On Nihilistic Destruction

So we covered a lot of dense ground surveying the material implications of the Iran war, but we still don't have a complete picture of the underlying motivations of the combatants in the conflict. This aspect of the conflict is important, as it tells us what is actually impelling the advancing material conditions of the crisis, and can provide clues as to where it may go. 

Unfortunately motivations are notoriously difficult to suss out. Getting into the heads of individuals requires those individuals volunteering their motivations, if they even understand their own motivations clearly. With powerful people, that is even more difficult for obvious reasons. And then you have to make sense of institutional and then whole state motivations as all of those layered individual motivations interact and add up, which Aurelien has been writing about.

Unless you're personally in the middle of these power centers and experiencing things personally, you are getting all of your information from various media, some of which is high quality and the rest of which is garbage. So this tends to dilute - or at least complicate - the predictive power of gauging motivations. 

What we can do here is come up with a composite based on the ongoing progression of events, hungrily clutching the good data like Gollum's Precious, taking into account historical trajectories and structural tendencies, simplifying the movements of these large organizational forms into personalities with certain characters, whose behaviors can be guessed at and speculated upon. 

That means veering back into the esoteric, and getting into an ontology of the respective motivating impulses of the main combatants in the war. 

In our initial discussion we talked about Iran's point of view and their motivations in the initial phase of the war: they've been cornered and are in an existential struggle to carve out a more acceptable state of geopolitical security for themselves, which necessitates a utilization of what leverage they have. This is straightforward: they've been repeatedly attacked, their state threatened on an existential level, and their leadership has been fairly clear and consistent in their communication of their intentions. 

But we didn't get too much into motivations of the actual aggressors who started the war, that is, the US and Israel, which I think are a little more difficult to get a handle on, because their motivations appear to be so confused, contradictory, and poorly realized when one pulls together the bulk of their media statements, as well as past and present actions and behaviors.  

On their face, these motivations seem fairly straightforward too: Israel has long considered Iran as a major threat to its power in the region, and not long after the previous 12 day war, they thought they saw weakness and a vanishing opportunity, and made the decision to strike again. 

The United States has a set of aims that are largely in alignment, along with some historical grievances to nurse, and made the decision to back Israel and preemptively strike with them. But then if you start to pick apart these motivations and the wavering actions on the ground, things start to fall apart.   

In terms of the US, we've been subjected to a never-ending carousel of changing motivations communicated in the press: we were engaging in a pre-emptive strike to back up Israel; no, wait, we were destroying Iran's nuclear capabilities and ballistic missiles that were supposedly annihilated in the previous 12 day war; no, wait, we were conducting regime change. Nevermind that there were no serious or coherent plans for any of that. 

And you look at Iran's overly cautious behavior in the years leading up to this war, and their willingness to compromise in negotiations that were then willfully scuttled and abused by the US. You look at the telegraphed fireworks shows in the form of airstrikes, and then the requests for cease fire in the backend, both in the 12 day war and the current war, and you get this strange sense that the US both cares and doesn't care about whatever result may come about. 

The rogue attack dog off-leash air that Israel gives off makes a little more sense, but not by much. It was them tapping out before the end of the 12 day war after all, as their interceptor defenses were wearing thin and more Iranian missiles and drones were getting through and doing more damage. Have they not been paying attention to the whole US "emptying its cupboards" thing to supply powers like them with munitions to carry on their genocide, in addition to supplying proxy powers like Ukraine?

It is here that I want to get into a more esoteric ontological discussion of these motivations, assisted by some great recent higher-level discussions on the Trillbilly Worker's Party podcast. 

What the guys at TWP explore in conversation is the basic structure and nature of the twin motivations of the attacking force in the Iran war. To engage once again in canine metaphor, we do seem to have the "tail wagging the dog" issue in which we have Israel's immediate interests driving the conflict. But to take the tail wag metaphor one step further, it is still the dog itself that is supplying that blood and tissue, which makes the wagging possible. 

Israel has long been a Western colonial project, in which the West (aided by Eastern Europe) exported one of its particularly thorny religious and cultural hang-ups, which went necrotic in the course of the World Wars and needed to be excised. The West and its Eastern European allies accomplished this by injecting its persecuted Jewish radicals into a territory opened up by the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, and then the West proceeded to lean on that territory ever more heavily as a foothold in the Middle East, after Iran turned against them, and it is this project now being rejected as Israel attempts to clear the territory for its own apartheid state. 

For Israel, the genocide, and their systematic and aggressive posture of sowing chaos and destruction in the region has turned them into a pariah, and now there is no way out but through, which it has attempted to accomplish by tugging at the skirts of a mythologized United States. But for their patron the US, this vision of religious zealotry and apocalyptic destruction seems to be the last compelling geopolitical vision to get behind, as there is nothing left to offer the world but to rain destruction and sow chaos. 

And it is the US' constant flows of aid and munitions which keep Israel running and fighting. At the same time, historical colonial investments have bequeathed Israel with a flourishing tech and surveillance sector, allowing it to export surveillance products trained on the subjugation of the Palestinian people, providing a valuable service and know-how to Western powers struggling with the same basic problem: how to manage populations that you can no longer offer anything to. This is a problem growing around the world too.      

It is easy enough to pick on the Trump administration, which takes this logic to an exaggerated end, but the US has had decades of developments towards this end. After decades of neoliberal policy and disintegration, concentration of wealth, and the systematic destruction of genuine alternatives, the US no longer knows what it is or what it stands for, and as such, is clueless as to what it can actually offer. Bored and struck dumb after decades of hegemonic power, where else is there to go or what else is there to do? 

There has been a lot of talk of nihilism when speaking about the motivations and actions on the part of the powerful in the United States. But what kind of nihilism are we talking about exactly? We often operate off of this mixed conception of nihilism where one believes in nothing, but then there is also often an element of destruction that is present at the same time. What is going on here?

After all, if you genuinely believed in nothing, it could be a conceivable outcome that you simply collapse on the floor and refuse to move, perishing right there. Because what really matters? No, where is this consistent element of destruction coming from?

Thinking about the psychology of power, you have this basic problem: you've come into your power through control of the helm. To let go of the helm is to let go of the basis of your power, and with the concentration of power, and the intoxicating and stupefying effects of great and sustained power, even the clear demonstration of incompetence and mismanagement is not enough to break that grasp, so the only way out is through knocking down any possible challenger or rival, sowing chaos, and spreading destruction.

This nihilistic destruction then appears as the natural terminus of that imperialist bid at the unceasing discharge of absolute power. Without a vessel to contain and regulate it, all of that undisciplined power flows outward, and disperses.  

We hear that Iran is in existential struggle, and that does appear to be true. But I think there could very well be an existential struggle in the West that mirrors it. Only, the locus of that Western existential struggle is concentrated in the individual, or at least in smaller groups, as opposed to some larger organized body struggling to survive, which could conceivably accelerate dissolution as greater and greater pressure is put upon individuals or small groups at odds with one another, after coming into contact with a larger organized body in existential struggle. In our case in the West, individuals may survive indeed, but whatever it was that we were a part of seems to be going away sooner rather than later. 

It ain't over yet; there is still a ways to go and much that can happen. But squinting at this basic ontology, we may have clues as to how things might advance. 

Spatial and Temporal Dimensions of the Strait of Hormuz Closure

Now I want to hook up the previous discussion of the spatial and temporal aspects of our political economy to these analyses by Yves Smith and Craig Tindale, which are absolutely harrowing. You really have to read them yourself to appreciate the gravity of what we are looking at. To summarize, they are a description of the systemic risks posed by a protracted closure of the Strait of Hormuz in the course of the Iran war. 

To seat further discussion, I'll briefly recap a higher-level takeaway from the previous discussion to provide a background framework: our global political economy has been predicated on the steady annihilation of time and space constraints. With perpetual revolution in powers of transportation, communication, production, etc. there is a necessity for a widening utilization of specialized materials and resources, which today translates to an uninterrupted circulation of advanced fuels, chemicals, materials, and manufactured products, which assist in the uninterrupted circulation of basic goods like food, water, and energy. 

As dazzling as it is, this rapid, uninterrupted circulation obscures the existence of geographically-bounded processes clustered in distinct territories. Over longer periods of time, these territories have been spatially reorganized into their current configurations, which aren't easily replaced or moved, and take long time frames and lots of energy and investment to do so. It is from these fixed territories that all of our marvelous modern resources, materials, and products come, which keeps global circulation of products and peoples rapid and stable. Through crisis we discover the nature of these productive territories, and their disruption can cause all of this rapid motion to come to a screeching halt. 

Lets turn to an aspect of Craig Tindale's central analysis to illustrate this: the cascading systemic effects of a bulk loss in circulation of even a single global resource, that of sour crude oil, due to the Strait of Hormuz closure. The implications of this single resource bottleneck are highly interconnected and dependent, but I am just going to get into one section of that analysis with some added commentary to flesh out the greater point I am trying to make, leaving the rest to your imagination.

For one thing, due to regional geological histories, different types of crude oil are found in different parts of the world. A given oil field took millions of years with an incomprehensible array of natural forces working to produce it, so whatever is there is what you get, and then that is effectively it. Some 20% of the world's crude oil currently passed through the Strait of Hormuz, a majority of it sour crude, named for its acidity and its sulfur content. This oil is extracted where it is found all over the Middle East, where it is loaded up on ships in the Persian Gulf and then shipped out through the Strait of Hormuz to the rest of the world. 

Logistically this is how you get huge quantities out of this region fast at lower cost, and this is how everything was regularly working up to this point. You can transport some of this by pipeline and truck, or on existing rail, but you can't transport as much as fast or as far, and increasing any of these parameters require new intensive investments in the infrastructure to support that. Plus sour crude is more corrosive and toxic, so you need specialized equipment and infrastructure to move it safely. 

There is redundancy: there are other places where sour crude is extracted, such as Venezuela, Mexico, and Canada, but again it requires time and investment to compensate for the huge loss in the Middle East, if there is even enough remaining exploitable reserve to compensate with, and then there is the matter of the difficulty of extracting the heavy crude deposits remaining from places like Canada and Venezuela, which require additional extractive technologies to process the more difficult reserves. 

So this mad war has resulted in the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which has taken a huge bite out of the sour crude supply. Which poses a longer term problem too: as Ian Welsh and others have noted, the idled shipping in the Persian gulf has led to upstream issues, such as the backing up of oil flows for Middle Eastern producers, with maxed out oil storage leading to the necessity of shutting down production at the wells, and when you shut down production on a well, it can be more difficult to get it going again, and this difficulty grows the more time passes.  So you have the first order problem of less oil to go around, which is used for just about everything in a modern industrial economy, which not only drives up energy and fuel prices but really the price of everything. But then there is a second order problem that follows from this too. 

As Tindale notes, regulations require that the sulfur content of sour crude be removed for it to be used in fuels and other products, and as a biproduct of that refining process, the removed sulfur makes for an indirect contribution to the majority of the world's sulfur production. With the strait closed, between the stoppage of the sour crude and LNG processing, you get an 8% loss in global sulfur production, by Tindale's estimation. 

You need sulfur to produce sulfuric acid, which is a crucial component of the modern industrial economy, with applications in metals extraction, artificial fertilizers, and wastewater treatment, to casually name a few crucial functions. Notice also that sulfuric acid is also highly toxic and corrosive, requiring advanced handling infrastructure, so alternatives here are not easily invested in quickly, and so a shortage is not easily or quickly remedied. 

With shortage, a strain is put on the global sulfuric acid industry, leading to a downstream strain on the mining and metals industries. Here Tindale gives a good example of the potential strain on production in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and in Zambia, where you get to see another territorialized cluster of global industry. Resources like copper, cobalt, and nickel must be extracted on an industrial scale where they are geologically abundant, and places like the DRC and Zambia are where you find them. 

Metals like copper, cobalt, and nickel are heavy, especially embedded in ore, so they aren't traveling very far before being processed for export. Indeed, the sulfur-burning acid plants are in the DRC and Zambia, close to the mining operations,  The sulfuric acid is either exported or used in the region in acid-leaching processes to separate the metals from the ores, so that the metals can exported in turn. 

Since the DRC and Zambia are not necessarily rich in sulfur, much of the sulfur must be imported, which is where we get the aforementioned strain on sulfuric acid production. Less sulfuric acid means a direct strain on the metals extraction process that requires it for separating metal from ore, so less copper, cobalt, and nickel are going out too. 

With the income these large operations are bringing in, these already-strained regions could become more unstable, radiating that political instability outward. We could go on describing even more downstream effects: new electrical products and electricity generation being starved of metals, chipmaking starved of energy and sulfuric acid, data centers starved of chips and electricity, and etc. 

These are just a few steps into one possible broken resource chain, and there are many more resources implicated in a much more complex web. Do read the analyses linked above and think them through. And we haven't even gotten into the political and financial layers connected to these resource chains. Its all tangled up. 

Gee, we've come so far. Once we fought over guano islands, timberlands, silver mines, salt mines, spice trades, and what have you. Now we fight over these global supply chains of some of the strangest and most dangerous substances you can imagine, which are intricately weaved together, tightly coupled and circulating together all over the world, powering and lubricating this deadly whirling Rube Goldberg machine that has been spiriting much of our food and other resources to us from various corners of the globe, which seems to drive people insane even when its growth merely slows.  

Many of the key nodes in these supply chains, where the actual territorialized production processes hum away to produce these substances, clustered in strikable nodules, cannot be easily moved or reconfigured without years of concerted effort and investment. Neither can these operations be starved for too long to remain economically viable, as their host nations are often deep in debt, requiring a constant flow of exports bringing in income.  

Like the various natural ecological services we rely on - that are too complex and too long term to reproduce - these productive operations are themselves abused and driven into the ground, simultaneously in many parts of the world, as labor is squeezed and wealth polarizes and political instability grows, concurrently as increasingly intense climate and ecological events mount through the abuse of the natural world. 

There are many of these productive territories, which only seem to reveal themselves to the ruling class through crisis, which becomes ever more likely as one after the other, neglected and abused, goes into crisis, weakening the others downstream, prompting additional crises. 

Spatial and Temporal Considerations of the Achaemenids and Greeks

I don't have the full story yet of what types of resource flows were involved in the back-and-forth struggle of the Achaemenid empire and the Greeks, but one issue that does seem to come up repeatedly is the presence of resources like timber and pitch in regions like Macedonia and other parts of the Balkans, which figured prominently in ship building in the ancient world. 

It would make sense that regions such as these would become contentious in terms of who is controlling them and the resources that are coming out of them. You need a hell of a lot of timber for those larger ships, and if you are looking to be a major player in maritime trade and warfare - which has been a necessity for the rapid movement of large quantities of resources for thousands of years - you better have a healthy supply. And those really large, healthy groves only grow in certain places.

The Space and Time of Industrial Political Economy

I'm going to briefly run through a summary of one aspect of the geographer David Harvey's work - who works off of Marx in turn - which will make for a useful framework to structure a companion piece on the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. 

In any sort of political economy - but especially in industrial political economy as we'll see - time and space are important dimensions to consider in the function and operation of the world economic system. Through the history of the capitalist system, it has been the relentless annihilation of time and space that has been among the most important (and predictive) motivating factors in support of capital's historic drive to accumulate and grow. 

However short-termist capital's appetites for extraction and profit may be, there are periods of its development when it is willing to engage in energy and resource-intensive long-term infrastructural and technological investments and conquest to effect the toppling of spatial and temporal barriers to accumulation. 

So we see historical improvements in transportation and communication for example that are linked to decades of research and development, and then years or even decades more embodying these improvements in massive and durable infrastructure projects, such as in the form of rail, ports, energy and electrical infrastructure, lines of communication, and then the ongoing development of various iterations of Internet technologies, and so on, so as to speed up the movement of materials and the coordination of production. There are complex historical reasons for this that I've explored elsewhere and don't have time for now, but a smattering of them include capitalist competition, warfare, various environmental and political pressures, and so on.   

The dimensions of time and space are inextricably linked together, and function together. The rapid movement of materials to and fro implies places that those materials are rapidly moved from and rapidly moved to, which adds an entirely new dimension of consideration to the historical processes of acceleration and movement. 

Historical to capitalist development, you not only see a continuous development of means and technologies to reduce the significance of distance in the passage of time, but also the complete spatial overhaul of relationships in the spaces between those distances. This began as a revolutionary overhaul of the means of production, which included gathering labor forces more tightly and densely together, and breaking their tasks down into increasingly simplified and specialized tasks which worked together in an organized and mechanistic manner, speeding up the actual processes of production locally.

This process was multidimensional in its effects. One good example Harvey gives is in the early phases of the Industrial Revolution when there was a transition from wood-burning to coal-burning for energy applications. There was a temporal element in this transition, as the energy dense and portable coal packed a bigger punch in a smaller package for the generalized acceleration of transportation and production. 

But there was also an additional spatial dimension as well: you get wood from trees, and you need a lot of it for a reliable energy source, and this takes a lot of land space, which competes for livestock, agriculture, production, and habitation spaces. With coal, you can go underground, and with parallel advances in the steam engine, it became possible to pump out a mine, allowing mining to go even deeper, freeing up the horizontal realm for ever more production. 

As this process gathered steam, the capitalist system went on to reconquer and reconfigure those distant lands where certain complexes of desired resources were to be found, which were either unique to their geography, or which posed as additional reserves when the local resources were burned up. These additional production centers had to be re-organized and invested in, which took time, but which then vastly accelerated production as they came online. This process was carried out by generations of hegemonic imperial powers and by their allies and rivals looking to modernize and rationalize their own societies to better compete. 

The more technological progress you make, the faster you are crossing larger distances, the more you are speeding up production, and the better you are besting rivals, the more pronounced is a tendency to require more and more quantities of different types of materials of greater specificity, which are sourced all over the world for either their uniqueness or for their redundancy and abundance, while at the same time denying rivals those very materials so that they can't compete.  

It is this historical process that defines the structural bounds of the present crisis. The world system, as it has been set up, now needs to run at a continuously rapid pace, as the perpetual circulation of the lowest fundamental necessities such as food, water, energy, and etc. is more dependent than ever on the perpetual smooth function of higher technological tiers of operation in transport, communication, security, energy, and so on, as such a system tends to destroy the slower, more localized processes of production that exist as impediments to the acceleration of its processes of production and accumulation.   

One example I really like is the pouring of vast amounts of concrete. Concrete is a really important resource for modern infrastructure, and a highly flexible and workable material. Anything really big with a heavy footprint at the very least needs a deep foundation which requires a lot of concrete. Any sort of heavy industry or transport requires strong, stable, lasting surfaces realized with a material like concrete or some similar material form like asphalt. 

In general, it is an indispensable base material for building upon or building with; it is what you want if you want a flat plane that will stay put with a stability and a predictability and to get you up out of the dirt, and which can be thrust upon, or hold things in place to build further upon. It is inseparable from civilization at this point. There is a reason concrete is the second-used substance in the world next to water. 

But as you lay down concrete to travel on or build upon, you must lay it upon the earth, covering up the earth and anything within or underneath. As the concrete radiates ever further outward as the built environment expands, you must traverse across its growing distances at ever more rapid rates, and the provision of natural resources has to occur ever further outside its bounds, with resources trucked in and finished products and wastes trucked out. This tendency could be managed differently under another political economy, but a more expansionary laissez faire version is what we have. 

Besides pouring more concrete for development, existing concrete must be maintained as it passes through its lifecycle by getting busted out, with new concrete poured in. You also have to bust concrete out any time you make changes to anything underneath, such as conducting maintenance on plumbing and sewage systems, and then you re-pour over the finished job. So concrete is getting poured all the time, which means you have to constantly be making it. You can recycle old concrete as aggregate, but that aggregate becomes less firm and stable with each generation of its use.

Concrete is composed of cement - typically made up of cooked limestone and clay and other materials - and various aggregates to bulk up the volume and add stability, such as coarse gravel and sand, the latter of which adds additional stability and fills in smaller voids. Here's where things get even more interesting. The type of sand you need for strong, stable concrete tends to be sand in which the individual grains are water-sculpted, making them more varied and angular, which you are more likely to find on river banks, lakes, and coastal zones. 

Sand that is acted on by the wind on the other hand tends to be more rounded and uniform, which is less effective as an aggregate in concrete. Research is ongoing to process less suitable sands for concrete, but that means adding expensive intermediate processes, as opposed to simply scooping it up. The interest in this alternative implies a shortage. And sand mining competes with coastline ecologies, water sources, landscape stability, and other natural resources.  

So you can only find good concrete sand in certain places, and sand is quite heavy, so you have to figure in the economics of its extraction and then its transport. You'll often find concrete plants at good central places near where the gravels are quarried and the sands are gathered, and then that mixed concrete is transported somewhere else in turn. In larger construction projects, you may even find a central mix plant close by, which mixes the concrete with water to get it ready for direct pouring, a time sensitive service. 

The spatial and temporal dimensions of the process of competitive production, toward the end of competitive accumulation, places hard limits on the actual physical places of production. Concrete manufacturing complexes must be developed in consideration of the economics of mining sensitive resources where they occur, and then getting large amounts of those resources, which are very heavy, where they need to go, where they are subsequently mixed and then enter into distribution as a product. These productive processes occur in a territory then, a delimited space which must be organized in accordance with the production of value and surplus value. 

In the West, it is easy to lose sight of this aspect of territorialization, what with the hitherto rapid and smooth movement of goods and services, though in recent years in the course of the pandemic and given the current crisis in the Middle East, the inner workings of these vast supply chains have become much more visible as they have begun to break down. In the companion piece to this one, we'll marshal this framework to explore the contemporary dimensions of this historical process, as well as the crisis that emerges within the confines of its structure. 

History is Hard

At a certain scale, the study of history can be a very difficult thing to navigate. With the intensity of our collective instruments of research, and our access to the vast amounts of information and inquiry now possible, we have a very long timeframe to account for now, which is suffused with an incredible richness of knowledge wherever you look. And with each new day, we make more history. 

If you choose any given historical period, you find that as you go deeper into that period, there is more and more to know, and more going on than you previously imagined, and that it was all simplification upon simplification in the history books, and even in our best efforts, and our cutting edge research. 

You can see how a given scholar can dedicate their entire life to a certain smaller period of time, or even region or limited subject. Poring through the historical record, you see name after name, relation after relation, event after event, and almost immediately in any given procession of events, the mind begins to melt. It takes a gifted person to organize all of that into a compelling narrative that works, so it becomes very important to learn from gifted individual thinkers covering a variety of topics throughout history to even begin to make sense of it all. 

Clash of Titans

Taken together, Paul Cooper's Fall of Civilizations podcast episode on the Achaemenid Empire and Dan Carlin's Hardcore History series on Alexander the Great (still ongoing) paint a gorgeous, multi-faceted historical picture on a very large spatial and temporal scale.  

With Achaemenid Persia, you could see the empire steadily coalescing under the capable hand of Cyrus the Great, famously besting the prophecy-misreading king Croesus among others, and defeating and annexing Medea and Babylon, in addition to Croesus' Lydia. The famous Achaemenid multi-cultural polity and policy, and religious tolerance began as genuine aspects of Cyrus' rule, but which would later be used as weapons, which we'll get to. 

Besides their flexible and tolerant approach to empire-building, the Achaemenids advanced a number of impressive feats in centralized bureaucracy and governance, development of a civil service and a professional army, development of cutting edge infrastructure such as roads in the form of the Royal Road - parts of which are still in use today - and an organized postal system which were adopted by later empires. Culturally the Achaemenids were emulated by other cultures in many ways, including in fashion, with the eventual widespread adoption of pants for example.

As Achaemenid Persia conquered its surroundings, it would annex those territories while attempting to keep their local cultures and religions intact, allowing them to largely carry on their own governance, installing satraps to rule them as satrapies (territories under Persian control), who were amenable to the local population but who could also be counted on for loyalty, maintaining resource flows, and helping to provision the Persian military, among other functions.

As the empire expanded out to its full extent you could make out a growing dispersal of its power and vitality over a longer period of time, which happened both in its core through indications of a degradation of leadership and occasional usurpations and brushfire civil war - with an occasional talented ruler emerging - and out in its periphery though a degradation in the satraps themselves, as they ruled over crumbling satrapies, responding to pressures and shocks of their own.

Because after all the peripheral territories had histories of their own and local forces and interests to harness and manage to conduct their own governance, with local individuals competing for power and resources, which had to somehow be harmonized with the distant Persian interests. Starting in 499 BC, one particularly large series of shocks, known as the Greco-Persian war as a whole, demonstrates this process well. And the roots of this conflict go back to the empire's early expansion. 

From a certain vantage point, that legendary Delphi Oracle prophecy that said Croesus would destroy a great empire if he went to war with Cyrus takes on a Moebius strip quality through the passage of time. To foreshadow a bit, the prophecy would end implicating the Achaemenid empire after all. 

After gleefully misinterpreting the prophecy and charging into war, Croesus' empire would fall to Cyrus' army, clearing the way for the Persians' annexation of Lydia. But Lydia contained on its coast the Ionian Greeks who settled there after the Bronze Age collapse of Mycenean Greece, and these Greeks would be incorporated into the Achaemenid empire. 

Over time, the Persians found the Greeks to be a troublesome bunch. The Greeks didn't have easily identifiable and stable native ruling elites to co-opt and rule through, only aristocracies made up of feuding factions that were difficult to get a handle on. So they ruled through local tyrants that they sponsored, who had the difficult task of maintaining power locally while remaining loyal to the Persians who supported them. 

It was in 499 BC when this troublesome arrangement hit a snag. To cut a long story short, one of the local Greek tyrants, a gentleman by the name of Aristagoras, would find his political position in danger after a failed venture to shore up his standing at home and curry favor with the Persians. His joint venture with the satrap Artaphernes to carry out a siege on the island of Naxos ended in failure after a tangled mess of leadership conflicts and a protracted siege exhausted the expedition's resources. 

Rather than risk political ruin or worse, Aristagoras incited the Ionian Greeks to revolt against the Persians, and they did. The revolt widened - which indicated existing issues with the Greek and Persian relations - with Sparta refusing support, but with Athens and Eretria agreeing to support the rebellion. 

Despite the lively revolt, which went on for 6 years or so, the Greek offensive was not at full force and relatively fragmented, and the Persian response was decisive and apparently fair. The revolt was put down, and the lead perpetrators were hunted down and executed, and the rebelling provinces were brought back under Persian control. 

However, underlying motivations in the Persian leadership were shifting from governance to revenge. The Persian king Darius vowed to punish Athens and Eritrea for their support of the Ionian revolt. He was reported to be like a dog after a bone, asking a servant to remind him of the Athenians some three times a day. He was also convinced that the rest of the Greeks were a threat to the stability of the empire anyway, and that they would eventually need to be brought under control. 

As part of the first major invasion of Greece, in 492 BC the Persians re-subjugated Thrace and Macedonia after those regions became more independent after the Ionian revolt. However at 490 the Persians were defeated by Greece at the Battle of Marathon, and then Darius died before the invasion could continue. Darius' successor Xerxes was eager to carry on the invasion, with the empire working itself into a frenzy, but at this point, the invasion was uniting the whole Greek world, which would put up a more coordinated, spirited defense. 

Xerxes enjoyed several victories, including a pyrrhic one after being delayed at the famous Thermopylae, which was an inspiration to the Greek world, motivating them to fight back hard, and eventually beat back the Persians. The final defeat of the Persians at Mycale encouraged the Greek cities in Asia to revolt and the Macedonians to regain their independence. 

After the invasion ended in disaster, Xerxes was assassinated, and the Persians halted military operations in Greece. However after their victory, the Greeks would enter into their own period of dispersion, with Persia opting to hang back and take advantage of the growing disunity, seeking to wedge apart the various Greek powers, playing them against each other by picking favorites and funding them against their rivals, with that tactic figuring prominently in various conflicts, such as the highly destructive Peloponnesian war. 

Athens' power and fortunes would come and go, with Persia backing the Spartans and the mainland Greeks against them. And then Spartan triumphalism and imperialism after the war would alarm the Persians, leading them to back an alliance of Athens, Thebes, and Corinth against Sparta in the Corinthian War. Athens' fortunes began to shift again, with them reclaiming lost ground, in the war, and alarmed, the Persians would throw their weight back behind the Spartans. After enough of that, when the Greeks were sufficiently weakened, that war was concluded with The King's Peace, which left Persia back in control of Ionian Greece, and the remaining Greek states as atomized, autonomous entities which were not allowed to form alliances, opening the door to perpetual Persian meddling indefinitely. Sound familiar? 

In the face of the Greek defiance, Persian tolerance would turn into contempt and then open hostility, and they would weaponize their abilities to appeal to disparate cultures by instrumentalizing the aims of distant cultures such as the Athenians and Spartans, encouraging their disagreements and amplifying the momentum of the challenger of the moment, while throwing its weight against the victors who had gotten more powerful, so as to further disperse their energies. This long history of invasion and then the subsequent background meddling would instill a deep resent and hatred of the Persians in the Greek populations, which would have future consequences. 

All of that dispersing Greek energy would then coalesce again in the rising Macedonian empire, firming up under the capable hands of Philip II, revolutionizing the army in the process, with his gaze turned towards Persia. A fascinating story in itself, but the post grows long. 

To cut another long story short, eventually that consolidated empire, replete with a deadly and well-oiled war machine, freshly revolutionized, would be handed off to Alexander III, or Alexander the Great as we know him, after his father Philip II was assassinated. Alexander consolidated his legitimacy, quelling various revolts such as in Thebes so as to bring the rest of the Greeks under his umbrella. And this young ruler had a bottomless well of ambition and an unquenchable appetite for endless war. It was with these material capabilities and personal attributes that Alexander assumed his departed father's stance towards Persia, a hated enemy which presided over vast lands, resources, and treasure.  

With that, Alexander launched himself and his Macedonian army into Achaemenid Persia, sweeping through that aging and weakening empire like a wildfire through so much dried-out kindling, spreading Greek culture and ideas all the while, like mycelium taking root in the sooty aftermath of scorched earth. 

Alexander's conquest of the vast holdings of Persia were similar to the future Arab conquests, in that he arrived with a thunderclap, taking a staggering amount of territory in such a short amount of time, with his conquest lasting just as briefly. After exhausting his expansionary limits and then having his life cut short, Alexander's empire would fracture under civil war after his death, leaving behind Macedonia proper, Ptolemaic Egypt, the Attalid kingdom in West Asia Minor (now Turkey), and the Seleucid Empire in a large part of what is now known as the Middle East. 

Later on I might fill in more of the latter half of this story, especially as Dan Carlin finishes his series on Alexander the Great, but that's enough for now. There was a general takeaway that I was most interested in expressing here. You can see these complexes of organized human activity - these empires - expand over time, fighting to maintain their shape with initial goals of governance and broad-based prosperity, goals which break down after the ravages of time and successive shocks deteriorate these structures, with power concentrating at the top, leading to king-driven processes of conquest, revenge, and extraction.

And different structures with different histories evolve differently, as we saw with the parallel development of the Greeks and Persians, which then interact with each other and influence each others' trajectories. And further, these structures evolve temporally as they expand, and come into contact with each other, and decline and collapse, and then reconstitute into something else, or reconstitute somewhere else, changing over time, which is something we can get more into another time too. 

Fast forward to today, and we have this striking inversion, where the West as spearheaded by its US hegemon - what with its affinity for the ancient Greeks as its spiritual predecessors - struggles with a dissipation of its own as it shambles after Iran, which has dug into the mountainous region where the Achaemenid empire once stood, with the West seeking its revenge after various historical insults, its goodwill exhausted after 80 years of various smaller scale wars of aggression and perpetual meddling, seemingly unaware of the yawning chasm of hollowed-out capability, with a dim inkling of some kind of plan. A rabid dog after a phantom bone. 

Gutpunch

So the Iran war is going into its third day, and already so much has happened, accompanied with a flurry of commentary. I'm going to put some of the commentary I've heard together and further some secondary commentary with some more open-ended speculation, as I won't be able to keep up with facts on the ground. 

Before that, in consideration of how complex and fast-moving this state of affairs is, I'm going to do something a little risky and describe something largely ineffable. Us moderns are trained to be very wary of the ineffable and the slippery for good reason, but it might be worth talking about nevertheless. 

This war feels very big. What I mean by that is that I've detected a rising sense of anguish that is particularly acute in nearly everyone I've talked to about this. In somewhere like the United States that has remained untouched by total war for quite some time, you hear about various distant wars and can be completely sickened and outraged by them - and we've had plenty of that - but its not the same thing as being closer to the war itself and being in danger of directly suffering its effects, whatever form they may take. But this one feels closer in a way, on account of being so big. 

In the last two decades at the very least (going back a smidge to 911 and the War on Terror), there has been one shock after another in the US, with each shock getting bigger and more frequent, with public trust and legitimacy getting weaker and weaker as a result. This is also true throughout the West. And as you get weaker, those shocks are more likely to hit, and when they hit, they hit harder. It's like riding in a car while you're sick: each bump and jostle - however minor they may be on their own - just ripple right through you, turning your stomach and making your head throb. And the West is pretty sick. Or maybe dope sick. 

We know it, we've watched it. For those paying attention, we know how financialized and hollowed out and corrupt - economically, culturally, morally, and so on - the West has gotten, and at the same time, we've been watching as a country like Iran has been pushed to the brink and into the realm of existential struggle. 

You may know of that rising feeling of unease and then panic as you watch someone getting pushed and pushed and you can feel a fight coming on, just before it erupts. Well and things have erupted: we have a fight and we have strikes all over the Middle East. Things could very well cool down again in a couple of days and return to a simmering unease, but it sure doesn't feel like it. 

Before getting too absorbed in those feelings though, I mentioned putting together some commentary and speculating a bit, which could help corroborate some of this ineffable stuff.   

Iran has been essentially cornered. Its caution, its amenability to political compromise, and its desire for stability have all been turned against it repeatedly, and it has become quite clear that the US and Israel want to strangle it, no matter what it does. But Iran is a bigger and stronger target. So it has to fight, whatever that might look like now, and its leadership does seem to be communicating this to itself.      

A land invasion of Iran would be quite difficult, and is unlikely. They still face getting bombed for days on end, though from the sounds of it they have a healthier missile and drone stockpile than their foes, and possibly greater powers of production, figuring in potential support from Russia and China. They also face intelligence penetration and further assassinations, as well as some difficult diplomatic decisions to make when some of the kinetic pressure is lifted. Iran has already been dealing with these problems for quite some time though, and has had a lot of time and experience trying to account for them.   

Here is what I find most interesting: one of the more powerful levers that Iran can really put its weight on is its position in the Middle East - just look at a map - which with its size and reach, puts it within striking distance of countless targets vital to the global economy, and they know it. Commentators have been pointing this out for decades. 

And they're already hitting bases and airports, and other buildings where US and Israeli targets are suspected, and now they've hit some vital oil infrastructure. These strikes alone will strain economic activity throughout the region, which will ripple through the world economy as well. Iran has also effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, where 20% of world oil supplies flow through. 

In the West, we know how financialized and hollowed-out our portions of the world economy are; how threadbare and wound-tight they are; how thin the walls of the asset bubbles are; how flighty and craven and faithless our investors are. And we've had ongoing inflation for some time caused by numerous destructive forces in the greater economy, which intensifies these existing problems, and which would be greatly further strained by rising oil prices, climbing investment risks and interest rate hikes, strained insurance services, and the like.    

Iran is in a central position to strike very sensitive, crucial organs and chokepoints of the world economy, and then with the widespread interpenetration and high visibility of Internet activity, they get nearly instant feedback of their probes. 

Iran also hit targets of US and Israel allies, such as those of the Gulf states and the Europeans, who have made noises about entering the war. But the Gulf states are incredibly polarized extractive regimes that are largely unpopular. European allies like the UK, France, and Germany are not far behind them with serious political and economic problems of their own. Protests in places like Bahrain and Pakistan have already flared up, and propaganda-wise, these regimes are paying indirectly for the sins of the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians. 

And the Iranians have been handed gold to make propaganda with: some of their statements have referred to their enemies as pedophiles, which is at least true for the ruling elite. The West has refused to clean house: it has allowed genocide to eat away at international law; it has allowed elite impunity to eat away at domestic law and public morality; it has allowed deep and widespread economic corruption, polarization, and deindustrialization. Try leaning on friends like that. And what is left to believe in or fight for?

And what of Russian and Chinese involvement? Besides economic, covert, and diplomatic support, it seems things have been relatively quiet, though that could change quickly. It is hard to imagine them letting Iran go without a struggle. 

But information is a little easier to pass along covertly than material support. Russia has struggled with the same diplomatic problems that Iran is now facing, and has resolved that it can no longer trust a word Western diplomats say, and proceeded with its own invasion of Ukraine, steadily grinding down its military capability and surgically dismantling its infrastructure. They've been doing this for years, learning all the while.  

Now that Iran is cornered, it is easy to imagine some hard conversations taking place about these lessons, considering Iran's diplomatic woes and its position to do on a larger scale to the world economy what has been done to Ukraine. 

But there is a lot in the air. Considering the tight coupling and interdependency of the world economy, these could be risky moves on the part of some of the BRICS members as well. It depends on how much successful work has been done to decouple, and whether this can be isolated from the damage done to the Western sphere. 

Further, Iran has political and economic woes of its own. The war could further intensify beyond anyone's imagination or endurance, or the West could yet again back off, and then we are back to this simmering critical state, waiting for another big blowout. 

This is the meaning of this war feeling very "big." Historical accounts of the decline of Roman Britain come to mind, where the Romans speak of this inflection point where the isolated "barbarian" incursions suddenly became much more coordinated and strong. And with a political economy in decline at home and an increasingly unmanageable resistance against the colony abroad, there came a point where it was time to turn tail and abandon that project entirely.