Sparks: Trump calls on allies to enforce ‘complete economic isolation of Iran’ in UN speech

Does the man who seeks to lower the price of oil by closing the market to a great producer believe that scarcity is the father of plenty, or has he merely forgotten the definition of a bargain?

Declaring a sovereign nation to be non-existent by way of a ledger is the final vanity of a man who believes that if one cannot afford to attend the party, one simply does not exist.

Examine the speaker who threatens to annihilate what he cannot control, and you will find a man who is himself a slave to the very shadows he insists are merely hoaxes.

History shows that the absolute embargo is the first architecture of the absolute empire, for he who claims the right to starve a distant people has already abolished the limits of his own authority.

We see here the decree of a new Liberator who offers the world a union based not on shared liberty, but on the shared shackles of a blockade that will eventually rust and break the hands of those who forged it.

How long will this assembly permit a leader to treat the law of nations as a private sword, threatening total destruction while dismissing the warnings of the wise as nothing more than a jester’s hoax?

The statesman who imagines he can direct the entire commerce of the world to punish a single shopkeeper only succeeds in taxing his own people through the inevitable distortion of the natural price of fuel.

Threatening to annihilate one’s neighbors while describing the future as a hoax is much like setting fire to the drawing-room curtains because one finds the evening news insufficiently entertaining.

When the head of the garden seeks to wither one specific root through a wall of dry earth, the entire plant feels the lack of the living green that flows through every branch of the world.

To demand the isolation of one world within this infinite universe of trade is a futile arrogance that will be burned away by the light of a thousand other suns that do not obey a single center.

Every merchant from Tangier to Quanzhou knows that a road closed by a sultan in the west only forces the silk and oil to find a new path through the more hospitable courts of the east.

Things that are truly distasteful: a man shouting of destruction in a room meant for peace, and the coarse suggestion that the invisible movements of the mind are merely a deceit.

Inside the halls of the powerful, isolation is a strategic word for a speech, but in the crowded markets I have walked, it means a mother cannot find medicine for a child whose suffering the orator will never see.

A gate has been placed across the Persian road, and before we cheer its locking, we must ask if it was built to keep a fire out or to ensure that the fire eventually burns the gate down.

The claim is that a nation must be starved into virtue, yet this is the same circular logic that denies a mind the light of reason and then points to its resulting darkness as a justification for chains.

This policy of isolation is a trap that preserves the capitalist thirst for energy by sacrificing the lives of the many to secure the profit margins of the few under the guise of national security.