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You would be forgiven, as the US and Iran traded strikes over the past few days, for thinking that it was only last month that the two signed the Islamabad Memorandum, which formalised the process of ending the war and established a 60-day period to negotiate the final terms of a deal. That’s because it was only last month. But there has been so much talk and bluster and strike and turn tail that the conflict feels like it has started and ended several times already. The whole war is only five months old but is already settling into a sort of permanent feature of life, one that is all repetitive theatre now, each act indistinguishable from the one before it to all but the most plugged-in observers. The war is over. The war is at its peak. The Iranians are brave people. The Iranians are scum, not least their leaders. The Iranians don’t want a ceasefire. The Iranians are begging for one. The strait of Hormuz is open, it is shut, it is partly open.
To recap, where we are now in the war that was only supposed to last a few weeks but is now entering its sixth month is that the US has expanded airstrikes on Iran in a “major military punishment”. Iran has once again struck US base targets located across the region. The Houthis have claimed their own blockade over a second shipping chokepoint – the war now extends from the Gulf to the Red Sea. Trump can’t get out. Iran now understands the powerful leverage of the strait and its geographical, and therefore military, advantage in controlling it. Trump cannot end the war with that bargaining chip in its hands and the Iranians will not end the war without it. He can’t withdraw on terms that merely restore the prewar status quo. And Trump can’t go all in. Boots on the ground would be an extended bloody campaign that would claim many lives. In the US, the deaths of 18 troops so far and how the Pentagon appears to be trying to undercount that number has triggered outrage.
So what now? A sunk-cost logic that will continue to throw more money, and more bodies, into the quagmire. The war has already cost the US almost $40bn. And the Pentagon is asking for another $67bn. The White House’s request for Congress for the fiscal year is a colossal $1.5tn. The implications of this profligacy for the US are the choking of domestic spending. “We’re fighting wars,” Trump said earlier this year. “It’s not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare … We have to take care of one thing: military protection.” For what? A war that the US itself launched, that nobody asked for, that has no defensive features at all, and which is run by a frat house of bullies and lickspittles.
Everything into the furnace for Trump’s adventures: Iranian children and civilians and infrastructure; Gulf countries’ economies and political stability and even their drinking water, as Iran strikes desalination plants upon which several are heavily dependent. And almost every household in the world. Oil broke $100 a barrel last week and energy prices are higher across the board. Brent oil prices are now almost 40% higher than before the war. A gallon of gasoline in the US now also costs 37% more than it did and diesel is 40% higher. Gas prices have soared again in the UK, up nearly 50% just this month, and the lag between the new raised oil prices and what you pay at the pump will show up in a fortnight. And the story is replicated all over the world, slamming energy consumption and government budgets. These are not just statistics: together they constitute nothing short of a global energy re-configuration as the Iran war beds in. One that heaps pressure on economies all over the world in various states of distress, whether it is wealthy capitalist ones creaking under the weight of privatisation, price gouging and profiteering, or poorer ones where governments cannot absorb more pain for already stressed consumers. Protests over rising costs and fuel prices have flared up and paralysed transport from Ireland to Kenya.
Which makes this volatile moment a perfect time to pass some stabilising measures and increase confidence in economic stewardship. Something, perhaps, like a swap of Trump’s tariff regime, which expired last week, with a new one, imposed on the grounds that countries were not doing enough to “tackle forced labour”. If you think that this is a risible excuse, and that the Trump administration does not harbour a deep moral concern about poor working conditions across the world, then this is sadly a symptom of Trump derangement syndrome. You should get that looked at.
There is no amelioration of the cumulative impacts of this vandalism, no subsidy or cap that can soak up a colossal shock at the heart of global energy transit channels and oil production. We are all held hostage by a regime in the US that has pressed its military and economic prowess in service of ego and ignorance; tethered to an administration that runs the country as it runs in the world, in pursuit of point-scoring in a game where no play is too small or too big. Whether it is adding warning signs outside the Smithsonian to alert that exhibits are “inaccurate”, initiating crude tariff policies, or dragging a whole region into war because he thought it would be easy and look cool, Trump is wildly casual, cavalier, one moment bored and the other vexed. As if the whole world were a plaything to be toyed with and discarded, then picked up again and shaken and prodded.
And it all shows no signs of abating. Yoked to US hegemony, we all count the pennies, the bodies, the ever-escalating tithes of the election of a single man and the willingness of careerists and cowards who enable and support him. The more it carries on, the more these costs will be recounted in a sort of background noise to our existence and what was previously unthinkable will become the new normal, again and again. The Iran war is the most hazardous manifestation of this. Phantom breakthroughs, threats of final decisive escalations, all have given way to a chilling reality. An exorbitant war that is with each day rearranging geopolitics, domestic budgets and household ones, is once again, a new normal. Trump is stuck. Unable to swallow the unpalatable price of peace. And everyone else pays the cost.
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Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist
English (US) ·