War to No End

The question of war and peace isn’t always simple or easy. Was it necessary to go to war against England in 1775? No. To take arms against each other in 1861? Absolutely not. To join the Allies in 1917 and 1941? Probably and certainly. It can get complicated.

Not this time, though. This time it’s simple, easy, and obvious. Nothing good can come of Donald Trump’s catastrophic decision to go to war against Iran. We’ve killed thousands of people to no clear end at all. We have $4 gasoline, going up daily and not likely to come down any time soon. It’s not just the closure of transport lines, but also the destruction of refineries, port facilities, and other infrastructure necessary to the world trade in petroleum products. Fertilizer is similarly affected, at least for this year, so the effects on food prices will range from annoying to devastating.

The war’s economic effects at home seem to be generating much more, and more fierce, opposition to the president than the slaughter of Iranians, or even the loss of American service members. That might not be quite the case if people understood why, other than distraction from the Epstein cases, the whole, bloody mess is going on. They don’t. Oh, the remaining supporters of Trump, members now of a small and still dwindling group, seem to think it’s about saving the poor Iranian people from their oppressors, and Trump himself crows about having effected regime change. Yet the same group of mullahs who ran things in Iran a month ago run them now. They’re missing a few key personnel, but it appears those people have been replaced by even more hard-line haters of everything American and everything Jewish.

America’s traditional European allies are aghast at all these developments, and refuse to be drawn into the conflict. Trump’s response? He threatens to leave the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, formally ending those alliances along with the world order that has maintained a fragile balance between Western democracies and their enemies for eight decades.

So the immediate results of this cockamamie, illegal slaughter are disastrous. The long-term results are not all foreseeable, but almost certainly much worse. There’s only one winner here, and his name is Vladimir Putin. Well, and probably Xi Xinping, whose country is producing lots of high-quality electric cars.

Perhaps it can be said that Trump himself benefits, and I mean beyond the obvious stock manipulations. He’s learned, I guess, that Iran can close the Strait of Hormuz and use that ability as a weapon against the rest of the world at any time. He’s a very slow learner, but the lesson is pretty hard to miss. The rest of us didn’t need it.