Iran is deepening its relations with China and Joe Biden can choke on his concerns

By John Wight

(John Wight is an author and political commentator, based in Scotland.)

‘Behold them, conquerors of the world, all clad in Roman gowns!’

—Virgil

There are many things the ancient world can teach us. One of the most important is that imperial hubris has been the undoing of every empire there has been, substituting illusions of grandeur and exceptionalism for reality when it comes to understanding a world that is no longer the said empire’s to dominate or control.

This brings us to Joe Biden, the 46th president of the United States, who, even before his landmark first 100 days in office is up, has been exposed as yesterday’s man, trying to reimpose the prison bars of US hegemony on a world that has already broken free and is now acting accordingly.

The arrogance of a US president voicing concerns over a developing economic and strategic relationship — specifically the 25-year cooperation agreement that’s just been signed between Beijing and Tehran — would at any time constitute an unacceptable attempt at interference in the sovereign internal affairs of other countries. At this time, in the context of Washington’s rapidly fading hegemony, unacceptable gives way to laughable.

In this regard, the symbolism of President Biden’s recent mishap while attempting to board Air Force One — when he stumbled not once, not twice, but three times while climbing the steps — cannot be overstated. It symbolized the increasingly faltering steps of Washington on the global stage after decades spent attempting to assert its right to roam around the world and control that which refuses to be controlled — namely those peoples for whom resistance not submission to empire is the acme of human dignity.

Two of those peoples are the people of China and Iran. No two peoples have suffered the depredations of Western colonialism and imperialism more, and no two peoples have done more to reaffirm the truth that oppression breeds resistance, culminating in both cases in the cultivation of a revolutionary consciousness and spirit.

This landmark agreement between China and Iran comes into the category of world-historical importance, carrying as it does far reaching ramifications for the region and the world entire. It marks a new geopolitical dawn, confirming that multipolarity is the new normal regardless of what any US administration or Western ideologue may argue or believe to the contrary.

“Relations between the two countries have now reached the level of strategic partnership and China seeks to comprehensively improve relations with Iran,” China’s Foreign Minister Wang Wi declared at the signing ceremony alongside his Iranian counterpart Mohammad Javad Zarif in Tehran on March 27.

The agreement covers multiple areas of mutual interest from energy, petrochemicals and nuclear power to high-tech, military and maritime projects under the rubric of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, by which Beijing has been building economic and strategic partnerships throughout the Global South. Signed in defiance of Washington’s sanctions that both countries have been laboring under, it refutes the notion of the US as being anything other than a giant with feet of clay in our time.

In this respect, President Biden would do well to imbibe the sage words of famed US Second World War General Omar Bradley: “Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace. We have grasped the mystery if the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount.”

Joe Biden entered the White House on a wave of liberal idealism, pledging to restore America’s moral leadership after four years of a rogue Trump administration. What arrogance and what hubris to believe that after decades of war, slaughter, dislocation and chaos Washington has inflicted on the world under both Republican and Democratic Party administrations, this man should enter office and not immediately get on his knees and beg forgiveness for the countless widows and orphans created in the name of Washington’s ‘moral leadership.’

And, too, just what level of moral leadership on the world stage can the leader of a nation which is imploding in front of his own eyes seriously claim? Because to the extent that this juggernaut of hegemonic destruction has been wreaking havoc beyond its own shores, at home it has been devouring its own. This to the point where today US society has descended into a war of all against all.

The beast of white supremacy that has defined the US far more than democracy since its inception is astir as it has never been since the country’s civil war in the mid-19th century. Trump has given birth to Trumpism, and Trumpism is a twisted ideology of hate born of mass ignorance and despair in the land of the free. It is also, chillingly, an ideology that has huge traction and is not going anywhere anytime soon.

The inculcation of greed as a virtue and compassion as a vice has corroded America’s soul. Its grim fruits are regular mass shootings, countless George Floyds, atomization, polarization, hatred of the other and of self, and a crisis of identity, none of which will be cured by paens to liberal tropes or warm but hollow rhetoric about unity and hope.

Joe Biden can choke on his concerns about China and Iran’s developing relations. The world has changed and changed utterly, to the point where increasingly decisions taken in Beijing, Tehran, Moscow, Caracas, New Delhi and Baghdad are more important than those being taken in Washington, London, Brussels and Paris.

Ending on a figurative note, ‘Rome has again met its Carthage and this time Carthage won’t be denied’