It’s becoming increasingly clear that the US never intended to honour the agreement it signed with Iran. The empire never negotiates in good faith. It always uses negotiations as cover for buying time to improve its own position. There is no point in attempting to negotiate with utterly an untrustworthy party that will stab you in the back at the first opportunity. The elder Khamenei apparently understood this, but the reformer faction under President Pezeshkian does not. The younger Khamenei has given Penzeshkian leave to proceed with negotiations despite his stated reservations, but the opportunity is not likely to last in the face of the perfidious actions of the American/Israeli axis. The US and its rabid attack dog are agreement incapable and will continue their quest for supremacy no matter the price the whole world will have to pay.
From the American perspective, the point of the MOU was not to end its aggression against Iran, but to open the strait of Hormuz, find ways to degrade Iran’s ability to manage it, lull Iran into a false sense of security, facilitate Israel’s destruction of its allies in Lebanon, and buy themselves time for renewed attempts at destroying Iran in accordance with Israel’s demands. The first clause of the MOU states that Lebanon is included in the ceasefire, but the US and Israel then arranged for a second MOU with the Lebanese puppet regime that directly contradicts the MOU with Iran. That agreements allows for permanent Israeli occupation of much of Lebanon, while setting the stage for a bloody civil war in the country. The Lebanese army is now tasked with disarming Hezbollah, which it is incapable of doing since it’s no more than a local police force because it’s not allowed by its US masters to possess any real military equipment. The point is to set the rest of the country against the Shia population in the south, which is being systematically driven out of their homes and their villages then destroyed. Israel then threatens to bomb anyone who gives the refugees shelter. It seeks to genocide the Shia population of Lebanon just as it has been doing with the population of Gaza.
The US also refuses to lift sanctions or to return frozen Iranian assets as it agreed to do. It has been pressuring Oman to allow vessels to transit Hormuz by hugging its coastline, and when Iran disables such vessels, the US uses that as an excuse to target Iranian radars along their coast that are used to manage the strait. It uses financial leverage to control its vassals – extending or withdrawing credit, and holding power over domestic banking systems in a way that would allow them to destroy a country’s economy at will. The reserve currency and the SWIFT system have been fully weaponised in order to leverage the remaining power of the empire, even as it destroys itself internally.
Its economy is failing, its people are divided and demoralised, it’s drowning in unrepayable debt, and its military has been revealed as far less powerful than it once was, despite the obscene amounts of money wasted on it. Financial power, backed by technological control through AI, is being substitued for military power, but that can only last for so long until enough of the world manages to extract itself from the dollar system and from the malign influence of the technical industrial complex exemplified by Palantir. The attempt to force support for US debt on to the rest of the world at the retail level through stablecoins, and to subjugate the global population through control of its data, is a last ditch effort preserve and cement that power. However, the extreme contralisation of control that’s being attempted is unlikely to succeed in an energy constrained world, given that the ability to maintain complexity is a function of surplus energy.
The empire is mired in Thucydides trap, fighting its own decline in the most destructive way possible, at the expense of the entire world. The rising power lies in the east, although it too is facing a wide range of challenges. The destruction of energy infrastructure, and of the capacity for production and distribution, is going to be globally devastating, as will the collapse of complex supplies chains and trade with the reversal of globalisation. Many countries in the east have severe demographic challenges, with birthrates far below replacement rate and young people demoralised to the point no longer wanting to have children. China, Japan and South Korea all have collapsing birthrates, and Russia’s is also low despite the wealth of natural resources providing for self-sufficiency that should insulate it from much of the impact of deglobalisation. The empire’s drone war against it is clearly harming both demographics and necessary infrastructure. India and Africa are still growing, but India is facing challenges with regard to energy, water, and agricultural capacity. An exodus is increasingly likely.
The Great Reset as proposed is meant to be a great subjugation of the many by the international hyper-wealthy few, with the super-rich continuing to live their jet-setting gilded lives off the backs of an enslaved (albeit greatly reduced) global majority, but this is a vision grounded in extreme hubris and a failure to grasp reality. The few depend on the labour of productivity of the many in ways they fail to understand. They depend of an energy supply that they take utterly for granted, assuming that they can maintain their own level of luxury by simply depriving the rest of virtually everything. Their gated communities and walled greenzones are likely to become gilded prisons once the abused masses eventually turn on them, as history suggests will happen. For the moment people have too much to lose, but once they have nothing left to lose, revolution becomes their only option. Unfortunately a great deal of destruction is inevitable as the dynamic of attempted control and inevitable failure plays out. Those who are left standing in the aftermath will rebuild with the remaining resources and infrastructure, but not to anywhere near our current standard of living. The heights we achieved were thanks to the fossil fuels that we’re currently destroying, and those heights will not be regained. Human development is still possible of course, but not in the purely material terms we have come to expect. Stability and trust can be rebuilt eventually, but at much smaller scale and with far more realistic expectations. The process will likely take decades, as trust destroyed takes a very long time to re-establish. Humanity less obsessed with material gain and more interested in working together, at least within a smaller trust horizon, for mutual benefit would ultimately be a happier humanity. The march of history will continue its rise and fall as it has for millennia.
