Watch Out for the Chickens

In a world of international anxieties, China and Iran are two which stand out and worry the West:

China, because of its fearsome rise in matters of trade, finances, science, the economy, military and naval ambitions, and its cornering the market in raw materials the resources needed to fuel its factories and feed its vast population.

And Iran, due to its perverse persistence in pressing ahead with the development of an independent nuclear industry, raising the implicit threat that it will inevitably build and deploy nuclear weapons.

The student of history does not need to delve far back to discover how China was once trampled upon by Western interests, from the forcing upon it of the opium trade by Britain, to the expropriation of Chinese ports by a gaggle of foreign powers (leading to the Boxer Rebellion of 1900).

Or of how Iran then known as Persia lost control of its independent future in the early 1950s when British and American intelligence services, encouraged by Western oil companies, conspired to unseat an elected prime minister (Mossadegh) and install in his place a puppet leader (the Shah), and how the Revolution of 1979 avenged the interference.

Like it or not, nations, like people, harbour resentments, which they store in their collective long-suffering memory, suppressing them until the time is ripe to redress the balance.

In resolving ‘never again’, perhaps China and Iran are merely re-asserting the reasonable right to be sovereign over their own affairs. Chickens may be late coming home to roost, but they do eventually come home.

One wonders how many others lurk in the shadows . . . . (WR)

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