WHY TRUMP SURRENDERED (AND WHAT IT MEANS)
After a few days of making genocidal threats of the kind the world has scarcely seen since the 1930s, finally, Trump surrendered.
“A civilization will die tonight.” A civilization did begin dying tonight. Ours. But I’ll come to that.
Why did Trump surrender? For the obvious reason. America was losing this war, and losing it badly. Incredibly badly. Not a single one of Trump’s objectives were accomplished. In fact, the precise opposite happened.
Instead of regime change, Iran’s regime survived and hardened. Worse, Iran has emerged now as a new global power. It withstood the might of both America and Israel’s militaries, and choked off the world’s oil supply, causing chaos around the globe, sending markets plummeting.
For Iran, this war signals its emergence as a major global player. It has shown it can withstand war to the point of mass war crimes, and not just emerge intact, but exert punishing, catastrophic cost of its own. And for all these reasons, Trump finally surrendered.
Now we are at a fragile ceasefire. You might thank an unlikely country, Pakistan, without whose efforts at diplomacy we would be soon standing on the brink of world war. That is where we will be, anyways, for some time to come now. This fragile ceasefire isn’t likely to hold. A man who can threaten the kinds of…let me pause here.
What are we to call it, a proclamation, a threat like “a civilization will die tonight”? Even war crime isn’t quite an adequate term. Perhaps even "crime against humanity” is a concept that fails us now, because if such a threat were to be carried out, it would be something new. The the Middle East would have been in ruins, from electricity to drinking water, millions upon millions at risk, and the world’s oil supply would have been dust.
Perhaps just as new concepts were necessary for what happened during the 1930s, they are now too. Maybe all this can only be called a crime against civilization.
A man who can threaten such crimes is unlikely to be capable of hewing to any principles or norms of decency, and we should already know that about Trump. And so this ceasefire is likely to be tenuous at best. How, precisely, is the Strait of Hormuz to be managed? Will Iran and America split the “toll”? Go ahead and chuckle.
Now let me come to the point, which isn’t why Trump surrendered, but what it means.
Let me begin with us as a civilization, which I’ve already done a little, and come to the financial and economic realities before us now.
As a civilization, we lost our dignity. Few stood to Trump’s threats, which, we should all understand, are at or beyond the level of the 1930s. To threaten to take a nation of a hundred million people back to the “Stone Age” is a crime so vast that it has little precedent in human history. And that we as a world stood cowering before such threats robbed us of our dignity.
Dignity isn’t a mere abstraction. It has a very real price.
Who will pay for the energy crisis, financial crises, or stock market crashes that Trump has imposed on the world? If you were the finance minister of any country on the planet, you should be looking at all your major financial markets right now, stocks, bonds, currencies, and thinking to yourself: America cost me this many billions or trillions, and the rational response is to protect myself, by divesting exactly that amount from a dangerous, implosive America that can loose this chaos upon the world.
Eventually, America will pay this price. The great trend of the world running away from investing in America will gather pace and force now, at least if the world is anywhere close to some semblance of rational.
It will want its dignity back. What shred of it is left after the shocking cowardice shown by leader after leader who remained silent in the face of Trump’s insane ultraviolece.
The world has been playing nice with America. Far too nice. Europe took a soft line with Trump, and where did it end? With a war on Iran, that choked Europe itself off from the energy it so vitally needs. If you were Europe, where would you put your money? How long would you suffer this kind of humiliation?
History is made of cowardice. And yet the world changes, too, when courage is mustered. There are a few foolish nations left in the world who will follow Trump into the abyss. Middle Eastern money has flowed into America over the last decade, a cycle of oil becoming money becoming oil, becoming instability, dictatorship, and war. But will the rest of the world want to join in this fatal bargain?
Trump’s humiliation will prove to the world that he is wearing the feathers of a hawk, but on the body of a chicken. He is a man who talks loudly, but accomplishes less than nothing in the end. Violence is his forte, true, but in the way of a petty gangster, who will always back down from a bigger threat.
Let me summarize all that now. America has lost control of itself and power over the world. It’s risk premium has risen massively now, and alongside it, it has the lost the power to force investment in it or cooperation with it. To put yourself beside America now is to be one of history’s greater fools. Meanwhile, we will never quite know when Trump rattles his limp saber again.
Every time that he does, the world will see it more and more as an empty threat. He is a nuisance and a menace, and the only way to contain the costs he imposed is to finish the job of making America a pariah state.
That is a very dangerous place for a world to be. Divesting from its major power. It will be ugly, and at every step, Trump will try to stop it. This alone will bring us to the brink of more wars.
And this too is in Trump’s psychology. After Iran, who will he go after next? Whose oil, minerals, land, will he covet and scream over? Greenland? Canada? South America? This is hardly the end. Trump wants to be dictator of the world. He has not succeeded this time, and only humiliated America, the world, and civilization itself, showing us all what true cowardice, in the form of the deafening silence of leaders, really is.
But he won’t stop here.
Where does all that leave us? With a new level of risk baked into the system. We have a would-be world dictator. Willing to commit crimes against civilization to steal a world’s resources. This is civilizational risk, and what we all just experienced was a civilizational crisis. I’ll talk more about that. You are already paying the costs. The question now is: who will be left to pay the price for the disasters such figures leave behind them?
Love,
Umair (and Snowy!)