This time the display of war in primetime news is not so apparent. Drones and missiles bombarded by the US with utmost precision killing civilians and military as the spectacle of global power is not being televised and celebrated as was the case during the Iraq war. In fact, the war of aggression imposed by the US and plotted by Israel on Iran seems to be evolving as a war of attrition. The US style of aggression in the name of restoring democracy or saving people from Islamic authoritarianism didn’t gain any traction this time. There is hardly any legitimacy of this war either gathered from the UN or from US citizens and lately nor from NATO allies. Escalation of war would have asymmetric impacts on the two sides, where one has the moral ground of protecting sovereignty backed by a huge nationalist mobilisation ready to fight to the last and the other one is simply unable to generate enough rationale for imposing the war and struggling to convince its own citizens.

Ironically, the self-proclaimed global defender of democracy and governance, the US, surprisingly finds the ‘crisis of democracy’ only in oil-rich countries! It is true for Venezuela and also for Iran. While the negotiations on nuclear weapons were ongoing, the aggression on Iran might have been ignited by Israel but US president Trump could also find enough reasons to jointly attack Iran. For Israel, apart from the decades long historical conflict with Iran, the issue was to emerge as the only power within West Asia as the declared agent of the US and control the oil producing neighbouring countries. For the US, it was also about controlling oil, defending the dollar and cutting off resources for China. China heavily depends on Russia, Iran and Venezuela for oil and therefore attacking Venezuela and Iran was part of the larger goal of containing China through restricting supply of energy resources. The US wanted a regime change in Iran through the decapitation strike murdering the supreme leader Syed Ali Khamenei along with some other officials hoping to appropriate the Iranian state. However, it didn’t happen the way it was envisaged.

Oil and Dollar

There is no doubt that the US along with Israel has much larger military power than Iran and the military budget of Iran is far less than that of the US. But Iran could resist the imperialist-Zionist axis by strategising its attacks by impinging higher economic costs on the US. Iran has targeted and destroyed many US military bases and CIA offices in West Asia. US vassal states such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrin and UAE are oil rich countries, heavily dependent on exports of oil and rely on imports of food and other goods and services largely from Asia and from other parts of the world. Iran has declared that it would not allow ships of pro-US countries to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, which is the most important channel for oil transit. Recently Iran announced that they will allow Chinese ships to pass through the strait and any country buying oil in Renminbi or Chinese Yuan will be allowed to pass through Hormuz. This is one of the biggest challenges in recent history to the dollar being sustained as the global reserve currency. It is important to note that the US has a lot of crude oil but still has to depend on heavy oil from Canada and likewise all oil producing countries depend on imports to procure different variations of crude oil for processing. Hence, both oil producing and non-producing countries depend on oil imports. To the US, the importance of oil is not because of its use as fuel but a use that has a prime role in the circulation of global money. If oil is bought and sold in dollars across the world, the dollar remains stable as the global reserve currency, which is the crucial factor for US dominance in the global economy. The petro dollar agreement of 1973 ensured that US dollars would be the currency in which these countries will trade oil and therefore dollar’s demand as the global money will be secured. On the other hand, the dollar earned by oil producing countries would be invested in the US in dollar denominated financial assets and treasury bonds generating financial profits for US speculators and help in mitigating US trade deficits. This is under threat because already some of the oil producing countries have decided that their trade will not be restricted to dollars alone. Also, Russia, Venezuela and Iran started trading in other currencies, which increases the threat to dollar dominance. This perhaps signals the decline of the US, which will be increasingly losing control on West Asia, and the recent war was a futile attempt to get hold of oil reserves by toppling governments taking recourse to primordial cruelty in the name of democracy and governance.

Declining Empire

The war is going to be a protracted one with devastating effects on the global economy. Oil and fertiliser prices are on the rise, which in turn is going to adversely impact food prices across the world. Food price inflation asymmetrically affects the poor more as the share of food expenditure in the consumption basket of the poor is proportionately higher than for the rich. Secondly, economies that are heavily dependent on oil exports and emerged as safe havens for financial operations depending on US military support are going to lose their comparative advantage whatever be the outcome of the war. Third, with the US increasingly losing its legitimacy as a global power and being isolated from its allies, particularly in Europe, it is already in a mood to reduce expenses for protecting other countries militarily. This has triggered a massive increase in defence budgets in many economies, which would result in a decline in public and social expenditure, once again hurting the poor. Supply chain disruptions and spike in oil and energy prices is likely to destabilise household expenditure, trade and global growth. The global world order is at a crossroads, as the empire is on the decline. The current interregnum is potent with massive shift of global power from the West to the East.

Historically, hegemonic powers in the world are defined by their dominance over new technology. The US seems to be losing its dominance in the evolving technological transformation. More importantly, the rot of liberal democracy has reached a new low when its own rules are deliberately debunked by its protagonists. The epitome of capitalism, the US, for survival tends to rely not only on imperialist dominance through institutional mediations and globally accepted rules but on direct colonisation and extraction of natural resources. It faces its severe crisis of legitimacy but responds to it through futile vengeance paraphrased as ‘nationalism’. This nationalism emerges from a sense of defeat and decline for the US, which is no longer able to represent the best achievements of human civilisation and progress but gasps with war, blood and death. The US hardly succeeded in changing regimes by instituting puppet governments in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya or Venezuela. It will not also succeed in Iran. The war is producing a devastating effect in the conflict zone with ripples of distress across the world economy. The biggest capitalist country in the world has lost its legitimacy and has nothing to offer except ruins and debris.

It is unfortunate that India, being one of the largest democracies of the world endowed also with nuclear power, is increasingly ceding its autonomy and becoming a follower of the US. India could not condemn the horrendous crime committed by the US-Israel axis through precision strikes on school children either in Gaza or killing of 165 school children in Minab in Iran. India didn’t condemn the attack on the Iranian unarmed naval ship IRIS Dena returning after a naval exercise at the invitation of India. The ill-timed visit to Israel and praising Netanyahu who has been declared a war criminal by the International Criminal Court, grossly diminishes India’s long-standing position on the question of peace and non-alignment.

The global order is at a crossroads, and this is the time working people should come together to fight against imperialist-Zionist aggression and its domestic followers who for their own interest will be inflicting the cost of an illegal war on the working people.