Deus ex machina

"Like a bolt out of the blue

Fate steps in and sees you through
When you wish upon a star
Your dreams come true.

   Disney, "When you wish upon a star," 1940

"When you're a star they let you do it. You can do anything."

   Donald Trump, Access Hollywood tape, made public, 2016

Deus ex machina ("god from the machine") is a plot device where an unsolvable, seemingly hopeless problem is abruptly resolved by an unexpected, unlikely occurrence.

We understand that the Deus ex machina device is implausible plotting. 

Herb Rothschild's guest post the day before yesterday recalled an incident that is burned into the consciousness of people on the political left about the hypocritical and disastrous decision of the U.S. to engineer a coup in Iran. In the 1950s the CIA and related organizations deposed Iran's elected government led by Mohammad Mosaddegh and replaced it with the pro-American Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Pahlavi made Iranian oil cheaply available to western oil companies. The Pahlavi dynasty wasn't organic to Iran nor a legitimate government. That was the original sin. The Pahlavi government was overthrown after 20 years by a government far worse than the one we deposed; our democratic hypocrisy backfired. That is the lesson the non-interventionist left learned 

There is another lesson that persists, though. It is that the U.S. has god-like machines at its disposal: air power, and special force teams that can do targeted assassinations and captures. We got Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan and Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi in Syria. So clean. So surgical. It would be a shame not to use so wonderful a machine. It would be like having the Covid vaccine and not taking it. Only foolish MAGA cultists would do that, right?  

Trump absorbed that lesson. We performed lightning strikes on boats off Venezuela, and no person, country, law, or norm could stop us. Trump was Zeus. The snatch and grab of Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores worked so well. Trump kept the existing authoritarian government in place, rejecting what would have been democratic government led by María Corina Machado, the Nobel Peace Prize winner. She would not have been compliant. The successor to Maduro holds power at Trump's pleasure. Perfect!

There is something unsatisfying in a narrative that requires a bolt out of the blue to resolve an intractable plot problem. If the cavalry is going to ride in and save the wagon train from attack, then it needs to be established that the cavalry was somehow summoned by the people they rescue. Superman or the Ghostbusters team cannot just show up with supernatural power. 

The world is re-discovering the limits of the bolt out of the blue. Iran's resistance to U.S. air power is organic. I am appalled by what I consider religious fanaticism that is widespread in the region, but it is present. They aren't being reasonable, from my point of view, but they are being who they are, and they are there, the combatants in Israel, Iran, and elsewhere. The comments written to the back-to-back guest posts of yesterday's by Michael Trigoboff and the prior day by Herb Rothschild make my point. Zionist Jews have asserted God's blessing on the region being theirs alone. Leave or die. Strong, fanatical words. Islamic voices have said Allah wants that same land for Muslims alone. Death to Jews. More fanaticism. 

Trump has kicked a hornets nest. This will not end neatly and quickly with a new, compliant, government in Iran. Such a government would not have legitimacy and would not reflect a plausible equilibrium of the centrifugal forces inside Iran. Is there any chance that a government that emerged after an assassination of President Trump by an Iranian drone would resolve into happy state in which the Iranian ayatollah picked a new U.S. government sworn to establish Sharia law in a disarmed United States? Of course not.

The sudden change that is possible is Trump abruptly announcing that the war has already succeeded, the greatest victory in history, a 100 percent removal of the Iranian threat, and that he is the world's best dealmaker. Bebe Netanyahu would protest that the U.S. is leaving the region with the job unfinished, but Trump will ignore him. It is TACO Trump. This is sudden, but it would not be a bolt from the blue. It would be Trump being Trump, making trouble as he has with tariffs, U.S alliances, and immigration control. He breaks things, and then moves on. That backstory is well established.

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