The End of the U.S. Unipolar World

A larger war is coming to the Middle East. This seems inevitable. Netanyahu's roll out yesterday of  purloined Iranian files that purportedly show an old secret effort to build a nuclear bomb paves the way for Trump's pullout of the Iranian nuclear deal.

Bill Van Auken lays it all out neatly in "Israel denounces Iran nuclear deal after new missile strikes on Syria":

Speaking at a press conference in the White House Rose Garden shortly after Netanyahu’s speech, Trump said it confirmed that he had been “100 percent right” about the Iran nuclear deal.

“We’ll see what happens, I’m not telling you what I’m doing,” he added, affirming that “we’ll make a decision” either on or before May 12, the deadline for the White House to renew the waiver of unilateral US sanctions against Iran that were lifted as part of the nuclear agreement.

Trump repeated his claim that under the agreement the US had given Iran “$150 billion and $1.8 billion in cash…and we got nothing.” The $150 billion is an invention concocted by the American political right as the figure for Iranian overseas assets that were unfrozen under the nuclear deal. The real figure is estimated at between $25 billion and $50 billion. The $1.8 billion is slightly more than the amount the US was required to return to Iran for an arms deal that was never fulfilled.

The fixation of the American president on money that went to Iran reflects broader concerns within the American ruling oligarchy that the agreement’s prospective opening of the Iranian market will benefit capitalist interests in Europe, China and Russia, rather than those of US-based banks and corporations.

The flurry of contacts between Washington and Tel Aviv since the weekend appear to signal the failure of the recent back-to-back visits to the American capital by French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel to convince Trump to renew the US sanctions waiver and forestall the collapse of the Iranian nuclear deal—an outcome that will almost certainly accelerate the drive to a major war in the region. 

The office of Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May issued a statement indicating that she and her French and German counterparts had reaffirmed their support for the deal in separate phone calls on Sunday. Moscow, meanwhile, issued a statement recording a similar conversation between Macron and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The European powers view the apparent determination of the Trump administration to blow up the JCPOA and head down a path of military confrontation with Iran with increasing trepidation. It is not merely the prospect of losing out on potentially lucrative trade and investment deals—few of which have actually been consummated since the deal was signed in 2015—but also the prospect of Europe bearing the brunt of the blowback from such a war, both in terms of regional destabilization and a new exodus of refugees.

There needs to be an anti-war movement in the United States to call a halt to this insanity. But there isn't one. Part of the problem is the hawkishness of the Democratic Party. The unspoken wisdom is that there is no meaningful register of protest because the entire power structure is completely enthralled with war, more war and total war. Revolution is the only option. And how does one go about taking the first step toward a revolution?

The encouraging sign in all of this is that Europe is about to go its own way. It must go its own way. The U.S. has chosen its Saudi and Israeli clients over a some sort of sustainable management of its unipolar world.