Iran is defeated, Iran is not defeated. Hormuz is open, Hormuz is closed. An agreement was reached, an agreement was not reached. Iran will give America its uranium, Iran will not give America uranium. America will not pay reparations to Iran, America will pay reparations to Iran.
Dear readers, don’t get confused. The above paragraph, full of mutually exclusive claims, is just an illustration of two conflicting and completely contradictory narratives that we have been seeing and hearing since the beginning of the unprovoked American aggression against Iran. For almost four months now, as has passed since the beginning of the war, we have an Iranian counter-claim for every American claim, which refutes and denies it, and the reverse is also true. Let us remind you that on the first day of the war, the president of the USA Donald Trump declared an American victory, after almost the entire state and military leadership of Iran, including the Ayatollah, had been killed by the very first rockets Ali Khamenei. Intoxicated by an easy triumph in Venezuela – where he kidnapped the legitimate president without a problem Nicolas Maduro – and armed with profound ignorance of Iranian civilization and the Shiite ideology of martyrdom, Trump thought that everything was over in Iran in a few hours, as it was in Venezuela.
He did not know or suspect that the Ayatollah and the main men of his regime had foreseen the possibility that they would be liquidated, and even before the war had established a “multi-layered system of crisis succession”, i.e. developed protocols according to which four deputies were pre-determined for key military and security positions, so that the chain of command would remain intact even in the event of mass assassinations.
Imaginary victory
Hence, after these mass assassinations actually took place, the Iranian regime only needed two hours to consolidate and re-establish the chain of command. Just a few hours later, the first Iranian rockets started falling on Israel and American bases throughout the Middle East. And with the blockade of Hormuz, Iran soon showed that it is capable of dominating the global economy.
To say that Donald Trump was stunned is an understatement. The man who declared war victory on the first day of the war – and was completely convinced of it – had to watch in the following days and weeks how his imaginary victory dissipated in the (un)expectedly strong response of Iran. Four months later, one of the points of the recently signed Memorandum of Understanding – which is only a prelude to 60 days of peace talks – commits America to provide “at least 300 billion dollars for the reconstruction and economic development of the Islamic Republic of Iran”. As history does not really remember that the victor pays compensation to the vanquished, it is already clear from that point of the Memorandum that America did not win the war against Iran.
How did this happen and how is it even possible, given that America is the strongest military power in the world, and Iran is only a medium-strength regional power and a country that has been groaning under American sanctions for almost fifty years, which prevent or at least significantly slow down its economic development? How is it that even Trump’s horrific threats – among other things, he threatened to “destroy Iranian civilization” – did not scare the Iranian regime, nor did they make it back down?
One of the possible answers to these questions is that in the war between America and Iran, two different political cultures clashed, which are based on two different philosophical conceptions of the world and life. Translated into the language of popular board games, American poker players and Persian chess players clashed.
Chess is stronger than poker
Namely, poker as we know it today was created in the USA in the 18th century, while the original version of chess was created in India, but came to the West from Persia, the civilization from which today’s Iran grew. The basis of poker lies in bluffing, and this – as we have seen in the past months – is perhaps Trump’s main political method.
On the other hand, the basis of chess lies in thinking ahead and predicting the opponent’s next moves – in which the Iranian regime has proven successful – as well as the willingness to sacrifice one’s own pieces, which lies in the foundations of the Shiite ideology of martyrdom. Practically, there is no one that the Iranian regime has not sacrificed in recent months: from thousands of its own young people who protested against the regime at the beginning of the year, to its own religious leader, Ayatollah Khamenei.
Bosniak academic Dr. Adamir Jerkovićusing the dichotomy just mentioned between chess and poker:
“Trump’s strategy is reminiscent of poker – a game in which the opponent tries to break with bluff and psychological pressure. However, Iran is not an opponent who reacts to bluff. It is a country whose political culture has its roots in the multi-millennia Persian tradition. In that civilization, the strategy resembles chess, a game that, symbolically speaking, the Persians gave to the world. That is why it turned out that the American policy of force does not produce the expected results,” wrote Dr. Jerković.
Stating that the American bombing “homogenized Iranian society” and that in those circumstances even political opponents of the regime “stood by the government in defense of the country”, while “in Washington they clearly expected a different scenario”, Dr. Jerković points out that in the end “everything comes down to one symbolic difference in political cultures”, which in the end turned out to be decisive:
“Persians, as is often said, invented chess and are used to planning several moves in advance. Americans invented poker and often rely on bluff. In this game around Hormuz, it was shown that chess can sometimes be stronger than poker,” concludes the Bosnian academic.
