By Toh Hsien Min

A meme circulating some years ago when North Korea was test-firing their latest generation of missiles at a time when tensions were high on the Korean peninsula placed the pudgy supreme leader in direct opposition to one of his generals and overlaid the headline "I said lunch not launch".  For all the internet mockery of Kim Jong Un, his regime still operates with a high degree of rationality, never letting the sabre-rattling progress far enough to trigger a real confrontation.  That's more than can be said for the pudgy one on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue; whenever we think he could not possibly be more daft, we lay ourselves open to be surprised.  Who would have thought that after the triumphalism of an excursion in Venezuela would come an unprovoked war with one of the world's largest standing militaries?  If not for the very real human tragedies playing out in the Middle East, it would have been almost funny to hear Trump in almost the same breath claiming that the US had already won and castigating Nato for not coming to their rescue.  And while there remains a responsibility on all of humanity to expose the fruitless deeds of darkness, in this case the evil illogic of the Trump administration, which we should have already learned from his first term, I startled to find that there were rather more lessons to be learned from this American aggression.

Sometimes you don't have to win to win.  Sometimes you win by not losing.  Yes, Iran has taken a beating, and its top leaders were de facto assassinated, but it had contingency plans and was (like Ukraine, it might be said) not afraid to endure.  This shifted the pressure on to an aggressor expecting a short war and unprepared for a long haul.

In this light, Iran played a weak hand perfectly.  It cannot expect to beat the US in a straight fight.  Instead, whether by meeting expensive missiles with low cost interceptors or forcing the Americans and Israelis to use expensive interceptors for a swarm of low cost drones, dragging in US regional allies to make the conflict politically and diplomatically expensive, or closing the Strait of Hormuz to constrict the supply of oil and make it economically (and, for the US, domestically) expensive to keep going, Iran's strategy has been clear-sightedly and primarily about maximising the costs of carrying on waging war.  More than cost, this also creates a strategic vulnerability for the US.  According to a late April analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the US is estimated to have expended more than half of its estimated prewar stockpile of four out of seven key munitions; which also means that in the near term it will be less capable if drawn into conflict elsewhere - say in the East China Sea.  As Robert Reich puts it, the way to beat Trump is to "[engage] in a kind of jiujitsu [by using] Trump's power against him".  Incredibly enough, in the short time since the direction of the war became clear, I've already had occasion at work to use this learning to turn a weaker position into a superior outcome, doing what Friedrich Merz suggests is negotiating by not negotiating.

Thirdly, no amount of doctrine can override ground realities.  Since the aftermath of the First World War, a branch of military doctrine has posited that air superiority wins wars, but the evidence for that is slim.  Leaving aside the atomic bomb - which is not really about air power per se - no war has ever been won from the air.  Rather, they have been won (e.g. Iraq) or lost (e.g. Vietnam) by boots on the ground.  Consideration of history over doctrine would have helped the Trump administration to avoid a terrible error.  But that, I suppose, would have required a degree of rationality.

It has been a trying time at work.  Any business centred around global trade would naturally have to navigate closely around the challenges of supply chain disruption in and around the Middle East.  So I often got to working on this issue late at night, tired after a long day.  Indeed this editorial is being pounded out after one such long day.  And yet, there was a degree of relief also in turning my mind to literary matters.  The poetry in this issue has come together in pleasing shape, blending domesticity with an epic scale - notably including one prose poem on David and Goliath.  Kai Chai's selection of short stories have drawing power, pulling the reader into conflicts that only reveal themselves gradually.  The clutch of reviews range over rather diverse books, and then we have the pleasure of again debuting new Arthur Yap material, this time a long-buried interview carried out some time in the 1990s and never previously published.  It's as if we're saying art not artillery.

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