You'll regret it
About nothing it is hardly worth while to waste a word
Human beings have manic episodes; when it happens to an entire nation we call it empire. The affliction is the same. You prance around town with your tits practically pouring out your top, demanding drinks from strangers, snatching cigarettes out their hands. Isn’t it funny how I can do absolutely anything I want? And everybody loves me? You know you have a special destiny in the world. It’s obvious; flowers turn their faces towards you whenever you walk past. You’re going to save the world by sniffing coke off a stranger’s frenulum. And other people don’t understand, they’re all such bummers, they take things so personally, when really it was just a joke. In fact the whole world is a joke, none of it’s really serious, this great primary-coloured playground built for your delight. Sometimes in the brief moments you’re alone you can hear laughter, not coming from anyone in particular, not laughing at anything you can name, just the manic chattering laughter of the entire universe, flooding the silence. Lately you’ve been getting in fights. You’ve been winning them all. You’ve been stumbling into casinos and putting it all on red, emptying out your bank account, taking unsecured loans, putting it all on red and winning every time. God loves you more than he loves other people, he loves you in a different way. Maybe in an erotic way. Maybe you’re interested. You’ve been buying precious stones, rubies and sapphires; you keep them in your pockets. Sometimes people tell you that one day you’re going to wake up in hospital again, or jail, again, or in a pool of your own blood and vomit, or maybe not at all. They’re wrong. That happens to other people. It will never, ever happen to you.
One good thing about Europe is we’ve all already been through it all. Here, every miserable dirt-poor republic had its century in the sun. Today, Splugovina is a dreary landlocked country of eight million people that produces sunflower seeds, insulated cables, and zinc-bearing ores, but for a brief period in the fifteenth century the glorious Splug Empire stretched clear across the continent. The crowned heads of Europe came to kneel and give tribute. After that, it’s true, there was the War of the Quintuple Alliance, and all the cities were razed, and maybe forty percent of the population starved in the fields, but there are still some very impressive ruins in the hills. That time is never coming back, though. All you can do now is put up a bunch of gaudy statues to the conquering heroes, make genocidal chants at football games. Remember, with a kind of lazy black bitterness, the days when the world was made of sugar and you were mad.
My own miserable dirt-poor country was the last one to suffer from a bout of empire, and we caught it worse than anyone else. God is an Englishman, we said. We really meant it. He only filled the earth with various fuzzy-wuzzies so we’d have the pleasure of conquering them. We didn’t even really want an empire, God just sort of dropped one into our lap. One day you wake up to find out you’ve been massively overproducing bolts of linen, meanwhile on the other side of the planet some kingdom you’ve been trading with has fallen into civil war, but maybe you could still shift all this stupid linen if the private security at your trading post just restored a bit of order locally, and then suddenly you’re being paraded around on an elephant while a thousand slaves die building a giant statue of your face. It all happened in a blur. Today you can still go to any quiet little English church in any quiet little English village, clipped hedgerows, cricket green, and read the tombs. All the local lads who died under far distant skies. Born in Kent, perished on the Niger or the Irrawaddy, puking through jungle, trudging over Antarctic ice. Today the British are known for complaining all the time, but that wasn’t always the case. We went cheerfully to these far distant places, madness in our eyes. During Scott’s Antarctic expedition half the crew had to spend an entire winter in a single nine-foot igloo, minus forty degrees outside, so cold it’s the same in Celsius and Fahrenheit, all of them wracked with dysentery and ptomaine poisoning, toenails falling off from frostbite, but they all kept their spirits up with callisthenics, lectures on subjects of scientific interest, and regular games of charades. The other half of the expedition died on the ice in equally good humour. They filmed the whole disastrous journey; it was released in 1924 as The Great White Silence. Film begins with an endorsement from King George V. ‘I wish that every British boy could see this film, for it would help to foster the spirit of adventure on which the Empire was founded.’
That mania has passed now. It’s one with Nineveh and Tyre. There’s nothing technically stopping us, but you no longer find British boys racing to be the first to die in some strange and exciting new way. Now it’s Americans. Soon it’ll be Chinese.
I like American optimism. Not everyone does. A lot of people from long-vanished empires claim to find it unbearable; it reminds them of what they no longer have. But I like it. There’s something ridiculous about an American who tries to hate their own country, like a dog trying to walk on two legs. They don’t know what it means to wake up and curse the grey skies and poisoned soil of Splugovina, this place that closes around you like a tomb. They can rage against the slavery and genocide, but it’s still with that bright, feverish, all-American gleam in the eye. The only way an American can really encounter pessimism is by hiring a British person to perform it for them. That’s what I do, basically. It’s a living.
The problem, though, is the corollary to all this charming American exuberance, which is the repeated bouts of mass murder. It comes in cycles. A few years of screaming bloodlust until it all blows up in your face, and then you spend the next few years at home drinking wine out the bottle and wailing over the unfairness of the world, before finally straightening your back, giving one last sniff, and bravely stepping outside to once again club someone’s children to death. I used to think some kind of progress was possible here. I used to have something called the Iraq War Theory of Divorce in Hollywood Films. The theory says that if a film features a male lead character who gets divorced or separated from his main romantic interest, and it came out before 2005 or so, by the end he will have cajoled his ex back into bed and they’ll live happily ever after. Liar Liar, The Parent Trap, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. If it came out after 2005, by the end he will have learned to accept the situation, moved on, and found someone new. A total bloodbath in the Middle East, maybe a million people shot or blown up or tortured to death with power tools, so you can learn that hey, sometimes things don’t work out there way you want them to, and hey, sometimes that’s ok. But all these things are temporary. Don Quixote got a decade of sanity between volumes before the rabbit poison started glittering in his eyes and he was babbling about knight errantry again. America got less than half. Four years after the last American troops left Afghanistan under Taliban guard, war critic JD Vance was on the TV, saying that while he understood why people were put off by the last round of wars in the Middle East, ‘the difference is that back then we had dumb presidents, and now we have a president who actually knows how to accomplish America’s national security objectives.’ The dumb presidents, the ones who blundered around getting America into quagmires, still always held back from directly attacking Iran. The smart president is Donald Trump.
America has discovered that you can just kill people. There might be a centuries-old taboo on the assassination of foreign heads of state, but that’s obsolete now. Those rules govern interactions between peers, and America has no peers. They’re useful for states that might conceivably face consequences for their actions, and America never will. Look at what they did in Venezuela. Kidnapped Maduro using weapons the rest of the world has never even heard of, sonic weapons, microwaves, directed radiation beams that can boil a Cuban guard’s brains inside his skull from half a mile away. They’ve got Kabbalistic weapons that rearrange your gematria, curdle your viscera until the vessel cracks and a glowing plasma leaks out. The US and Israel are playing on sandbox mode, so technologically ahead of everyone else it’s like the nineteenth century again, when you could scythe down masses of spear-chucking savages with one good burst from the Maxim gun. And yet every previous administration tried negotiating with the savages, threatening them, sanctioning them, playing this weird choreographed game where they agreed to let Iran fire a volley of missiles at Tel Aviv to satisfy some vague principle of honour and then shot them all down. When you’ve got so much power, why bother? Why keep having conversations? Why not just kill them? If you don’t like the spiritual leader of three hundred million Shia Muslims, just fucking kill him. Kill him, kill his wife, kill his daughter, kill his fourteen-month-old granddaughter, kill his cabinet, kill his military command, kill all the representatives you’ve been negotiating with, and kill a bunch of your preferred candidates to take over his position while you’re at it, why not, they’re only lives. What a brilliant discovery. Amazing no one else ever thought of it before. They must all be dumb. And yes, maybe something goes wrong, and Opus 4.6 accidentally deletes the wrong object. ‘You’re totally right to call me on that. What I fired on wasn’t an IRGC missile bunker—it was a primary school full of little girls. Here’s why that matters.’ But so what? It’s the world’s problem if Israel or America gets a papercut, but there’s no reason to let the disintegrated bodies of a hundred and fifty strangers’ daughters interfere with the general giddy atmosphere. They’re only lives. ‘It was something, and it is nothing. Does not this amount to exactly the same thing as though it had been nothing, and came to nothing; and about nothing it is hardly worth while to waste a word.’
So far, the war is going very well. It’s called Operation Epic Fury. Operation Epic Badass Ninja Pirate. Organs of state keep issuing public statements that say things like ‘Kill without hesitation, avenge without mercy’ and ‘You say death to America, we say America will be your death.’ They’re having no problems killing anyone they want to kill. Iran might be a proud and ancient civilisation with a historical memory stretching back six thousand years, but right now it’s an easily broken toy in the hands of an empire that can barely remember the day before yesterday. But somehow, the power to kill anyone at will isn’t enough. Things are not going according to plan. As far as I can tell, the plan was this. As soon as Israel and America eliminated the Supreme Leader, the entire Islamic Republic would disintegrate like an alien invasion fleet once the mothership’s been hit. At this point the Iranian people would fill the streets, overthrow the mullahs, and immediately start signing up for an OnlyFans account. Obviously these are early days, but it doesn’t look like things are going to plan. Something very different is happening. Decapitating the Islamic Republic has not shut it down. Instead, individual IRGC units are all operating autonomously, using their own mobile and highly fluid command structures. Instead of a single enemy, there’s now a swarm. No central authority to negotiate with even if you wanted to. A headless zombie Iran, the wreckage of a six-thousand-year-old state spewing ballistic missiles in every direction. Missiles falling on Saudi oil refineries, Bahraini radar installations, on the matcha labubu sexual slavery camps of Dubai. You thought all those CGI skyscrapers meant you were abstracted from geography, but this is still the Middle East. Meanwhile the revolutionaries have not yet shown up in the streets of Tehran. Possibly because the people most likely to overthrow the regime already tried that in January, and the regime killed or imprisoned them all. It might not happen. The Islamic Republic is a bad government, possibly the worst government anywhere on the face of the earth, but it’s being attacked by children making plane noises. Not inconceivable that large numbers of Iranians will, for the time being, rally around what’s left of the regime. So now the plan is to conjure up some ethnic militias, Kurds and Azeris, use them to re-enact the breakup of Yugoslavia. A pro-Western liberal democracy would be nice, but if we can’t have that we’ll settle for a giant festering sore on the face of Asia, roiling with endless massacres.
The most pathetic figures in all of this are, of course, the lackeys and catamites of the American right. Sixteen months ago they were screeching that Kamala Harris was about to lead America into a cataclysmic war with Iran. Sinister HR girlbosses want to feed your sons into a woodchipper so Raytheon can afford more Pride flags! Vote Trump for peace! And maybe she would have started a war with Iran if she had the chance, but in the end she didn’t. Trump did. Now his followers have to find a way to justify supporting the exact same thing that horrified them five minutes ago. Not an easy job. One attempt, from someone who apparently passes for an intellectual in these circles: ‘Many people derive immense satisfaction from feeling betrayed. For them, politics is an activity where you first build yourself up as a righteous victim, then wait for your champion to betray you so you can luxuriate in outrage and moral superiority.’ Got that? It’s grievance politics if you want your representatives to do anything at all; you’re being morally obnoxious if you object to your anti-war candidate starting a war. Instead of expecting some kind of result from your politics, you should just go limp while Pete Hegseth whispers slurred and whiskey-stinking entreatments into your ear. Do anything, this person is saying. I’ll support anything you want, like a good little whore, because I don’t want to think of myself as a victim. A good rule of thumb is that if you ever feel the need to degrade yourself in public like this, it’s time to totally abandon whatever political opinions brought you here and start again from scratch. I think I would stab myself to death with a butter knife before I wrote anything this undignified. But maybe Aristotle was right, and some people are natural slaves.
I’m sure it doesn’t feel like being a slave at the moment. A lot of people are still giddy with war. It feels like infinite power, it feels like you can do anything you want. But you’ll regret it. Things will not go how you want them to. Unlike previous empires, America can’t even make a desert; everywhere it goes the world reverts to mere chaos. State collapse, ethnic war, tribal militias forgetting how to speak, stammering and babbling over the ruins. Now you’ve decided to create a widening gyre right on top of the sea passage for thirty percent of the world’s energy. Whatever it is, this will come back to fuck you in ways you will not predict. There will be buildings exploding in unexpected corners of the world. It might not be fatal, not yet. But it’s not looking good. Eighty years ago, the United States could essentially print out a theoretically infinite number of tanks and battleships. Now you can’t, and China can. Young Chinese people have a strangely cheerful attitude to their country. Not so long ago China was devouring its own population for no good reason, torturing and killing them by the million; now everyone gets a massive TV and an electric car and a big bowl of soup noodles and a million plasticky vertical dramas about a Tang dynasty princess who falls in love with a mysterious assassin. How can you not love your country when it’s lifted one billion people out of poverty? They’re starting to go a little bit giddy. Meanwhile the American earnestness I love so much is tinged, these days, with a touch of resentment and desperation. Would a declining empire do this? you say, thrashing about, casting off all your subtlety and sophistication for a show of naked force. You don’t get many more of these. Each one brings you just a little bit closer to the end.