Consider this hypothetical:
Two apartment buildings share a single parking lot. Management from both Building A and Building B are engaged in negotiations over how the parking lot will be organized, painted, maintained, and paid for.
Across the street is a restaurant. The restaurant’s customers primarily come from Building A, and internal studies have shown that Building B’s tenants overwhelmingly patronize the restaurant’s competition. Therefore, the restaurant is seeking to sway the parking lot negotiations to make it easier for Building A’s tenants to get to their shop, and harder for Building B’s tenants to get to the competitor.
Through back-channel discussions, the restaurant learns that Building A may be conceding to many of Building B’s requests for how the parking lot should be organized. Worried that this will help their competition, the restaurant announces on social media that if Building A doesn’t get their act together and negotiate more aggressively, they will “bomb the sh*t out of them.”
Now, that’s quite a leap. How did we go from negotiations one day to threats of mass murder the next?
If this scenario were to occur in Anytown, USA, we would immediately see this as unhinged and immoral. No, you cannot use murder as your default method of settling disputes. The vast majority of us accept this in our day-to-day lives, and the proof of this is that the vast majority of us have never murdered anybody. We settle disputes verbally, or through contractual agreements, and if negotiations fail we tend to just walk away. But for some reason when it comes to the global stage, where the harm caused by these decisions is far greater in scale, many struggle to see the issue with this type of rhetoric.
The Hormuz negotiations
Iran and Oman have been engaged in negotiations over the future governance of the Strait of Hormuz for the past few weeks. We were told in the early stages of the talks that a deal was within reach, but it is yet to materialize. The fact that these talks are even happening seems to imply a quiet U.S. admission that Iran will control the waterway in some capacity going forward, which is a major diplomatic climb-down from Donald Trump. With this concession, the focus seems to have shifted. Whereas before the goal was to “liberate the Strait,” the objective now is to get a deal that Trump can spin into a victory.
To this end, Trump has sought to influence the Iranian-Omani negotiations. In an August 17 phone call with Fox News correspondent Trey Yingst, Donald Trump said “If Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the sh*t out of them.”
This frustration seems to have been caused by the lack of progress towards opening the Strait of Hormuz. The Iranians and Omanis said weeks ago that a deal was almost complete, only to have negotiations extend longer than anticipated. Trump, desperate for a deal that can help bring down oil prices and sooth the economic stress at home, chose to lash out at Oman, who he believes is being too favorable to Iran.
This sadly is not an unusual sentiment from Donald Trump, who has made a habit out of threatening to bomb countries as a negotiating tactic. The regularity with which Trump threatens mass murder does not make it civilized or moral, however. It makes it even more unsettling.
As a result of Trump’s loss at the hands of Iran, the American empire has been dealt a severe dent to its armor. The image of American bases scattered across the Middle East – once a symbol of military dominance – has been quite literally shattered. Trump can no longer rely on previously held assumptions about American power in order to get his way. Thus, he must lower himself rhetorically to the level of a brutal warlord.
Hellbound and Down 