While the world has been distracted by Coronavirus, Iran has been busy making its moves. What a mere twelve months ago would have been big front-page news all across the world now barely even registers in the mainstream news media at all. Yet, despite the lack of coverage, Iran seems to be rapidly approaching the point of acquiring a viable nuclear weapon. Shockingly, nobody in the mainstream media even seems to care.

At this writing, it is widely assumed that Iran is now mere weeks away from nuclear breakout status. If true, this is a crisis that is very soon going to come to a head.

Jake Sullivan, White House national security advisor, referred to Iran’s forthcoming nuclear breakout status as a “critical early priority” for the Biden administration. Sullivan went on to state that this issue could well become an “escalating nuclear crisis as they move closer to having enough fissile material for a nuclear weapon.”

As a show of force and possibly intention, US B-52 nuclear bombers have been flying sorties over the Gulf and right up to the border of the Islamic Republic, clearly signposting Western intent should the revived nuclear deal negotiations fail.

French President Emmanuel Macron has described how the international community has but a “very short time” to prevent Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

But there is a problem with all this hard talk. Iran, it would seem, is not buying this show of strength, and they are not afraid. The uncomfortable reality is that they simply do not seem to fear President Joe Biden, as they once feared President Donald Trump. The inauguration of a new president, rather than put them on notice and high alert, seems to have emboldened them.

In the face of all the tacit threats from America and Europe, Iran remains belligerent. The Islamic Republic has thus far refused point-blank to come back to the negotiation table for talks, something Joe Biden put so much faith in during Obama’s final term.

Tehran has flatly ruled out any amendments to the nuclear accord, describing the document the Biden administration believes can bring Iran back in line as “non-negotiable.” Before they have even begun, the negotiations are dead in the water.

So entrenched and emboldened is Iran that even before any conversation is had, before they even sit down at the table, Tehran wants the harsh sanctions the United States has imposed on them previously for violating the original terms of the nuclear deal, completely removed.

To do so would essentially reward the Iranians for breaking the terms of the original nuclear accord and is something the West is understandably very reluctant to do. But time is against the West, just as time is against little Israel. On this present course, if nobody does something soon, the issue will become a fait accompli – Iran will have a viable nuclear weapon.

Even the United Nations nuclear watchdog has conceded that the Iranian nuclear weapons program is back in full swing, revealing that a second cascade of advanced IR-2m centrifuges for enriching uranium has once again begun working at Iran’s underground Natanz facility. They also believe there is a third cluster just waiting to go.

The Iranians have openly admitted that they have enriched Uranium to the critical 20% level at their Fordow plant, still a large level below the 90% enrichment required for a nuclear weapon, but a significant step in that direction nonetheless. The reason for this is that the time and processes involved in enriching uranium to 20% are much longer and more difficult than that of taking it from 20% enrichment up to 90%. This can be achieved in a relatively short period of time.

Most surprisingly, Iran has been really quite frank and open about these violations. Perhaps this is because Iran no longer fears the reaction of the United States under its current presidential leadership, as it clearly did under its previous incumbent.

At this point, Israel is grappling with a huge number of uncertainties regarding Iran and its nuclear program and the wider geopolitical environment. It is at best unclear to even the most informed Iran pundit just how advanced Iran’s nuclear program now is, or exactly how close they may be to a feasible weapon. It’s all about best estimates, and all the best estimates seem to conclude that Iran is getting very, very close.

Iran is clearly making rapid progress towards nuclear breakout status. It is also widely agreed that Iran would not go for nuclear breakout status unless they had enough material to produce 3-5 viable weapons. They just won’t take the risk for one weapon, as the US or Israel would simply destroy it, and all their efforts would be in vain.

Israel or the United States would think twice before attacking Iran if they knew there were five weapons, not just one. So, this rush to breakout status is likely not for just one weapon but multiple warheads.

As we speak, the IDF is actively preparing to take on Iran’s nuclear weapons program – even if it has to do it alone. The United States, however, would be mistaken to think that this was an issue critical to Israel only. The world is watching new United States President Joe Biden, and just like Iran has done, rulers like Vladimir Putin of Russia, Xi Jinping of China, and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un are weighing Joe Biden and measuring him.

Whether Biden will be found wanting will be directly determined by the outcome of this issue, not by his response to Coronavirus, and may well determine the Biden administration’s international standing during the rest of his term.

Time is not on Israel’s side. Israeli Defense Force chief of staff Lt. General Aviv Kochavi issued his own blunt assessment of the state of play: “I have instructed the Israeli Defense Forces to prepare a number of operational plans, in addition to those already in place.”

So significant is Lt Gen. Kochavi’s concerns over Iran’s imminent nuclear breakout status that these comments were entirely unsanctioned and from his own initiative, something he himself was sanctioned for.

Israel’s hand is being forced, and it is increasingly likely that if they are forced to act, they will do so alone. Iran knows this. Last week Iranian Defense Minister Amir Hatami issued an ominous threat to raze Tel Aviv and Haifa “to the ground” should Israel launch any pre-emptive action against Iran or its nuclear program.

It seems evident from President Biden’s first few months in power that he would likely not be willing to overtly engage the Iranians in direct military intervention, especially if side by side with Israel. To do so would be to enrage a great portion of his base at home, to whom he is so beholden.

On February 2nd, Senior Israeli Minister Tzachi Hanegdi commented that in his opinion, he cannot see the Americans agreeing to take on such a military initiative, leaving Israel to face this growing threat alone.

Time is clearly running out. Whether Israel’s hand will be forced or not remains to be seen. If Israel and the West are not careful, though, we will all wake up one morning and an Iranian nuclear weapon will have become a fait accompli.

The drumbeats of war are getting louder and louder.

wardmatt1977@gmail.com

I often wonder about Job and his amazing resilience. I wonder how I would react if the calamities that afflicted him came upon me. To accumulate such great wealth, status, and comfort and have it all reduced to nothing in such quick fashion, and then have your loved ones taken away from you in such a devastating manner as he. It must have been crushing for him.

I wouldn’t have the resolve or fortitude of Job; I think few would. Yet today, we are all of us like Job. We stand on the very brink of everything we know and have come to accept as “normal” being forcefully changed in just a moment, and almost nobody seems to know it, or worse, care.

We all take everything for granted, even our precious loved ones. Even they can be taken away from us. Very soon, our world will be filled with men and women just like Job. People who have never known the pain of overwhelming and complete systemic loss. People who will very quickly be plunged into the most extreme circumstances of loss imaginable.

This is because our current global system is already effectively dead. Right now, we await the emergence of a new global order, a one-world system of governance and control that will leave no person untouched. Something serious has gone wrong with our current world order, and it now stands on the verge of total collapse.

This is no mere hyperbole either. There is a feeling, just a sense perhaps, that the masses are finally beginning to realize this, even if only at a subconscious level. There is a deep feeling of unease wherever one chooses to look; it permeates all our societies from the Middle East to Russia, from North America to South America, and throughout Western Europe. And with this volatility and unease, there is a tangible sense of societal failure, betrayal and even foreboding over what might yet be in the not too distant future. People and societies are increasingly on tenterhooks.

Stable world orders that last for prolonged periods of time are rare things indeed. Our current world order, now about 75 years old, arose from a period of intense convulsion and violence caused by the Second World War. Over a hundred million people died in the process of birthing our current world order. It is a truism of history that new world orders never arise out of calm but from the ruin of destruction and chaos.

Maintaining any kind of stable world order for any length of time requires skillful diplomacy and statecraft, as world orders are made and maintained; they do not just suddenly appear. If they are not maintained and managed effectively with creative diplomacy, with functioning national and transnational institutions to hold them up, and creative effective decision-making at just the right time to avert crisis, global systems eventually break down and fail.

This is where we stand today, on the very brink of collapse.

Our global system is breaking down and failing right before our eyes. Millions upon millions are still living their lives under the false daily presupposition that the way things are today is the way things will always be in the future, both for themselves and their children. This viewpoint could not be more wrong. Our current global system is fragmenting before our very eyes.

It is no feat of extraordinary prognostication to say such things either. All world orders come to an end eventually. It is an inevitability of all history. Ours will be no different. What is not in any way inevitable, though, is what comes in the wake of a collapsed world order. There is no guarantee that one world order will move seamlessly and peacefully into the next. What is more likely is that there will be another intense period of convulsion and violence before another world order is birthed. It is becoming increasingly clear that we are even now heading into another period of extreme chaos.

It strikes me as being highly unlikely that we will experience a period of peaceful transition into the next world order. In history, I can think of few such examples ever occurring.

Everything in our global system is linked and intertwined. And I do mean everything. The financial system, supply chains, transportation, food, oil production, the electrical grid, nuclear power… everything. When one system fails, it all fails; and the crash, if one is to occur in our global system, will not be a slow one as in previous world systemic crashes, like the Roman Empire that declined over a period of a century or more.

When our society crashes, it will be an epic fast crash.

The interconnectivity of our global system ensures it. The interconnected nature of our world, which enables worldwide business and trade, which in turn generates such huge profits, has not made our world system strong; it has made it incredibly fragile and brittle. If just one element in the complex system fails, all other systems inevitably crash too.

Consider this realistic feedback loop crash related to our dependence on oil. When oil prices rise, so does everything else simply because all things are connected to oil in some way. So, oil prices rise, slowly at first but then very quickly. Food prices then rise in step with the oil price rises. The high price of oil begins to drive many businesses into bankruptcy, which leads, in turn, to a failure in the financial system leading to a collapse in belief in the monetary system. This then leads into societal revolt, which ultimately is what collapses governments.

But even that scenario, bad as it is, would not be the end of the matter. It would get even worse from there. Oil prices, which caused this hypothetical fast crash through high prices, would then experience a price crash because demand would fall to zero. All drilling would then stop, and new exploration projects would end, meaning that in likewise fashion all other connected businesses and industries would stop, and the worldwide economy would crash again. A double whammy.

It would be a domino crash, with one system bringing down the next, and the next, and so on until all that is left is chaos. And this is just one example of many. It could happen in a thousand different ways. What is important is that it will certainly happen.

But are there any indications of this happening today, or even soon? Well, the short answer is yes, there are. There are very real parallels between where our global civilization is today and those of the past, especially to the global system that existed in the mid-nineteenth century, during the Concert of Europe period.

This period saw the most sustained efforts up until that time at building and maintaining a truly global world order, until the modern day. From 1815 until the outbreak of the First World War, a little under a hundred years later, this period saw the first real multinational effort to define international relationships through global law and order, and attempted to set basic norms for international conduct between countries. It was the precursor to our own current United Nations-led world system.

And it failed catastrophically in 1914 with the outbreak of the “war to end all wars.” The crucial lesson for our generation today lies in the way this world system failed, not in the fact that it did so. The Concert of Europe’s increasing failure and demise had become apparent long before it actually came crashing down, but crucially world leaders and decision-makers failed to recognize that simple fact. This meant that the decline was managed poorly, and that led directly to the calamity and carnage of the First World War.

And this is exactly what we are seeing today. We are witness to an ever-growing distrust both within nation-states and especially between them. Civil war is even openly discussed in the United States today as a potentially realistic outcome of the entrenched partisanship of a current US political system that has divided US society, especially in the wake of the recent contested general election.

There is chaos and bloodshed everywhere one chooses to look. In the Middle East, there is no end in sight to the undeclared war between Israel and her blood-sworn enemies Hamas and Hezbollah. Iran is resurgent and increasingly bellicose. Syria is still in the grips of a civil war and is now a ruined land, being eaten up by Iran, Turkey and a host of other competing nation-states. Iraq is as unstable today as it has ever been in its history.

In Turkey, Recep Erdogan has transformed a once pro-West country into an increasingly Islamized one, and an increasingly anti-Israel one too; Asia is riven by tension, and China is actively seeking to reassert itself globally as the world leader that will usurp the United States’ place over the coming decade. This strain can be seen daily in the ongoing tensions in the South China Sea.

Europe is reeling from one crisis to another, mass migration is reshaping the very fabric of the continent, and there is chaos and uncertainty coming to Britain from Brexit.

What makes the demise of our current world system a certainty is that America’s traditional dominance in international affairs is rapidly coming to an end, with its influence in world affairs starting to diffuse. This is why we are seeing the power and the influence of the United States being challenged now like never before.

The election of Joe Biden, if it stands, will only increase this.

None of the current world leaders or decision-makers of today seem to recognize these simple facts. This is likely because the consequences of this actually happening – that our world system actually does collapse – are too awful for many of them to seriously contemplate.

But it will, and all we are waiting for is the crisis that will start the free fall and push us all over the edge.

The really pertinent question, however, is who or what will come forward to take over when the world emerges from the coming chaos?

The Antichrist will. Keep looking up.

wardmatt1977@gmail.com