The following interview was first published in Frankfurter Rundschau on 28 March.
The Israeli-American war against Iran has thrown financial markets into turmoil and there is growing concern across national economies. Does this remind you of the oil price shock of the 1970s?
Not very much. Back then, it was all still relatively manageable: not much more than a producers’ cartel in the Middle East. Today, thanks to fracking the United States is energy self-sufficient and can afford any kind of madness, including the systematic destruction of energy infrastructure not only in Iran but across the Gulf states – and, as a bonus, the destruction of Iranian society. By contrast, in the 1970s Nixon and Kissinger were preparing for rapprochement with China, while in Germany the Brandt government was turning to a policy of détente, which contributed to the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc two decades later.
Could the war against Iran turn out to be the biggest mistake of Trump’s presidency? He evidently underestimated the potential for escalation.
The Americans always do – they don’t need Trump for that. Look at Biden in Ukraine, and in his wake the Europeans who allowed themselves to be convinced that the war would be over in a few months (the Russians, incidentally, believed something similar). The EU has now taken over the Ukraine war and insists that it must continue, even though the Americans have lost interest and the Russians have, by and large, already won. Why? Presumably because they do not want to admit that they ‘underestimated the potential for escalation’ as you put it. But it could also be that they anticipate technological and economic benefits, as well as greater internal cohesion, from a war others are fighting for them. This will not pan out, of course, but hope dies last, after the Ukrainians, who, according to von der Leyen, are ‘dying for our values’.
Some suspect that Trump could use the war to manipulate the mid-term elections in November in some way. Might domestic political considerations have encouraged him?
That is possible: wars are often fought to consolidate one’s own side and paint those who oppose it as traitors. Yet this war is not popular domestically. The prevailing suspicion in the US is that Trump was talked into it by Israel and the Israel lobby, led on by the promise that it would be resolved in a few days. One does not know, of course, what compromising material Netanyahu may have on Trump. What must also be borne in mind – this is often overlooked in Germany – is that the US is essentially invincible on its own continent, flanked by two oceans and with only two neighbouring states, one to the north and one to the south, both of which it has in its pocket. This allows it to get away with anything in matters of foreign policy, no matter how pointless or nonsensical – the Vietnam War, the invasion of Iraq – because if it goes wrong, they can simply go home, where even the most triumphant victor cannot follow them. This also explains why the US, as a matter of course, maintains old enmities toward recalcitrant states over decades – Cuba, Iran, Afghanistan. No matter how often its crusades fail, the US doesn’t have to pay damages, make amends or learn anything.
In January, Trump called for defence spending to rise to $1.5 trillion, a more than 50 per cent increase on this year’s budget ($900 billion), already by far the highest military budget in human history. I assume he wants to keep the military leadership from asking why they are supposed to bomb Iran back to the Stone Age given that the country has done nothing to the US and never could.
Many detect personal motives behind Netanyahu’s decision to attack Iran, that he is trying to save himself from corruption charges through permanent war.
Yes, that’s possible. Or to secure his re-election. But one should not overstate the personal element. The destruction of Iran is a long-held and widely shared Israeli ambition. Israel wants to remain the sole nuclear power in ‘West Asia’ (as the Iranians call it). If the US were ever to withdraw from the alliance, Israel would not hesitate, if push came to shove, to use its nuclear forces. What else would all that money be for? (Though the submarines equipped with nuclear delivery systems were a gift from the Federal Republic of Germany.) We can’t rule out the possibility that Trump is participating because his intelligence services or indeed Netanyahu informed him that Israel would make use of its nuclear-armed missiles, bomber aircraft and ships in an emergency.
Trump has encountered scant resistance from the European Union. Only the Spanish Prime Minister is speaking plainly. Why is the EU so weak?
The EU is not a state and will never be one. No one listens to it; it just doesn’t matter. As for its member states, their interests and allegiances differ radically. France has close ties to Lebanon and imagines itself the country’s protector. Spain has long-standing, primarily cultural ties with the Muslim world. Germany has its well-known special relationship with Israel and its ‘right to exist’, the definition of which it leaves to Israel – both in terms of territorial scope and the internal order of the state. Before Israel resorts to nuclear weapons, it would undoubtedly call on Germany for military support, in the name of German ‘Staatsraison’. No other EU member state, except perhaps the Netherlands, would be willing to provide it.
German Chancellor Merz first expressed support for the attack, then said it was not ‘our war’. Is he following in the footsteps of his predecessor Gerhard Schröder?
That depends on how one interprets those footsteps. Schröder did, together with Chirac, refuse to join Bush II’s invasion of Iraq. But the Federal Republic under his and Fischer’s leadership provided all kinds of support, especially in the so-called ‘War on Terror’, when Steinmeier, as head of the Federal Chancellery, approved the use of the Ramstein airbase for every single flight, if I recall correctly, including those used to fill Guantanamo with prisoners.
Merkel, too, first with Sarkozy, then with Hollande, repeatedly tried to distance herself from individual American operations and initiatives – see Syria and Ukraine (Minsk I, Minsk II, together with Steinmeier). In 2011, Westerwelle, her Foreign Minister, abstained in the UN Security Council vote authorizing the disastrous America-led intervention in Libya. Yet 40,000 American soldiers are stationed in Germany as part of NATO, along with nuclear-capable bombers and their corresponding nuclear weapons. Moreover, Wiesbaden is home to the command centre of US forces for operations in the Middle East, including the current bombing of Iran. No word of objection from Merz. Seen this way he is indeed following in the footsteps of his predecessors; the precise details of his contribution will be for future historians to determine.
Wouldn’t it be in Merz’s interest to oppose Trump and Netanyahu more forcefully? Experts fear the worst energy crisis in history.
He absolutely should oppose them. Especially since this is not simply an energy crisis, ‘experts’ notwithstanding. We are talking about a global conflagration; compared to this one is tempted to say, it’s just oil, and if it gets really bad, we can buy it from the Russians after all. We can only speculate about what Trump and Netanyahu will do next. What we do know is that whatever they decide, they will not listen to a German Chancellor, because it is clear that in the end, they will fall in line no matter what.
Could this war be described as a world war, even though there are no opposing blocs as in the two world wars of the twentieth century?
All wars are different. In the First World War, the European empires were broken up; the Second World War was a struggle to defeat two regional powers, Germany and Japan, which sought to subjugate their respective ‘zones of influence’, as Carl Schmitt called them. The result was a bifurcated world with two victorious powers, the US and the USSR, each with its own empire – one expansive, the other constrained by itself and its rival’s policy of ‘containment’, until it dissolved remarkably peacefully at the end of the twentieth century. This was followed by more than three decades of a unipolar world, in which not a day passed without its central power waging war somewhere in the world. This was called ‘stability’. Today, we are witnessing the disintegration of that superpower, which cannot decide between retreat and resistance, but with a tendency towards resistance.
If such resistance led to a third world war, what might that look like in these circumstances?
The US would attack China in an attempt to halt its hitherto unstoppable rise. According to current American national security doctrine, there must be no power on earth equal to the US. To this end, they would, among other things, put pressure on Russia from Western Europe – or have NATO do so – to prevent it from supporting China, and force China to divert resources to support Russia. Japan and NATO Europe, Germany in particular, would be induced to side with the US. Israel, meanwhile, would seize the opportunity to destroy the states and peoples in its vicinity irreparably; even now, the Iran war cannot last long enough as far as Tel Aviv is concerned, because in its shadow the annexation and ethnic cleansing of Gaza, the West Bank and southern Lebanon can continue unnoticed. Everything else lies, as Clausewitz said, in the fog of the expanding battlefield.
Read on: Susan Watkins, ‘Trump Abroad’, NLR 157.