“Help Is on the Way.” Then Came the Oil.
Donald Trump told Iranian protesters to remember “the names of the killers and abusers.” He promised them: “HELP IS ON ITS WAY.” Five months later, the help appears to have taken a detour through the Strait of Hormuz.
Iran’s regime remains intact. Protesters have been executed. Civilians have died in the war. The nuclear file is still unresolved. But the White House’s urgent moral vocabulary has quietly been replaced by the more durable language of shipping lanes, fuel prices and getting out. The promise to Iranian protesters is now among the war’s most conspicuous unfulfilled objectives.
One Iranian protester told The New York Times: “I genuinely thought that help was on the way, but I was so wrong.” Another was less diplomatic: “They used the language of human rights toward only their own benefit.”
This is how great-power liberation usually works. First, activists are called patriots. Then they become proof that the enemy is evil. Then the war becomes expensive, the strategic objectives get revised, and the patriots are informed that sovereignty must be respected after all.
Trump once hinted at support for an uprising. He later praised Iran’s new rulers as “very rational people” and urged the world’s ships to “start your engines” and “let the oil flow.”
The ayatollahs offer repression. Washington offers slogans with an expiration date. And Iranian citizens are left holding the receipt for both.
#Iran #Trump #USA #Hormuz #HumanRights #war #MiddleEast
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