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Sunday’s Forum
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6 responses to “Sunday’s Forum”
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Reasonable people can draw a reasonable lesson from defeat in Iran: even putting ethical questions aside, violence will not lead where you think. History, however, instructs us fairly clearly about how utopians of violence interpret defeat in foreign war: they blame an “enemy “at home for their own poor judgements and failures, and then claim that this enemy must now be defeated. The poor performance of the armed forces cannot be explained by their own ideological folly or their own manifest incompetence; it must be the fault of someone else. It will be quite easy for Trump and Hegseth (and Vance) to shift from their current (and risible) claim that we won the war to the claim that we would have won it if not for the stab in the back at home. And that way of seeing things then becomes the justification for putting soldiers (and ICE) on the streets during an election, or claiming that a terrorist attack (most likely a fake one) means that we have to have a state of emergency instead of an election, or something else along those lines.
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The war in Iran began with a dream of violence. The question now is whether the nightmare that followed returns to the United States.
The use of force does not magically lead to the outcome you want. You can think that firing some missiles and dropping some bombs will end Iran’s nuclear program, overturn its government, and lead to a victory that makes you feel grand about yourself; and then you can find that you no longer have any leverage over the nuclear program, that you have strengthened the power of the regime, and that you are paying hundreds of billions of dollars of reparations as the world draws conclusions from your capitulation.
To be sure, the inherent unpredictability of violence was joined by other factors in this foolish war. It originated in the human incompetence and strategic ignorance in the White House. The chief executive is, sadly, a superloser bent on superpower suicide. In the long term, the lesson for Americans is that our domestic politics will have to be restructured such that no aspiring tyrant can fight wars of whimsy.
But there is a more pressing concern for Americans. Will the tyrannical emotional state that brought us the war now be applied inside the United States? The emotional state, the utopia of violence, is not closely tethered to reality, and has to be considered in its own right. It has causal force, as we have just seen in Iran. There was no thinking behind the decision to go to war. There was however a vision, a feeling about how the world works, a utopia of violence.
The war began not with a plan, or a strategy, or for that matter any sense of the national interest. The attack on Iran began with a longing — a subjective sense that violence is pleasurable and can bring a utopia in which desires become reality. In the statements of President Trump and Defense Secretary Hegseth, such a utopia of violence is palpable.
Donald Trump is having such a moment. Having deployed the American armed forces to aid one Venezuelan faction against another on January 3rd, he decided that there was no limit to what violence could achieve in politics. Given the modest goal of the Venezuela operation and the prior work done by Venezuelans, this was a curious conclusion: but the utopianism is a mental state that doesn’t rest on reason. For those of us who listened to Trump call in to Fox and Friends right after the operation, it was clear that he was elated and wanted more. “I watched it,” he said, “literally like I was watching a television show.” Indeed he did, transfixed: “And this is something that, gee, I don’t know, it’s amazing.” And he wanted more of the amazing feeling: “We can do it again, too. Nobody can stop us.”
Lots more at the link of course.
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@charontwo:
I think this is highly improbable. It would not be at all easy to shift blame, except perhaps onto Israel. Trump doesn’t have the energy or focus or support or the ability to mobilize opinion. I don’t think either the National Guard or the military would follow any such orders. Nor do I believe a false flag attack would get any traction. I also don’t think there’s even GOP support in Congress for a move that invalidates their own elections. And there’s just no way Rubio and Vance could agree to work together on a coup. Then there are the states to deal with. -
@Joe: War is the continuation of politics by other means. The power of US arms was nullified by the no boots on the ground rules. The US was unwilling to engage in anything other than long distance standoff bombing. The Iran-Iraq war showed that the ayatollahs are willing to sacrifice huge numbers while the US isn’t. The economic price of 2026 war with drones and missiles has been shown by Ukraine vs Russia to be a great equalizer. In brain power, I don’t have much confidence in Trump/Hegseth over a random bunch of guys steeped in Shia mythology. The results speak for themselves.
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I maintain regular survey of weapons development as a result of my daily monitoring of the Ukraine war with Russia. Military production, R&D, and procurement are “exploding everywhere across our planet — Europe, USA, Canada, Asia, throughout the Middle East, even South America.
Galvanized by the wars of Russia, Israel, USA, the rising geopolitical challenge of China, and importantly, shifting U.S. geopolitical focus, there is a growing insecurity in all hemispheres. Cheap drones and high-tech advances have nations scrambling in response to newly emerging threats. Lower cost aerial weaponry, ground and sea robotics, lower maintenance hardware, threat awareness tech, and of course, A.I. all figure into the equation.
Everyone is simultaneously pursuing “muscle, quantity, and quality” as triple hedges. All this burgeoning activity is turbo-charged by robust a “capital sector” in pursuit of returns. Military defense industries are the hottest game in town, keeping up with expended munitions and generating the next level of fight and deterrence . Our entire planet is moving towards a war footing unseen in decades.
Humanity’s commitment to the social compact of nations for the rule-of-law, sovereignty, and non-violence will be tested like no period in recent history. Much of the current destabilization of order is driven by the malignancy of individual personalities who have ascended to the highest positions of power amid eroding or absent checks on that power — Putin, Trump, Netanyahu.
Will humankind’s civility hold the line?
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A spate of recent artifacts captures the global synergism of this dynamic:What to Expect From New Neptune 2 Cruise Missile if Ukraine Cooperates With MBDA
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I submit that we are entering entirely new territory for global civilization, for which analogies to history are useless.
