Pentagon acting comptroller Jay Hurst told the U.S. Congress on April 29 that the war against Iran—at least the first 60 days of it—had cost the American people about $25 billion. While this enormous amount might be the price tag of the U.S. military operations overseas (though some insist it’s at least double that), the actual cost for the globe is orders of magnitude greater.
Initial estimates are that if we take into account military expenditures, damage to military installations, damage to countries in the region, the global fallout from the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and associated lost output, real costs are in the range of $4 trillion and rising—two orders of magnitude greater than the “measly” $25 billion cited by the Pentagon.
But this figure, likely an underestimate, still does not begin to capture the physical economic realities of the damage. While it took only 60 days to destroy schools, housing, industries, and infrastructure in Southwest Asia—and to take thousands of lives in Iran and beyond—how long and how much will it take to rebuild? How much of the damage is irreversible?
The $4 trillion cost comes out to about $20.5 billion per country worldwide, larger than the GDP of roughly a quarter of the world’s nations. This burden is, of course, not felt evenly. Take the added costs of energy with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz: While the added strain of gas and fertilizer shortages will certainly cause hardship in developed nations, in developing nations, it will mean the difference between life and death.
And what of the effect on the world’s relative potential population density, the measure of true physical economic progress? What will be the effect on the power to raise the productive powers of labor per capita and per square kilometer, to thus support a growing human population at an increasing standard of living? What will be the cost in terms of lives not lived?
When one paints that picture, two interconnected issues come to the fore: First, this collapse of the global system into a depopulation mode is the very intention of the system of empire that the world has been suffering under for more than 500 years; second, nations of the world must wake up to the fact that certain measures might delay the collapse, but it cannot be stopped unless the entire policy of geopolitics and war is replaced with a new world security and development architecture which has the common aims of mankind as its raison d’être.
This, indeed, was, at its root, the mission of the American republic, which was founded out of the first anti-colonial, anti-imperial revolution in history. The American Revolution was a victory, not for one group of people, but for an idea, rooted in thousands of years of human history, of a government based on a higher principle of mankind, rejecting the bestial notion of an oligarchical (Epstein) class.
That fight is not over. The great advantage we have today—despite the fact that the empire system is now global and nuclear-armed, with all the destructive potential that implies—is that if nations of the world can come together and use this crisis to replace the dead, collapsing system with a new security and development architecture, as called for by Helga Zepp-LaRouche in 2022, cementing it with an era of development that overcomes the physical effects of colonialism, we can eliminate the system of empire for good—relegating it to a bygone era of human civilization.
A mission this big is, ironically, the least-action pathway to peace; it is the only way to eliminate the perpetual cause of war—namely, the ridiculous, imperial notion that man is a beast who must be governed as such. “We have to abandon geopolitical grabbing of wealth and riches,” Helga Zepp-LaRouche told a meeting of the International Peace Coalition on May 1, “and we have to replace it with a foreign policy based on love for humanity.”
This is our task for the immediate period. Citizens of the world must lead their governments in demanding this.
