The prognosis of the Iran war is now so couched in politics and so warped by the American Left that the public has grown tired and wants it all to go away.

But in truth, the situation is so fluid that any accurate prediction is impossible.

Yet there is good reason to believe in an eventual outcome quite favorable to the U.S. and one far better than the status quo ante bellum.

The Strait of Hormuz

Prior to President Donald Trump’s most recent announcement that the United States would first blockade and then reopen and control traffic through the Strait, only a few ships were going through, mostly those aligned with Iran, opposed to the U.S., or neutral.

Thus, the Strait was disrupted to a far greater degree than during Iran’s earlier efforts at closure during the “Tanker War” phase of the Iran-Iraq War, as well as its chronic harassment of shipping in 2018-19. And now?

If Trump quickly clears and secures control of the Strait, and if allowable traffic reaches, say, 60-70 percent of prewar levels and if the U.S. avoids a full-scale war, instead responding disproportionately to any renewed Iranian attempts to close it — then, within one to two months, oil prices will begin to taper off.

The American challenge with the war is not military but political.

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Pearl clutchers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your credibility.

A week ago, on Easter Sunday — Easter Sunday, forsooth! — President Trump horrified delicate souls by issuing this minatory post on Truth Social:

“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the F–kin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. That meanie used a bad word, called the Iranian mullahs “crazy bastards,” and taunted them by saying, “Praise be to Allah.” How disrespectful can you get?

There was worse to come. On Tuesday, as zero hour approached, President Trump went whole hog.

“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”

Oh, oh, oh! Can you believe it? He just threatened to destroy the storied civilization of Persia, Cyrus the Great, Darius, and the Achaemenid Empire! The collective knickers of the anti-Trump establishment were twisted tight. . . . The frenzied knot of moralizing mouthpieces competed mightily to show the world how lustrous their consciences were.

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This morning at 4 am, something not unusual (for me) happened: I woke with an insight after falling asleep mid-chapter reading C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy.

Ransom, his main character, was based on J.R.R. Tolkien, and I had been having a conversation with Professor Tolkien in my sleep.

What I wrote down was this: Triptych: Wealth. Power. Beauty.

These are the three things humans desire. Beauty is generally within our reach. Wealth and power must be worked for but are achievable in our great Western civilization. And these are precisely the things that socialist and Marxist movements, or indeed any ideology that seeks control over others, work to destroy.

It’s not that they hate the good and the beautiful so much as that the desire to dominate is more powerful. In The Lord of the Rings, Sauron and Saruman knew that domination of others is easiest when people are hungry, diminished, and surrounded by the drab and the ugly.

Of the three, I am most fascinated by beauty.

 

Power and Wealth

Everyone knows about the first panel, wealth. As socialism creeps into a system, we see more and more confiscation of wealth: progressive taxation, expensive regulatory tangles, redistributionism, and equity.

Promises of fairness harden into, as the hobbits in “The Scouring of the Shire” discovered, the powerful gathering far more than is ever shared back out. The ordinary man is “given” just enough to stay fed but hungry, kept dependent upon the government.

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At least it’s colorful: The Gray Lady just gave us the green light to wave the white flag.

Running in the April 7 edition of The New York Times: “The Iran War Is Turning Iran Into a Major World Power.”

The author, Professor Robert Pape of the University of Chicago, offers the following thesis:

1. Iran will keep control of the Strait of Hormuz for “months or years,” and there’s nothing militarily we can do about it. (Sorry, guys.)
2. The U.S. and Europe are now in decline — and the axis of China, Russia, and Iran is ascending.
3. Iran will emerge as a “new major world power” and the “fourth center of global power” (the other three: America, China, Russia).

But before we pulverize Professor Pape’s preposterously pessimistic proposal, here’s an earlier example of The New York Times’ piercing wisdom, courtesy of author Hans Mahncke….

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In a study by Jean Twenge of San Diego State University, she found that college kids today are more likely to call themselves gifted and driven to succeed, while their test scores and hours spent studying are decreasing. Their tendency toward narcissism has also increased over the last 30 years.

Today I want to look at what I consider one of the sources of this trend: the unearned self-esteem movement.

Many years ago, when I was young psychology graduate student studying with Nathaniel Branden, I remember him talking one day about how he had been invited to be part of The California Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem, lead by California State Assemblyman John Vasconcelos.

Nathaniel couldn’t see why he would be involved in that, since he did not see a role for government in the development of self-esteem. Nonetheless, the Task Force carried on, and created guidelines for building "self-esteem" in a way that Branden would never have advocated.

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