The NATO alliance structure has been severely strained, with Japan, South Korea, Australia, Canada and most of Western Europe declining to participate directly in the war or assist in reopening the strait. The military stockpile of critical weapons systems has been drawn down to levels that the Pentagon acknowledges will take years to restore. Iran, far from collapsing under the weight of American military power, has demonstrated that a country spending one-hundredth of the American military budget can impose strategic paralysis on the world’s largest economy through the asymmetric leverage of a single geographical choke point. The Islamabad negotiations have now failed after 21 hours of talks.
In these circumstances, the Times outlines what it considers essential for the success of next phase of the war: congressional authorization to provide domestic legitimacy; allied support to reconstruct the appearance of international consensus; strategic planning for the Strait of Hormuz; and coherent objectives for ending Iran’s nuclear program.
The New York Times speaks in this crisis with the authority of an institution whose commitment to American imperialism is an organic identity. It provided the fabricated intelligence on Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction” that prepared American public opinion for a war of aggression that killed over a million people. It supported the NATO destruction of Libya and the regime change operations in Syria. It served as the primary media legitimator of a drone assassination program that killed hundreds of civilians across seven countries, for none of whose deaths it ever demanded criminal accountability. When it has criticized American wars, it has done so in precisely the terms it employs here—as failures of planning and execution—and has never, in its institutional history, characterized an American war of aggression as a crime requiring prosecution or reparations.