US, Iran hit each other again as hopes for quick peace deal fade

Kirkcaldy, 2024

The morning’s intelligence brings a heavy heart but a familiar fatigue. It appears the sovereigns of the West and the East have once again abandoned the quiet commerce of the counting-house for the thunder of the battery. They speak of “negotiations” and “deals,” yet their hands are busy priming the flintlock. I have often observed that the pride of kings is a far more expensive luxury than the most decadent feast of a merchant; the latter merely wastes his own capital, while the former squanders the blood and industry of a whole nation.

When I consult the impartial spectator within my breast, I find no sympathy for this calculated escalation. Each side claims to act in defense of some abstract honor or future security, yet they ignore the immediate misery of the common man who must bear the tax of war. The merchant of Tehran and the artisan of New York are bound by a thousand invisible threads of potential exchange, yet their leaders see only a chessboard. It is the great delusion of the “man of system” to imagine he can move the pieces of a society as easily as a hand moves the figures upon a table. In reality, every individual has a principle of motion all his own, which these volleys of shot and shell serve only to crush.

The delay in peace is not a failure of diplomacy, but a success of the military interest. Those who provide the munitions and those who seek the glory of command seldom meet together, even for a brief council, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public peace. They claim the peace deal is “dragging out,” as if it were a stubborn mule, when in truth, they are the ones holding the reins. They find more profit in the friction than in the flow. How much more wealth might be created if the energy spent on these retaliations were turned toward the improvement of the lands they currently seek to scorch? But alas, the passion for dominion is a fire that consumes the very ledger it purports to protect.

The samovar has been cold since noon. I sat by the window, watching the birch branches tap the glass like impatient fingers, and read the newspaper aloud to no one in particular. The words - United States launched fresh attacks… Tehran to retaliate… negotiations dragging out - fell flat in the empty room, as if the syllables themselves were exhausted. Outside, the wind carried the scent of wet earth and something faintly metallic, like the air before a storm.

My sister came in, her shawl still damp from the garden, and asked if I thought the tea was still good. I said it was, though neither of us believed it. She poured herself a cup anyway, her hands trembling just enough to make the liquid ripple. We spoke of the garden - how the peonies had bloomed too early this year, how the fence needed mending - but the words were a screen, a way to avoid the weight of what we both knew: that the world beyond our windows was tearing itself apart, and here we were, sipping cold tea in a house that had long since stopped being a home.

The postman arrived, his boots caked in mud, and left a letter from Moscow. It was from a publisher, declining another story. I folded it carefully, as if the paper itself might judge me. My sister sighed and said, “Perhaps next time,” though we both understood there would be no next time, not for us.

The birch branches tapped once more against the glass. The storm was coming.

It is the peculiar madness of our age that men who cannot keep peace for three months presume to lecture the world on how to achieve it for three centuries. The latest exchange of blows between America and Persia (for I shall use the old and better name) resembles nothing so much as two children throwing rocks across a fence - each convinced that the other started it, neither remembering who first climbed into the orchard.

What strikes me is not the violence - violence is, alas, as old as Cain - but the dreary, mechanical predictability of it. The modern statesman, having forgotten why borders were drawn or treaties signed, now wishes to redraw them all in a fit of abstraction. He does not ask why the fence exists; he only knows he dislikes its placement. And so he tears it down, only to find the orchard overrun, the road impassable, and the children bruised from their own reckless demolition.

There was a time when even enemies understood that certain lines, however arbitrary, were better left standing - not because they were sacred, but because the alternative was chaos. The fairy tales knew this: the troll under the bridge, the dragon at the mountain pass - these were not mere obstacles, but warnings. Remove them without understanding their purpose, and you do not get freedom, but an open road to greater tyranny.

And yet our statesmen, in their haste to be rid of old grievances, have forgotten that the quickest way to prolong a quarrel is to insist on ending it at once. Peace is not made in the space between explosions, but in the quiet recognition that some fences, however crooked, still mark the difference between a garden and a battlefield. - G.K.C.