Find all blog entries at A Commoner Manifesto Substack.
Trump and Iran: Win or Loss?
The question, for me, about the Trump Iran thing, is that obviously we are in a post boots on the ground era.
Why? Because boots on the ground didn’t work so well in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
And, I suggest to our friend Vladdy von Putin, not so well in Ukraine. Old chap.
What is the strategic interest with Iran? I’d say that, first, Iran must not get The Bomb. Why? Because everyone, since Hiroshima/Nagasaki, has had good reason not to start a nuclear war. Whereas with Iran, we experts have to wonder. Second, we need to dial back Iranian power so that the Mullah/IRGC regime can’t afford to finance proxies like Hezbollah, Hamas, and Houthis. Obviously, the Iranian regime has had tremendous success over the last half century by using proxies to fight Israel and the US but steering clear of direct boots-on-the-ground war with Israel and the US.
Clearly, someone in Israel and/or the US has decided that the way to stop the Iran nuclear project is with a bit of bombing from a great height every now and again. And someone has been thinking about how to get out of the proxy trap.
Obviously the proxy game runs on money. So if Iran runs out of money it can’t finance the proxies.
But the other thing that I notice is that, up to now, it looks like all the Sunni states around the Persian Gulf didn’t want to poke the Iranian bear. But since February, it is clear that they have pretty well all decided: enough already. Did that happen because of the strategic brilliance of Trump and Netanyahu, not to forget Jared Kushner and the Abraham Accords, or did it all just fall into place by accident?
I suppose that in the months and years to come we will be presented with various Narratives about how it all came about and who is the real strategic mind behind the whole thing.
The other thing that seems to be emerging is that the US has used the crisis as an excuse to extract the Strait of Hormuz from Iranian domination and place it under US hegemonic domination. Will it work? We shall see.
Again. Was this all foreseen by some strategic genius, or are we feeling lucky?
Like I say, ask me when it’s all over. All I am doing is trying to understand some meaning within the chaos of day-to-day events and the usual rubbish from the media and our Democratic friends.
The one thing I feel confident to preach is that, in Trump Two, someone has decided that the foreign-policy conventional wisdom going back to the end of the Soviet Union needed to be put in the garbage disposal. Why and how this occurred we cannot know. Not yet. And obviously the resolution of the question cannot be separated from the whole Deep State question about who is really the power behind the throne in the whole National Security Industrial Complex, including the intelligence community, the secret police, the foreign-policy establishment, the armed forces, and I know not what else.
Meanwhile, I think it is fair to say that on the Iran question we are not in Kansas any more. Am I right, Dorothy?
| Fri, 28 Aug 2026 15:12:47 GMT |
Finally. How to Understand Islamism
I just read a piece about the intersection of western literary culture with Arab culture. It’s called “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Crisis” by Hussein Aboubakr Mansour. And it’s one of the most important things I have ever read. Here’s a starter.
The premodern Arabic chronicles simply record events: in a given year the Nile rose to such a height, a governor was appointed, a plague came, a noted scholar died. There is no sense that these years fell into [a] particular epoch, and no overarching patterns of progress or development.
There is, in other words, no story.
A reader of Ivanhoe [by Walter Scott], by contrast, presumes that he is reading about a different time—the Middle Ages—with its own ways of doing things.
Historical fiction was brought to the Middle East by a chap called Jurji Zaydan.
Altogether, [Zaydan] wrote 22 historical novels from the material of Islamic history with the devices Walter Scott had invented some 80 years earlier for portraying the Scottish past: private lives caught up in public events, a hero of modest rank rather than a prince, a period depicted with its distinct manners and forms of speech.
So, we westerners taught the Arabs how to view history as a story! I had no idea. But Zaydan was part of a bigger story.
[There is] Rifa’a al-Tahtawi, a Sunni cleric sent to Paris in 1826 as chaplain to the first Egyptian student mission. Five years later he published An Overview of Paris, a work that fits no earlier Arabic category—part travel record, part constitutional description, part appalled inventory of French manners.
Then they revived poetry. But it wasn’t easy.
The language itself had to be rebuilt before it could carry any of this. Like many other languages, classical Arabic came with no punctuation to speak of, no equivalent of the paragraph, and no words for parliament, revolution, political party, public, class, society, consciousness, or nation in the European sense.
Are you stunned yet? Go and read the article in full.
Of course things got out of control on the language front. Enter The Experts. In 1932 “an academy in Cairo [was created] to bring order to a rapidly expanding lexicon.”
And this. The periodical political magazine.
Within a single generation, an Arab reading public came into being that expected, at monthly intervals, an essay—another new form—taking the condition of the Muslims as its subject and reporting on how that condition stood.
Then came Constantine Zureiq — who created the nakba — and Sayyid Qtub — who invented Islamism.
The movements Zureiq and Qutb unleashed, secular Arab nationalism and jihadism, spent the following decades at war with one another[.]
And everything was a “crisis.” Nothing new there. That’s what the French Revolution and Marx and our beloved wokies are all about: permanent crisis.
Hey!
Crisis is the secular form of apocalypticism… In Scripture it is Judgment…
In his book Critique and Crisis, the German historian Reinhart Koselleck reconstructs the post-Christian transformation of the concept of crisis.
Because there is something very human in the culture of crisis. Particularly if you want to Change the World with Fundamental Transformation. Right, Barack?
The myth of crisis has imprisoned Arab political thought, and the prison is built of…
OK. Enough already. Go and read The Whole Thing. At least it helps understand why our lefty friends and the mullahs and the British rape gangs and Hasan Piker are all on the same page.
Because if there isn’t a crisis — if the world isn’t about to end because climate or Trump or ICE or Israel or Palestinian genocide or data centers — why then, what’s a poor activist or Islamist or DEI administrator to do?
Bless their hearts.
I wonder if AI is the answer to the crisis culture. Because AI is so… sensible. I think it is time for me to ask AI about “apocalypticism”, as in “how to dial down apocalypticism”.
| Fri, 28 Aug 2026 02:20:06 GMT |
Switch to Substack for more blog posts
Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
Reign of Terror equals Great Purge equals Cultural Revolution equals Cancel Culture
When people start to feel the heat, that is when they start to cheat.
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
And the trouble with politics is that it reduces human society to a war against the enemy, as determined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
Today’s topic: Small Minorities and the Culture of Innocence
