A multitude of factors are coming together around the worsening situation in Southwest Asia that have dire consequences for the entire world. Hostilities are continuing, despite U.S. President Donald Trump’s repeated claims that the war is “almost over” and that Iran is on the verge of collapse. Neither seem to be the case, as Iran appears to have no plans of surrendering while also showing it has the means to continue fighting for a long time. However, what is on the verge of collapse is the prevailing delusion inside the Trump administration that this operation would be quick, painless, and overwhelmingly successful.
The reality is quite the opposite. Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz is having a rippling effect across the world, and threatens to become the prick that brings down the already bankrupt Western financial system. Saudi Aramco Chief Executive Amin Nasser warned that the closure will have “catastrophic consequences for oil markets,” and “by far is the biggest crisis the region’s oil and gas industry has faced.” Fuel and fertilizer prices are soaring, and the scramble is on to keep the markets under control. On March 11, the International Energy Agency and its 32 member states announced the decision to release 400 million barrels of reserve oil onto the market to offset the closure—the largest release in the organization’s 50-history by more than double.
Many other nations are now being drawn into the conflict, as France, the U.K., Greece, Italy, Australia, and Pakistan have all announced various plans to begin deploying their militaries to the region.
As this reality sets in, one would hope that sanity begins to prevail and that the Trump administration looks for an off-ramp, a way to prevent this from spiraling further out of control. However, this is not a normal nor a rational group of people, as the President himself showed when he recently posted two videos of religious leaders prophesizing that he was sent by God to save the world. As has unfortunately been made evident, there is a pseudo-religious fanaticism dominating this administration, in addition to the well-known zealotry which runs through Israel. This is epitomized by Secretary of “War” Pete Hegseth, who took a break from his extramarital affairs and drinking habits to preach about why his religion encourages reigning “death and destruction from the sky” onto Iranian cities. Former UK Ambassador Craig Murray raised the frightening question of whether the likes of Trump, Hegseth, and Rubio will do to Iran what Israel did to Gaza if they don’t get their way. American officials are exhibiting a “lust to kill and they revel in impunity,” Murray observed, comparing their joy of killing to that exhibited by Israel’s Ben Gvir and Smotrich, who cheered on the butchery of the Palestinians.
In commenting on this situation during her March 11 webcast, Helga Zepp-LaRouche noted that several factors are coming together to create an extreme danger of another world war. “We are clearly in a new phase in history whereby international law is officially declared non-existent anymore,” she noted. This is all the more damaging because the war was again launched under the cover of diplomatic negotiations, so “diplomacy is out,” she said. “Who should trust anybody?” Add to this the growing dominance of a religious factor in the U.S.’ military affairs. This kind of Armageddonist outlook “should scare the pants off everybody in the whole world, because if you have such an element of irrationality things could go wrong in a moment’s notice,” Zepp-LaRouche added. Then you take the growing desperation to “win the war,” even if it requires extraordinary measures, as senior advisor at the Atlantic Council Harlan Ullman wrote in a March 10 article in The Hill. “Only once in history has strategic bombing forced surrender,” Ullman writes, and that was Truman’s bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. If Trump wants to force Iran to surrender, Ullman goes on, he needs to use “pure shock and awe. And only nuclear weapons could produce that.”
Zepp-LaRouche said of this: “I mean, that could have consequences for an escalation spiral in no time! For many decades, everybody who discussed the situation in the Middle East, we always were discussing the potential of an attack on Iran becoming a global war—a nuclear war which would end all civilization… The danger that we may end up with the extinction of humankind has never been as great as right now.”
Therefore, people should take action and intervene into this situation with a sense of determination to stop the unthinkable before it is too late. In addition, Zepp-LaRouche pointed to a new initiative of the International Peace Coalition, an open letter to Pope Leo XIV, which calls for “the Churches of the West and the East” to unite in a campaign for world peace, “to save mankind from its final tragedy.” Read, endorse, and circulate the open letter here.
