The Economist, founded in 1843, is perhaps the most influential and longest-running chronicler of capitalism. Its immense journalistic reputation and financial strength have often been criticized by left-leaning voices. The British journalist Francis Wheen – among other things he wrote a biography of Marx, which The Economist reviewed highly critically in 1999 – in an essay published in The Guardian in 1996, accused the magazine of being “flimsy, narrow-minded”, where “editorials often read like essays by a particularly enthusiastic Oxford graduate. That’s because they are, more or less; many of the staff involved come straight from university, seminar rooms. Untainted by contact with life outside”.
The Economist has made mistakes many times. To be fair, any 200-year-old newsroom would do the same. But there is one thing about which it was remarkably prescient in recent times.
On September 12, 2023, a day before the Oslo Accords – which laid out the framework and guardrails for a two-state solution between Israel and Palestine – turned 30, it published an article titled The Oslo Accords were always doomed to fail. “Diplomats call for agreements like the sermons of a dying faith, as if another confidence-building exercise or round of negotiations will be what will unlock real peace. Inertia will keep them going until new generations of Israelis and Palestinians are ready for something new – for better or for worse”, it said.
Less than a month later, on October 7, Hamas carried out its most brutal terrorist attacks on Israel, killing hundreds and taking scores of Israelis hostage. That day West Asia changed forever and for the worse. Israel’s subsequent attack on Gaza has led to one of the biggest humanitarian disasters in recent times. Its blatant violation of the rules of war has demolished all claims to the existence of a rules-based international order.
Two and a half years after the Hamas attack, on February 28 this year, America and Israel attacked Iran. Anyone with common sense would agree that the two incidents are linked. Iran’s response and escalation following the attacks has delivered the largest energy shock ever in the history of global capitalism. The attacks and counter-attacks on Iranian and other West Asian gas fields on Wednesday and Thursday show that the blow is growing bigger by the day.
Even a mental simulation of a high-order supply chain disruption due to a disruption in global fuel and petrochemical production sends a shiver down one’s spine and will probably break the back of the global economy unless the war ends the day before tomorrow. The war would not have happened if US President Donald Trump had not been involved in it.
Israel’s Wednesday attack on Iran’s South Pars gas field was one of the few examples in the current war when even Donald Trump sought to distance himself from Israeli action. “Israel, enraged by what happened in the Middle East, has violently attacked a major facility in Iran called the South Pars Gas Field…The United States knew nothing about this particular attack, and the country of Qatar was not involved in it in any way, shape, or form, nor did it have any idea that it was about to happen. Unfortunately, Iran did not know this or any relevant facts related to the South Pars attack, and were unjustly attacked. “Part of Qatar’s LNG gas facility, there will be no further attacks by Israel”, Trump posted on Truth Social.
Certainly, Trump has fallen into a trap where even criticism of Israeli actions prevents him from doing anything that would prevent further such actions. His situation can be described as that of someone suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, where the detainee has developed an attraction towards the detainee and is failing to testify against him. More and more American allies in Europe and the Middle East are waking up to this reality.
“One by one, Donald Trump’s European allies rejected the US president’s demand to join his war in the Middle East… This week’s collective rejection by Trump’s European allies of his demand to help open the Strait of Hormuz by force – or risk a “bad” future for the NATO alliance – was remarkable for its strength and unanimity. The end of two weeks of chaotic division between the continent’s capitals over his war against Iran. It was even more shocking”, said a story published in the Financial Times on Thursday.
Even more damaging for the United States is the response from Oman, which is currently a direct victim of Iran’s military aggression. Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi wrote in The Economist on March 18, “Iran’s retaliation against its neighbors’ claim to US bases in their territory is an inevitable, if extremely regrettable, and completely unacceptable outcome. In what both Israel and the US have described as a war to eliminate the Islamic Republic, it was perhaps the only rational option available to the Iranian leadership.” As unprecedented as it gets. Albusaidi played a key role in US-Iran negotiations before the war began, and it seems appropriate for him to be betrayed by the US for starting the war. “The question for America’s friends is simple. What can we do to extricate the superpower from this unwanted entanglement? First, America’s friends have a responsibility to tell the truth. This begins with the fact that there are two sides in this war who have nothing to gain from it, and the national interests of both Iran and America lie in an early end to the hostilities. This is an uncomfortable truth to tell, because it signals the extent to which America has lost control of its foreign policy. But it has to be Must be told”, says Albusaidi.
What exactly explains America’s helplessness in deterring Israel in West Asia? There has been no change in the equation of what Israel wanted from the US in this region. There is more than enough evidence to support this claim.
“James Baker temporarily banned him (Netanyahu) from the State Department. Madeleine Albright described him as an Israeli Newt Gingrich (and that was no compliment). Bill Clinton emerged from his first meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996 (then serving his first term as prime minister) more than a little annoyed by his arrogant self-confidence. “Who’s the ****** superpower here? Clinton told aides, according to a 2012 foreign policy article titled The Curious Case of Benjamin Netanyahu by Aaron David Miller. Netanyahu’s true intentions were known well before 2012. This was put in so many words by David Remnick in his 1998 New Yorker profile. “Netanyahu’s overall argument is that a peaceful Arab dictatorship in a region The left’s dream of a new Middle East of close ties and open markets is a fantasy”, it said. Netanyahu had accused his predecessor Yitzhak Rabin – who was assassinated by a far-right Israeli after a rally in support of the Oslo Accords – of betraying Israeli and Jewish interests by his decision to cede Israeli land to Palestine.
The world, and more importantly the US, did nothing to stop the confrontational turn in the Israeli state’s approach to the Palestine-Israel question. The status quo (as we now know) was mistakenly seen as the ability to keep kicking down the road indefinitely. Opposition to this viewpoint and Israel’s increasing belligerence has often been dismissed as anti-Semitic. When Trump took office after the October 7 attacks, he made it clear that he wanted to change the status quo for the worse. His plan to develop war-torn Gaza into a real estate paradise is a vivid example of this. Most of America’s West Asian allies saw this, and other developments before the war, as a carte blanche for Israel’s expansionist ambitions.
Of course, none of this is to say that Israel’s adversaries, including Iran and its proxies, are entirely benign regimes. These players, both state and non-state actors, have a lot of blood on their hands. The entire history of West Asia is one of competing, one more barbaric than the other, fundamentalisms of various kinds that have spread disorder, anarchy, violence and war to the world.
However, it is also true that the rest of the world, especially the US and its allies, have interfered or allowed things to go from bad to worse in the region. Kim Ghattas’s book Black Wave is a gripping, undeniable account of this history. This does not mean that the people of these countries have no agency or that they are not treated equally by their regimes and countries. Ghattas was among the few who said on record that Trump and his advisers had misunderstands Iran as to why it was not capitulating to the US even before the attacks began. “These drivers – ideology, national pride, regime survival – seem to escape real estate negotiators like Trump and Witkoff,” he wrote in an article in the Financial Times on February 26, two days before the war began.
So far, there is no sign in Trump’s America of recognizing what everyone else is able to see: It is Israel that is doing everything possible to keep America embroiled in a war from which both the world and America will gain nothing and lose much. The real challenge for the world, especially the larger countries, is what Karl Marx called “ruthless criticism of everything that exists, ruthless in the sense of not fearing its consequences and ruthless in the sense of having little fear of conflict with the existing powers”. All major countries, including India, must work together to end America’s Stockholm Syndrome or be prepared to suffer immense pain.
There are many self-styled realists, including India, who would argue that letting the US and Israel finish the job may be the best way to ensure peace. They should read these lines from Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous March 18, 1956 sermon. “Yes, it is true that if the Negro would accept his place, accept exploitation and injustice, there would be peace. But it would be an unpleasant peace”, King said. It is actually this unpleasant silence about the violations of the Oslo Accords that has brought the world to its current state where it is stuck in a destructive war as the world’s largest superpower is suffering from Stockholm Syndrome.
