Porter’s Pensées

Why is Trump at war with Iran? – Which raises the broader question: what are his motives for almost anything he does?

With regard to Iran there are several possibilities, some of them stated, others not. They are: regime change; bringing peace to the broader Middle East (with an eye to next year’s Nobel Peace Prize); oil; stopping nuclear proliferation; pre-empting an attack on the USA; doing Netanyahu’s bidding – Netanyahu’s motives are easier to understand, and his influence on the US government manifest; countering global terrorism, much of it originating in the region; distracting Americans from what might be revealed about Trump in the Epstein papers; giving him a popular boost in time for the ‘mid-terms’ in November; appearing to ‘make America great again’ militarily; bringing on Armageddon and the second coming of Christ (! but see https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/us-troops-told-iran-war-anointed-jesus-bring-armageddon-watchdog-says); and boosting Trump’s presidential ‘legacy’, in the eyes of future historians.

There are problems with most of these supposed ambitions. Firstly they might not work – look at the effects of American wars in the recent past. Secondly, they may not truly reflect what Trump (as distinct from Israel, say) really wants from his Iranian adventure. Several of them seem to contradict the political programme that he got elected on (both times), which promised, for example: ‘No More Endless Wars’, ‘America First’, ‘open government’; and ‘draining the swamp’. (One can’t believe the ‘Armageddon’ one, except as a hook to draw America’s crazy ‘Christian nationalists’ in.) Nor do they seem to have any connection with two of Trump’s most widely perceived prejudices, which are racism, and misogyny. In fact it’s difficult to discern any clear rational motive or calculated policy behind anything he does, in Iran or anywhere else; beyond, that is, being seen as ‘successful’, in his lights, in what he does do. So maybe that’s it.

That’s my guess, for what it’s worth. It’s based on no special evidence; and I’m not claiming any originality for it – others I’m sure will have had the same idea. Trump is after all a very stupid person, despite his claims to ‘genius’; and his inability, it seems, to follow any argument beyond the ‘slogan’ stage. He doesn’t read, apart from what is flashed up on Fox TV, and changes his mind according to which of his trusties last had his ear. He didn’t even write his own book, The Art of the Deal, according to the poor but presumably well-paid mutt who did. He’s an uneducated and unprincipled dum-dum; who has only one broad principle to sustain him.

This is: that the only object in a person’s life is to be a ‘winner’, in a world where everyone is either that or a ‘loser’; the latter category including even servicemen and women who were killed or captured in America’s wars. (See https://factually.co/fact-checks/politics/trump-calls-john-mccain-loser-01c295.) The words he chooses are crucial here: a ‘winner’ is not the same as a ‘success’, and a ‘loser’ is not necessarily a ‘failure’. Winning and losing depend on competition, and can be measured in material terms. A millionaire is a winner; as is – by virtue of his success in a competitive field – a President. How he earned or spent his money, or performed his Presidential duties (‘he’ in both cases, for this is a very masculinist way of looking at life) are too vague to be relevant. It’s measurable success that Trump craves, irrespective of the quality of that success, and of its impact on others.

This ‘success’ motive has been constant throughout his 79-year career. It defines him. Any hint of personal failure is played down, and usually denied. Hence his desperation to be awarded a Nobel Peace Prize (for ending seven – or is it eight? – wars), and his anger at the Norwegians for denying it to him; his exaggeration of the numbers attending his first inauguration; his constant iteration, already mentioned, of his ‘genius’; and his reluctance – still, and against all the evidence – to admit that he was the ‘loser’ in the Presidential election of 2020. He rates other national leaders by their levels of ‘success’; which is why he is such a fan of Putin and other dictators. And is why he would clearly like to be one himself: not for what he could do with his powers, but simply because it would make him the greatest ‘success’ of modern times. (‘Top of the world, Ma!’ as James Cagney yells at the end of White Heat, before being consumed by fire.) He has already accumulated many of the powers of a dictator, surprisingly to those of us who believed that the US Constitution safeguarded Americans against that. The same way of thinking is reflected in the way Trump attacks his critics; for example female newspaper reporters – always as ‘losers’ and of ‘low IQ’: another quantitative measure. ‘Winners and losers’. These are the only categories he recognises.

Where did this come from? Any American, or visitor to America, will recognise the phenomenon as being embedded in American middle-class culture; more I think than it is elsewhere. There are scores of books published in the US helping readers to ‘self-improve’, and so to fit themselves for the individual struggles for dominance – or survival – which will define their futures; and – incidentally – mould their characters. I have the idea (or prejudice) that this may be a particular feature of capitalism – individualist, competitive, materialistic – which makes a ‘winner’ like Donald Trump a particularly apt representative of the most quintessentially capitalist nation of our times.

Today (7 March), he described Iran as the ‘loser of the Middle East’. Ukraine seems to be another ‘loser’, with ‘no cards’, as he told Zelensky in that notorious White House interview last year. That’s the only language he understands.

No liberal can feel any regret over the demise of Iran’s Supreme Leader, if he really was as ‘evil’ as Trump claims he was. (I have no reason to doubt that; but we know how persuasive false propaganda can be these days.) Of course I would have preferred him to have been captured and tried in a court of law, rather than bombed to death; but even if that were practicable, we know that it’s not how the Americans do these things. (It’s why they carry guns.) Nonetheless, ‘good riddance’ is probably the overwhelming response with which most of us in the West greeted the news of Khameini’s killing yesterday; apparently shared by much of the population of Iran, if the scenes of rejoicing in the streets of Teheran we are currently seeing on television are to be believed.

That really is our problem with it. We would rather it had been done less forcibly, and directed by someone other than Trump. We distrust his motives for the strike, suspect that he has no clear plan for the future government of Iran, and fear that any good it does might unravel, leaving a worse situation behind – as did the earlier American interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. We also notice how this action appears to run counter to the clear promises Trump gave to the American people at the time of his election: that his ‘America First’ administration would finally put an end to America’s ‘never-ending’ foreign wars. This, remember, is the second of his foreign wars, after Venezuela.

On the question of motives, one can’t dismiss the possibility that one of Trump’s was a domestic political calculation: that a war would boost his popularity in the upcoming mid-term elections, at a time when opinion polls seemed to show it declining. (As a Brit, I thought back to our Margaret Thatcher in 1982, whose  invasion of the Falklands gained her an enormous electoral boost, at a time when the support for her government was waning. Cynics said then that this was her motive.) Then of course there’s oil, which was a motive in the Venezuela case; and was also the main one back in 1953, when the US and the UK together ousted a relatively liberal government in Iran in the interests of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. Could also it be part of the equation today? And lastly, of course, there’s Israel; the US’s (only) partner in the current war, and with motives of its own.

More broadly, America’s attack on Iran is yet another clear signal that Trump is reverting to the foreign policy of the Neo-Con years: rejecting post-1945 internationalism in favour of the more nationalistic – ‘might is right’ – and imperialistic policies of the past. Pete Hegseth – the ‘War’ Minister – gave a speech shortly after the event, which endeavoured to distance it from former American wars (https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2026/03/02/pete-hegseth-iran-attack/88942488007/), but unconvincingly. Internationalism, co-operation and diplomacy don’t seem to be part of the Trump administration’s armory; as is perhaps to be expected of an ex-capitalist property developer, whose ‘ideology’ – if you can call it that – centres around ‘deals’, in which there are ‘winners’ and ‘losers’, and no other ‘principles’ at all. Yesterday Trump was undoubtedly the ‘winner’ – for the time being. We’ll see what good it does for him; and of course for the 80 million-plus people of Iran.

As a very long-time Labour voter, and occasional member, I’m nonetheless delighted by the result of yesterday’s Gorton and Denton by-election; won convincingly by the newly resurgent Green Party, with Labour plodding along in third place. The Tories were slaughtered; but not on this occasion to the obvious benefit of ‘Reform’ (our Right-Wing, populist party, for foreign readers), which came second, but 4,000 votes behind the Greens.

Clearly this result reflects public dissatisfaction with the two parties that have dominated British politics for the last eighty years, just as ‘Reform’ does over on the other side. This is the same constituency that propelled the radical Jeremy Corbyn to the leadership of the Labour Party in the 2010s, albeit not for long. Both movements can be seen as expressions of disappointment with ‘conventional’ British politics, albeit coming from radically different directions. For the past few years it has been the Right that has exploited this most effectively, leaving ‘progressives’ like me desperately wishing that someone else could do the same for ‘our’ side. I wasn’t expecting the Greens to take on this role; but here we are!

Much of this can be put down to their choice of a candidate in this election, Hannah Spencer. She ticked all the boxes to mark her off from most conventional present-day politicians: young, a woman, non-university educated, and a professional plumber; with whom working-class voters – so long as they’re not male chauvinists – can easily identify. She also seems to have said very little in her campaign about the environment; which may be thought surprising for an overtly ‘environmental’ party, but may have done something to free it from the stigma of being a ‘single-issue’ and somewhat ‘wokeish’ body, and so broadened its appeal. Which of course any party has to do to if it aspires to the government of a whole nation. We’ll see whether the Greens can rise to this.

Of course, if this pattern were repeated nationally at the next General Election, the Greens could ally with another Left-leaning ruling party – Lib Dems or Labour – in order to exert influence that way. In Gorton and Denton the Greens and Labour together garnered more than half the total vote, which is bad news for the Right-wing ‘populists’, but promising for the ‘Progressive’ side. Here in Sweden that would ensure a Progressive national government automatically. But the UK of course has ‘FPTP’ to complicate things  (https://bernardjporter.com/2016/02/29/first-past-the-post/).

Still, a welcome sign that the Rightists are not having it all their own way.

You can see why Putin so often characterises Russia’ s enemies as ‘Nazis’. The label immediately provokes revulsion; except of course among Neo-Nazis, who the Russian President seems to think are more influential – in Ukraine, the Baltic States (see https://www.propastop.org/en/2024/02/01/decoding-putins-accusations-of-nazism-against-baltic-states/), the USA, and even the whole of Europe – than they probably are.

There are of course historical reasons why Putin chooses this particular stick to beat the Ukrainians with. In its ‘Great Patriotic War’ (1941-45) the Soviet Union’s main enemy was a Nazi-dominated Europe; the Soviets’ heroic victory over which cost around 26 million Russian lives. (For comparison, Britain lost ‘only’ 450,000 dead, and the USA 418,000.) So you would expect the Russians to remember that war more, for longer, and rather differently from the way we in the West remember it. And since it ended we’ve never sufficiently acknowledged the Soviets’ vital contribution to our Allies’ war effort, and have been pretty beastly to them in other ways – albeit with good reasons, to be sure. So in these circumstances the ‘Nazi’ charge is an understandable prejudice, as well as being a useful propaganda tool for Russia.

And of course it’s not entirely groundless. There will undoubtedly be some genuine neo-Nazis in Ukraine today, as there are everywhere in the West; in Ukraine’s case feeding the resistance against Russia. (See https://www.dw.com/en/fact-check-is-there-any-truth-to-russias-ukrainian-nazis-propaganda/a-63970461.) How strong and influential they are I have no means of knowing – it’s not my area of historical expertise; but it’s an obvious nail to hook Russia’s Europhobia on. But of course not to explain the latter’s invasion of Ukraine, exactly four years ago. Or even to excuse Putin’s motive behind it; which to a historian in my field looks far more like 19^th-century imperialism.

The British Empire was not all aggression, exploitation and racism, although it was very largely that. It also had a more idealistic side to it, which was why many liberal-thinking Britons supported it at the time. Some of them were even persuaded to go out and run it, including the husband of Virginia Woolf, and the man who later became George Orwell. Both of these later wrote highly critically about aspects of British rule in the Indian subcontinent; but not necessarily about imperialism per se.

In fact most of the constructive criticism of the way the empire was ruled came then from Critics of Empire – not opponents – which is why I decided to use that as the title of my first book: rather than The Anti-Imperialists, which was what I had had in mind when I began researching the subject. Strict anti-imperialists wanted to have nothing to do with the existing British colonies, but to let them relapse into pre-colonial savagery, as they thought (they were usually racists), or be taken over by other empires. It was the ‘liberal imperialists’ who had higher ambitions for a reformed British Empire, seeing it as a force for the spread of freedom in the world, once it had been democratised. They were the internationalists of their time; not the ‘Little Englanders’.

The most notable expression of this skein of imperial thought in the early 20^th century was the ‘British Commonwealth of Nations’, later simply ‘The Commonwealth’; which is still with us today, albeit almost imperceptibly. Of course imperialists of the old aggressive, exploitative and racist kind saw it as a continuation of the Empire they had loved; and then felt highly let down when some of its members – notably South Africa – started telling it what to do. (South Africa left the Commonwealth in 1961, because its apartheid policies were seen to transgress the organisation’s values.) Of course, historically speaking the Commonwealth was an outgrowth of the Empire; but – as the South African episode exemplifies – of its more liberal side.

One interesting aspect of the present spat over tariffs and Greenland between Trump and the rest of the world, is the part the Commonwealth is now playing in it. Carney of course is the Prime Minister of a Commonwealth country, and is being backed by two others, as well as by a Europe led by Britain. Carney’s vision of a quasi-federation of widely-scattered states (or economies), standing in opposition to a ‘bullying’ USA, could be seen as the apotheosis of the Commonwealth ideal; and especially if other nations choose to join it – as they had been able to do, theoretically, in the last century. Could this form the foundation of the ‘new world order’ that many are talking about, now that the post-1945 one is so ‘ruptured’: to use Carney’s word for it.

A brand-new ‘Commonwealth of Nations’ might be a better and safer answer to our present global problems than Trump’s strident beggar-my-neighbour nationalism; just as the original Commonwealth was conceived to be by those more idealistic imperialists a century ago. (Greenland would of course be a member.) So a ground plan exists for Carney to build on; back in my realm of British imperial History.

If the USA goes to war with Britain and her allies over tariffs and Greenland, it will be the second time this has happened in history. The first was the ‘War of 1812’, between the newly-minted USA and British Empire ‘loyalists’ living to the north; the latter supported by a federation of native Americans, mainly Shawnee. Here it was the Americans who were the ‘imperialists’, and the Canadians – British, French and indigenous – who were the ‘freedom fighters’; preferring to live under British protection than under American.

Present-day Americans (I think; they’ll correct me if I’m wrong) sometimes have the 1812-14 conflict presented to them as the ‘Second American War of Independence’ (after 1776). But it could just as well count as Canada’s. Don’t be misled by the ‘imperial’ appellation. The British connection was after all not so very oppressive, especially at that time for the Shawnee. One thing that independence did for the new republic was to enable it to massacre its ‘Indians’ with relative impunity – and also, of course, to enslave its blacks. Did that happen to the same extent in Canada? – The 1812 war itself ended in a stalemate, so far as the north was concerned; but one that preserved the British and French Canadians’ effective independence (albeit not the Shawnees’), and with the southern boundary that its eastern provinces still share with the US today.

It also enabled Canada to evolve thereafter in some subtly different ways from its increasingly powerful and more imperialistic neighbour, some of which can be recognised in the present stand-off between Trump and Carney. It remains more ‘European’ in its identity, with the contrast most noticeable in the two nations’ public health systems: the USA’s reflecting its capitulation to the extreme capitalist ethic that is its main distinctive feature, whereas Canada’s has been more open to European social-liberal ideas. Then there’s its parliamentary system; the position of its prime minister by contrast with that of the US’s president-emperor; and the much remarked-on ‘niceness’ (!) of Canadians. And finally, of course, there is its membership – as an ex-colony – of the (British) ‘Commonwealth of Nations’; which at its birth (in the early 20^th century) was visualised by the more idealistic – or naïve, and even anti-imperialist – of its aficionados as a means by which liberal ‘British’ values might be spread in the world. The USA, of course, broke away from the Empire too early to join. I imagine it’s too late now.

I used to read science fiction for entertainment, and for cerebral stimulation. By ‘science fiction’ I don’t mean all that Star Wars stuff – ‘Cowboys and Indians’ transposed to a different time and place; but the sort that makes you think: ‘What If’…; and so on.

I was led into SF via the Eagle comic’s Dan Dare: Pilot of the Future, which was, to be honest, a little bit Cowboys and Indians-y’, or rather Britain versus the Nazis-y: the Treens representing the Germans, the Mekon a kind of green Hitler, Dan a public school-educated Spitfire pilot, Digby his salt-of–the-earth working-class batman, and space ships modelled on Wellington bombers shorn of their wings. But how else could we imagine them all, so soon after World War II? (The first issue of the Eagle came out in 1950, when I was nine. I still remember my excitement when it dropped through our letter-box.)

Nonetheless, crude and relatively unimaginative as it was, Dan Dare made one aware of alternatives: different sorts of people, although all with recognisably human features: two arms, legs, eyes and so on; vastly different physical environments (Mercury especially); alternative social and political arrangements, albeit again usually reminiscent of earth’s history, especially the Middle Ages; but still exotic enough to stimulate a small boy’s imagination. And in my case, to lead me on to the more cerebral stuff in this genre: novels by HG Wells, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Olaf Stapledon, Ursula le Guin, latterly Cixin Liu, and others; and to some of the early very political Sci-Fi flicks: Things to Come, Metropolis, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Quatermass and the Pit, The War of the Worlds (1953 version), Forbidden Planet, The Time Machine (1960), The Fly, Them!, Dark Star, The Thing from Another World, Plan Nine from Outer Space (for fun)….and so on. Fellow aficionados will cavil at some of my selections, and at my many omissions; but this list is only meant to exemplify what I mean by ‘cerebral’ Sci-Fi, as opposed to the cowboys-and-Indians sort. I was a huge fan.

Not so much now, I’m afraid. I read far less Sci-Fi nowadays, partly because I’ve got less time to read or watch any sort of fiction; but partly also because present-day reality is starting to give me the same vicarious thrills that Dan Dare’s exploits used to give me as a boy. I’m now addicted to news from the USA, which currently seems as other-worldly as anything I used to read in the Eagle, and consequently as mentally stimulating. (It will appear differently, of course, to Americans.) I don’t need the Mekon, when Trump is around.

Then of course there’s the asteroid (or comet) 3i/Atlas, which has recently come into our solar system from a galaxy millions of light-years away, and may be much older than us. Early reports of it last year raised the interesting possibility that it might be being guided on its journey by intelligence, with many of its course corrections being inexplicable by natural forces – gravity, and the like – and pictured as a kilometres-length rocky cigar, with enough room in it to house scores of aliens, or robots; who perhaps had designs – for better or worse – on Earth. Which of course fascinated an old Sci-Fi buff like me; and especially a historian, who saw his whole subject crumbling into nothing. If an extra-terrestrial object could interrupt history so totally, it would make all our theories about the causes of human progress pointless. Ask any dinosaur who survived the last catastrophic impact from space 66 million years ago. Every dinosaur history written before that time would be worthless.

Now, I don’t believe this about 3i/Atlas; and indeed its Wiki entry (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3I/ATLAS) casts serious doubt on the theory that it really is a piloted spaceship, out either to destroy us, or alternatively to save the world from Trump. But I’m keeping an open mind – albeit open only very marginally (0.1%?) – that it might be something unnatural; and so am following the latest reports on it with the interest I use to devote to Sci-Fi.

I’m not a great fan of Keir Starmer’s, my main gripe with him having been over his re-categorisation of ‘Palestine Action’ as a ‘terrorist’ movement in August last year. Noisily demonstrating, holding up incendiary placards and even daubing planes with red paint, are not ‘terrorism’. They don’t ‘terrorise’ – or even ‘terrify’ – anyone.

However, I welcomed his elevation to the Labour leadership, and later to Number 10, as a concession, as I thought, to the rabid right-wing press, who surely couldn’t find or manufacture the charges against him that had helped it bring down Jeremy Corbyn.  Starmer, with a distinguished non-political career behind him, and one to boot that required careful thought, forensic objectivity and keen intelligence, would restore what in the 18^th century was called ‘bottom’ to the Labour Party. He clearly has little of the ‘charisma’ that today is felt to be essential in a political leader; but then neither did Clement Attlee, who led the most constructive – even revolutionary – peacetime British government of modern times. (‘A modest man, who has much to be modest about’, as the very charismatic Winston Churchill waspishly called him.) I was hoping that Starmer might follow in Attlee’s path, and at the same time serve to undermine this appetite for personal ‘charisma’, which has blighted British politics in recent times. (Look at Boris Johnson.) Starmer is decent, honourable and pragmatic, and gained a stonking majority – if a misleading one – at the last General Election.

What he appears not to have – this is what the press and even some Labour MPs are throwing at him now – is political judgment. Some of us thought we could see a certain kind of judgment when he appointed Lord Mandelson as Britain’s ambassador to Washington. Distrusting ‘Mandy’ as many of us did, we nonetheless went along with the idea that, in view of the complexion of the current US government, it might be a good idea to send a snake to parley with the other snakes there, rather than someone more traditional and moral. It was certainly a pragmatic decision, which Corbyn could never have made. Some of us – me included – even thought it might be ‘brilliant’. How wrong in retrospect we were.

I’m glad that Starmer has announced today that he won’t resign over this. His excuse is that he believed Mandelson’s lies when he questioned him over his ties with the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, which at one point involved Mandelson’s passing secret documents to him. Mandelson insists that he knew nothing of Epstein’s dirtier activities, featuring underage girls, which he thinks were kept from him ‘because I’m gay’. Starmer’s acceptance of his lies may say a lot about his naivety; but is that a resigning matter, if it stands alone on the charge sheet? (A historian is reminded of the Profumo affair here; Macmillan didn’t resign over that issue either.) Besides, one is uncertain about his possible successor, and the boost it might give to the quasi-fascists in ‘Reform’. That’s a plus for Starmer, who may be living on borrowed time. But if he uses that time well – more radically, in my view – he might well come to be seen to stand on that pedestal beside the modest Attlee.

In Europe Anarchism was (and is?) usually associated with the political Left. In the modern USA, however, it is definitely a thing of the Right. Unfettered free market capitalism is an essentially anarchist ideology, whether free market capitalists want to describe themselves as ‘anarchists’ or not. It often goes under the name of ‘libertarianism’, or other titles incorporating the contentious word ‘liberty’.

Here’s a meticulously-researched account of the origins and modern history of the movement in America, up to and including Trump, taken from the current issue of Lobster magazine. A long read, but well worth it.

I think I’ve mentioned before my difficulties with my Emails, which I’ve not been able to send or receive for the past couple of months. After numerous enquiries to KCom – my ‘server’ (is that the word? based in Hull) – they’ve have been unable to restore the connection, or to offer any explanation as to why it’s been cut off. That’s until yesterday; when they at last replied back, on a ‘help’ line, with this message:

Regarding your Karoo email access: the reason you’re unable to log in while in Sweden is due to our updated security measures. We’ve strengthened security to protect customer accounts from scams and unauthorised access. As part of this, access to Karoo webmail is now restricted to a small number of approved countries.
You can only access Karoo webmail from

United Kingdom
France
Germany
Spain
Portugal
United States

If you’re outside these countries, webmail login won’t work.

That contravenes what KCom expressly promised when I originally signed up with them – that I could access my account anywhere in the world. It also goes against my experience with them until a couple of months ago, when I used KCom constantly – from Sweden – with no difficulty. Why on earth they couldn’t tell me of this change in their ‘security conditions’ at the beginning – whenever that was – or when I first raised the issue with them, I don’t know. It has been frustrating for me, of course, but also directly damaging to my work. I shall be protesting in no uncertain terms.

I pay £79 a month for this service; which friends tell me seems excessive in any case. What else do I get for it, apart from email? What shall I lose if I cancel it? (And ask for a refund, for the last few months, at the very least.)

In the meantime I have a new backup email address, which is:

bernardporter869@gmail.com.

Please use that from now on.