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In his televised address last night Trump said the US was going to continuing attacking Iran for another two or three weeks and would bomb the country “back to the Stone Ages, where they belong.”
More on that phrase later.
But first a bit on the economics.
Promising to keep doing the thing that has brought the world to the brink of a global economic catastrophe, and threatening maximum escalation, didn’t go down well with the people who make numbers go up or down. The oil price rocketed, and markets sank. It seems the people behind the screens might finally be waking up to the looming disaster. They might be realising, belatedly, that very soon the molecules are simply not going to arrive where they are wanted and needed in the quantities required.
You can’t decouple the numbers from the atoms forever and you can only deny physical reality for so long.
And the physical reality is stark and stunning. The drop in oil production since the US-Israeli sneak attack on Iran is bigger than the drop during covid, which was the biggest drop in modern history.
Read that again if you need to.
But there’s a crucial difference that makes this situation worse.
The covid drop was demand destruction.
This is supply destruction.
In 2020 no one needed the oil because of a mandated and somewhat managed power down. In 2026 everyone still needs the oil, and gas. There’s been no managed power down. The fuel just isn’t there. For the global economy the difference is like willingly checking into rehab versus being forced to go cold turkey.
Two once-in-a-generation events in six years.
The outcome can only, logically, in the short-term at least, be disastrous.
In the medium-to-long-term perhaps, on the energy front at least, this will accelerate the shift to solar, wind and wave, as a friend suggested yesterday.
Perhaps.
But covid didn’t.
Despite that energy shock, despite all the talk of building back better and the demonstration of how active state interventions could end homelessness or drive child poverty to record lows, nothing changed. The US even re-installed Donald Trump, the man who during the first once-in-a-generation event suggested drinking bleach to cure yourself of the virus.
Nothing changed because to make pro-social changes you need pro-social leaders willing to create pro-social systems. Maniacs, war criminals and imperialists aren’t going to do it.
And that’s what we’ve got.
Additionally, for all the uses I detailed in my last article, it’s impossible to get rid of oil and gas entirely, or even mostly. You can’t even make turbines or solar panels without fossil fuels. Petrochemicals are deeply woven into the fabric of our societies, and the interests of capital have a huge incentive in keeping it that way. And when those chemicals aren’t flowing through the system in the quantities we rely on, our societies are forced to react.
And that’s what’s about to happen.
This power down will be messier than covid because it’s even less planned.
Now to the imperialism.
Trump threatened to bomb Iran back to the Stone Age. Hegseth tweeted the same.
Yes this is sadism. Yes this is an openly announced war crime. Yes it shows that this was never about helping the Iranian people.
But Trump and Hegseth’s sadism is far from anomalous.
The use of this exact phrase by US military leaders has a long history.
Curtis LeMay
General Curtis LeMay was known as The Demon. An air force general who commanded US forces in Japan, Korea and Vietnam, he advocated total war against civilian infrastructure to break the political leadership of a country. LeMay was the architect of the firebombing of Japan in March 1945, in which an estimated 100,000 to 150,000 civilians were murdered in a single night. He also commanded the total war bombing campaign against civilians and civilian infrastructure in North Korea and casually boasted that “we killed off, what, 20% of their population.”
It was during the Vietnam war, and later recounted in his autobiography, that LeMay advocated for bombing North Vietnam “back to the Stone Age.” He also said the same about the Soviet Union, arguing that the US shouldn’t just bomb but nuke them into the Stone Age.
LeMay is revered among the US military. US Strategic Command in Nebraska is named after him. LeMay was also a racist. In 1968 he joined George Wallace’s campaign for president and became his running mate. Wallace’s main policy was maintaining racial segregation.
So when Trump and Hegseth use this phrase, they are using it knowingly and deliberately. They are channelling all of LeMay’s savagery, racism and fascism.
They are channelling the savagery, racism and fascism of empire.
A savagery, racism and fascism that American empire was built on and which still today knits the United States together.
So no, Trump and Hegseth’s language, for all its barbarity, was not a surprise.
They are simply reflecting the dominant belief held for decades by US military planners that the US can, and should, commit war crimes and mass murder to get what it wants.
Naked empire
If there is a difference right now, it’s how naked empire has become. How the savagery is uttered in real time, by the president of empire, to a global audience.
The imperialists no longer pretend to have humanitarian motives for their crimes. Now they openly announce they’re going to kill large numbers of humans and overthrow governments to steal oil and resources.
Which is why anyone coming out on the other side of this still clinging to liberal beliefs about the international order, about the US as a force for good, about Trump as an anomaly, is a coward. Anyone who tells you Trump is merely an aberration is afraid to internalise the truth about empire, or is motivated by privilege not to do so.
Which goes for the vast majority of legacy media, liberal or otherwise, all of whom have utterly failed to keep citizens informed about the catastrophe this war has provoked. A major reason is because, as appendages of empire, as stenographers for imperialism, they didn’t want to say too much about the targets Iran has hit for fear of hyping the enemy.
Completely captured, but, in the end, it doesn’t matter. Because, I repeat, physical reality has a habit of being real.
It doesn’t matter whether you like that reality or not.
Molecules and atoms don’t care about your political bias or your ideology.
So now, as US-Israel escalate to catastrophe against Iran, the shock is really going to shock, especially for those who’ve been kept in the dark.
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