John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY SEYED HOSSEIN MOUSAVIAN IN MIDDLE EAST EYE
"As the US pushes Iran to the brink, may need to get tough"
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Response to a comment which said, “I genuinely thought that Trump pulling out of the nuclear deal would isolate the US, instil solidarity in the other powers and help Iran's economy in the long term. However, that has not happened, and the other countries seem to have been cowed by the US threats of sanctions, which in my opinion is a complete disgrace”:
Well said.
I think it has not happened because the United States is so very ready to use threats and pressures against even allies who cross it in any matter of empire it considers important.
We see and hear about some of the threats, but you can only imagine what uncouth men like Bolton and Pompeo say in private over encrypted phone lines.
America really has become something of a gangster state, working with and for that other gangster state, Israel, which in practice represents an American imperial colony in the Mideast, one whose every act is against the interests of its neighbors, only excepting those neighbors, such as blood-drenched Saudi Arabia, who completely serve American interests.
Many of Europe's major leaders understand this, and they show all kinds of negative reactions, reactions working against America's genuine long-term interests. There are serious cracks and breaks in the foundations of a set of old relationships, and I believe they cannot be repaired. America expects everyone to put their own interests after America’s.
But human beings don’t work that way. Continuous hammer blows from America have had much the effect that a very abusive parent has on his children, damaging effects which never go away, and I do not mean by the comparison that Europe in any way represents America’s children.
While America is in its relative decline (vis-à-vis a growing and increasingly competitive world) and will decline considerably further in coming decades to a certainty, it holds for now some awesome powers to use against those who displease it.
And it uses those powers just the way a gangster would, “Do it my way, or else,” as it tries to extract what it regards as benefits for itself, benefits which it is no longer capable of achieving through friendly competition and cooperation, its public posture of the 1950s. We’ve seen this, in the raw, in the case of Venezuela.
Europeans are rightly afraid of what an angry, powerful gangster is capable of, but they are, many of them, struck deeply by the godawful behavior they have witnessed.
America’s treatment of the Iran nuclear agreement represents a key test of Europe’s resolve, its abrogation by the United States being high-handed and unjustified. A test just as has Russia and Germany’s new natural gas pipeline, Nord Stream II, has been a test. America has done everything that it can think of to stop that project, including inciting last-minute objections from an EU now packed with American-favored small and weak Eastern and Southern countries (the same approach used to bend NATO), but the project is proceeding, and if it doesn’t, there will be significant energy shortages in Europe in the near future.
Only a wilfully blind person, or the kind of extreme ideologue such as those now dominating Washington, can’t see what America is doing to a law-abiding country like Iran, without any genuine cause. And only such a blind person fails to see America’s complete contempt for rule of law, which represents civilization’s single most important founding principle. And that contempt holds immeasurable danger for the future.
