What Makes the Iran Crisis Different

Insights from a night of talking peace and catastrophe.

Photo by Maxim Hopman on Unsplash

Last night, I spoke at a peace-activist event in Wellington. Terrific, diverse crowd, and much larger than I expected. It came at the end of a long, exhausting day for me, so I wasn’t at my best, but it still ended up being a really rich discussion.

A few summary observations.

Protests should be promises

I had to teach yesterday for three hours before the evening talk, and it just so happens that I was discussing with my students a piece by Olufemi Taiwo arguing that protests should be promises:

for protests to succeed, they must be backed by movements with the ability to promise to withhold—labor, debt payments, rent payments, or consumer support—and to follow through if demands aren’t met. Protests by such movements consequently morph into real, tangible promises: demonstrations of an ability to escalate, backed by strategic leverage.

I brought this up during the event, and I think it landed well because others referenced it repeatedly throughout the night. It’s simply a useful way to think about protest organizing. It also means that labor unions and the antiwar movement need to be arms akimbo.

In many countries, party politics strip people of their power, and that might be the case in New Zealand too. For protests to be promises, the power relation between civil society and parties needs to be inverted. And to make that happen, organized labor and organized peace activists must exercise their power not only by putting demands to the state, but also putting demands to the electoral parties that claim to represent their interests. That won’t happen if they’re not unified.

We’ve got a standpoint-epistemology problem

Several Iranian dissidents and ethnically Persian Kiwis were present. They were against both the war and the theocratic regime. Their politics are democracy-and-equality first. That puts me on their side. And yet they acknowledged deep polarization within the Iranian diaspora globally, and I was reminded of that as I saw news of Iranians in the US holding pro-Israel protests cheering on the war…gross and blinkered and insane.

I only bring this up because “Listen to Iranians!” is a call that is far too easily co-opted by warmongers and owners of capital. Which Iranians???

The opportunity within a Global Financial Crisis

Of all the wars America’s been fighting and funding in recent years, the Iran War is unique in its catastrophic potential for two reasons.

One is that Iran has a military strategy that counters the US way of war; the Trump administration has shown no sign of understanding that. The other thing that makes Iran unique is that its military has proven the ability to exercise control of the Strait of Hormuz, which is among the most important geographic choke points in the world.

It’s these two things—a winning military strategy and strategic chokepoint control—that have thrown us into an energy crisis that we’re only just beginning to feel but is guaranteed to be much worse than the ’73 OPEC crisis. Because the Iran war is directly causing a global financial and food crisis, it is taking money from every worker in the world.

Most American wars tend to concentrate pain in specific geographies, but this one creates global pain. Nobody escapes it. And the fact that we’re all paying for the Iran war creates an objective solidarity of position. All that remains is a solidarity of consciousness and strategy.

China never came up

I didn’t think to bring up the China angle on the Iran war in any of the discussions (I was very tired), and nobody else raised it either. I’ll have more to say about this when I have a bit of free time (lol), but China does not appear to want hegemony.

China could be providing Iran with a mirror-image of America’s Israel policy (qualitative military edge, QME). It could be positioning itself as the guarantor of regional stability, a broker of peace. It could unfurl a grand proposal for Yuan supremacy in the Middle East, building on the existing arrangement that Iran has established whereby ships pass through the Strait only if they negotiate safe passage with Iran directly and denominate their transaction in Chinese currency.

If China did these things, it would be the hegemon of the Middle East. It’s not. What appears to be emerging instead is, as I’ve argued many times, a kind of multipolarity or non polarity. No single reserve currency. Regions will exhibit their own multipolarity. Distant power projection can cause chaos to financial markets but not much else. And Iran will exercise administrative control over the Strait of Hormuz while the US functionally abandons policing global shipping lanes. Even by the narrowest definitions of hegemony that is a post-hegemonic world. Not a new Chinese hegemony; a post-hegemonic world.

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