Tanker Wars

The seizure of the British oil tanker by the Iranian regime is clearly in response to the seizure of an Iranian tanker off Gibraltar by the UK.  Socialists should be opposed to all such actions, because they put in jeopardy the lives of the workers employed as sailors on those ships, and because they threaten to spill over into wider conflagrations that imperil the lives of millions of workers in any resulting war.  As Frances O'Grady has pointed out, many of the workers employed on these British flagged ships, are foreign workers, who are not even paid the UK Minimum Wage for the danger in which their lives are put in peril.

Britain has tried to distinguish the Iranian action from the British action, which was the immediate cause of it.  There is no such distinction.  Britain has justified its seizure of the Iranian tanker on the basis of it infringing EU sanctions against Syria.  In reality, everyone knows that Britain took this action, rather than Spain or any other EU country, because it was prompted to do so by Trump, and the US government, as part of its ongoing economic war against Iran.  Britain was keen to comply with Trump's request, because as the UK eyes its departure from the EU, it knows that it will be increasingly be dependent upon Trump and the US, as it becomes a vassal of the US regime, destined to do the US's bidding, and to respond to its beck and call.

But, the pretext of enforcing EU sanctions on Syria itself raises other issues.  These sanctions are EU sanctions, so why would Britain as it emphasises its forthcoming departure from the EU seek to act as the EU's policeman?  But, even were that set aside, what right does any EU country have to seize the ships of non-EU countries?  If the EU imposes sanctions on Syria, its clear that it has a right to enforce breaches of those sanctions by EU countries or companies, but it has no right to enforce those sanctions against non-EU countries.  Iran has no sanctions against Syria, and so it should be free to ply its trade on the high seas free from obstruction by the EU or any other power.

The only right that the EU has to enforce its sanctions on other countries going about their business legally according to their own laws, is the power of force.  It should not be surprising, therefore, if other countries, as with Iran, now, where they have the ability to do so, also act on the basis of force.  In fact, the EU should be well aware that this is the case, from its own experience with the US.  The US pulled out of the JCPOA (Iran Nuclear Deal) largely it seems, because of Trump's personal enmity towards Obama, and his attempt to reverse everything that the Obama government put in place, be it the Dreamers legislation, Obamacare, the Paris Climate Treaty, or the Iran Nuclear Deal.  It is typical Trumpian petulance.   

Having pulled out of the deal, and imposed sanctions on Iran, Trump has insisted that the EU and other signatories to the JCPOA, who have not withdrawn from it, also conform to the US imposed sanctions.  The US has no legal right to do so, but its economic power has enabled it to force European companies to abide by US sanctions or be themselves sanctioned by the US.  For the last year, Iran complied with the terms of the JCPOA, despite the US withdrawal, on the basis that the EU promised that it was looking at ways of circumventing the US sanctions on companies dealing with Iran, that operate largely through the role of the Dollar in international trade and money flows.  The EU does indeed appear to have been attempting to find such alternatives, because as the US and EU increasingly come into competition and conflict with each other, it is in the EU's interest to prevent the US from exerting such a stranglehold.

But, the EU has not provided any such alternative as yet, and meanwhile it is the Iranian economy, and the Iranian people that are suffering as a consequence.  Whatever you might think of the Iranian regime, and for me that is very little, it is quite obvious that Trump's demands that Iran effectively disarm itself are never going to be accepted at a time when the US and its UK puppet are providing the reactionary expansionist regime in Saudi Arabia with billions of dollars worth of the latest weaponry, and when that regime is engaged in a genocidal war in Yemen that is in reality a proxy war with Iran.  Nor is Iran going to disarm itself when that same Saudi regime and the other reactionary Gulf Monarchies were the prime agents in providing weapons and special forces to fight in Libya to overthrow Gaddafi, and providing weapons, money and fighters, in cahoots with the CIA, to fight in Syria, in an attempt to overthrow Assad.  And, of course, that same Saudi regime is in a close alliance with Israel, which in addition to its massive firepower of conventional weapons also has one of the world's largest stockpiles of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.

After all, Iran has good reason to remember that in the 1980's, the US, and UK provided large amounts of weapons, including chemical weapons, and technical expertise in how to use them to best effect, to their ally Saddam Hussein in Iraq, as they used him in an attempt to overturn the Iranian government.

The proximate cause of this conflict is Trump's decision to withdraw from the JCPOA.  The US has every reason to engender or at least to be indifferent to rising conflict in the Gulf, and in the wide Middle East and North Africa.  At the start of this century, a number of economies in MENA were developing at a moderate to rapid pace.  There was a growing degree of co-operation between those economies and the EU, as even Gaddafi and Libya were being drawn back into the fold.  The EU created a structure for increasing economic cooperation with MENA, along similar lines to that which was used to draw in the economies of Central and Eastern Europe into the EU.  This gave the EU considerable economic and strategic advantage compared to a declining US.

The Iraq War, which was for all intents and purposes a US war fought with the support of its junior partner Britain, and from which other EU countries largely abstained, undermined that development.  Iraq was thrown into considerable chaos, including the creation from it of a large group of Islamist insurgents that, in various guises spread out into Syria, Libya, Mali and so on.  Those Sunni jihadists were provided with large-scale support by Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States and the US to spread this unrest across MENA, leading to the overthrow of Gaddafi and descent of that country into warlordism and jihadism, with a similar attempt to impose that in Syria, in both cases under cover of the Arab Spring.

The further consequence was a migration and refugee crisis that necessarily imposed itself not on the US and UK which had created it by causing the conflagration in the first place, but on the countries of the EU, primarily, in the first instance on those EU countries on the  Mediterranean shoreline.  If we ask the question Cui Bono (Who Benefits) from this, it is the US, which thereby placed an increased burden on its EU competitor.  The same is true with the similar destabilisation of the EU's Eastern border as a result of the so called colour revolutions.

The US has nothing to lose from chaos, destabilisation and conflict in the Middle East.  The US buys very little oil from the Middle East, now.  It is, as a result of fracking and the extraction of oil and gas from tar sands, a net export of oil itself.  It benefits from a higher oil price, which is the consequence of instability in the Gulf.  It is the EU, which is dependent on Gulf oil, which suffers.  And as the instability causes oil and gas prices to rise, even the oil and gas that the EU buys from Russia becomes more expensive, hitting the EU economy, as well as the Chinese economy, which is the other major target of US sanctions, tariffs and other forms of economic warfare.  And, of course, the US is simultaneously trying to force the EU not to buy oil and gas from Russia either.

US policy is aimed against its two major economic competitors the EU and China.  Trump;s global trade war is designed to that effect, but so to is his military and strategic agenda, which seeks to increase instability instability on and within the borders of the EU and China.  Within that context, the UK, which for the last 75 years has acted as the US proxy and fifth column in Europe - one reason DeGaulle wanted to keep Britain out of the EEC - is fulfilling its natural function as tame poodle of the US, and now, as Brexit draws near, even more forced to act as a vassal state of the US, dependent upon Trump for favours, as it whores itself out to him.