Por Patrick Mazza
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| U.S. Army Photo – Public Domain |
I awoke this morning to pictures of Iran’s South Pars gas field burning, the world’s largest. I know what this means. It makes me almost physically ill, a recurrent feeling since the war on Iran broke out several weeks ago. It means Iran almost certainly will escalate attacks on Persian Gulf oil and gas infrastructure. What might have been a temporary interruption of exports with the closure of the Hormuz Strait will go into the long term, with waves of disruption cascading over the global economy.
The interconnected global system has suffered major shocks over recent years. The financial sector broke down in 2008. The pandemic broke supply chains in 2020, and the Ukraine war upset energy markets in 2022. These may have only been precursors of the degree of shock we are about to experience.
The disruptions extend beyond fuel. Around one-third of the fertilizer shipped by sea originates from the Persian Gulf. It’s made from fossil gas. Food production will be deeply impacted. Sulphur, a product of refinery operations, is also interdicted. Its uses range from fertilizer to processing copper ore, a material vital for green energy technologies. Much of the world’s helium, a byproduct of gas processing, comes from the Gulf. It’s crucial for chip manufacture.
From one standpoint, those of us who have worked toward a more bioregional order less dependent on global supply chains are completely validated. This disruption makes a compelling argument for getting off fossil fuels and becoming more reliant on local sources of energy and food. But being right doesn’t make it any easier. It feels more like Cassandra warning the people of Troy there are Greeks in that Trojan Horse, and being ignored. The Greeks are now bursting out to vanquish the city. The best that can be said is that global disruption will push us more in a bioregional direction, but with much pain and death across the world, especially in the nations of the Global South.
It is not just the disruptions, but the war itself with all the unnecessary suffering it imposes. I cannot look at that picture of a bloodied backpack from the bombed girls school without feeling pangs of grief. It is clearly a war of choice. Anyone who conceived that you could bomb people into regime change, and not rally them around even an unpopular government doesn’t know how people work. But what appears to be more the goal is to shatter Iran as a modern state, a long standing Israeli agenda. It is a war of empire, boldly, blatantly so. If Donald Trump is good for anything, it’s for making things obvious.
The U.S. has been an abusive, overlording global empire for around a century. It has had an imperial DNA since English colonists began settling the Atlantic coast, beginning the conquest of a continental empire. But leaders have tried to put a patina of righteousness over past wars. Trump isn’t even much trying, and feels no need to do so. That this war is the least popular in U.S. history really doesn’t matter. The imperial machine rolls on. The people have about as much say as Roman plebeians had over whether the legions would march.
Can the U.S. move beyond its imperial history? What historian William Appleman Williams called empire as a way of life. Perhaps suffering a monumental military loss combined with economic disruption at home can provide enough of a shock to cause fundamental change. In no way has empire been more the U.S. of American way of life than control of global energy flows. Even though the U.S. is now the world’s biggest oil and gas producer, it leverages control of oil and gas to rule other nations. And now that it is losing control of a vital link, the price impact will come back home to undermine our way of life, one of the most fossil fueled on the planet.
But I am not hopeful even these hard blows will be enough. The imperial consensus spans both political parties. If Democrats win coming elections, it no doubt will be a tremendous improvement for a range of issues from climate to human rights. But the consensus that has led the U.S. into wars under Democratic and Republican Administrations will remain. After all, Kamala Harris said during the campaign that Iran is the greatest threat to the U.S.
Change is going to have to come from a more fundamental level, a more rooted level. I think it is going to come as we graduate from empire as a way of life by building a bioregional way of life. A way of life that does not so much rely on global supply chains but bioregional resources. That is in a material sense humbler but in a spiritual sense far richer, a way of life in which we have rediscovered place and community. As important as it is to protest and resist, it is at least as vital to build community institutions on a bioregional level.
We don’t know what is going to happen in coming months. But when the biggest energy crisis in history is breaking out, with supply cutbacks several times those of the 1970s oil shocks, there is certain to be major disruption. I think few of us grasp the full extent. This may be the time when we are driven by necessity back to community and place to learn a more bioregional way of life. It is certainly a teachable moment.
This first appeared on Patrick Mazza’s Substack page, The Raven.
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