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Iran

The Iran War has forced American motorists to reconsider long road trips. At the same time a  farmer in Kenya is facing a drastic drop in his $2,200 income and a Sri Lankan construction worker in Dubai is worrying about how his wife and children would survive without his remittances. The Iran War has been little more than an inconvenience for most people in the West. For those in the developing world it was—still is – a matter of life and death.

The people in the developing world were already reeling from the effects of cuts in foreign aid, the covid pandemic and the Ukraine War before the Iran War closed the Strait of Hormuz.

Petrol prices rose by as much as 50 percent in the US. They rose by the same amount in Kenya. The difference is that the average household income in America is $80,000. In Kenya it is $2,200.

East Africa imports about 25 percent of its fertiliser supplies from the Gulf region. The start of the Iran War coincided with the start of the planting season. If a farmer is unable to afford fertiliser than he buys less. This means lower farm incomes, higher maize prices, higher prices for animal feed, higher meat and milk prices. Greater food insecurity.

In the United States, agriculture contributes approximately one percent to the country’s GDP. In East Africa it contributes about a quarter and employs half of the population. Roughly 70 percent of Africa’s 1.5 billion people are directly or indirectly employed in agriculture.

Remittances to developing countries are also suffering. The Gulf countries are not known for their enlightened labour practices. In fact, for many migrant workers, conditions have been described as akin to “modern slavery.”

Millions, however, leave their families in Africa and South Asia to live up to ten in a room while working on construction sites in the Gulf region. When the bombs started to fall many of those workers were laid off. For countries such as Nepal—where 25 percent of the economy is remittances—this meant financial ruin.

Families from Mombasa to Kathmandu suddenly faced the cruel arithmetic of paying more food and fuel with less money arriving from sons and daughters working in Dubai or Riyadh.

Americans and the rest of the world

Americans often struggle to understand the rest of the world. That is an over-generalisation. America has produced some of the world’s finest experts on China, Russia, Britain and the Middle East. But the average American has little need to look beyond his own borders.

Why should he? America spans a continent. It possesses almost every climate, every landscape and nearly every natural resource. Its entertainment industry dominates the globe. Most Americans spend their lives without needing another language and only about one in five owns a passport.

That self-sufficiency has bred a certain assumption: that what works in America should work everywhere. It is not unique. The British Empire convinced itself that imperial rule brought civilisation. Vladimir Putin appears to have believed that Ukrainians would greet Russian tanks with flowers. Great powers have always had a tendency to mistake their own preferences for universal truths.

The tragedy is that military and economic power can reinforce this misconception. If you are powerful enough, people often tell you what you want to hear. Success breeds confidence. Confidence breeds hubris.

Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and now Iran all share a common thread. Again and again, Washington has assumed that superior force could overcome history, culture and nationalism. Again and again, it has discovered that people usually prefer imperfect governments of their own choosing to enlightened rulers imposed from outside.

America’s problem is not that it is uniquely arrogant. It is that, like every great power before it, it has become convinced that its own experience is universal.