April is the cruellest month

As the ‘final ultimatum’  given by Donald Trump to Iran draws near, we recall how T S Eliot set the tone for his masterpiece,  ‘The Wasteland’, by choosing to subvert the optimistic April showers bring May flowers’ and say “April is the cruellest month...”. The world has seen much devastation in different parts of the world in the month of April in different years, but this April has seen more devastation and a regional war, which threatens to trap more and more countries. On Easter Day this year, the world was in the grip of fear of a great crisis rather than the hope of a resurrection. Like an evil alchemist, Trump is turning spring into winter.

The spring flowers have begun to bloom around the world, unaware of the emergence of cruelty all around, we hear of ultimatums, defiance and wrong calculations of balance of power. The war had no apparent reason as it started after an agreement was reached on the crucial question of Iran’s nuclear capability.

“Wars begin in the minds of men...”, declares UNESCO, but this is the case of a war beginning in the mind of one man, whose conditions for ending it keep shifting from preventing the manufacture of a nuclear weapon to the opening of the Hormuz Strait. But the aim is one of obliterating of something or another or decapitating regimes. In other words, there are no attainable objectives as actions are blinded by ideology and religion. The situation reflects the global realisation that political and economic agreements alone are not enough to prevent war.

The 9/11 massacre showed that the power to destroy the world many times over with weapons of mass destruction does not ensure success. Unarmed men with nothing but forks and knives picked up from passenger planes brought the most powerful country in the world to its knees. The US-Israel combine not being able to defeat Iran after more than a month of bombing has exploded the belief that Goliath will always win over David. Stealth, secret weapons and determination may determine the result and not power measured by possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction.

The unending threats to rain terror on Iran if the ultimatums to open the Hormuz Strait are repeatedly ignored by Iran, making such threats unreal because even the US cannot afford to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. The Aesop Fable serves as a timeless warning against short-sighted greed at the expense of long-term sustainability. Perhaps the latest threats being laced with expletives express frustration rather than determination.

The twenty-first-century wars have a tendency to last longer, as seen from the number of active state-based conflicts across 36 countries, as the Uppsala Conflict Data Programme has recorded. This is perhaps on account of the United Nations having failed to use the scheme for maintaining international peace like Preventive Diplomacy, Ceasefire, Peacekeeping and Peace building outlined in the Charter. Setting of the sun over the UN has been anticipated by the formation of a Board of Peace with Donald Trump as its permanent Chairman. His quest for the Nobel Peace Prize has now turned to creating more conflicts so that he can resolve them one by one and claim more Nobel Prizes!

The April cruelty is not confined to West Asia. The Russia-Ukraine war is raging in its fourth year and may prevent any celebration of the arrival of the spring. Donald Trump’s list of things to be done keeps getting longer.

He appears to have a vision of the whole region from Greenland to ion of Iran Panama forming a new geographical and political entity dominated by the United States. That will mean turning many springs into winters, back to T S Eliot, who concluded his poem,  ‘The Hollow Men’ with the following words, “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper...”. A silver lining on the dark horizon this April, however, is that Artemis II has officially entered the sphere of influence of the moon, a singular achievement. For the moment, he has shifted the ultimatum given to Iran to open Hormuz to April 7, 2026.

The highest irony of the US-Israel invasion of Iran is that the peaceful and prosperous Gulf countries have been attacked more than US and Israeli targets. That has brought the war to our doors. Kerala is busy fighting elections to determine who will run the state for the next five years. The political leaders seem to be unaware that the biggest challenge that the new Government of Kerala will face will be the consequences of the turmoil in the Gulf. April is likely to be the cruellest month for Kerala and India. Prime Minister Modi mentioned this even in the heat of the campaign.