by ALEXANDER ZEVIN
The trump administration sometimes seems intent—so stark is the difference between its first and second incarnations—on inverting the apothegm from the opening of the Eighteenth Brumaire to the effect that ‘all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice . . . the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.’footnote1 Then it was the nephew, Louis Napoleon, reprising the role of his famous uncle. Today, Trump has reprised his own role, in a second act bursting with cruelty and carnage; here, the repetition-alteration is more rapid and self-reflexive, as befits the actor and the age. Others have made productive use of neo-Bonapartism to analyse the socio-political coalition on which Trumpism was initially built. But we now seem to be living through the re-run of a later moment in the career of the second Napoleon—not the plebiscitary roll of the dice with which the story began, but the bad bet of the gambler whose luck has run out in a risky foreign adventure.footnote2 Trump is not facing a Sedan. But eight weeks into the us–Israeli war on Iran, things are not going as planned.
1
If Trump’s second term has been a sharp contrast to his first, the starkest differences have lain in foreign policy. Here America First had appeared to promise a turn inward—away from forever wars and foreign occupations, and even away from allies, seen as ripping the us off in Europe and East Asia. Much of the sense of a popular insurgency attaching to Trump’s 2016 campaign came in his barbed exchanges with Jeb Bush and other mainstream Republicans, whom he attacked mercilessly over their role in the Iraq War. Trump had some basis for his claim to have started no new wars in his first term in office. But this is far from the case in his second. He had already ordered attacks across three continents—the Caribbean, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Arabian Peninsula—before launching his full-blown assault on the Islamic Republic of Iran.
For all that is novel about Trump, it would be a mistake to ignore the American foreign-policy continuities that underlie his actions; indeed, were it not for the longstanding desiderata of various internal and external pressure groups, it would be hard to explain how a man whose promise to wage no more ‘stupid wars’ was so important to his outsider appeal ended up fighting the war of all neoconservative wars against Iran. To understand that we need to look at the changing three-way relationship between Iran, the us and Israel, as well as enduring imperial structures and projects. Trump may have miscalculated in striking Tehran, but his Administration can also claim with considerable justice to be pursuing aims that Western governments have long backed.
2
The Islamic Republic has been in Washington’s sights since 1979, when the pro-American Shah was overthrown by the Iranian Revolution. In some respects, the war is the logical conclusion of the way the us has demonized Iran ever since.footnote3 Israel initially maintained better relations with the Khomeini-ites, counting the ‘outer ring’ states represented by Iran and Turkey as potential allies against the ‘inner ring’ of militant Arab-nationalist republics—and funnelling arms to the Iranian military in the 1980s to help them fight the ‘near enemy’, Iraq. It was only after Saddam Hussein’s army was crushed in the 1991 Gulf War that Israel switched its attention to the now strengthened and stabilized Islamic Republic, urging Washington to block Tehran’s acquisition of a nuclear deterrent—in other words, to help preserve Israel’s nuclear monopoly in the region.
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