The shadow of the “Sudetenland” over Gaza becomes the nightmare of the “Polish solution” for Tehrān. The “rogue state” strikes where and when it wants. Especially whoever wants. The U.S. plays war using its most reliable proxy. Or is Washington a Tel Aviv proxy? “Regime-change” has always been the weapon of American diplomacy. Even internally, but this is the intelligence problem. The reopening of Israeli embassies around the world is expected
By Glauco D’Agostino
For a serious historian, the coincidences of dates are not the result of chance. The events that only slightly forgo the subsequent steps warn of what will follow. Only to refer to the last 50 years, the USSR invades Afghanistan just a month and a half before the return of Āyatollāh Khomeini to Tehrān; the year before the Berlin Wall fall, the Iran-Iraq nearly decade-long war ends, and the year before the USSR dissolution, Yemen is reunified; two days before the Twin Towers are “unexpectedly” destroyed, General Aḥmad Shāh Mas‘ūd, an anti-Taliban Afghan hero and yet opposed to external military intervention, is assassinated, it is not known by whose order; two months before China joins the WTO, the entire rest of the world brazenly invades Afghanistan, which happens to border China; seven days before Russia begins its “special military operation” in Ukraine, France announces the withdrawal of its army from Mali, triggering subsequent military coups in Burkina Faso and Niger opposing Kiev’s financial interference in favour of the pro-French opposition parties.
I will stop here so as not to be verbose in the long list that demonstrates how the events and especially the warnings are to be read within a framework of rigid rationality rather than in a key of ethereal premonition.
Without wishing to emphasise the temporal coincidences, Tel Aviv’s announcement that it has started a real war against Tehrān comes two days before the (perhaps decisive) negotiation on the resumption of nuclear talks between the U.S. and the Islamic Republic of Iran. This says a lot about who is whose proxy. The poor showing of President Trump in front of the world public opinion, if the idea that Washington is subservient to Israeli financial lobbies, would have been sufficient in the last century to determine an extreme gesture by the President before Congress. But, as we know, nothing is further from the credibility and honourability enjoyed by the statesmen of the 20th century.
From a geopolitical view, everything is quite clear. Israel wants control of the entire Middle East, without the worry of rivals matching its fearsome firepower. A geopolitical goal, therefore, and not an ideological one. It has nothing to do with the defence of democracy and human rights invoked by most Western regimes, which in bad faith raise the spectre of Islamic totalitarianism, also because we have been able to observe the sincere democratic and humanitarian spirit of the aggressors in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and the Golan. And on the other hand, the hypocrisy of the unbearable Western leaders goes so far as to talk lovingly with the Saudi leaders without raising any problem regarding their constitutional system, which, let us remember for the sake of history, was endorsed and supported since its inception by a democratic champion like the UK.
Let it be clear this is not a preconceived judgment against Riyāḍ, because, in compliance with the principles of coexistence that inspire international rules, it is not a geopolitical task to examine the internal systems of States. Instead, the reasoning is a profound rejection of a now-consolidated Western practice that it is possible to unleash wars throughout the world based on the judgment of the democratic nature of the rival contender, without ever confessing the geopolitical purpose. It brings us back to the unspeakable discourse of interests, legitimate or illicit, that drives conflicts. If legitimising the invasion of entire nations is the lack of sharing internal political systems within states, why do the courageous and omnipotent democratic-Western leaders not contemplate in their plans the invasion of an explicitly Communist state like the People’s Republic of China? Aside from the now well-known technological inferiority compared to the Asian giant, there is one issue that is difficult to address objectively: deterrence. And come to the point under hand.
Generally, Islamic World Analyzes does not follow Italian foreign policy, both because of its irrelevant definition and sterile role in the game of the great global powers. As an Italian, I am outraged by the statements of the Prime Minister when she reiterates the need to ensure that Iran cannot, under any circumstances, acquire nuclear weapons. And this on the same day in which a nuclear power that refuses IAEA international control attacks a Republic that is instead subjected to such control and is ready to sit around a negotiating table to reassure about the eventuality of building a nuclear weapon.
Argentine diplomat Rafael Grossi, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)
Only two months ago we had taken a position in favour of US-Iran negotiations in Rome, provided that the evident disparity in the defence capacity between Israel and Iran was recognised and that the talks were not the result of blackmail against Tehrān by the international community (https://www.islamicworld.it/wp/repubblica-islamica-delliran-negoziato-aperto-con-gli-usa-per-evitare-il-ritiro-dal-tnp/). That blackmail has now materialised at the expense of Iran’s recognition of determining its destinies. Iran first, in short.
Decidedly, Rome’s “Garbatella-style” foreign policy is ignominiously subjected to the “Tel Aviv-style” one, not because the orientation is not legitimately expressed in the continuity of the submissive geopolitical approach typifying the nation, but because of the arrogance and presumption that deterrence in the Middle East can be the exclusive and indissoluble heritage of a regime that is at the very least questionable in terms of international legal behaviour and respect for human rights. Italy’s pro-Israel option over the last 30 years has been due to its role as Washington’s proxy even when the White House rejects the mannered Westernism marking the Prime Minister and his Foreign Minister, who would be better off realising the important office he has been invested with, very different from just a Minister of Italians Abroad he currently comfortably embodies.
Antonio Tajani, Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs
The State’s policy of deterrence cannot be unilateral, especially when subordination to international law is rejected. The Islamic Republic of Iran has fulfilled these obligations and today is once again subjected to aggression by a “rogue state” that, while citing possible violations of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons to which it is not a party, receives the acquiescence even of fearful Western democratic Italy. Does the right to defence also exist for the Iranian people? And is a nuclear umbrella Europe benefits from also legitimate for Tehrān if it is not guaranteed international security provisions?
If we truly want to pursue a Middle East appeasement, first of all we should distinguish unambiguously the role of the aggressor from the aggressed, and we should condemn the aggressor with consequent provisions (as it has been done for other ongoing war situations); second, Tel Aviv should be asked to reject the “Begin Doctrine” which provides for preventive air strikes and policy of counter-proliferation against any subjects arbitrarily deemed potential enemies; third, diplomacy (if any) should activate to induce Israel to join the NPT.
If this were not the case and the policy of double standards regarding international law violations were to continue, the Islamic Republic of Iran is entitled to claim its right to access military nuclear power. Even international law, with all due respect to everyone, would be satisfied if Tehrān rejected the NPT, following Tel Aviv’s example. At that point, it should no longer declare anything, just as Israel not only does not declare the number of nuclear warheads that experts estimate to be hundreds, but it does not even declare holding them.
The Zionist Gideon Moshe Sa’ar, Foreign Minister of Israel
The issue is not clearly about the legal quibbles the States appeal to. Here, the senseless drift, not only of its Prime Minister but of the State of Israel itself, and their intoxication with omnipotence, recall something that already happened in history with the 1938 German annexation of the Sudetenland, and the birth of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia the following year. Unfortunately, the current situation in the Middle East suggests the danger that the declaration of war on Iran could represent what the Polish invasion in 1939 stood for, not only for the peoples subsequently subdued, but also for the entire world dragged into a shocking global war.
Geopolitical reality underlines that nuclear-armed states are gathered in a few groups in geographical proximity, a logic that responds to the need for mutual control. China, Russia and North Korea bear witness to a core whose historical events have been particularly intertwined and sometimes conflictual; India and Pakistan have been in constant conflict since their birth, the result of the British Empire disintegration; France and the United Kingdom inherit the centuries-old mutual opposition on the European continent and the contest for the domination of their respective global colonial empires. But the United States and Israel? The former have had and have a problem of security and deterrence at the overall level, and therefore, their foes and the territories to be controlled are considered everywhere. Israel, as a small regional power with no contenders at its level, aims at exclusive control of the Middle East and North Africa.
This is the problem of nuclear deterrence, which enables Tel Aviv to consider not only neighbouring states as institutional players, but also their populations and infrastructures, as subordinate and expendable. It is a strategy with a clear state terrorist face, which goes well beyond the “madman theory” imagined by Richard Nixon for an unpredictable and terrifying military response.
Now, after the declaration of war on the Islamic Republic of Iran, Tel Aviv and its Knesset are gnawed by a dilemma: the massacres in Gaza and the West Bank involve hundreds of thousands of defenceless civilians, that’s fine and all according to plan. The real challenge will be the genocide of 92 million people…
The West still talks about an Iranian danger, while the “rogue state”, but democratic, has a license to kill whoever it wants? All that remains is to wait for the reopening of Israel’s embassies around the world.
