Trump is not 'betraying his base'
J'accuse blogs
The tie clip mafia have taken to the airwaves today to denounce Donald Trump for attacking Iran, denouncing the ‘neo-con establishment’ for creating refugees who might come to Europe and for attempting to nation build outside of the Occident.
Private Godfrey, the leader of Restore, has been permitted by his papist handlers to tweet out a mangled ‘realist’ argument on why we should have nothing to with an intervention in Iran on the basis that our military is too depleted to play a role in this conflict, really a way of avoiding taking a stance on whether or not the Mad Mullahs should be allowed to stay in power.
This is a weak analysis because the US attacks rely on British bases like Diego Garcia - if the strikes this morning began from there (it is not clear at time of writing if this did happen), we have already taken a side in the conflict. If we are still preventing Trump from using Diego Garcia, we have taken a position on the conflict. Iran, in retaliation, could already justify launching missiles at our sovereign bases in Cyprus, so the capability of our own military is now a moot point, we are either in, or out of the conflict. You don’t get to choose not getting to choose.
But leave that to the side for one moment. There are two core arguments anti-interventionist arguments, from the right, that we are going to hear a lot about in the coming weeks which must address in short order because they are both vacuous.
The first is the one which has been advanced by Aaron Bastani for years and is now being taken up by some of the more imbecilic right-wingers, that by launching interventions in the Middle East or elsewhere we are creating refugee flows. This falls flat for several reasons – not least that military interventions which speed up the collapse of a failing government can actually make a region more stable in the long-term. Abu Naji set this out beautifully in J’accuse regarding Libya in the summer of 2024, explaining how restraint in 2011 could have led to many more hundreds of thousands of deaths.
The main source of refugee flows into Europe during the mid 2010s was from the Syrian civil war, a war which dragged on for years because the West did not decisively intervene whilst Russia and Iran supported Assad. If Iran is able to acquire nuclear weapons and use them in the Middle East, we will have many, many millions more people trying to flee the region (a nuclear war in Africa is the cause of migration in Christopher Priest’s Fugue for a Darkening Island).
So the argument is historically/factually untrue – fine for Bastani, a man of the left to advance it – but embarrassing when ‘right-wingers’ adopt the same framing, the idea that the third world only wants to come here because of what they are leaving behind. Afghanistan, which has been left to its own devices by the west, is still the no.1 nationality for small boats arrivals in the UK (YE 2025). We also receive large numbers of illegal migrants from India, China and Vietnam, all countries without active conflicts Why does the third world want to move to Europe? In fact, 10% of our small boats arrivals are already Iranian.
What Bastani might find difficult to admit (his father was an Iranian refugee) – but a ‘based racist’ should be able to say – is that Europe is a much, much, much nicer place to live than, say, sub-Saharan Africa. That is because Europeans have built a lovely civilisation. If you were to put me in the body of an Indian sixteen-year-old boy, and give me a mobile phone showing me what life is like in Europe, access to Wikipedia etc, I would also make it my life’s work to move to Britain, by hook or by crook. The Trinidadian writer VS Naipaul put it best when he said he came to Britain ‘to join civilisation’.
Iran is an ancient civilisation which deserves respect, it is much more prosperous than say, Afghanistan, but sure and night follows day, intervention or no intervention, we will continue to have Iranians trying to migrate here illegally. The solution to this is to do what Restore GB likes to prevaricate about – quitting the ECHR and any other conventions which prevent deportations and send them to Rwanda.
Now let us address the second core argument that the tie clip mafia are advancing, that there is a problem of Western governments and electorates attempting to ‘nation-build’, and that we went into Afghanistan and Iraq to ‘spread democracy’, a doomed project that will never work in Iran and will just get hundreds of thousands of people killed.
The extent to which foreign interventions in the Middle-East are moralistic is massively overblown in this analysis. We did not decide to invade Afghanistan one day in 2001 because we were concerned about how the Taliban were treating women. We (the west) did it because of 9/11, as part of a wider war on terror because the Taliban was sheltering Al-Qaeda. This intervention was not sold to the public as a way of ‘spreading democracy’, it was sold to the public as a way of keeping them safe from Islamic terrorists. The abstract ‘values’ argument was mostly taken up by leftish academics who were ‘mugged by reality’ after 9/11. It was about addressing a specific, as it was with Iraq. This was a feature of the Sun (a popular tabloid in Britain) in September 2002, a month before Congress authorised the use of force in Iraq.
Human rights, and the liberation of the Iraqi people, were a much smaller part of the case for intervening in Iraq than many Millennial/Gen Z commentators apparently believe. This also, weirdly, informs how they perceive what Trump is doing in Iran. From their point of view, any attack against a country in the middle-east is another invasion of Iraq which will see thousands of British troops die in the desert for nothing. This is supposedly a ‘betrayal’ by Trump of his ‘America First’ platform.
