The Great Wall of Incomprehension

In an earlier post I talked about making deals, and how people who’d never made any didn’t understand how that worked. Particularly the part where you walked. I’m bringing that up because last weekend, that’s exactly what happened. Supposedly there was to be a second round of something in Pakistan, but we walked away.

The message there is in two parts: when you get serious, let us know. The second part is that doing that is a tell: we have all the cards.

When that happened, I guessed it would be a considerable shock, since the Khamenie regime had been stringing the world along for decades, accommodating the bizarre idea that negotiations were an end in themselves.

So I’m not surprised that Tehran promptly fell back on the their traditional tactic, a sort of bait and switch: we can talk about this part, and maybe then later some other part, coupled with a good deal of bluster, and backed up by feeble attempts to demonstrate their control of the straight.

Easy to understand why: it’s been working for decades. So it’s genuine incomprehension. Let me be clear about that, incomprehension isn’t delusion. And Iran’s string of proposals reveals a pretty clear understanding of their current problem. Without enriched uranium, without the ability to export their oil (and to control Hormuz and the gulf), they’re just another failed state.

Now I’m aware of all the claims currently being made about why Iran keeps stalling, ranging from complex theories about the leadership deadlock, to the idea of religious fanaticism, and off into the weeds of traditional anti-Americanism. It definitely seems as though there’s no one able to assume a leadership role, but given the mortality rate in the leadership (actual, potential, or imaginary), they have an excuse.

But the Tehran’s combination of denial, threat, bluster, and contradiction isn hardly unique. On the contrary, it’s surprisingly widespread. Here are three examples. I’ll just list them, before pointing out the connections and hazarding a guess at why.

As I’m sure you know, the United Nations has admitted they’re shortly going to be broke, and of course they’re blaming the United States for withdrawing its support, even though currently dozens of members haven’t paid up either.

But instead of attempting to make a deal with Washington, as in what changes in the organization would persuade you to support us, the secretary-general has said flatly that we don’t have any choice. It’s an obligation that must be honored.

Then there’s NATO, initially designed to keep the Soviet Union from overrunning Europe, but since the USSR and its empire collapsed over thirty years ago, it’s hard to see what the point is, and very few of its members have lived up to any of their commitments.

The point of the treaty was we’d help them defend themselves against the Soviets, not that we’d do it. But that seems to be the current idea, has given rise to an interesting concept of treaties, since the signatories seem to feel we have obligations and they don’t.

Lastly, a good many of what used to be called First World states are currently in some kind of internal political deadlock. What with deindustrialization, dependence on imported energy instead of their own resources, leaders only hanging on by the skin of their teeth, and collapsing economies, there’s surprisingly little difference between them on the one side, and Iran on the other.

Sure, their leaders haven’t gotten to the stage of killing everyone who disagrees with them, and so forth and so on. But Iran is just a cruder and more wicked version, because the responses to the current situation, both the internal and the external challenges, is the same combination of paralysis, bluff, and fantasy.

I’m not surprised at the failure to comprehend reality, as it’s been steadily developing for over a century.

I think what we’re seeing is the final gasp of an American zealotry that Richard Gamble traced in The War fir Righteousness combined with a European variant as identified by Daudet in his twelfth and fifteenth “Stupidities” of the Nineteenth Century.

Here they are: “The relations of people to people are improving without pause. We are moving to a United States of Europe,” is number twelve. And “We are at the dawn of new era of fraternity and justice” is number fifteen.

A century on and the result is a profound belief in the actual existence of a global community, that all conflicts can be solved by compromises and agreements, and a total dismissal of national self interest as “isolationism,” nowadays perhaps the deadliest of the sins.

The people who believe in this are not just impervious to the world of experience, they’ve created alternative histories that ignore that the suffering and injustice inflicted by wars of national or imperial interest in modern history pale to insignificance when compared with the wars of the twentieth century. For example, in 1997 Hanoi admitted that their war to turn Vietnam into a communist state cost 5.1 million Vietnamese lives.

That China and Iran have for decades simply ignored any international agreement or convention that they didn’t like was of no consequence.

So when someone is attempting to figure out who’s in charge in Iran, my response is simple: now explain who’s in charge in the United Kingdom as of the council elections of 7 May. But they actually have elections! Yeah, but as I’ve explained before, or tried to, that’s confusing a process with a result, a confusion that’s based on assumptions that aren’t actually true.

But the people making them simply can’t deal with a shift in which the world is reverting back to its traditional order. It can’t be true, because it mustn’t be true. So the result is paralysis, and that’s the cause.

For Iran, the UN, most of the Europeans, and a good many other people. When you watch the press conferences of India’s foreign minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, you see a very clear and precise statement both of the new reality and of foreign incomprehension. When he observed that Europe’s problems are not the world’s problems, his audience was incredulous, reacted like one would suppose a meeting of Flat Earthers would react when it was explained to them that the world is round.

I would suggest that when people are confronted with events that contradict everything they’ve believed, they go through a process roughly like the one Kübler Ross posited for grief. The first three are the same: Denial, Anger, Bargaining. Then comes Depression, but I believe in this case, it’s more like Paralysis.

I say that because death is a concrete event, we’re all aware it happens, which is quite different from seeing your world turned upside down. So maybe paralysis isn’t the right word, or maybe Depression actually covers it.

But I’m skeptical about Acceptance (her final stage) when it comes to grief. And I’m not sure it even applies here. I think the passage through these states can be torturous and lengthy—and it may not even happen.

Since various groups have been trying to talk Iran out of going nuclear for decades, and to no avail, there’s an almost instinctive assumption that the current round is either just more of the same, or will end up the same way.

But just because we use the same word, we’re describing fundamentally different processes. Up until 2026, the West was trying to persuade Iran not to go nuclear, and Tehran was just being opportunistic. That is: seeing what they could get by playing along.

But the current situation is entirely different. First, Tehran is the one trying to get the Coalition to stop, and they’re having to confront the fact that the United States has all the cards. So instead of negotiating to see what they can gain, they’re trying to see what they can salvage. It’s the difference between seeing how much you can con the other fellow out of, and what you have to do to persuade him to stop holding a gun to your head.

Although that analogy establishes the all important differences, it’s also an imperfect analogy, because Washington doesn’t have to pull the trigger. Every day that Iran can’t export its oil, their situation worsens. So the current ultimatum, with a one week deadline, is about it. It meaning their oil production will be too far gone to recover.

And the point I was trying to make about the Kübler-Ross stages is that Tehran’s leaders are having to come to terms with what they’ve lost, and that’s emotionally and psychologically difficult.

In fact, I would go a step further, and say that I think the Iranian leadership is actually further along the road to acceptance than the leaders of France, Germany, and the UK.

And although I think the stages are a pretty good outline, since we’re talking about human beings, you can have all four going at the same time.

Now as I’ve explained, if Iran can’t export its oil, their economy will not only collapse, but the chances are very high that they’ll be out of the petroleum exporting business.

So the American blockade has them not just in a vise, but in a trap. And over the weekend, Washington sprang the first part of the trap, when it announced that it would help neutral ships pass through the gulf. Basically, that forces Iran either to quit stalling, or to fight, because at this point the only card they have to play is to demonstrate their control over the gulf.

The reason that’s a trap is that to make good on that, they have to start up the war, and when they do that, the Coalition can subject them to another round of air strikes.

So on 4 May, very predictably, they did, by firing a few missiles at the UAE sending out some motor boats to enforce their claim, damaging a South Korean transport ship, setting fire to a Chinese flagged tanker, and even attacking American naval vessels transiting the gulf.

But the result was basically the ultimate humiliation: not only did it not do much (or any) damage, but the United States made it clear that those attempts were so feeble they didn’t even constitute breaking the supposed cease fire.

And the effort promptly boomeranged in another way. It’ pushed the UAE and the Gulg States over the edge.

From the start of the war, Iran devoted an enormous effort to attacks on the Gulf States, who have claimed that 85 percent of Iranian aerial attacks were directed against them The only reason I can come up with is Tehran was aiming to intimidate them sufficiently to decouple from Israel and the United States.

If so, this was a serious misjudgment on several different levels, as it created an openly anti-Iranian block in Iran’s neighbors, whose existence deprived Tehran of claiming this was a West versus Islam conflict.

In fact, it has exposed Iran to a whole new trap. Because while Washington is saying that Iran’s admittedly feeble attempts don’t change the situation—which is precisely the right attitude—the UAE is now saying it will retaliate against Iran.

Most people don’t know this, but the UAE has surprisingly large military air arm (over five hundred planes), built around somewhere in the neighborhood of around 100-130 American F16 and French Mirage aircraft, supported by tankers, and their aircrews have a good deal of combat experience. They’ve also taken advantage of the supposed ceasefire to upgrade their defensive systems, which is why it appears that only one target was hit in the latest strike.

And since Iran currently doesn’t have either an air force, a navy, or much in the way of air defenses, there’s not much they can do to stop whatever retaliation the Gulf States (or the UAE) do.

Interestingly, the UAE can probably put more combat aircraft into the air than any of the supposedly great European powers, plus they’re closer. A failed national defense policy brings about its own punishment: NATO.

There’s another aspect of this incomprehension that needs to be pointed out.

When the invasion of Israel by Hamas started, I pointed out that they were basically just like any other criminal gang, wouldn’t survive a war with an actual state. But in the alternative universe I described above, all the various gangs (Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthi, the Mullahs) were treated as though they were “peoples” whose “rights” must be recognized. The logical outcome of Saint Woodrow’s Fourteen Points, given intellectual status by Anderson’s Imagined Communities.

That being said, I want to add an important reservation, the same one I’ve made before when I observed that Marx said on numerous occasions that he wasn’t a Marxist. Tracing the history of an idea back to its source, or sources, is a scholarly endeavor, not a charge made by a prosecutor. There’s no theory, no idea, that human beings can’t screw up, and oftentimes it’s difficult to sort out the genuine errors from the work of the wicked.

And so it is here, even though the reality of the situation frequently gets either lost or turned inside out.

So in the fantasy world I’m sketching, the most important part was missed: states don’t negotiate with gangs, they neutralize them. So, for example, right now, Hamas is still trying to “negotiate,” but they’re basically being ignored, as is Hezbollah: Israel and Lebanon are negotiating directly, as one state to another.

Sure, the gangs in this case are members of a religious cult. So were the Thuggee in India. So are the Shia.

So even though the exact timetable is unclear, that we can’t calculate the parameters of the curve, the direction is obvious. Well, except to people who are so invested in their fantasy world that they refuse to look. Just because there are a great many of them about doesn’t mean they’re right.

It might seem at first glance that these incomprehensions, delusions, and erroneous predictions are new and unprecedented. On the contrary. As Lord Melbourne (William Lamb, Second viscount Melbourne), who served as Great Britain’s prime minister twice in 1834-1841 exclaimed in exasperation,

What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass.