Give Peace a Chance. It Might Just Save the World.

There is a massive shadow play going on which makes movement towards a ceasefire agreement more inevitable than it may sometimes seem.

In the first place, I believe leading officers of the US military are signalling their unease about obeying orders which could lead to violations of international law.

The first batch of generals were slapped down and fired, among them the Army chaplain who may have been complaining on behalf of the enlisted ranks. (Hard to fathom what arguments are used to fire a chaplain!)

But many serving senior officers, particularly those representing the Air Force and its pilots, could be registering their opposition to attacks on civilian targets, specially in the context of an illegal war.

If so, Trump and Hegseth have no choice but to take such military foot-dragging  into account.

The fiasco of the US Special Forces raid on Iranian nuclear sites in March must also be weighing on many minds.

It won’t be long before the public learns the details of this misconceived operation -- to go with the many photos of its scenes of devastation. It failed to achieve surprise leading to the loss of many US aircraft and serious casualties.

The whole episode reminds me strongly of the disaster of Operation Eagle Claw in 1980 which ended with the same storyline of American troops making a panicky escape while leaving behind their charred helicopters.

As Trump must know this one incident was enough to destroy the rest of Jimmy Carter’s presidency.

The belated confirmation that all the US bases in the Gulf have been made unusable together with the general withdrawal of major American naval assets from potential danger zones means that there is little chance of the US starting land-based operations in the foreseeable future.  

Just when it seemed that the Americans had no more cards to play they came up with the smart idea of blockading Iranian ports. But given that that such a move cannot be continued indefinitely this is basically a stopgap measure, part of Trump’s overall stance of trying to bluff his way into some kind of face-saving outcome.

The ruling principle of this war remains unchanged. The more time passes the more   the American strategic position is eroded and, conversely, that of its opponents is strengthened.

No wonder a blame game appears to be already underway in Washington. The military leaders in particular are keen not to be scapegoated. However it is likely that the CENTCOM commander will have to pay the price on behalf of his colleagues.

For his part Trump seems to be planning to throw Hegseth under the bus, having taken care at a recent press conference to identify him publicly as the chief supporter of the whole offensive action.

The Secretary of War’s hardly believable lapse into a starring role in Pulp Fiction only further readies him for the chop.

JD Vance’s protectors meanwhile appear to have given him the task of cornering Netanyahu, who will be named the chief culprit, the one who originally tricked the president into the war and is even now interfering in the negotiations in order to prevent them from succeeding.

It is interesting to see how Israel has been completely swept from the board as a power, which must be because the country has been blasted to smithereens. I doubt that its Tweedledum and Tweedledee minders will be permitted to take part in any future talks between the two main parties.

These weaknesses feed into the general disgust with Israel that is growing in America. As a result the US vice president is being positioned to serve as one of the leading voices working for a quick settlement. I expect that Trump will be increasingly sidelined, specially because the threat of the 25th Amendment has come into play, even if only at one remove for now.

However the most powerful of all the hidden forces operating today is the one I fear the most. The US Treasury debt is USD 40 trillion, growing at the rate of about USD I trillion every 3 months. In the face of this mountain of debt the total revenues of the US government are about USD 5 trillion per year.

From the evidence of world economic history such an outsize overhang between growing liabilities on the one hand and the relatively small income available to meet them on the other, will ultimately have to be balanced by the only possible outcome.

Huge, uncontrollable hyperinflation. On the Weimar Republic scale, such as I million dollars to buy a cup of coffee. (Creating a wave which will also sink us in Bangladesh.)

If this has not happened as yet it is because the world banking/financial system is huge, sluggish and is sheltered by the public’s general confidence. But this entire facade is at such risk today that an inciting event could bring about an inflationary crash in a trice.

To his credit no one is more acutely sensitive to such an existential risk than Donald J. Trump. He and his cronies in the 1% (actually more like the 0.1%) who have the most assets at stake have been trying in various ways to ward off this catastrophe. Of course the simplest and most direct option of raising taxes on the super wealthy was never considered.

Instead the most bizarre, ineffectual, ways of reducing the debt have been attempted under this US administration -- from the DOGE campaign’s slashing of the Federal Budget to the launch of the golden passport for foreigners able to contribute a million US dollars.

 In the same vein Trump’s otherwise inexplicable drive to raise tariffs represented a sleight of hand intended to reassure the world that the US was indeed augmenting its national revenues. The idea was that this supposed inflow would help to restore the US Dollar’s standing.

I suspect that, at its base, the war of choice on Iran was yet another attempt to counter the threat of a financial crash. If Operation Epic Fury had gone as expected, with Iran knocked out in less than a month, it would have eliminated the growing pressures on the petrodollar and dramatically weakened the Chinese Yuan’s financial potential. Instead the opposite has happened. With almost no oil exports the Gulf countries are unable, or unwilling, to buy US Treasuries. The longer this goes on the more the petrodollar will hang by a thread.

For nearly 20 years the Federal Reserve has been carrying out "quantitative easing," the coy term which stands for printing money without restraint; this is the origin of the USD 40 trillion debt. As a result the most dangerous aspect of the war on Iran is that even more debt is being piled up.

Despite expenditure of the order of USD 50 billion in the 2 months since the war started the US Congress is currently facing a budget request of an additional USD 150 billion to pay for emergency military needs.

As all these funds can only be provided by printing more US dollars, one can hardly imagine a more potent trigger for the hyperinflationary bomb which is threatening to gut the international economy.

So we demand of the world’s leaders. There is no more time to spare. End the Madness. Achieve a Just Peace.

It so happens that this may be one of the most effective solutions available. If Iran is honorably invited back into the financial system its 90 million refined and energetic people, backed by huge oil wealth, will be able to make the greatest possible contribution to strengthening not only the whole world economy but specifically to saving the US currency.

The country’s pent-up economic demand could well set up such a surge of macroeconomic consumption and investment as to defeat, or at least delay, the scourge of unbridled inflation.

Salahdin Imam is a Harvard graduate. His memoir of university days and the Bangladesh Liberation war is to be published later this year.