Por Paul Street
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| Image by Tianlei Wu. |
There’s a very insightful formulation on page 65 of the brilliant historian Luke Kemp’s indispensable book Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse, a study of hierarchy and power that ranges from the first hunter-gatherer bands and cave drawings of the Ice Age to the time of capitalist climate catastrophe, nuclear proliferation, global pandemics, Trump, Xi Jinping, Putin, and Elon Musk.
“The four fundamental ways to gain power over others,” Kemp writes, “is to control valuable information (information power), to control by threat or force (violent power), to control the decision-making (political power), or to control the critical resources that others need (economic power).”
Think about that formulation in relation to the current US-imperialist Trump war on Iran.
How has the “Goliath” Trump regime been able to undertake this reckless, mass-murderous, and arch-criminal campaign of unprovoked aggression against Iran, sanity and the world? What obstacles is it facing in trying to complete his real or supposed mission(s) and/or extract itself from the dangerous and bloody mess it has created?
The parts of Kemp’s formula most clearly working on behalf of its monumental crime in the Middle East are its possession of political and violent power. The Trump fascist regime and the Trump-captive ex-republican Republifascist Party “won” – likely stole – political power atop all three branches of the US imperialist state (it already had the US Supreme Court) in November 2024-January 2025. Among the many ways it translated that dark victory into policy was placing a Christian fascist crusader, Pete “Maximum Lethality Not Tepid Legality” Hegseth, atop the Pentagon, purging those who might have put some restraints on criminal military conduct from the armed forces and filling the National Security Council with Trump toadies. Relying significantly on threat and force (violent power) to gain and retain political power in the “homeland,” the Trump regime has used its control over US decision-making to direct massive violent power, drawing on the power of its unsurpassed high-tech for -profit war industries, to attack a nation (Iran) that sitting atop a massive stock of economically strategic “critical resources” (oil and gas) with “chokepoint” capacity to close off others’ access to a broader massive regional (Middle Easters) stock of the same critical (oil and gas) resources.
The war was certainly launched with the expectation of cutting off global capitalist-imperial competitors’ (chiefly China’s) access to those critical resources (economic power). It undoubtedly was launched also with the hope of deepening the Trump regime’s domestic political power by garnering accolades for “winning” (and thereby supposedly restoring/rebirthing national “greatness”) and/or providing pretexts for deepening violent repression in the “homeland” — declaring a state of emergency to cancel upcoming elections, mass arrests of war opponents said to be “domestic terrorists,” etc..
By Kemp’s formula, Trump’s weakest points in the war are around “information power” and resource/economic power. To be sure, Herr Trump was able to launch his reckless and insane war without sparking immediate domestic protests remotely commensurate to his crime partly because the preponderant majority of US-Americans have been kept in the dark about the long and grim record of mass-murderous Western and US capitalist imperialism within and beyond the oil-rich Middle East. That informational blockade is the consequence of a national chauvinist, anti-communist, and imperialist ideological system dedicated to manufacturing domestic consent to class and imperial rule.
Probably no more than a miniscule portion of 1% of the United States’ heavily propagandized populace could tell you anything of substance about Washington’s bloody record in and against Iran, including the overthrow of that country’s democratically elected government in 1953 and the imposition of a CIA-backed dictatorship on that country for the next quarter century (leading to great revolution that was tragically captured by reactionary Islamists instead of revolutionary communists in 1979). Only a tiny slice of Americans could tell you about the brilliant and prolific historian Gabriel Kolko’s important work on how the “the roots of [Islamist] terrorism lie in America’s own cynical policies in the Middle East and Afghanistan, a half-century of realpolitik justified by crusades for oil and against communism” and on how Washington recurrently and futilely “reacts to the complexity of world affairs with its advanced technology and superior firepower, not with realistic political response and negotiation.”[1]
This vast elite-manufactured popular ignorance/amnesia means that only a tiny sliver of the US population possesses any of the historical context required to properly wrap their minds around their rulers’ longstanding provocation of Iran and the broader Middle East. Most Americans are denied the sort of information that would help them understand why Iran has long considered the US a “satanic” enemy. (And of course major US media even at its [not-so] leftmost outlets [e.g. MS[not]NOW] dutifully follows the Western-imperial doctrinal distinction between “worthy” and “unworthy victims” by paying huge mournful and humanizing attention to the relatively small number of US war casualties while telling Americans next to nothing about the lives and humanity of the much larger number of Iranians Trump and Hegseth are slaughtering with impunity.)
Economic power of a kind fuels this disabling ignorance and amnesia, since the underlying US economic system, the core facto material dictatorship of capital, the source of imperialist wars, keeps most Americans scurrying around in a maddening paycheck-to-paycheck rat race, lacking the time and energy to study the history of “their” nation’s blood-soaked “foreign policy” (imperialism) and to engage with any science-based theoretical framework to understand that imperialism.
Still, there are partisan splits within the US imperialist ruling class about the imperial wisdom, viability, consequences, and even legality and morality of the war on Iran. Trump and his war are highly unpopular with Americans even without a broad popular understanding of the war’s roots. This means that one can find considerable information contrary to Trump’s war narrative in those parts of corporate media that have not fallen under the thumb of the widely hated Trump regime. One can learn from various non-regime experts, politicos, and talking heads on various mainstream news outlets about the Trump regime’s failure to anticipate both the Teheran regime’s political and military resilience and Iran’s David-like ability to inflict massive economic damage on the world capitalist system and thus on Goliath America through its geographical position at a key critical global resource (petroleum) chokepoint – the Strait of Hormuz. We can learn from mainstream media outlets about how Trump and Hegseth’s war machine murdered 170 people, mostly children, at a girls school on day one of the war and on how the orange-brushed ogre sickeningly tried to blame this atrocity on Iran. We can also hear from critical experts and talking heads about Trump’s criminal refusal to consult Congress before launching his war of aggression and about Iran’s persistent possession and likely dispersal of dozens of canisters containing enriched uranium, the key ingredient for nuclear weapons – the capacity for building which the Iranian regime would now seem less willing to surrender than ever before, thanks to Trump’s war.
While there’s no chance of an actually radical leftist activist or intellectual getting on or into the mainstream media with a full throated properly Marxist or left anarchist critic of the war as an outcome of the Trump fascist regime’s version of the longstanding Golath that is US capitalism-imperialism, one can pick up from that media a fair bit of information on how the war is being waged incompetently, illegally, and even immorally.
This resilience and resource power of Iran and the limits of the Orange Goliath’s Trump’s power over reporting and commentary poses obvious political problems for the Trump fascist regime. While lying to the American people about the extent and duration of the economic pain, inflation (of everything, including food prices, not just gas prices) imposed by his criminal war, Mad Mein Trumpf has recently engaged in a failed attempt to enlist help from lesser Goliath European powers and even from the rising rival superpower Goliath China(!) in clearing the Strait. The almost laughable irony of this effort is remarkable: Trump has tried to shame into the Hormuz “kill box” troops from nations he regularly demeans and on whom he has imposed wild and punitive trade penalties (tariffs), this after claiming that Great Again America doesn’t need anybody’s help and that “the straits are in great shape!”
The Iranian regime, made more “hardline” by Israel and America’s murder of those Iranian leaders most likely to seek a negotiated end to the war, is in no mood now to let up on its Goliath-checking resource power resulting from its territorial and military position alongside to the great global economic chokepoint that is the Strait of Hormuz.
You can learn about all this from experts and talking heads who are not averse to mocking Trump for his transparent absurdity, seen (for one particularly insane example among many) in his call for oil tanker crews to “show some guts” by braving Iranian drones and missiles: “come on sailors, lay down your lives to help Trump help keep a lid on global oil prices and more rapidly tip the planet into irreversible climate catastrophe! Man up, global mariners!!”
Hence the orange fascist maniac’s recent tantrum saying that reporters reporting on his war are guilty of “treason,” punishable by death, fascist Federal Communications chair Brendan Carr’s threat to pull the broadcast licenses of media networks that don’t toe the White House and Pentagon line on Iran, and Hegseth denouncing “dishonest [US] media” (as well as “ungrateful” European allies while calling for a freaking $200 billion Iran War supplemental payment from Congress) this morning.
The collapse of the US and global capitalist-imperialist Goliath can’t quite come soon enough for humanity. We need to organize a revolutionary people’s alternative so that it can collapse in a way that helps emancipate humanity from five millenniums[2] of oppressive state power instead of ending the human experiment in a pile of carbon-cooked and potentially radioactive ash.
Notes
+1. How odd to realize after writing this that I penned it on the 23rd anniversary of the day that the American Goliath under the deranged messianic militarist George W Bush launched his insane, reckless, and failed invasion of Iraq, precisely the sort of violent imperial misadventure analyzed by Kolko one year earlier.
+2. Kemp finds that “the first states arose approximately 5,100 years ago,” emerging from the need of a few rulers to impose power on a broad populace – a many or multitude. Goliath’s Curse, p. 45.
Paul Street’s latest book is This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America (London: Routledge, 2022).
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