It is no surprise that even some of Washington’s closest war-time allies, including the United Kingdom, have expressed shock over the decision to assassinate Iranian General Qasim Soleimani, along with Iraqi militia commander Hashd al-Shaabi, on Friday. Senior British politicians have gone on to complain about America’s habit of no longer sharing sensitive information or discussing important decisions and, indeed, ‘surprising friends instead of enemies’. Now, quite naturally, everybody is worried that Iran would retaliate, which it has promised to do quite severely, and there’ll be another bloody war in the Middle East.
But it’s not as if Washington would not have factored all that in before green-lighting the strike. Everybody knows that the Middle East has become a powder keg waiting to explode. And it will not take too many further provocations before it will go off. Unfortunately, this particular American administration has been pushing much of the region, especially Iran, towards isolation and conflict for some years now. How distant those days already feel when everybody – Americans, Europeans, Russians – worked together to find ways of working with Iran; and how the whole exercise brought a sense of calm to the region.
Not very strangely, just the countries that resented the brief peace and quiet, and warned against getting too comfortable with Iran, have cheered President Trump’s policy of isolation and now can’t seem to stop celebrating General Suleimani’s killing; even if it carries grave security risks for a number of countries. Financial markets, historically the best gauge of war risk in the Gulf, are already sounding alarm bells. Oil is rising, as are safe-haven currencies, commodities and assets, implying that the people who control the money expect the market to swing wildly, which is often in reaction to extreme events; events like war sometimes.
It is, unfortunately, a pretty safe bet that Iran will eventually respond. Even though it is politically severely isolated and financially not too far from ruin, it still boasts a formidable military and the ability to skillfully disrupt the entire region, which is littered with US allies and interests.
If this situation does not miraculously deescalate soon, there could well be another war in the Persian Gulf. And even if it is limited in scale, it will carry military, political, financial, medical, etc, implications for millions of people near and far.
Things have not been particularly cheerful in the Middle East for quite a while. And every country in the region shares a part of the blame – some more than others, of course. But this particular collision course has been needlessly set in motion, without any provocation early on, by the US president alone even as very few people around him share his views on the matter. Now the whole world must try and undo all the damage that this one man has done. *