Trump as a prophet of doom

Hearing President Donald Trump’s warning to Iran during a prime-time national address — that he intended to bomb the country with enough force to send “them back to the Stone Ages where they belong” — reminds one of America’s flair for such apocalyptic metaphors on another historic occasion. In Pakistan, which hosted the highest-level face-to-face meeting between the United States and Iran since Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, the Bush administration threatened to bomb Pakistan “back to the Stone Age” after the 9/11 terror attacks if then-President General Pervez Musharraf did not cooperate with America’s war against Afghanistan.

That Iran’s First Vice-President Mohammad Reza Aref dismissed Trump’s aggressive posture asserting the enduring nature of the Iranian state by highlighting Iran’s deep historical roots (“Iran is not a mere ‘incident’ in history, but history itself”) at variance with Trump’s stark provocation (“A whole civilisation will die tonight, never to be brought back again”) earlier is beside the point. What is important is that America’s expansionism vis-à-vis Iraq and Afghanistan earlier, and Iran currently, once again finds it guilty of transgressing the great seats of ancient civilisations.

Aref’s claim that Iran is history itself is not misplaced. The history of the area now known as Iran, but often still referred to as Persia, spans millennia, boasting a rich and complex artistic and cultural legacy. It is one of the most dynamic areas of Islamic civilisation, as it was home to the world’s first powerful empire (led by Cyrus the Great during the Achaemenid dynasty) that influenced a vast portion of Central Asia, including Armenia, Georgia, and India. The Persian empire surpassed in size any previous polity in the region: the Great King’s writ ran from central Asia to Libya and from the western shores of the Black Sea to the banks of the Indus. Even if Trump doesn’t like this bit of history, he must learn to chew on this.

The Strait of Hormuz was historically a venue for adversaries to access and threaten Iranian coasts. The Portuguese attack on the Island of Hormuz in 1507 and the British occupation of Bushehr port in 1856 are two occasions that have been emphasised in Iranian strategic thinking to argue about the potential vulnerabilities that can occur from ignoring the Strait. Trump seeking to force open the Strait rekindles the age-old demons. What is worse, it exposes American vandalism that has wreaked untold havoc on civilisations time and again.

Regarding Trump’s call for extinction, civilisations such as Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Cretan, Classical, Byzantine, Middle American, and Andean have vanished over time. But the interaction of the civilisations that have remained – Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Islamic, Western – with one another, as much as with their own environments, has been among the most important drivers of historical change. In a six-week assault on Iraq’s civilians and infrastructure in 1991, called “Desert Storm,” grain silos and public water-treatment plants in the country were targeted. What is most reprehensible is the extensive use of depleted uranium missiles, intensive use of cluster bombs, fuel-air bombs, napalm, cruise missiles, and so-called “smart bombs.” The Dutch Laka Foundation estimates that this particular US terror campaign left behind 300-800 tons of radioactive waste from the depleted uranium ammunition all over Kuwait and Iraq – poisoning air, land, water and people.

“Sacralisation of war”

It becomes a civilisational irony how an eminently rich and barbarian state ends up fuelling nuclear proliferation, as between 1945 and 1992, the US conducted 1,054 nuclear tests and two nuclear attacks. In November 1997, Bill Clinton issued a Presidential Decision Directive which declared that nuclear weapons would remain central to US defence policy and that Washington has the right to target nuclear rivals and prospective nuclear states that might threaten US interests. In March 2000, then-Deputy Secretary of Defence John Hamre said: “Nuclear weapons are still the foundation of a superpower... and that will never change.”

In March 2002, a copy of the Pentagon’s revised Nuclear Posture Review, leaked to the Los Angeles Times, revealed the US’s contingency plans to use nuclear weapons against China, Russia, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Syria, and Libya.

We are often told that Western/Christian and Muslim/Arab civilisations are on the verge of destroying each other. But the global reach of US military power is increasingly equated with a pervasive ethos of imperial arrogance, with a distorted vision of national exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny. This has led to a valorisation of warrior politics, merging with what Barbara Ehrenreich calls the “sacralisation of war,” where society converts the act of killing into a sacred duty, similar to ancient blood sacrifices – a “burst of nationalist religiosity” in which foreign populations are faceless, dehumanised, and demonised.

Currently, the US is a global economic predator, sustaining itself through an increasingly fragile system of “tribute taking.” Having lost the ability to harness its own economic gain with the economic advancement of other societies, a weakened US frequently resorts to more desperate and aggressive actions to retain its hegemonic position; these actions inevitably point to the disintegration of the American empire. Trump is acting as a prophet of doom in presiding over this.

(The writer is a Kolkata-based commentator on geopolitics, development and culture)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.