Dem
53
Ties
3
GOP
44
If you haven't studied World War II fairly closely, you may not be aware of exactly how much most Americans loathed the Japanese back then. There was Pearl Harbor, of course, followed by a brutal 4-year war during which the Japanese often fought dirty and committed many war crimes.
The anti-Japanese sentiment gave rise to some ugly behavior from Americans. Japanese internment probably comes to mind first, for most readers. There was also viciously racist anti-Japanese propaganda, including cartoons from the likes of Disney and Warner Bros. American tank battalions in the Pacific theater would sometimes decorate their tanks with the skulls of dead Japanese soldiers. This was against the rules, but few officers, if any, had any interest in actually enforcing those rules. On some level, this sentiment made possible the deployment of nuclear weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Harry S. Truman made the decision he thought was correct, and necessary, but if the target had been white people (even if they were Nazis), that might have given him pause.
Truman's response, after unleashing devastation that wiped out a quarter of a million Japanese civilians in two fell swoops, is instructive. After the first nuclear strike (Hiroshima), Truman delivered a speech in which he said, in so many words, that Americans might hear about the terrible damage done by the bombs, but that everyone should remember this was necessary to end the war and that the Japanese started it at Pearl Harbor. After the second nuclear strike (Nagasaki), the U.S. government worked hard, with significant success, to keep photos or video footage of the bomb damage from reaching Americans. Most of the well-known visual evidence of the aftermath of the bombings was not known to Americans until the 1970s or 1980s.
What is the purpose of beginning with this (brief) history lesson? Well, Donald Trump was in New York City yesterday to speak to the United Nations General Assembly. And in his speech, he advised the delegates:
I have a big decision to make. Will a deal be made with Iran that lets them rebuild and create a far greater country than it ever was before? Maybe one of the greatest in the Middle East or even the world. Or do I annihilate the Islamic Republic, and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill and destroy people and countries again?
We don't know what response Trump was hoping for, but it wasn't the one he got. If we were to describe it in a word, based on accounts of people who were there, and on looking at video of the speech, that word would be "eye-roll."
Every person sitting in that room is a veteran diplomat/politician. They know that the U.S. could theoretically rebuild Iran in the way that Trump proposes. After all, the U.S. did that with Japan, Germany and other nations after World War II. However, that is an expensive, long-term commitment. Trump ran on a platform of reduced American involvement abroad, and most certainly has no intention of implementing the Marshall Plan v2.0. He also represents a political party whose members soil themselves when so much as one dollar flows to Iran, even if that dollar actually belongs to Iran. There is no way the Republicans would allow that kind of investment in a country full of Muslims.
The folks in the room also know Trump has no intention of annihilating Iran. He doesn't even have the fortitude to order air strikes that would help Saudi Arabia. He certainly doesn't have the fortitude to order something more substantive (and the implication, presumably, is a massive nuclear strike). Even if Trump was willing to go nuclear, the Saudis and Israelis would be furious. Plus, it would be open season if any other nation felt like it wanted to start lobbing a few nuclear weapons at its enemy (looking at you, North Korea).
One has to assume that the UN General Assembly wasn't the real audience for the speech. The real audience, presumably, was American voters (with Iran as a secondary audience). From that vantage point, we would say the speech was... a complete and total failure. As we have already noted, U.S. voters by and large are not on board with a new Marshall Plan for Iran or anyone else. And those voters who DO like the idea don't trust Trump to implement it.
And then there's the "annihilation" talk. Returning to where we started this item, Americans in 1945 largely hated, hated, hated the Japanese. And yet, the politically savvy Truman realized that, even under those circumstances, annihilation (or something that was annihilation-adjacent) was not something the American public could stomach. In the end, Americans are human beings, the Japanese are human beings, and annihilation is just a bridge too far.
Iran may not be popular with the American people right now, but they are nowhere near as loathed as the Japanese were in 1945. And so, while talk of annihilating Iran might make Trump feel strong, and might make him feel like his... hands are bigger than they really are, it's going to go over like a lead zeppelin with every voter who isn't a Pete Hegseth clone. Also, threatening the Iranians with annihilation is not going to make them more open to peace talks and to finding middle ground.
The bottom line is that Trump has absolutely no idea what to tell Americans, or anyone else, about this mess of a war that he personally created. Truth be told, we don't know if even a skilled communicator, like Franklin D. Roosevelt, or John F. Kennedy or Ronald Reagan could talk their way through this mess. Trump's best option here is almost certainly to shut up, clench his fists, and hope that the damage done to the GOP in November is less than he fears. But Trump's instinct is to keep talking, and to keep digging the hole deeper, and he's clearly running that playbook here. He's even cleverly finding venues where the lack of a press-pool microphone isn't a problem.
Also, we had an item yesterday titled "Iran Gets Even More Quagmire-y," in which we talked about the pressure the Saudis are under, and how the Iranians have successfully shut down one exit point for oil shipments from the Kingdom of Saud (the Strait of Hormuz), while the Iranian-client Yemeni Houthis have largely shut down another (Bab al-Mandab Strait).
We were simplifying a bit, in part for clarity purposes, and in part due to illness, but there is a third way to get oil from Saudi Arabia to the rest of the world, namely the Suez Canal. Several readers took us to task for omitting this, so we'll address it now, and why it's not all that much of a solution to the overall problem. To start with, here's a map of Saudi Arabia:
The blue star is Hormuz, the red star is Bab al-Mandab, the orange star is Suez.
There are three problems that a "Suez only" situation presents. First, most of Saudi Arabia's oil fields are in the east, and so if they're going to use Suez, they have to get the oil all the way across the country to the Red Sea. They have a pipeline that is used for that purpose; it is known as the—wait for it—East-West Pipeline. Undoubtedly, they worked very hard on that name. Anyhow, everyone knows that pipeline is key, and that includes the Iranians. So, they have been attacking the East-West Pipeline, and have managed to shut it down a couple of times.
The second problem is that, like the Panama Canal, the Suez Canal can only accommodate a certain number of ships per day. Generally speaking, maximum daily capacity is about 100 ships. And, of course, the Saudis are competing with many other nations for that space, since 12% of all global shipping traffic goes through the Suez. So, there is an upper limit to exactly how much oil can be rerouted.
The third problem, and arguably the biggest one, is that Suez is a fine and dandy option when the Saudis are servicing customers in Europe and/or the Americas. It's a lousy option for customers in Asia, who purchase the bulk of Saudi oil. One of those major Asian customers, the UAE, can be reached by land. The others, not so much. That includes both India and China, who each purchase about 10% of all Saudi oil exports, or about four times as much as the U.S. purchases. To get oil to (most of the) Asian customers through Suez, Saudi ships have to travel all the way around Africa. This increases shipping time by about a month and, of course, increases costs.
If someone told this to Trump, he would probably say, "Too bad for China and India." But all the rest of us, having been given a crash course in the economics of petroleum in the last 6 months, know that oil is a global commodity. If China and India (and South Korea and Japan and Singapore) can't get Saudi oil, or if they can't get it at a competitive price, they will look elsewhere, which will serve to drive up costs of non-Saudi oil. So, Americans and other western customers of the Kingdom of Saud will feel the pinch, even if the Suez remains an unhindered conduit.
The bottom line is that the whole situation is now a giant mess. If we were president, we flatter ourselves we would never have been stupid enough to create this mess in the first place (of course, we also would never have palled around with a serial pedophile, thus creating a need for a distraction). And we thank the deity of your choice that we are not responsible for fixing this mess, because we have absolutely no idea how to do so at this point. (Z)