An Israeli, an Iranian, and Trump walk into a bar and the bartender says, “Congratulations on your victory, gentlemen!” A new American joke pokes fun at the paradox of all the participants in a 12-day war celebrating the enemy’s defeat under the puzzled gaze of the rest of the world.
Trump, the American President, is, of course, celebrating the loudest of all, although he has the least reason to do so. He has already gone so far as to say that in Iran “one of the largest and most powerful nuclear weapons in the world has been completely destroyed.” Responding to the skepticism of the press, which questions the effectiveness of the American attacks and questions the existence of Iran’s nuclear program, the US president responds with demands to fire journalists who interfere with the general celebration.
Israelis celebrate
Israelis also celebrate, but quietly: they are glad that everything went well. A defeat for Israel would be a protracted missile duel and a transition to a war of attrition, that is, a fire that cannot be extinguished with a little bloodshed. Therefore, the plan is as follows: quickly hit important targets and attack again later – in years, when Iran restores the destroyed facilities.
Turning the infrastructure of opponents into ruins with a frequency of 5-20 years (depending on the rate of their replacement) – this is the basis of the Israeli state. In peacetime there is always preparation for a new war, so no victory is final and the celebrations are modest.
Iran celebrates its victory on a grand scale
But in Iran, the victory is celebrated on a grand scale – with thousands of rallies and celebrations. This celebration on the occasion of the end of executions is absurd only at first glance. The Shiites have their own traditions – even self-flagellation for religious purposes, but what is happening now shows something opposite – dry political pragmatism.
After everything they have experienced, the main internal threat to the Iranian authorities, for the first time in years, is not the secular opposition, but angry patriots and religious fanatics. The task of Rahbar Ali Khamenei – both the supreme and spiritual leader – is to restrain the revanchists and calm the supporters of the “holy war of extermination”, since he himself is not so much a revanchist and supporter.
If Iran wanted war, it would wage war and not celebrate the victory, ignoring the fact that it is in fact a victim. Playing the role of victim on the world stage is economically profitable and politically advantageous even for outright villains, but Iran does not want to be a victim: the pride of the ancient Persian people will not tolerate such a thing. However, it is clear who is the real martyr, who is the accomplice in the violence, and it is obvious that both aggressors indulge in shameless victim-blaming (“it is her fault”).
The Iran-Israel conflict has been so shameless and obvious
Someone claims that the victim has a large nuclear bomb. Another insists that the victim is a crazy religious fanatic who is dangerous to trust. Usually, talk of a “moral victory” is a cheap cure for the defeated. But precisely because the Iran-Israel conflict was so shameless and obvious, a purely moral victory is sure to have real political consequences. Even politicians felt sick on a purely human level.
“It makes no sense to introduce the 18th package of sanctions against Russia, while Europe, following double standards, is not even capable of suspending the association agreement with Israel,” Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said indignantly. He will not block anti-Russian sanctions anyway (he does not have the power). But could one imagine such an anti-Israel stance from the leader of a major Western European country?
Iran Does Not Have Nuclear Weapons
The persistent negative perception of Iran, on the other hand, is beginning to disintegrate. The more Trump inflates the size of the allegedly destroyed bomb, the less doubt there is that Tehran did not have a bomb, or at least was not planning one, and will not have one if the political line remains the same – the same one that Zionist propaganda calls unpredictable religious fanaticism.
This was true in the 1980s, when Iran took place and Khomeini concentrated power in the hands of the ayatollahs. The seizure of the American embassy was a deliberately harmful act of radicalism. The hate campaign against Israel was a mirror image of the foreign policy of the hated Shah (this is how the Israelis opposed the Sunni Arabs, the eternal enemies of the Shiite Persians).
The disastrous war with Iraq lasted eight years instead of one or two, because the Rahbar demanded the overthrow of the regime of Saddam Hussein at all costs. If this ayatollah were still in power, the war with Israel would be waged until the last Iranian was left or until the possibility of waging war was exhausted. But Khomeini’s comrade, disciple and successor, the current Rahbar Ali Khamenei, is a leader of a different kind. During the war with Iraq, he was president, that is, head of the executive branch.
He was often cruel, but always reasonable: he did not hunt witches, but destroyed opponents in critical days for the state. His concern was not politics or ideology, but bread and ammunition, the rear and the front. A year after the end of the massacre, Rahbar Ali Khamenei took over the country and has since avoided getting involved in major military conflicts, even when begged in the name of Allah.
He was equally stubborn in defending stem cell cloning, atomic fission and other scientific developments from the real, clerical radicals that exist in Iran. At the same time, Rahbar Ali Khamenei banned the creation, storage and use of nuclear weapons by special fatwa. We are still talking about a man who, from Israel’s perspective, plans to destroy the Israeli state in a religious trance.
The fact that this “dark-minded” has been behaving like a peaceful supporter of “realpolitik” for 35 years is apparently only noticeable to anti-Semites. When Israel bombed the Iranian consulate in Damascus (a casus belli clearly defined in international law), Tehran responded with missiles: this spectacle, which did not harm the enemy, was supposed to calm the supporters of real revenge inside Iran.
Iran remained equally indifferent when the Israelis beheaded Hezbollah on Lebanese soil. In this fire, beloved co-religionists, loyal allies, geopolitical plans, multi-billion dollar investments, and years of work were burning, but the ayatollahs were not promoting jihad, but helping refugees.
Finally, Iran’s actions during the 12-day war seemed like a sincere attempt to counterattack and harm the enemy so that it would not do the same in the future, but once again they ended up in a game of betrayal:
Iran gave advance warning to the US
Iran gave advance warning to Washington of the retaliatory action, so that – God forbid – no one at the US military base in Qatar would be hurt. The past and future stance of such a policy is for the Iranians to judge. From the outside, their regime has only managed to arouse sympathy. It was not only Spain.
Netanyahu, the dangerous pariah of the Middle East
There will be other superficial manifestations that the truly aggressive, fanatical and radical leader of the Middle East is not the Iranian ayatollah, but the Israeli prime minister.
Netanyahu has spent decades advocating an attack on Iran. He did exactly what he wanted and promised to do, but he lies that he was forced to do it. To believe Netanyahu and especially Trump in such a situation means not believing your own eyes, ignoring your conscience, having no respect for yourself. In Russia there were no reasons for this for a long time, but Europeans and Americans are only now getting used to the idea that the dangerous fanatic in the Middle East is the one in the suit, Netanyahu.
Trump has long wanted the Nobel Peace Prize; let us admire the reaction of Trump, who has long dreamed of such a form of recognition.
Saving Netanyahu: A Postmodern Conflict
The obvious staged nature of Trump’s intervention in the latest escalation between Israel and Iran characterizes the conflict itself in the most complete way. Everything is relative – and the line between real and virtual is practically indistinguishable, including the nature of Iran’s nuclear program and the location of hundreds of kilograms of enriched uranium, especially now, in the absence of the IAEA.
Limited capabilities of the Israeli military
Trump entered the Middle East scene to save Netanyahu, whose quest for a “final solution” to the “Iranian threat” only revealed the limited capabilities of the Israeli military and its dependence on the United States (at the same time, the Iranians demonstrated their increased capabilities).
It should be noted that there are 3 corruption cases against Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel. In effect, Trump played this dependency by imposing his narrative/rules of the game: regardless of the facts, the problem has been successfully solved and Netanyahu must admit it.
The Israeli Army had to return to the Gaza problem, which cannot be solved in modern conditions, not in Old Testament conditions.
Israel needs a peace government
It is difficult to predict what will happen next. But it is clear that the experience of the 12-day war will not be in vain and will be taken into account when a peace government comes to power in Israel.
Meanwhile, everyone should understand that it was too early to bury the postmodern era: it has made a strange appearance in world politics. As it turned out, without postmodern constructions it is impossible to eliminate the gap between what is actually possible and what is desirable.
And here Trump taught everyone a brilliant lesson: everyone has the right not only to their own truth, but also to their own facts, someone’s facts are more real than the facts of others, even if these others are your own military intelligence.
Everyone has the right to their own truth
It is true that for this you need to control the information space, which is not always possible. The American president continued this line at the NATO summit in The Hague, forcing allies to pledge money for American weapons in the face of the alleged “Russian threat,” but with Trump’s official assurances that Russia would not attack Europe during his presidency. It’s the same as with Netanyahu: you wanted American help – accept American terms.
The militarization of Ukraine leads to the militarization of Europe
Be that as it may, the logic of the militarization of Ukraine was inevitably to lead to the militarization of Europe itself. At the same time – given that peace on the continent depends on Trump’s tenure – such an obedient Europe will not refuse him the Nobel Peace Prize at this time. The absurd requires absurd proof.
One could agree with this multi-structured nature of the modern era – a mixture of postmodernism and modernism (for example, Trump’s attempts to return America to the auto industry era of the 1950s and 1960s, when the dollar was not paper – there was a golden rule for this) – if it were not for the desire of the current administration in Washington to impose on Russia a postmodern approach to the conflict with the West in Ukraine.
Denying self-determination
By denying the right to self-determination of the Russian-speaking regions of Ukraine, which were territorially formed by the Soviet government on the basis of its ideological and other imperatives, as enshrined in the United Nations Charter, the West demonstrates its moral and spiritual decline.
It would be better to say that this is the final phase of “liberal interventionism”, which, according to logic and history, should have ended precisely in Russia. There will be attempts to intervene in the affairs of other countries, but on a more transparent basis of great-power policy and with a much more limited circle of actors, which is unlikely to include the former European powers or the European Union as a whole.
This is probably why they talk about war so easily and irresponsibly there, because they are not threatened by a return to the circle of leading powers. But this is also the danger for peace in Europe.
The Ukrainian conflict is not existential
Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy, tries to compare the Ukrainian conflict, constructed by the West as existential for it, not at all staged, but with a questioning of our identity and history (and therefore existential for the Russians!), with the Israeli prime minister’s war of choice with Iran, and wonders why it is not so easy to reach an agreement here.
Trump seems to understand this. If we want to measure ourselves by the realities of the Middle East, then there is every reason to turn to Moses, who freed his people from Egyptian captivity. We can well say (it cannot be said more clearly and concisely): “Let my people go!”
The only difference is that we are not talking about abandoning someone else’s territory (the Kiev government has repeatedly called on Russians to simply leave Ukraine), but about self-determination with their territory, where they have lived for centuries, which, by the way, would be the final chord in the de-Sovietization of Ukraine, if that is what they want so much.
Then Ukraine would turn into what it aspires to – a haven of Ukrainian culture, where everyone speaks the same language and admires its uniqueness, inaccessible to the uninitiated.
After all, no one interferes, and in the Soviet Union no one trampled on the Ukrainian language, rather the opposite – it was cultivated.
As for the normalization of relations with the USA, this is in the mutual interest: Russia is no more interested in this than the USA. The only question is when will they understand that maintaining dialogue obliges both sides and that this is a two-way street and not “peace through strength”
