More chaos for the world: Trump's recipe
The latest military adventure by Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, the attack on Iran, has a clear objective: to topple the ayatollahs' regime, change the country's government, and control the region. The US president has embarked on this mission spurred on by the success of the operation in Venezuela, where he managed to remove Nicolás Maduro in a lightning operation and, it seems, so far, impose upon him. de facto A government obedient to its interests. But Iran is not Venezuela, and the attack that began early Saturday morning is not a swift raid. Even if the Iranians, tired of the repressive and patriarchal regime under which they live, heed the call of Trump and Netanyahu and bring down their government, it will not be easy for another option to take hold. Moreover, the consequences of this military operation could affect an already quite unstable region in ways that are still difficult to predict. Iran has responded by attacking US bases in Bahrain, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar, which could lead to an escalation of the conflict throughout the region. For the moment, it will be necessary to see what effects the attack may have on the flow of goods through the Strait of Hormuz, a key point for international trade. Iran already announced yesterday that it was beginning maneuvers to block it, and if successful, the economic consequences will be global in scale.
The US attack, carried out jointly with Israel, also makes Donald Trump's desire to present himself as a pacifist to the world seem almost comical—a pretense that had even led him to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Making it more difficult for another autocratic government to develop a nuclear arsenal and the fall of the fundamentalist regime of the ayatollahs would be good news. But it is not good news that, once again, the US president is treating the world as his private battlefield. The attack on Iran is another disaster that Iranian civilians are already paying for with their lives, another violation of international law. It is further proof that Trump was lying again when he said he defended a non-interventionist US policy, one that wouldn't wage wars abroad, in contrast to Joe Biden.
The US president has amply demonstrated that negotiation is not his forte, however much he tries to portray himself as a master of diplomacy. Negotiating hasn't stopped the war in Ukraine, nor has it changed the regime in Venezuela, and more than two years of war in Gaza can hardly be considered a diplomatic victory. Now he has attacked Iran while talks were still underway. Hours before the bombing, Oman's Foreign Minister, Badr bin Hamad al-Busaidi, said in a CBS interview that Tehran had made a key concession, implying that it would have no uranium storage capacity. Either the US didn't believe the concession, or it wasn't enough for them, or the military operation had already been decided upon and they didn't care.
Whatever the reason, the result is another military conflict in the world, with more civilian deaths and consequences difficult to foresee. Chaos upon chaos, Donald Trump's preferred natural habitat, into which he seems to drag his country and the rest of the world whenever he can.