Anyone wondering whether Iran is second-guessing the Hormuz blockade? Don’t. They have the receipts. They are watching from Tehran as the dominoes fall: France first, Albania close behind, Italy wobbling, the rest queuing up. A little more time is all it takes. No nuclear bomb required. Nuclear economic reform is the gift they are sending west.
For decades, Washington has relied on the belief that enough deprivation will turn a population against its government. Restrict its access to credit. Obstruct its trade. Make ordinary life steadily more difficult. Eventually, the reasoning goes, people will remove the leadership you want removed.
“Make the economy scream,” Nixon said of Chile.
You identify the pressure points in its economy: the currency, the fuel subsidy, the bread price, the pension fund, the single commodity on which half the working class depends. You squeeze. You sanction the banks. You freeze the reserves. You cut the SWIFT access. You wait for the shelves to empty and the queues to lengthen and the mothers to start calculating what their children will eat. And then, when the pain has ripened into rage, you fund the NGOs that will give the rage a flag, a hashtag, a square to gather in, and a demand that happens to coincide with the demands of the State Department. You call it a color revolution. You call it a democratic awakening. You call it the people rising up. You give it a Nobel Prize if the timing is right.
This does not mean every uprising is manufactured abroad. People living under corrupt or repressive governments have grievances of their own. Like they do in France. But their grievances can be exploited, their movements selectively financed, their demands embraced or ignored according to the interests of a foreign power.
Iran was manipulated like this for forty-six years. Venezuela for twenty-five. Cuba for sixty-five. Syria was dismembered by it. Iraq was starved by it before it was invaded. Half a million Iraqi children died in the 1990s and the Secretary of State said on television that the price was worth it. Nicaragua, Chile, Zimbabwe, Belarus, Russia, Afghanistan under the Taliban, Yemen under Ansar Allah, Lebanon when its banks were strangled into collapse the moment Hezbollah entered the government. The pattern is so consistent it is no longer a strategy, it is a reflex.
And now watch what is happening in Paris.
Inflicting pain without consequence has been an average Monday for the West. It made them arrogant. It made them insensitive to the pain of others. It made them a people who feel nothing, who feel nothing even now, as children burn alive in Palestine. The age of impunity is over. What goes around comes around.
The protests in France are not a color revolution in the classical sense, because there is no foreign hand distributing banners and no embassy wiring money through a civil-society front. But the mechanism of pressure, the thing that is causing French workers and farmers and nurses and truckers to pour into the streets, is the same mechanism the empire has used against its enemies for half a century. It is an economy being squeezed from outside.
It is a cost-of-living crisis engineered by energy war, by the self-inflicted amputation of Russian gas, by the blind support for a genocide, by the forced subsidization of a war in Ukraine that the French public never voted for and increasingly does not want. The French government is now in the position Washington has spent decades putting other governments in: unable to feed its own people at the price its own people expect, and unable to say honestly why.
This is what it feels like to be Iran.
And here is where the story takes an interesting turn, because for the first time in the history of this technique, the target has learned to use it in reverse.
For decades the resistance to American empire fought the symptoms. It fought the war machine itself. It fought the invasions. It fought the drones and the carriers and the special forces and the proxy militias. It fought bravely and often brilliantly, and in Vietnam and Afghanistan and Iraq and Lebanon and Yemen it won the military engagements that the empire’s own generals thought could not be lost. But the empire kept coming, because the empire’s power was never primarily military. The military was the enforcement arm that could go on endlessly because it had an endless stream of money.
I see you’ve not restacked this article yet. Have you? Help us counteract the suppression.
Hence, the real weapon was the dollar, the sanctions list, the SWIFT network, the insurance market in London that decides which ships are allowed to sail, the clearing house in New York that decides which transactions are allowed to clear. The empire’s Achilles heel was never its army. The empire’s Achilles heel was the economic system that funded the army, and that economic system depended on one thing above all others: the uninterrupted flow of cheap energy from the Persian Gulf, priced in dollars, insured in London, shipped through straits that Iran can close in an afternoon.
Iran has figured this out. Something that Nasser could not figure out, what Saddam could not figure out, what Qaddafi figured out and was killed for the moment he moved to act on it. You do not fight the empire where it is strong. You do not meet its carriers in the open sea. You do not try to match its air force or its satellites or its nuclear arsenal.
You fight it where it is weak, and where it is weak is in the chokepoints, the shipping lanes, the price of a barrel of crude. You fight it in the insurance premiums on a tanker transiting Hormuz. You fight it by making the global economy that the West designed through centuries of genocide and slavery finally start to cost it something.
Ansar Allah closed the Red Sea. And Iran has closed the Strait of Hormuz.
And now the French are in the streets.
Inflicting pain without consequence has been an average Monday for the West. For centuries Europeans inflicted mass suffering on the brown and black peoples of the world without noticing a single hiccup. It made them arrogant. It made them insensitive to the pain of others. It made them a people who feel nothing, who feel nothing even now, as children burn alive in Palestine. The age of impunity is over. What goes around comes around.
The empire taught the world that economies are weapons. The world was a slow student but a thorough one. And the lesson, now that it has finally been learned, is being recited back in the empire’s own capitals, in the empire’s own currencies, by the empire’s own citizens, who do not yet know that the hunger they feel and the cold they feel and the rage they feel in their own streets is the exact hunger and cold and rage that their governments have been inflicting on other people’s streets for as long as any of them have been alive.
Empire’s tricks come home. And the worst is yet to come.
– Karim
Yang Shanshen (China), Poet Xie Lingyun and His Companions, n.d.
