Remembering Bob Dylan’s song from 1962, Masters of War

So much has been spoken and written in recent days about the American and Israeli actions against Iran, and so much has been foolish. Too often we forget that violence as instrument of state always has vast unintended consequences, and even more so when there is little evidence of any planned outcome or endgame.

Palestine and Gaza are issues of long standing. Wisdom could have brought resolutions, recognising rights and interests on all sides. But any hope of that ended with the rise of Netanyahu. Iran is a vile, repressive, ideology-driven state. Israel not least as an American proxy gave it an external focus. Obama and the EU had an agreement (the JCPOA) to limit Iran’s nuclear ambitions: Trump scrapped it. We moved quickly from a world of attempted conciliation, which is always a long, hard road, to a world where threat is the modus operandi.

Trump in 2016 was a novice, and after 2020 he could have been written off as an aberration. There have been other populists aspiring to power in US history, but they’ve always been seen off. Not this time.

The notion of American exceptionalism is deep-rooted. Obama bought into it. But he saw it as bringing responsibility, not fist-waving, gun-toting belligerence. Seeing yourself as in some way ‘great’ is always a bad idea. Translated to a nation it’s dangerous. Allied to ‘again’ and we’re into wild misreadings of history. Was America greatest in the era of the robber barons, in the late nineteenth century? Or was it the 1920s, before the Wall Street Crash. Or the late 1940s and 1950s, when American beneficence brought restoration after the devastation of world war? Or the 1990s after the fall of the Berlin Wall?

‘Greatness’ as currently manifested (in its MAGA and Heritage Foundation guise) lies in the freedoms of markets and expression. But both are heavily compromised. The US market is anything but free. And power is ever more concentrated. We have the big seven (Apple, Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, Nvidia, Tesla) and a stock market racing ahead fuelled by their AI investments, not least in vast power-hungry datacentres. Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Jensen Huang, enjoy their closeness to power. And their extreme wealth. Power has devolved upwards, and ends with Trump, in whose hands it has an increasingly deranged quality.

Where lies the future? The rules-based order the USA once espoused and help police has had remarkable success. But at the same time it has built up a vast deficit. Chinese investment in Treasury Bonds and elsewhere has funded vast levels of debt. But you could blame the vast appetites of the American consumer for Chinese imports for that. Not an attribution of blame Donald Trump would accept. (So also the extraordinary levels of drug consumption. The Jalisco New Generation Cartel is only a symptom, not the cause. But that’s a subject for another time.)

The USA as it is now is epitomised by the rantings of Trump, but also by Peter Hegseth, who has come from nowhere and now heads the newly-anointed ‘Department of War’. There is for him, for Trump, for the Israeli government, no sense of the value of human life for any nation other than their own. Thousands of deaths are necessary collateral damage. The destruction of a city, of Gaza, and now vast swathes of Iran, is of secondary concern.

Along with nuclear disarmament, now it seems dismissed as a fool’s game, we should be arguing for the banning of all aerial bombardment, other than that of specific military targets. And the routine taking out of heads of state is an appalling idea: once established as a practice government becomes impossible.

That brings is back to the UK and Starmer, limiting the American use of the Diego Garcia bases to defensive operations. That had to be right. But, as the Iranian regime in its death-throe madness aims its missiles and drones at Gulf State targets, the definition of ‘defensive’ has had to expand, maybe to the point of being meaningless – where international law as we’ve understood it becomes irrelevant.

Trump is a pip-squeak in the long sweep of history, just another emperor who would cast off his imperial clothes but found they fit too snugly. The only history Trump connects to is of the shortest – one deal at a time – variety. Short history is also the Heritage Foundation, which is itself a rejection of the notion of progress in human affairs, also in the MAGA movement, but for them at least American responsibility ends at its borders. Trump disavowed external involvement, he was in his eyes a peace-maker, but as we see now it was and is peace guaranteed by war. Aggressors may want peace – but on their own terms.

Short history also exists in a fabled space: it has embedded in it the notion of recurrence. We can, we must, go back to a fabled era. ‘Judaeo-Christian civilisation’ is under threat: we hear this argued on both sides of the Atlantic. And we do indeed need to define that culture, and its freedoms and wide responsibilities, and in its finest forms its embedded compassion and rejection of violence, against other cultures, and not least Islam. But by defacing our own culture, by being violent or abusive in its supposed protection, we only do damage.

The world by arrogance and by sheer foolishness has found itself in the last few days in a terrible place, with outcomes uncertain, and hatred deeper embedded, thousands of lives lost, swathes of territory obliterated, with no possibility of any simple transfer of power to the good guys – not least because, these days, just who are the good guys?