we dont agree

Once again I write within the context of unfolding events, this time geopolitical, to make a deeper theoretical point that includes predictions about the future. This is of course always questionable enterprise, particularly given the stakes. Some of what I wrote here is already outdated.

Nonetheless.

On the 28th of February air strikes by Israel and the United States began on the country of Iran, targeting military and government sites. Iran responded with a flurry of missiles and suicide drones against neighboring states.

For people following the hostilities, the most notable thing is the degree to which the war is influenced by social media and popular culture. On the social media platform X.com the newly coined US Department of War announced “OPERATION EPIC FURY”. Donald Trump has gone on lengthy, contradictory rants about the nature of the war and his broader grievences whiel it has gone on. You have official White House social media accounts putting out meme edits of bombing footage going viral, mixing in film, television and video game footage.

Unsurprisingly a common reference point for commentators on social media is the trilogy of essays by French poststructuralist philosopher Jean Baudrillard in the collection The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. The essays, which were written in the lead up to, in the middle of and after the First Gulf War in 1991 argued that the war simulation, a constructed media spectacle mediated through 24/7 cable news enabled by the technological superiority of the United States army over the Iraq forces that served as entertainment for the American public.

Those who reference Baudrillard online don’t really have much to say beyond making references to the man and the text. And for good reason. When you have official government social media accounts posting “epic memes” acknowledging the postmodern nature of the conflict is frankly passé. If you’re at all familiar with philosophy there isn’t much to do beyond gesturing it. “Look the American government is posting Call of Duty killsteak animations intercut with airstrike footage” effectively says it all. Anyone who comes along who is out of the loop can just go watch up a YouTube video or read a Wikipedia article or ask an LLM about it.

Far more useful in my estimation is talking about the material and organizational realities that underpin the hyperreal spectacle.

It cannot be emphasized enough how the spectacle that Baudrillard describes was not a determined consequence of the outgrowth of technology, but also the result of political decisions to utilize it. In particular the catastrophe of the Vietnam War which came in part not just from social unrest at home and within the ranks of the military itself. Part of what drove the unrest was the relative autonomy of the media during the war which reported a far worse picture than the official press conferences given by the military and expanding access to television among the American public.

That was not at all the case during the Gulf War, where on-the-ground journalists were pre-approved by the military. Moreover novel technologies like high-tech targeting systems and night vision also supplied footage of strikes against the Iraqi soldiers which news companies could use and gave the war the feeling of some futuristic feeling. Such media was popular with, but access was conditional and so there was a basic incentive to maintain ties with the military.

A similar point can be made about the way the hostilities played out. Baudrillard makes significant hey out of the potentials of simulation and surveillance, claiming that it would be possible to map all contingencies ahead of time, reducing the conflict to a staged performance that could be anticipated ahead of time. But this was a consequence of the conflict being limited. The United States merely defended Kuwait against the Iraqi invasion and then advanced into Iraq. While this incursion did result in civilian casualties and failed uprisings by Iraqi civilians and Kurds that were curshed, the number of deaths were minor compared to that of the full invasion and occupation of Iraq over a decade later.

The fact that this conflict was so constrained is part of its success. Baudrillard implies that the hyperreal nature of war is in part a consequence of simulation getting so advanced that it enabled the military to “remove uncertainty”, creating a series of events that could be choreographed in advance.

Now there’s something to this. During The Cold War there was an unprecedented explosion of simulation and control to deal with the problem of planning out nuclear war. But while there was initial hope of perfect control, those involved immediately ran into the computational problems of modelling complex systems. There was just too much to take into account to produce accurate simulations and empirical validation was off the table because it would require a civilization-ending war.

And, as the attempt to do “nation building” in Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrated, even sophisticated systems of surveillance and control have their limits over a technologically inferior adversary provided it can inflict damage.

At the same time asymmetric warfare requires ways that the inferior side in a conflict can inflict meaningful damage to the superior force. This is where the limited nature of conflict helps. For example the raid on the Venezuelan president of Maduro earlier this year went so well because it did not see the United States attempt to occupy the country.

The fact that this has escalated into outright war changes things. In particular Iran has a straightforward force multiplier because it can disrupt the global economy.

While I am by no means an expert on the economics of oil or geopolitics, I am capable of typing “why is the Strait of Hormouz important?” or “how can Iran disrupt the world’s oil supply” into a search engine and finding out from a multitude of explainer articles – that nobody in the Trump administration seems to have read – about the sheer scale of the oil that is produced and moved around within strike range of Iranian weaponry that will not be exhausted any time soon.

(Iran’s capacity to impact the global economy goes beyond that, but its the most obvious point of leverage.)

Iran doesn’t even need to bomb every oil tanker within each, it just needs to imply the threat to increase oil prices.

So unless something completely unexpected happens, this means there will be an energy shock as oil prices rise which in turn will make the conflict “real” to many people. The reason prior adventurism by the United States after Vietnam seemed so unreal was because the relatively low number of casualties and the fact the cost was felt in slightly higher taxes over long periods of time. It’s easy to dismiss such conflicts as being part of business as usual.

If Iran is seriously committed it can do a lot of damage in the months and even years to come.

Given the fact that this is going to hurt the Trump regime’s aspirations, one must ask why? And it’s here I’d like to finally make a deeper theoretical point. A constant theme to the action Trump has taken in his second term is to utilize the coercive power of the American state in blunt ways with the seeming intent of cowering the opposition with direct violence and the spectacle of violence. From DOGE firings to ICE raids to the occupation of Minneapolis, the point is not just hurt people, but to overwhelm them with images so they give up and stop resisting while also giving his supporters the visceral thrill of seeing their enemies crushed.

Coherent policy is largely an afterthought.

With this I propose that one way to understand what’s going with the second Trump regime is that it is a variant of authoritarian high postmodernism, a state defined by attempting to affect change in the world through the creation and dissemination of media first and foremost.

Writers like Don Moynihan and Ryan Broderick have looked at how the Trump regime is enacting policy in ways that is encouraged by the incentives of social media. But what they neglect to mention is the degree to which the creation of media is dependent on a vast technical complex that they are inclined to disregard. Just as the high modernist states James C. Scott describes in Seeing Like a State were parasitic on informal processes that they could not create and frequently failed to recognize, so too is authoritarian high postmodernism parasitic on modernist rationality.

Such an emphasis on the production and dissemination of superficial images in the hope that they change people is, of course, incredibly stupid. The air superiority the United States currently enjoys in Iran is not because Pete Hegseth banned military academies from teaching critical race theory and posts videos of him doing workouts with marines, but because the man was given command of arguably the most ambitious high modernist project ever attempted in the history of humanity, a vast megamachine of unimaginable complexity that Hegseth actively undermines his disregard for formal rationality and organizational competence.

Yet despite the obvious problems with all this, many still believed it would all work out. And I’m not just talking about the chumps on social media who are the primary audience for this content. I’m talking about people who should really know better and could meaningfully have pushed back against Trump, such as the investors who dismissed the risk the war posed for the global economy.

That so many people are fundamentally disconnected from reality in ways that threaten life on Earth going forward is a truism, a straightforward acknowledgement of the facts. That may not be particularly interesting, but sometimes to be a responsible intellectual is to state the obvious. Another Gulf War is going to take place and this time its effects will be felt around the world, with those least responsible suffering the most. The question to ask now is not “will this fail” but “how can we limit the damage” and “what can we do to channel the outrage this will create in a productive manner?”