Sight Unseen

The Iran war has plunged its chief aggressors into a funk. Or into what my father called cloud cuckoo land. They are furious that Iran is firing back at them. Let’s recap. The United States and Israel, miffed at the slow progress of nuclear talks, decided enough was enough and launched preemptive strikes on a nation that lacks a functional air force and depends almost exclusively on missiles and drones. Good-guy warplanes bombed the capital and assassinated the country’s longstanding Islamic leader. According to the cuckoo land script, a stunned Iran should have immediately capitulated and allowed for the creation of an America-friendly government. Instead, mean old Iran has done the unthinkable. It has defended itself and even dispatched missiles into Arab states with close U.S. ties. But listen up, ladies and gentlemen: This is called war. It’s no video game. Imagine California attacking Texas to then become annoyed when Texas, its governor killed, fights back. Most nations have pride and emotion. Few invite sworn enemies to a cookout. Russia has sought to break Ukraine’s will for four years and has so far failed, losing at least 200,000 men in the process. In all likelihood, this Iranian government will eventually be overwhelmed by superior firepower, and when that time comes, the aggressors will claim “Mission Accomplished.” But until then Iran has the right to fight in any way it can. To think otherwise is to take up residence in the cuckoo’s nest.

As a young and ambitious real estate developer in New York City of the late 1970s, Donald Trump had little love for an American president, Jimmy Carter, who seemed to him timid and indecisive. This annoyance turned to rage and mockery when the new Islamic state took 52 American hostages they would end up holding for more than a year. To the New York businessman, the idea of spending more than 400 days talking to a hostile regime that labeled the U.S. the “great Satan” represented unforgivable incompetence. The United States, he knew, possessed both the military and economic tools needed to bring Iran to its knees. None of them were used. There was a botched rescue attempt in April 1980, when the hostages had already been in captivity for half a year, but little else was done because the Cold War still raged and neither the U.S. nor Israel could take wider liberties, at the risk of Soviet intervention. Carter could not assassinate Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in the way recent attacks have eliminated his successor. Thus the circle is now squared, from old impotence to big strike force. The real estate developer–turned president has evolved into a minor Shiva, a small destroyer of worlds. The impotent Carter legacy has been set aside. As have been the efforts of Barack Obama, who reached a tortuously negotiated 2015 nuclear deal with Iran that this president repeatedly described as “horrible.” Mr. Trump craves the role of hero and liberator — both now in the offing — no historical strings attached.

If any doubt existed before this writing, international law and diplomacy are dead and buried. Ironically, the culprit is the United States and its 51st state, Israel. Israel’s deeds are well-documented. In a disproportionate reaction to a 2023 terrorist incident, Jerusalem spent 2 years reducing the Gaza strip to rubble, with an estimated 70,000 Palestinian casualties. The U.S. then followed suit. Over the course of 6 months, it has abducted a Venezuelan leader, threatened the sovereignty of Greenland, attempted to fold Cuba into the United States by starving it of resources (it may succeed), and now assassinated the Iranian head of state in a move Russia’s Vladimir Putin, now an American “friend,” rightly called “a cynical murder.” Is there any end in sight? No. When big-power politics and military brawn come front and center (as well as a lust for oil), there is usually no turning back. It is this kind of militarism that precipitated the two most recent world wars. Let it be clear, however, that the U.S. has opened a Pandora’s box of the kind that cost it nearly 15 years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq. The murder of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei may mean little to Americans, but he was an important and symbolically weighty Shia leader. Domestic reprisals may not be imminent, but they will come. And they will be, in their way, justified. What is happening now, is what every American president since 1970 has sought to avoid, namely openly stoking the flames of anti-Americanism. The post-9/11 wars were at least, in part, justified by terrorist attacks on the United States. Here, there is no such justification, aside from one president’s impatience over slow going on the diplomatic front. In a nutshell, this cauldron of bombardments and bloodshed, provoked astonishingly by a man who created a self-styled Board of Peace, was not at all necessary. In the long run, woe to those who cast the first stones.

The kidnapping of Nancy Guthrie and the response of her television-personality daughter, a combustible mix of sadness, dread, longing, and resignation, has the effect of reminding me, at least in tone, of my mother’s quiet-but-poignant lamentations regarding the unresolved wartime disappearance of her Polish father, a man she adored. From the little that was known, he had escaped the Warsaw ghetto and managed to secure clandestine passage across the Vistula, away from the Nazis and toward the encamped Russians. But something apparently went wrong, and he was shot dead by a contingent of German troops who had also crossed the river. What haunted her, and she spoke of it in the same manner as Savannah Guthrie, was that her father was never found and therefore never buried. My mother’s dramatic, mystical side imagined his soul as still at large, unmoored and drifting in the ancient tradition of the unburied. I was mostly silent when she spoke of the story, and it was rare that she did. What she sought was what many Americans now call closure, which at times sounds more like a demand than a wish. But my own truth, now that my own mortality is tangible, is that more often than not, there is no clean final chapter, no explanation or even a longed-for resolution. Sometimes all that remains is acceptance, the book’s last chapter read again and again but with final pages always missing.

The U.S. president has finally begun his long-awaited military and political cleansing of Iran, which will march forward with Israeli help. The war is unprovoked, an act of Russian-style hubris rationalized because it is for the “good.” Bad people will be routed and replaced with leaders more to the White House’s, and presumably Iranians’, liking. Again, there is no surprise here. America’s new bully-pulpit arrogance has no limits, nor does it need congressional approval, propelled by a man who toys with the world like rubber ducks in a tub — and I am no radical leftist. One can only hope Iran’s Islamic regime folds as soon as possible so as to let the victory parties begin, dastardly ayatollahs placed high atop the ash heap of history. Call this Operation Righteous Rubble, gentiles and Jews united in a 21st-century version of a Nazi blitzkrieg.

Should the United States succeed in toppling the existing Iranian regime, an increasingly likely outcome as it intensifies both economic pressure and gunboat diplomacy, the man most mentioned as a leader-in-waiting is Reza Pahlavi. Long exiled in Washington, he is the son of the late Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, shah of shahs, king of kings, himself deposed by Islamists in a year-long revolution that began in 1978 and ended early the next year with the return of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini from his own Paris exile. The revolution and the brutal theocracy that followed were not spontaneous events. Since 1967, when the king of kings was himself crowned in a lavish ceremony that at the time was rumored to have cost a billion dollars, Iran’s merchants, rural residents, Islamic clergy, and even its growing middle class had grown restive. Many believed the new and mostly secular Iran had sold out to the west, the U.S. in particular. The shah proclaimed himself a devoted capitalist and anti-communist, a stance that enticed Western support. But as doubt and income disparity grew, he responded in much the same way as the Islamists who would replace him,  encouraging a secret police known as SAVAK to arrest and detain at will. Many were tortured, some killed, and others simply vanished. In September 1978 came a massive earthquake: 25,000 died, and the slow, seemingly uncaring government response incited the whirlwind of dissent and fury that would ultimately force the monarch to flee. When Khomeini made his stern-faced return from Paris, millions thronged the streets to welcome him. Finally, the tyrant shah was gone. It is now 50 years later, and all seems set to swivel again. This is called history, and because of its fickleness, it is constantly teaching paradoxical lessons. Best to sit down, pocket your smartphone, pay attention, and take smart notes, lest it surprise you again.

Since the development and deployment of the first atomic weapons in 1945, the original members of the so-called Nuclear Club — the United States, Soviet Russia, and communist China — have fiercely guarded the inner workings of their weaponry. After all, they were and still are rivals. Leaks remain severely punishable. The popular spy-novel phrase Top Secret emerged from all this forced mystery. The newest twist on Top Secret is not top secret at all, but is as potent as a bomb. All have come to know it, and many to depend on it, as AI, the seemingly harmless acronym for artificial intelligence. Like the web before it, AI is poised to open a vast frontier. But there are risks. Even Sam Altman, one of its godfathers, has pointed out AI’s potential dangers because, unlike any tool before it, it can extrapolate and improve on human knowledge. In the wrong hands, it could be used to develop pathogens, chemical poisons, and possibly nuclear-grade explosives. Make no mistake. The madding crowd includes chaos-minded actors. Imagine, if you will, a real-life Goldfinger or Darth Vader. Checks and filters are therefore vital. To which the White House says “halt!” Never mind an AI conscience, there is big money to be had. If any regulation is necessary, the Board of Peace CEO-president or his successor will take that responsibility. Unfortunately, none of this comes close to monitoring advances that will very likely change the complexion of the planet. If AI is Superman, the world needs some sort of kryptonite, but given the stakes involved, no fail-safe seems near at hand. As my father once said with an unsettling prescience that now seems apt, “If you can see it on the horizon, it’s already too late.”

Twice in the last six decades, the American judiciary, foremost the Supreme Court, has intervened when it believed a president exceeded his authority. Richard Nixon now has company with the twice-impeached incumbent. The specifics of the tariff case matter less than the conservative court’s strong message that presidential decorum had been violated. This leader despises those who stand in his way, and, like a petulant child, he responds vindictively as if caught with his hand in the cookie jar. His tormentors — he said in crass language of a kind never before directed at a Supreme Court — were “fools and lapdogs,” the most disgraceful of anti-American enemies. Democracy and the rule of law should apparently not constrain the “lust for unbridled power,” a no-nonsense phrase assigned to him recently by a Texas judge regarding an ICE deportation order. The president has already imposed a new 15% global tariff to defy the court’s ruling. But in both legal and symbolic terms, and they matter, the president-felon has been warned he has exceeded his authority. It is not America First but Democracy First. Kick and scream as he might, he has finally been rebuked, the fools and lapdogs, some of whom he appointed, ultimately doing the nation a brave favor.

At a recent security conference in Munich, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told assembled leaders that America would help with what he called European “revitalization” if the continent put an end to “civilizational erosion,” which he tied to “managed migration.” Europe, he all but said, should follow the lead of U.S. policy, rooted in detention and deportation. Migrants, like Jews of another era, are now perceived as money-hungry interlopers. In every sense, migrant has been made into this century’s dirtiest word, one mostly assigned to Muslims, Hispanics, and, more generally, those of darker skin, who occupy a space outside compassion’s embrace. No one should feel the slightest guilt in treating them as vermin, never mind that their flight to Europe is largely a trek born of hope. America First cares not at all and instead builds camps while Italy lets rickety boats founder in the Mediterranean. These ongoing events put me in mind of David Lynch’s remarkable 1980 film, “The Elephant Man,” in which a monstrously deformed British youth — he has spent most of his life as a circus freak — finds himself so tormented by gawkers that at a certain point he cries aloud, “I am a human being!” His name was Joseph Merrick, and he suffered through an entirely alienated existence in Victorian England, rescued only by a London surgeon able and willing to see beyond his first-person civilizational decline. Today’s migrants have few such benefactors. On the contrary, ciphers in the stream, they face a rising tide of wrath from people, police, and politicians who, unable to release their rage into a cathartic world war, turn to imagined elephant men.

Since the end of World War II, a fair number of Americans have lined up to take their place in the private pews of a new faith governed by the Church of the Conspiracy Theory. Its high priests — and this president is among them — dispute all science while suggesting “leftist” media exists to disseminate falsehoods. This belief system has expanded a thousandfold since the dawn of the online world and social media. When the president struck down what he called a “green scam,” he was doing no more than preaching to his choir. That ardent choir tends to believe that a plot was behind the murder of JFK, that the moon landing was faked and the Earth is flat, that COVID was manufactured, and that all vaccines and medical breakthroughs are mind-control schemes and a public menace. Racism is a fiction to disrupt White America, and the first Black president, no evidence needed, is not who he says he is. Perhaps even the surgeon general may have lied about the risks of smoking to snuff out the tobacco industry, just as the Black president (and Joe Biden after him) may have lied about climate change to undermine the lagging American auto industry. Again, facts are irrelevant because the passion of the true conspiracy theorist operates on a truer and higher plane. What John Kerry has called “Orwellian governance” is gospel truth to this latest flock. All of which makes this America a theocracy of a sort, a western kind of techno-Taliban minus the beards. So it is that years of enlightened conclusions have become contaminated by conspiratorial thinking — an industry in its own right — in much the same way Joe McCarthy (and Richard Nixon) imagined a contaminated America filled with communists. It’s an old dog with a new collar, and it snarls.

Europe and its imperfect union now know what it feels like to be Humpty Dumpty. For decades it sat benignly on a wall, safe in the assumption that America had its back. Now, in the space of little more than a year it has been pushed from its perch and feels both fractured and stunned. Stunned because the delinquent doing the dirty deed is the nation that was central to gluing it back together after World War II. French President Emmanuel Macron has gone so far as to refer to an “openly hostile U.S. administration” while encouraging Europe to reform itself into a nation-state, a Europe newly armored as an America, a Russia, a China — the new actors in an old, great Power-Passion play. With the United Nations all but dead and the American president interested only in divide-and-conquer ties with individual states, what other choice does it have? Even before the us invaded Iraq in 2003, there were tensions between France and the U.S. Many were the disagreements over the years, but they were always patched up diplomatically. Both America and Europe realized their Cold War–era bonds were too valuable to jeopardize. Were not Americans the ancestral sons and daughters of Europeans? But for the sitting president, who revels in neo-isolationism, it’s time to toss out the baby with the bathwater. His America First has no qualms about betrayal and counts support among the generation born after 1990, few of whom care much about Europe unless as a tourist destination. The damage done is now severe enough to think Humpty Dumpty cannot and will not ever again be mended. Maybe all this will eventually lead to a new and dynamically united Europe, as Macron has also suggested. But no messy divorce is easily forgotten and if the American troops who landed on Normandy Beach were still alive to witness this wrecking-crew administration, they would first wince, then weep.

By blocking its oil imports in the form of global tariff threats, the United States is effectively laying siege to Cuba, hoping energy shortfalls will cause the Communist regime to collapse. Few regional or global actors seem to care. Even fewer have much affection for the Cuban leadership just as they have no love for Iran’s. But the U.S. strategy remains a squalid bit of blackmail. The oil being blocked from Cuba is oil in essence stolen from Venezuela in America’s regime-changing putsch in which 32 Cuban soldiers died. No matter, say some, since the U.S. did Caracas a favor by ousting a dictator — and swinging open the doors to Big Oil. Cuba is headed for a similar endgame that will be labeled liberation. Cuba’s Miami exile community will heap adoring words on the great Anerican übermensch. If only this liberation weren’t also self-serving. Cuba has no oil, but it does have a gorgeous coastline primed and ready for massive real estate development, something a builder of tall towers and casinos knows a fair amount about. If the Gaza resort transformation is out of reach, the Havana scheme is not. It’s shameless but also shamelessly lucrative. As Canadian and Russian tourists are evacuated from the island because of jet fuel shortages, the other side is probably imagining a Major League Baseball franchise (the Havana Trumps?), ready to go by 2032, when the president will enter his fourth term, the minor obstacle of the Constitution overcome.