January 2020 has sealed its mark as the month that the Fatima Century assumed definitive shape. Events involving the United States, Iran, China, and Russia are coming to a head in such a way that the trajectory of both Eurasian and American geopolitics for at least the next two generations is emerging with clarity. Namely, the seventh capitalist regime, Chimerica (2010-2050), is observing the dawn of its breakout second decade (2020-2030); its impetus, in turn, is already being fueled by the gathering undercurrent of its successor, the eighth capitalist regime, Fatima (2050-2090).
The assassination by US President Donald Trump of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani on January 3 in Baghdad has marked a point of no return in Washington's confrontation with not only the Islamic Republic, but with the entire Shiite Muslim world. This clash will play out over the coming decade and more, yet even now, its outcome is already little in doubt: Iran and its powerful Eurasian friends will prevail, while the United States and its Western partners will be marginalized or even expelled from the region.
The true backdrop of the sudden and dramatic uptick in instability in all three of the most important countries of the Shiite Crescent - Lebanon, Iraq, and Iran itself - during the final two months of 2019 was the abrupt entry of China's game-changing Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) into the very heart of the Middle East. A $10 billion oil-for-reconstruction deal signed between Baghdad and Beijing last fall posed an existential threat to US influence in the entire region, as it opened the prospect of an unbroken economic corridor from Iran to the Mediterranean greased with Chinese cash, goods, and infrastructure. Almost overnight, the Trump administration found its dominant position in post-ISIS Iraq compromised; much worse, its plans to curb Iranian influence in the country and region also took a shocking blow.
For it was as though China, conscious of US hostility to its economic relations with Tehran - especially its oil imports, which it had sharply reduced from the theocratic regime since airtight sanctions were applied the previous spring - decided to flippantly skip over the American proscriptions by throwing a lifeline directly to Iran's Shiite expansionist efforts in Iraq, on through Syria, all the way to the golden shore of the eastern Mediterranean. That unbroken land bridge from Tehran to the Syrian coast - hugging the middle Euphrates valley - had first been cracked open in mid-2017, at General Soleimani's direction, in the fight against ISIS; now in late 2019, China was essentially endorsing it as a "Shiite economic belt" with ominous geostrategic implications for America and its allies in the region.
This proved too much for the Trump administration to swallow: the Iraqi insult had to bear a severe price for that country's Shiite-majority government, but not before an attempt was first made to knock out Hezbollah's grip on Lebanon. The reason that anti-government demonstrations popped up first in that small Levantine country - before moving on to Iraq and then finally Iran - is that the US and Israel, enlisting the financial firepower of Saudi Arabia and its sway especially over Lebanese and Iraqi finances, is that Hezbollah has always been correctly perceived as the tip and vanguard of the Shiite regional spear. If it could be broken, the entire Crescent would suffer disproportionately from the loss of its coordinating and animating principle for the rest of the coalition; much as the sabotage of a missile's warhead would render its entire body along with its launch and flight systems useless.
But the Lebanese protests failed - despite best covert efforts by American and Israeli intelligence and their operatives on the ground in Beirut, in conjunction with Saudi banking sanctions on the government which first forced it into overnight austerity measures that hammered the ordinary populace - to produce a unified and resilient "anti-Iranian" front and hence insurrection in the sectarian-mixed country. The unsurprising ouster of PM Saad Hariri only opened up a vacuum into which it was clear, in the end, that only the best-armed and most internally coherent faction - far and away, Hezbollah - would decisively rush into, once the chips were really down and the nation really plunged into total socioeconomic meltdown.
So next came Iraq: the administrations of Trump and his fervent regional ally, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, determined to threaten the functional strength and integrity of the Shiite-majority government of PM Adul Abdul-Mahdi - with the intent not to remove him or end his governing coalition, but simply to force it, with financial pressure applied by the Saudis and other Gulf monarchies, to revoke its new Chinese BRI contracts. But this also proved harder than expected: knowing that the US military presence in Iraq was already unwelcome among so much of the Shiite populace, Iraqi officials balked at Trump's blackmail, and in fact the escalating - though still yet secret to the world - standoff between Washington and Baghdad only hastened the latter's drive into Beijing's economic and financial orbit.
The Saudis, it turns out, were themselves rapidly becoming a Chinese client: in the runup to the massive December IPO of state oil firm Aramco, Beijing's quiet pledges of liquidity and valuation support were sufficient to shield Riyadh from American pressure to turn up the heat further on Iraq. Not only that, the Chinese overtures also seemed to have played a significant role brokering a progressively thawing truce between the Saudis and Iranians themselves, at least in their proxy war in Yemen. All this left the US in the unenviable position of having to apply financial and economic pressure on the Iranian-aligned government of Iraq more directly and singlehandedly - and even then, it had to capitalize quickly on the surge of austerity-fueled discontent with Abdul-Madhi's parliamentary coalition to force its point home. This directly set off the series of progressive deteriorations in US-Iraqi relations from November onward that finally culminated in the drone attack on Soleimani and his chief Iraqi lieutenant, Shiite militia commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, outside Baghdad international airport in early January.
For unlike in Lebanon, protests in Iraq found much more fertile ground for anti-Iranian actions and goals. Ever since the 2003 US invasion that removed Sunni Arab strongman Saddam Hussein, the country had been politically dominated by its nearly two-thirds Shiite majority - over which Tehran always exercised a disproportionate influence. In the wake of the defeat of ISIS' territorial caliphate in 2017-18, the return to the default post-Saddam Shiite clerical-led order had triggered an unprecedented new groundswell of discontent, especially among younger Iraqis - many of them secular Shiites themselves - who understandably had little faith left in their religiously inclined civic institutions and leadership. After all, these only seemed to reinforce and entrench a steep and incurable corruption of kleptocratic state administrators and their attendant patronage-based - as opposed to meritocratic - support and beneficiary networks. When this latent dissatisfaction was conveniently combined with the sudden inflationary effects of fiscal austerity, the tinderbox of "anti-Iranian" unrest ignited quite instantaneously and spontaneously both in Baghdad and in Shiite Arab strongholds of the south, such as Najaf and Basra.
The problem was that - perfectly in keeping with character - neither the US nor the Israelis seemed to have any contingencies in place besides a quick capitulation by Abdul-Mahdi's government to their core demands on China and the BRI. When the government's crackdown on protesters turned bloody in early-to-mid November, it was first seen as further pressure on the Shiite parliamentary coalition to make nice with the American overlords - restoring not only their job security but, far more tellingly, their financial perks for being compliant functionaries of the occupying Western powers. But the very fractiousness of said bloc - so fervently taken advantage of by Trump and Netanyahu - turned into an even bigger liability when their ideal scenario failed, which it did almost as rapidly as the upheaval began.
For the official Iraqi legislators were still practically a rump: real power and control on the ground remained in the hands of the clerical and even quasi-tribal hierarchies from whence they came. This meant that, once a violent repression of the so-called "Iraqi spring" began, there was no way to keep the bloodshed from spiraling out of control - that is, before it claimed many additional lives the Americans and Israelis actually needed, i.e. to install a new, pliable regime of secular liberals, once the existing Shiite theocratic government was removed. It was a bit of Western imperialist cognitive dissonance at its classic finest: try to take out a mirage adversary, arouse a real reprisal, and watch from the sidelines as one's own pawns get decimated. Even considering the illustrious history of "color revolutions", this Trumpist imitation set a new bar for sheer competence.
But no matter: if you can't cut off the serpent's tail or chop it in two at the midsection, why not just go for its venom-spewing head outright? That's what Trump and Netanyahu did next, when as November progressed, demonstrations against fuel hikes in Iran held the prospect of major civil disobedience against the Islamic republic itself. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei even personally warned the swelling ranks of protesters to, in effect, "not try anything." In other words: the regime knew what was really going on, and was prepared to take the kid gloves off to deal properly with it - even if the scale and severity of its response would shock public opinion at home and engender more than the usual "human rights" outcry from the West abroad.
When, ultimately, the Ayatollahs temporarily suspended internet connectivity in Iran and killed upwards of an estimated 1,000 to 1,500 protesters, they apparently gave the Trump administration a face-saving exit: he was allowed to tweet about Tehran's awful treatment of its own people without any reprisal from the regime that would expose the leading covert US role in stirring up the unrest. When this olive branch only invited further backhanded bullying by the White House, however, the Iranians publicly identified and arrested dozens of suspected spies coordinating the anti-government demonstrations on behalf of the CIA and Mossad, primarily via illicit Western social media tools.
By early December, then, not only had the US-Israeli campaign to destabilize and ultimately dismember the Shiite Crescent utterly failed, it had produced a horrific, exact opposite intended effect: strangled by US dollar sanctions or the threat of them, the governments of Beirut, Baghdad, and Tehran turned to Communist China and the BRI scheme for help. Though this offer from Beijing had been on the table for some time, only now did the Iraqis and Lebanese - without whom the Iranians (and by extension, Chinese) literally had no way to connect Central Asia to the Mediterranean - consider it a necessity. They had been loath to upset the Americans by drawing into the Chinese orbit, but now that Trump had forced their hand by his own arrogance and imperiousness, those earlier reservations were moot.
This understandably enraged the volatile US president even more. As 2019 drew to a close, his private attitude towards the Shiite world grew from one of mere hostility to outright violent aggression. He thus became easy prey for his friend Bibi Netanyahu's more extreme proposals: in hindsight, these included a major increase of the US military presence and activities in Iraq that were to be arrayed not to help liquidate the remnants of ISIS, but to contain and harass the pro-Iranian Shiite militias which were the integral link in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps' "land bridge" via Iraq and Syria to the Mediterranean. This was the red line for Iran and its proxies that directly led up to the eruption of hostile exchanges in the last days of December, when on the 27th the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) rocketed a US base near Kirkuk, killing one American contractor; resulting in a massive reprisal airstrike on both Iraqi and Syrian Shiite militias that killed 25 of the former; triggering the PMU assault on the US Embassy in Baghdad just before New Years' - which, in turn, finally led to the drone strike on Soleimani and Al-Muhandis in the wee hours of January 3.
It appears that Soleimani and his IRGC did make - and pay for - a strategic miscalculation: they were wrong to think that the US military presence in Iraq could be confronted head-on, i.e. that their Shiite but Arab brethren in Lower Mesopotamia were as yet ready to see the exit of American coalition forces which were still an insurance policy against ISIS. This for sure meant Soleimani's demise: as Trump himself has admitted the general was already marked for termination, with only the pretext of loss of American life missing until the Kirkuk attack. But the broader geopolitical - that is, regional and even global - blunder was far and away Trump's and not Iran's: in one fell swoop, he gave his principal adversary, China, just the added pretext in Tehran and enhanced legitimacy in Baghdad that, over time, would render the loss of Soleimani and Al-Muhandis small potatoes.
Indeed, it's worth emphasizing from here on out just how badly the Trump administration is misrepresenting the actual state of play in the Mideast: few American representatives and policymakers - forget the general public - have any idea that their country's escalating mutual vitriol with Iran is actually about China. In the whirlwind of aftershocks of Soleimani's assassination - culminating in a retaliatory Iranian missile strike on a US airbase in Iraq, along with an accidental downing of a Ukrainian jetliner over Tehran - it would be hard not to get lost tallying the same old opposing scores, i.e. hardliners versus reformers within Iran, or Iran versus its "Great Satan" adversary. And it definitely is a temptation to reduce Trump's - and America's - conundrum with the Islamic republic to the mere imperative to secure a better nuclear deal than the 2015 JCPOA accord.
No, the world is already moving on. As economic and hence geopolitical power continues its irrevocable shift from West to East, it will dawn on even an increasingly provincial and inward-looking United States - Trump or not - that a catastrophe of monumental proportions is already unfolding for not just the liberal democratic world, but the very security of Western Judeo-Christian civilization itself. There's just no turning back now: the autocratic Eurasian nexus of China, Russia, and Iran will not permit the Anglo-Zionist imperium to emerge unscathed from the blunder of a "clash of civilizations" - one made only the worse by the complete ignorance of the very nature of this struggle that its instigators, Washington and Jerusalem, have unwittingly (even largely unknowingly) committed to.
There is no great "Arab spring 2.0" coming in Iraq - no more than there's some "Persian spring" sweeping Iran. It's now the Twelver Shiism of the Imams - of the children of Ali and Fatima and their son, Hussein - against the Protestant European offshoots of the Roman Catholic Church, alongside the latter-day reincarnation of the Jewish Nation of Israel. Sunni Islam will remain largely an observer but also act as mediator for its Shia brethren; just as Orthodox Russia may perform such a role for its Anglo-Zionist cousins. But China - the great "Middle Kingdom" - now holds all the real winning cards: the Celestial Emperor in Beijing will not so much choose the winner of the gathering clash as opportunistically ride its crest to commanding Eurasian heights only once before seen in history, with the Mongol Empire of the Great Khans.
A mere three decades after "history ended", it's already returning with a vehemence and vengeance that will shock even its apparent beneficiaries. The world in the early 2030s will be virtually unrecognizable from the one today: it will mark the dawn of a Chinese hegemony even more remarkable for its sheer unrivaled scope as was that of America's short-lived "unipolar moment" four decades earlier. For America herself will no longer even register so powerfully as the unified, Anglophone, federal constitutional republic it's been since 1776: its structure will remain, but with its Northwest European cultural core so relatively diminished that the entire hemisphere's Latin, i.e. Central and Southern components will have overtaken it in vitality. That, too, will mark the onset of the Age of Fatima.
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