The Gulf War Shifts the Global Balance of Power

The American-Israeli aggression against Iran, which broke out on 28 February, is drastically reshaping not only the configuration of power in the Persian Gulf but also worldwide.

The British magazine The Economist could not resist quoting Beijing’s thesis about the current state of America’s decline: “A group of scholars in Beijing published a report expressing their gratitude to President Trump in unmistakably sarcastic terms — thanking him for alienating America’s traditional allies, for showing the world that China is more reliable and stable, for placing economic pressure on China and thereby pushing it through towards innovation, and above all, for ‘revealing America in its imperial twilight, an exhausted and hypocritical power in decline’.”

As The New York Times observed, the attack on Iran was not merely a bad idea but a pivotal point in the decline of the American empire. The newspaper compared the process to Britain’s decline a century ago: deindustrialisation, overextension, and complacency.

Many observers and commentators suppose that the war against Iran will most likely end with an American retreat. The US-Israeli war plan was conceived as a decapitating strike against Iran and was presented to President Trump by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and Mossad director Barnea. The idea was that a joint American-Israeli bombing campaign would weaken the structure of the Iranian regime to such an extent that it would collapse, providing for the United States and Israel installing a compliant government in Tehran.

Trump appears to have believed that Iran........

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