A commentary by Ernst Wolff.
With the targeted killing of the second most powerful man in Iran and the deployment of several thousand soldiers in the Middle East, the tensions between the USA and Iran, which they have declared to be “the world’s worst terrorist state”, have intensified considerably.
The US war preparations against Iran, which have been ongoing for some time, have been systematically intensified since Donald Trump took office as US President and Commander-in-Chief of the US Army. The relocation of the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, the cancellation of the nuclear agreement, record spending on armaments and the arms deal with Saudi Arabia that Trump brokered, as well as U.S. support for the Saudis in the war against the Huthis in Yemen allied with Iran are just a few milestones of this development.
A war against Iran is unavoidable for the USA in the long term and is supported by almost all Democrats and Republicans together with the US media for the following reason: The USA’s fiercest rival, the People’s Republic of China, has been working on the largest economic project of all times, the New Silk Road, since 2013. Its completion would create an economic area that would connect Asia, the Middle East and Europe and end the domination of the world by the superpower USA once and for all.
Since Iran plays a key role in the New Silk Road – both as the bottleneck between the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf and as the most important supplier of energy – a war against the country is the most effective way to torpedo the New Silk Road and maintain the global dominance of the USA.
However, the fact that the USA has just ignited the next escalation stage at the beginning of the New Year is probably due to current reasons in addition to these causes.
Firstly, there is the crisis in the US fracturing industry, which is assuming ever greater proportions. Although hundreds of billions of US dollars have been invested in the production of oil and especially natural gas in recent years, the industry is making ever greater losses due to the combination of oversupply and low prices. Despite the continuous reduction in extraction costs, these are sometimes higher than the prime costs, so that the gas is often burned off on site.
The world’s largest producer of natural gas is Iran, which together with Qatar is exploiting the world’s largest gas field to date in the Persian Gulf. A war against Iran would cause the price of natural gas to skyrocket immediately, eliminate the biggest competitor of the US fracking industry on the world market and immediately catapult the sector into the profit zone.
Another motive for the US aggression against Iran is likely to be the problems that the US financial system has been experiencing since last September, which are obviously much worse than officially admitted.
The background is the attempt made between 2015 and 2018 to stem the flood of money created after the near-crash of 2007/08, which failed at the turn of 2018/2019 and which prompted the FED to reopen the money-locks last year. Despite this turnaround in monetary policy, there was severe turbulence in September on the so-called repo market, where US banks supply themselves with fresh money by depositing collateral.
To date, the FED has refused to disclose the reason for its interventions in this market, which have been ongoing since September. In return, it has dramatically expanded its balance sheet in a very short period of time, thus ensuring that new money is constantly flowing into the system. Trump, in turn, has been driving the stock market for months through tweets, in which he repeatedly announced, among other things, that he was on the verge of concluding a “great” deal with China.
The date for this deal, scheduled for mid-January, is now within reach and is forcing Trump to either keep his promise or lose face. Since any provocation against Iran is also a message to Tehran’s main ally China, the killing of the senior general may not only have been a provocation to Iran, but may very well have been an invitation to China to submit to Trump’s terms of a deal.
Whether Trump’s game is going to work with fire remains to be seen. Apart from the importance of the Strait of Hormus for China’s energy supply, the biggest trumps in his hand are likely to be the still existing global dominance of the petrodollar, the dependence of the Chinese export economy on the US market and the huge problems in the Chinese financial system, which are considerably limiting the room for manoeuvre of the Chinese leadership.
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Thanks to the author for the right to publish.
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Picture reference: KPG Ivary / Shutterstock
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