On: Iran targets Bahrain and Kuwait after US launches strikes

The empire strikes the power that threatened its shipping lanes, and the power, rather than absorbing the blow, reaches for the nearest smaller nations - Bahrain, Kuwait - as though punishing a neighbor for the fist of a distant adversary were not the oldest reflex of the wounded state. I know this reflex. I watched it across the viceroyalties: Madrid struck, and the viceroy punished Bogotá, and Bogotá punished Quito, and the chain of reprisal ran downward until it reached people who had nothing to do with the original dispute.

What strikes me is not the violence. It is the geometry. A nation that considers itself struck does not aim at the striker. It aims at the territory it can reach, the airfields it can hit, the neighbors whose sovereignty was always conditional in its eyes. Bahrain and Kuwait did not fire into the Strait of Hormuz. But they host, and hosting makes you a target, and being a target makes you a lesson to others. This is the logic of empires - not the logic of nations.

I spent twenty years building nations from colonies, and the one truth I could never write into a constitution was this: sovereignty is not a document. It is a position on the map relative to someone stronger. Kuwait has a constitution. Bahrain has institutions. And tonight both are absorbent material for a quarrel between Tehran and Washington that neither of them started and neither of them can end.

The coalition against the empire always holds until the empire is gone. Then the coalition discovers it was held together by the empire’s pressure, not by its own internal bonds. Here the pressure remains - and still the smaller powers are crushed between it. The soil was never ready. The map will not permit it.