Western Cold War win? Israel’s collapse, Iran’s rise, China’s dominance & Russia’s conquest prove otherwise

Cold War II includes 4 blocs, not only 2

The Cold War was always only “cold” for the two main combatants - the USSR and the USA. For everyone else it was as hot as blood, and nowhere more so than in the attempted colonisation of Palestine.

It’s often forgotten that the 1947 creation of Israel is permeated with the West’s three primary Cold War goals: fending off de-colonisation (failure), destroying the rise of socialism (failure) and entrenching as many far-right reactionaries as possible to foment the 1%-er ideology of liberal democracy (successful).

The propping up of Israel immediately after the end of World War II didn’t happen by accident: it was the Western beachhead to try and ensure Western control of oil, French domination of West and North Africa, and Anglo-American control of the Indian Ocean and its passageways.

Israel is now crumbling internally and externally, and their atrocious military and diplomatic decisions ensure that it’s not a viable colony for much longer. The writing is on the wall, and the biggest graffiti reads: The West lost the Cold War.

1. Even in 2006, before the Great Financial Crisis locked in this certitude, the rise of China had already disproved Western victory in the Cold War, and that was the assessment of awful far-right intellectuals like Scotland’s Niall Ferguson: “Thus was the supposed triumph of the West in 1989 revealed to be an illusion,” he wrote.

2. The victory of Russia in their war with Ukraine and NATO is another dagger in the idea that the West won an enduring victory over their main enemy.

3. What’s become clear is that the United States only can claim actual victory in the Cold War in Europe, thanks to the creation of the European Union. But victory for whom? Not Europeans, as the continental bloc has been an economic, democratic and political catastrophe since it got off the ground in 2009, but this obviously serves primarily American interests as much as any non-White colony ever did. For many the European Union stands as the obvious failure it is: proof that the US cannot be entrusted with nation-building anywhere.

4. And now we have a fourth major reversal: Iranian ideological and military supremacy in the Middle East.

We can imagine the incredible grudging with which The New York Times two longtime Middle East correspondents - David Sanger and Stephen Erlanger - were forced to publish the following analysis on January 7th:

“‘I see Iran as well positioned, and it has checkmated the U.S. and its interests in the Mideast,” said Sanam Vakil, the director of the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House, aka the British Royal Institute of International Affairs. Vakil isn’t being lawyerly (forgive a Persian language joke) - the Beltway, Wall Street and 10 Downing Street have been forced to admit that they have been outplayed by a revolution expressly unobsessed with earthly profit.

The fundamental Achilles’ heel of Western thought - and elevated to a global scale by pretentiously aristocratic and arrogantly bourgeois Liberal Democracy - is that the natives are simply incapable of any progress.

It’s a belief which has existed for over five centuries (and which allegedly permitted the genocide of so many peoples) and it explains why the West has been repeatedly caught off-guard by military advancements by Russia, urban planning advancements by China and nuclear technology by Iran, to name just a few key areas. The non-West is playing for survival, but the West merely plays for the profits of a few.

This Achilles’ heel is destined to be endlessly pierced and poisoned by that arrow of the 99% - socialist-inspired democracy, which demands more progress, more distribution of wealth and more social peace.

Those four major Western defeats helps explain the world’s new political architecture.

Cold War II includes 4 blocs, not only 2

In Cold War I the violence for everyone not safely inside the US and USSR was massive and endless: hundreds of thousands leftists murdered in Indonesia, billions of thwarted futures and impoverished lives resulting from the endless US, UK and French coups, the paid entrenchment of far-right forces from Afghanistan to Tel Aviv to Miami Beach, etc.

But the same principle of “hands off the big guys” applies in our new Cold War II, only the number of “hands off” combatants has increased to four: there will be no direct attacks on the US, Russia, China or Iran by these four adversaries, and this fact was relayed by one of those same top propagandists of The New York Times (Erlanger) in an article on January 14:

“Yet in Ukraine, nearly two years in, a similar, unspoken set of restraints has worked - somewhat to the amazement of even President Biden’s closest aides. Early on, Mr. Biden directed the military to do anything it could to support Ukraine - as long as American forces did not take on Russia’s directly, whether in land, in the air or on the Black Sea.”

The article relates what appears clear to many: Washington and Tehran are going out of their way to warn each other of attacks so that their own citizens don’t get killed and spark World War III. There’s no red phone between them, but implicit is the idea that both are too powerful to attack each other directly. The idea of a US attack on Chinese nationals is similarly considered impossible.

This is a huge development in modern history.

It means there’s a new Cold War pitting the West versus China, Russia and Iran - everywhere else, including Israel, is part of the front lines again.

The conflict in Palestine is unfolding as I predicted: Iranian allies (falsely called “Iranian proxies” by the West) are doing damage to Israeli and Western imperialism long before Iran ever gets directly involved, and also that we remain just one major unexpected development away from a free Palestine.

Hezbollah is so strong they are not even being tested - instead it’s the Houthis who have proven unexpectedly successful in the resistance. Anglo-American power has rested on the navy for over two centuries - following 25 years of attacks on the progressive French Revolution by reactionary, monarchical England - but Yemen is closing off the Mediterranean from the Indian Ocean for Western interests.

In the January 14 article the illustrious Times reporters published a quote from a retired US Navy Admiral which illustrates both reckless wishful thinking and foolish journalistic analysis, and I am referring to after when the Admiral said, “the Houthi rebels, who are really just Iranian pirates”. He continued, “‘Our experience with Somali pirates shows years ago that you can’t just play defense; you have to go ashore to solve a problem like this.”

Yemen’s involvement isn’t something that can be stopped - they are not like Japan in 1853, to be cowed, “opened” and converted to a lifetime of Western-aping via the arrival of a few gunboats. Pained Western shipping giants, like the Dutch, would like to sabre-rattle that they’re about to disembark and fight in Yemen - a war theatre possibly even more treacherous than even Afghanistan - but the fact is that they’re just going to have pay more to ship tulips until they rein in Israel’s genocidal desires.

The idea that the Houthis have no agency in their relationship with Iran stems from the false mindset of the capitalist-imperialist colonist: i.e. one who wages total societal control to aim at war ends, which is the basis of “totalitarianism”, and who assumes the natives can do nothing without their consent. The mistake here is assuming that Iran is capitalist-imperialist when it’s clearly been fighting that awful ideology since 1979.

Iran has no grand control; did not know about Hamas’ counter-attack on January 7; simply provides support for local grassroots struggles when those struggles are politically righteous. The “guidance” is mainly political and technical - give a man a drone and he can stop shipping for a day, but teach him how to make a drone and he can stop shipping for… who knows how long the Houthis can keep this up? They’ve already resisted American bombs - launched by the House of Saud - for over a decade, after all.

Cold War I wrested away Eastern Europe for the Western 1%’s colonisation schemes - this is the clear result of the European Union. Cold War II finds impregnable and allied China, Russia and Iran - and their loud or quiet allies across the Global South - facing an American superpower in decline with their vassals in turmoil. How can capitalism, imperialism and elitist Liberal Democracy become rejuvenated enough to defeat any of the ideologically-supercharged three, or even supposedly apolitical Yemeni “pirates”?

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Ramin Mazaheri is the chief correspondent in Paris for PressTV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. His latest book is France's Yellow Vests: Western Repression of the West's Best Values. He is also the author of ‘Socialism’s Ignored Success: Iranian Islamic Socialism’ as well as ‘I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China’, which is also available in simplified and traditional Chinese. Any reposting or republication of any of my articles is approved and appreciated.