Did the ayatollahs get one over on Trump?

Channelling Genghis Khan, Donald Trump threatened to make a “whole civilisation die tonight” unless he got his way, only to relent at the last minute after persuading himself that Iran should be allowed to survive because the ayatollahs’ regime was ready to cave in to his demands. Was it? According to the surviving leaders of the battered but unbowed theocracy, they were winning the war against the Great Satan and that was why Trump backed off. To rub it in, they said they would maintain their chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz unless he reined in the “Little Satan,” Israel, whose forces continued battering Hezbollah in the Lebanon.

As many have pointed out, Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu have different priorities. After learning that the Middle East imbroglio is a bit more complicated than the Venezuelan one he thinks he sorted out by capturing Nicolás Maduro and leaving his sidekick Delcy Rodríguez to run the show, the US president realised it was not in his interest to get bogged down in a lengthy campaign abroad because doing so would upset folk back home. In contrast, the Israeli prime minister knows that the Islamic Republic’s current rulers really are determined to destroy his country and its inhabitants, an outcome which would greatly please the many “progressives” in the West who are rooting for the holy warriors. Netanyahu does not want “a deal” with the ayatollahs; he wants to see them gone for good.

So too do most Iranians, Though those who say that at least 80 percent are against the clerical dictatorship may be exaggerating, the repeated uprisings, which have been put down with barbarous force – nobody knows how many tens of thousands were butchered just a couple of months ago – suggest that if free elections were held, the regime’s candidates would not get many votes.

For a brief moment Trump – whose attention span is limited – seemed to understand this, but instead of attributing his decision to join Israel in an attempt to bomb into oblivion the apocalyptic cult that has had Iran in its grip for almost half a century to his desire to liberate the country’s on the whole pro-Western and pro-Israeli inhabitants from a sinister dictatorship, he made little effort to explain what his war aims were to inward-looking North Americans. As was to be expected, the many who loathe him made the most of the confusion he engendered, with some making it clear that they hoped Iran’s terrorist-sponsoring regime would emerge strengthened from the ordeal it was going through.

This could happen, but it probably won’t. Even though Trump is desperately looking for an excuse to call it quits, he could change his mind yet again when it dawns on him that, by claiming he is grovelling at their feet and begging for mercy, the remnants of the Iranian regime are making him look like a loser. Trump, who sees himself as an intellectual and political colossus capable of bulldozing anything that stands in his path, will certainly not take kindly to being treated with disdain by a bunch of clerics and their thuggish enforcers who, by behaving in this way, are virtually asking him to renew the war.

Few people outside the Middle East seem to appreciate just how dangerous the Iranian theocrats are. They have already shown themselves to be more than willing to throw the world economy into a tailspin by abruptly depriving it of a considerable proportion of the oil, gas and related products that it needs and attacking inoffensive Arab neighbours who only want to make money.

They are also deadly serious about their determination to destroy the Jewish State before attempting to do the same to the infidel lands in Europe and those on the other side of the Atlantic. This is why they have devoted so much of their resources to a nuclear programme, the building of a large arsenal of missiles, including some that could reach European cities, drones and well-equipped armies of proxies plus a thriving network of terrorist cells. As recent events have reminded us, defeating them will not be at all easy, but the alternative, leaving them alone so they can go about their business, is not an attractive option.

The Iranian zealots take it for granted that their capacity to endure pain is far greater than that of their enemies, and this is why in the long run they will come out on top. As Islamist fanatics like to say; you love life, but we love death. In the United States and Europe, the fate of a single soldier or airman can be a matter of public concern for days on end, with politicians and the news media doing their best to show they fully share the feelings of his or her relatives. In non-Western countries, whose rulers are accustomed to treating the deaths of tens of thousands of combatants as a merely statistical matter, attitudes tend to be very different. It is therefore understandable that Vladimir Putin, who is happy to shovel huge numbers of Russian soldiers into the Ukrainian “meat-grinder” in exchange for a few square metres of territory – it is reported that more than a million have been “lost” since that war began – feels contempt for the armed forces NATO can still put in the field.

It is unfortunate that, at a time when the international order is undergoing change without anyone having a clear idea about how it will be even a handful of years from now, the West is led by a man who is more interested in his own personal reputation than in anything else.

Trump has already riled almost all his country’s allies, whose leaders treat him as a dangerous lunatic and think they have to keep massaging his ego because otherwise he could fly off the handle. He has also contrived to give most people in the Middle East good reasons to despise him. They now include the millions of Iranians who took him seriously when he told them help was on its way and urged them to put their lives on the line by rising up against the regime, which predictably reacted by slaughtering protesters in the streets or, if wounded, in their hospital beds.  In addition to all this, by making the world participate in his own personal psychodrama, Trump has helped persuade politicians and others that there is nothing much to fear from a theocratic regime whose leaders dream aloud of Armageddon which, they piously hope, will decide the fate of the world.