“Men worthy of faith say (but Allah knows best) that in the early days the king of one of the islands of Babylon gathered his architects and his magicians and ordered them to build a labyrinth…” he begins by saying “The two kings and the two labyrinths.”
The deserts of the Middle East are beginning to look like the Arab labyrinth of the story that Borges included in El Aleph.
In that brief story, the Babylonian king received a visit from an Arab sheikh, whom he invited to see the labyrinth that he had built and it was “so complex and subtle” that whoever ventured among its endless corridors and stairs became inexorably lost.
That was what happened to the visitor, who, although confused and humiliated, was able to come out alive because in the twilight hours Allah heard his supplications. Some time later, to heal his wounded pride due to what his cruel host in Babylon made him experience, with his army of brave Bedouins he attacked the kingdom of the one who had mocked him and captured it to take it to the Arabian desert. There he abandoned him to his fate, telling him that this was his own labyrinth and that, even without walls or stairs, it would be impossible for him to get out alive.
That’s how it happened. And the same thing could happen to the power of the head of the White House in the deserts where he is waging a war that is causing economic and energy calamities of global reach.
The five-day ceasefire ordered by Donald Trump, postponing the threat to bomb Iranian power plants if the Strait of Hormuz is not unblocked, is a sign of an erratic wandering seeking a way out of an immensely complex and apparently inextricable conflict. The American president’s argument to justify his retreat was an alleged direct conversation with Tehran that the Iranian regime immediately and categorically denied. In this way, what this truce announcement appears to be is a sign of the complications that the prolongation of the war and the Iranian blockade of the Strait of Hormuz generates for Trump.
He hardly ever had a direct conversation with a leadership he claims no longer exists in Iran. In any case, it is most likely that he heard and understood what German Chancellor Frederich Merz explained to him about the escalation of the energy crisis that would cause the devastation of Iran’s electricity production plants, due to the response that the regime could implement by devastating the power plants of the Arab countries.
The immediate drop in the price of oil and gas that caused the five-day postponement of the attack announced by the president of the United States seems to be the breath of economic and political oxygen that the North American government needed and for which Trump announced that kind of truce, although attributing it to conversations with the Iranian side that, at least directly, would not have existed.
A whiff that could last very little because the ayatollah regime knows that by strangling the jugular of hydrocarbons it can bring closer the objective that was proposed in this war: for the North American president to put an end to the bombings and withdraw the Western superpower from the conflict, before having achieved the total destruction or the explicit capitulation of the Persian theocracy that he had set as an objective.
In other words, survive this war to continue ruling in that immense Central Asian territory that has ruled by dint of fanaticism and repression since 1979.
Pentagon strategists know that the closed curve of the passage that connects the Persian Gulf with the Gulf of Aden favors Iran in geostrategic terms for controlling navigation. The Iranian islands of Qeshm, Hengam and Larak are one of the advantages that the Iranian army has to dominate the strait. And if they were attacked by Western warships, just as the Iranian city of Bandar-e Abbas, located on the coast at the midpoint of the strait, could be attacked, Iranian forces rely on the mountains surrounding that strategic passage. On the rocky heights of Kuh-e Shab and Kuh-e Genu, it can install medium-range missile launchers that make transit impossible in that key point for the export of oil and gas that drives a good part of the world economy.
To eliminate these strategic positions of Iranian forces, the United States would have to land thousands of troops fighting on the ground. That is Trump’s worst nightmare because, with Iran having an army of one million troops, it would substantially increase the number of deaths in the American ranks, which would liquefy even more quickly the little support that this war has among Americans.
A warning for the North American president was that his Italian follower Giorgia Meloni lost her undefeated record after being defeated in the referendum on the judicial reform she proposed.
Donald Trump’s word, as well as the triumphalist certainties that he transmits all the time to the world and his country, suffered a strong erosion due to the slamming of the door that Joe Kent gave to the New York magnate’s government. The anti-terrorism czar, who is also a powerful figure in the MAGA movement and in the most extreme wing of the Republican Party, resigned, denouncing in a letter that the president lied when justifying this war by saying that Iran represented an imminent and serious danger to the United States.
Although they did not reach the target, with the missiles launched at Diego García Island in the Indian Ocean, the regime has shown that the limit of its missile power was not the two thousand kilometers of the projectiles used until now. Towards the island under British control where there is a North American base, Iran launched two missiles with a range of four thousand kilometers, which warns Europe that if it does not stay out of this war, Iranian rockets can reach its territory far beyond Cyprus and Turkey.
Trump is beginning to feel like he is wandering in a labyrinth from which he will hardly be able to emerge with his leadership intact. He finds himself at a point in the war from which he cannot go back without implying a defeat that would fray his image as a winner, showing him as what he considers the worst thing that can happen to a leader: being a loser. But prolonging the conflict with the damage caused to the global economy by the energy crisis it causes increases the risk of political wear and tear from which it will be difficult to recover in order not to lose control of Congress in the November elections.
The urns are at the exit of a desert that, like the Borgesian labyrinth, has not yet appeared in sight of the bombastic lost “king.”
