It’s been a bad week in the West’s existential battle against the green-red alliance of imperial Islam and the Left’s demagogic, cynical, and addled American followers.
President Donald Trump is reportedly weighing a quick end to the Iran war, which would leave Tehran’s clerisy and the Revolutionary Guards with their chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz. The reason Trump is said to be considering this appallingly premature step is that he wants to stick to a war no longer than six weeks.
The oil market is global, and it is fantasy to think the United States is insulated from price surges just because it is a net exporter of energy. A quarter of the world’s oil transits through the strait each day, and the latest conflict has pushed the price above $100 a barrel. It threatens serious disruption of the world economy.
It’s true that the price of a barrel topped $170 a barrel in inflation-adjusted dollars during the Obama presidency, but that will hardly ameliorate consumer anger now that the average price of a gallon of gasoline is just above $4. Consumers, who are voters, are feeling the squeeze with the midterm elections six months away.
But the dangers and fecklessness involved in prematurely abandoning the fight against the Islamic Republic are not primarily a matter of economic health or electoral calculation. It is more to do with the much bigger matter of the tide of battle in the West’s civilizational conflict, of which Trump’s Iran “excursion” is only a part.
Perhaps by musing about an early cessation of hostilities, the president is merely again misleading America’s enemies by suggesting a softening and weakness while planning to take them by surprise with a massive strike after they’ve been lulled into a false sense of security. One can only hope that this is so, for it would be a debacle to pretend that ending the war much as it stands would be anything other than a failure.
It is not encouraging that the president is letting people around him know he might smash Iran’s missile stocks and military industrial capacity for only a short while longer, then declare victory, then press the recalcitrant mullahs to free the waterway with heavy diplomacy, and if that fails — get this! — ask European and Gulf nations to take the lead in reopening the strait themselves.
On his Truth Social network Tuesday, Trump taunted Britain — it has richly deserved contempt — to “build up some delayed courage” and “get your own oil.” He suggested that “the hard part is done,” to which the obvious question is, if opening the Strait of Hormuz is the easy part, why hasn’t the U.S. been able to do it already?
Seeing such a series of events unfold would be like watching a willful child trashing a room and leaving its parents with the cost and unpleasant effort of putting the place back together again. European leaders have called this war not their battle, even though they’re desperately seeking new energy sources, and Tehran’s terrorist regime has proved itself capable of hitting most of Europe with ballistic missiles. After such a display of fecklessness by Europe, it would be extraordinary for Trump to make its leaders look like the adults in the room.
Even as things don’t look great on the kinetic battlefield, Islamist forces have been lent further encouragement recently by the American Left, whose forces were out in what are claimed to have been millions over the weekend for “No Kings” rallies. These were anti-war protests as much as anything else. A sign, typical for its vulgarity and the evident glee of its possessor, blared, “No Turd World War,” with an associated brown heap close by. It perfectly captured both contemptible lowness and formulaic rhetoric of Iran’s supportive harridans in the West.
Other signs depicted the democratically elected Trump as a tyrannical monarch, even though it is, of course, Iran’s leaders who are murderously denying the will of their people they govern. Marching through the streets of New York City — where else? — protesters waved red and gold hammer and sickle flags and chanted, “There is only one solution, communist revolution!”
HUGO GURDON: TRUMP’S DANGEROUS IRAN OFF-RAMP
This last was utterly telling. The chant took the formula and rhythm of the jihadist cry, “There is only one solution, intifada revolution,” and overlayed it with Marxist words. Thus, it perfectly expressed the opportunistic alliance that is waging a civilization battle with the West, of which the Iran conflict is only one part. In its fatuous words, it expressed the bond between modern Marxists, determined as they have been for more than a century to bring down their own civilization, and Islamists who share none of their ideals or aims other than murderous determination to undermine and eventually destroy Western society.
Unless we are seeing a Trumpian feint to be followed by renewed intensity in battle against the Islamic Republic, what we’ve witnessed in the last few days is a president raging, lashing out, and losing conviction while a rampant Left does all in its power to demoralize America, its sense of purpose, and its confidence in its future.
