Iran war – the reckoning

Despite projecting strength through their military, the US cannot protect its allies.

The Arab Middle East states are seeing that placating the US by allowing them to have its military bases in their countries is not protection. The rulers in the Middle East only cared about themselves so betting on the US to be able to protect their power seemed like a good deal at the time, saving themselves from have to bear the full cost of their defense. They seemed to think that they were thus immune to reprisals when they allowed those US bases to be used to bomb Iran. Iran has shown them that there is a cost to being complicit, and the price is the loss of their illusion of stability.

The US has shown that it has no idea how to deal with nations whose own populations are willing to defend themselves and their land to the death. It thought that its notion of freedom was enough to sway those populations, but their histories were rife with exploitation by the West so they were not willing to give up their real freedom for false hopes peddled by corporations who were exploiting the US's own citizens.

It is not enough now to expect propaganda to distract people from their true needs, especially when the capability for violence to back up that propaganda is severely deficient in creating real change, and cannot even protect the world from the disorder of its own making.

We see that Israel is the nation that is creating the problems in the Middle East.

While putting a pseudo-Western nation in the middle of the Middle East seemed like a useful outpost for Western hegemony, that it had the anti-Arab agenda of ridding itself of non-Jews was not going to go down well among neighbouring countries. That the West has continued to indulge the nation despite its willingness to start conflicts, even to the point of many politicians willing to be traitors to their own country to defend and protect it.

Israel started the 2025 and 2026 bombings of Iran on the pretext it was about to make nuclear bombs, and that the US was willing to scramble to support them shows just how high the Israeli corruption of the US has reached. While many Western nations have refrained from joining the bombing, that they have been vocal in condemning Iran and imploring it to stop but not Israel shows that many politicians in those nations are also traitors willing to bend their own rules to support Israel. Western populations are seeing that the hegemony that Israel supposedly allows is not worth it.

We are seeing that many politicians are willing to sabotage world order for their own ideological indulgence.

Many politicians are focussed upon Iran as the rogue nation, conveniently forgetting that it was UK and US interests that overthrew a democratically elected government there that was trying to regain controls of its own resources. Many nations then overlooked the murderous regime of the Shah that took over, but now condemn the current Iranian government for being the same.

That these same politicians have overlooked the decades-long genocide of Palestinians in Gaza while spouting the Israeli government propaganda that it has a right to defend itself shows that their value judgement is severely warped. They have demonstrated that they are not fit to be trusted with the welfare of their own citizens when the lives of other people are expendable to them.

With the constriction of the Strait of Hormuz, those nations affected are seriously looking at their energy supply chains.

The Iran war has resulted in constriction of supplies of several fossil fuels due to the Arab states not having a significant means of getting them out to the world. While many nations have kept months of fuels as a hedge against such supply holdups, if the war continues for months, refineries in the Middle East will have to shut down, which will requires months to start up again when hostilities cease enough that insurance companies are willing to cover the ships.

The US has become fairly self-sufficient in recent years, and the EU was shaken into finding alternative sources of fossil fuels to Russia after their invasion of Ukraine in 2022, so the nations most directly affected are in Asia, and they are now rationing fossil fuels by efforts such as reduced workday weeks. Some have indicated possibly moving to coal which is not affected by the Iran war. Such short-term ramping up of alternate fossil fuels to oil is to be expected.

The real impact of the Iran war has been rather like the 1973 oil crisis created by the OPEC price squeeze, which prompted the US to work towards self-sufficiency. Then there were no real alternatives to fossil fuels, but today mainstream renewables are cheaper than them, but electrification of a lot of industries is now more feasible, including production of non-fuel derivatives of oil. Nations in the mid and long-term will now be looking for such renewable futures as a means of preventing similar dependencies upon volatile regions or recalcitrant supplier nations.

Populations around the world are seeing that the world order is a delusion.

Many are seeing that the world order built to support the extremely selfish is the real enemy of humanity. Oligarchs everywhere are revealing their true beliefs and how far they are willing to destroy the world to get what they want. They are showing that they really did not care about the institutions that were ostensibly created to support the world order, and are now just feeding voters overt nonsense and expecting them to just lap it up.

All this is showing us that those who purported to be freeing us are far more interested in exploitation of everyone around them, no matter in which nation they operated. We are seeing that it is us that have to build the world we want and not leave that to those who pretend to help us but lie to us instead. It is we who have to make sure our institution serve our needs, and that the people we elect serve us. We are human being and we matter. The earth supports us and it matters. We do not need false heroes nor false prophets, but have to define our own lives and share the planet.