the United States and Israel would not be the only countries that would benefit from the eventual replacement of the delusional Iranian government by a less fanatic regime, be it a republican democracy, a constitutional monarchy or even a “normal” dictatorship without apocalyptic pretensions. In view of the existential danger posed by the Shiite sect that has ruled Iran for almost half a century, all European countries, China, India, Japan, the Arab states and even Russia would have good reason to celebrate its destruction.
One can understand, then, the resentment that Trump feels towards his traditional European allies who, at the beginning of the war against Iran, refused to help him because he had not consulted them before the start of hostilities, although, over time, some began to modify their attitude. As for Xi Jinping, the Chinese boss puts his country’s rivalry with the United States before any long-range project he could have and in which a hegemonic Iran would hardly be found in the Middle East. Although it sometimes seems that Trump likes the idea of the United States sharing with China the duties corresponding to the “international gendarme” on duty, from the point of view of the ruling elite of the communist dictatorship, it is still premature to think in such terms.
