Essay by Keith Rankin, 20 April 2026
It’s commonplace, especially in The West, to think of wars in binary terms. In those terms, wars are either won or lost, like a sports match. And the symbol of victory is a trophy. In a match-up, the symbol of defeat is the loss of a trophy.
In the days of the Roman Empire, the trophy might be a ‘barbarian’ leader being paraded in chains; or maybe his head in a box. ‘Decapitation’ is a crude trophy word, still very much in vogue.
In the present Iran War, the trophy of victory might have been the ‘head’ of the 86-year-old ‘Supreme Leader’; Iran’s former equivalent of the United Kingdom’s late Queen Elizabeth II. But in reality, the Iranians were waiting for Ali Khamenei to die; and all the signs were, so long as Iran was left in relative peace, that a liberalisation process was already in place.
Further the assassination of Khamanei could never have been an adequate trophy for the United States. Because it was actually done by Israel, another country, another nuclear power, indeed a highly secretive nuclear power, a genocidal power which terrorises its part of the world. And we note that it has always been in Israel’s interest to keep Iran on a war-footing; to keep it from being anything other than an enemy. A progressive Iran would have very much stymied the Greater Israel project. Hence the need to assassinate Khamanei before he died of natural causes.
For the United States, another trophy had to be found. Having co-started the present war, the United States needs to end it, and with a victory trophy.
It would seem that the trophy being demanded is Iran’s enriched uranium. Apparently, the United States wants to be allowed to go into Iran, excavate the enriched uranium, and then to truck it and ship it to some undisclosed destination. To facilitate this, the United States is trying to make its victory arrangements with ‘negotiations’ brokered by an actual pro-China nuclear power in Southwest Asia; namely Pakistan, a country over which the United States has intruded upon its political sovereignty on a number of occasions, a country with no popular love for the United States and its proxies.
We need to note that, for Iran to allow the United States to acquire its trophy would represent a military defeat; a capitulation in the eyes of the world in general, the Iranian population (both those in favour of the present Pezeshkian regime, and those opposed to it) in particular, and to the global community of Shia Muslims. (The total Shia population is estimated to be 350 million, 250 million of whom are faithful, and 90 million of whom are resident in Iran.)
Japan
On the matter of understanding the shortcomings of binary victory and binary defeat, we may turn to the matter of Japan in 1945. The trophy at stake was Emperor Hirihito. And, on the basis of this binary, it was Japan, not the United States, which was victorious. Japan retained its trophy.
On 9 March 1945, the United States embarked on its campaign for unconditional victory; meaning that Japan had to unconditionally surrender, which in turn would mean that Hirohito would be Japan’s last emperor, and that his reign would end in 1945.
For starters, the United States slaughtered 100,000 residents of Tokyo in four hours of one night; the wee hours of 10 March. Total Japanese deaths from that spring and summer bombing campaign – including the nuclear deaths – was between 500,000 and one million people.
None of these bombings came close to resulting in Japan conceding its Emperor. The United States was preparing to drop three more atomic bombs on Japan that year – production criteria meant that these bombs were scheduled for November and December 1945. If Japan still refused to give up its trophy, the city of Kyoto was scheduled for removal from the United States’s non-hit list. Also, to note, the United States kept up its non-nuclear aerial assault on Japan until the day before the deal was signed.
In August 1945, communications were not good in Japan. The leadership in Tokyo had heard that there was an unusually large explosion at Hiroshima, and then another in Nagasaki, but they didn’t really have time to process their limited information. They had already been hit by plenty of other big bombs. Meanwhile, the people on the ground in Hiroshima were able to restore electrical power within three days of that explosion; locals did what locals do everywhere, pick themselves up if they can, and try to keep living.
What happened to finish the war was the threat from the Soviet Union. After the end of the war in Europe, the Soviet Union returned its attention to the East. There had been longstanding territorial disputes – and cold dispute still continues in the Kuril Islands – between Japan and Russia. Russia, having been embarrassed in the 1904/05 Russia-Japan War, potentially had a score to settle; Manchuria, for much of the first half of the twentieth century, had been territory contested between Russia, China and Japan.
But it was the United States which most feared the Soviet Union’s advance into Northeast Asia. In Europe, the United States was pushing the narrative that the Soviet Union, which had ‘liberated’ Eastern Europe from the German Nazi regime, was intent on pushing Communism onto Western Europe, and would use military means to do that. The hoary trope in Paris and London, that the Russians would soon be at their front-doors if they could not be held behind an iron curtain within Germany, was a narrative very much adhered to by the Americans with regard to the Far East as well as to the Far West. Indeed, by the time of the end of hostilities in August 1945, Soviet Russia had already ‘liberated’ half of the Korean Peninsula; Korea was a mirror image of the emergent East-West faultline within Europe.
So, the Americans caved in. They agreed that Japan could keep its Emperor. Japan saved face. Hostilities in the Pacific War ended the next day.
Iran again
2026 hostilities could end as soon as the United States removes its demand for a trophy which the Americans know the Iranians cannot accept. The barrier to ending the war is that the American regime would lose face without a compelling victory trophy. In the earlier Japan situation, by contrast, the American occupation after August 1945 meant that the United States could easily obscure the fact that it had had to make a major concession to secure the end of that war.
Enemies of Convenience: On the matter of Non-Binary War
At one level there is the matter of stated and unstated goals, criteria for ‘success’ (which is not necessarily ‘winning’), and knowing how and when to ‘vacate the arena’. Re the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs, they contributed very little to ending World War Two, but were successful examples of ‘live testing’, and had the huge impact on the new Cold War arena in Europe as ‘demonstration devices”. With the Cold War setting in, Japan proved to be a World War Two enemy of convenience.
Of particular interest is Is war more profitable than peace? David Keen explains, Talk to Al Jazeera, 5 April 2026 (and on YouTube).
Introduction: “What if ‘who is winning’ is the wrong question? Because in many modern conflicts victory is not the only or even the main objective. … It opens streams of profit, and, for many, it creates a constant state of threat that justifies its own continuation. … Wars evolve, adapt, and sometimes sustain the very actors fighting them. … To understand why some wars don’t end, we turn to a leading voice in the political economy of conflict, Professor of Conflict Studies at the London School of Economics, David Keen.”
Keen suggests that some of the benefits of war include “making money”, “suppressing dissent under the cover of war”, “divide and rule”, “painting dissent as disloyalty”, “turning your enemy into the image that you’ve put about in your propaganda”, … “taking actions that are predictably counterproductive”. For certain aims “the enemy can be surprisingly useful”.
David Keen (unassuming, quiet, thoughtful): “This division of people into ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ is incredibly simplistic, and goes back as far as the Vietnam War.” (And further, of course!)
The Soviet Union had proved so useful to the West, that from 1991, after the Cold War, a new bogeyman – convenient enemy – had to be invented. (Note Samuel Huntingdon’s influential 1992 thesis, The Clash of Civilizations, which facilitated the multi-decade employment of many people in high-paid jobs in Washington DC, and no doubt other federal capital cities with otherwise underemployed think tanks.) Iran had already become the enemy-in-waiting in the 1980s, albeit with a degree of secrecy, when a proxy leader for American interests (called Saddam Hussein) was called upon to deal to Iran. Saddam obliged; indeed, he over-obliged, taking his cut in the form of Kuwait.
In the midst of that Iraq-Iran War, in 1987, there was the Irangate scandal.
‘”Soon after taking office in 1981, the Reagan Administration secretly and abruptly changed United States policy.” Secret Israeli arms sales and shipments to Iran began in that year, even as, in public, the Reagan administration presented a different face, and “aggressively promoted a public campaign […] to stop worldwide transfers of military goods to Iran”. … After a leak by Mehdi Hashemi, a senior official in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Lebanese magazine Ash-Shiraa exposed the arrangement on 3 November 1986″.’ From Wikipedia.
Revolutionary Iran (the new Islamic Republic of Iran, under Ayatollah Khomeini) was becoming an enemy of convenience. It was, in the 1980s, being armed by Israel and the United States. Some of those arms will have gone to Hezbollah, established as a Shia resistance movement in 1982, in response to an Israel-led genocide in Lebanon. We note that, today, Hezbollah is a critical and convenient element justifying Israel’s grand expansionist venture.
Today, Russia and Iran – even China – are enemies of convenience to a few; and of great inconvenience to the many. Indeed, re Russia and China, there is talk of the New Cold War. See, for example, The New Cold War: A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing, Fred Saberi, The Times of Israel, 19 April 2026.
Re Russia, the Cold War of the twentyfirst century represents the Third Cold War. In The First Cold War, historian Barbara Emerson discusses the ‘war’ against Russia that led to New Zealand’s fortifications on North Head and other places in 1885. (I also draw attention to this 2016 extended critique of President Obama’s ‘weakness’: War by Other Means: Geoeconomics and Statecraft, by Robert Blackwill and Jennifer Harris, and its unsavoury ‘adversaries of convenience’ premise.)
Modern history (which includes 1885) matters very much; Biblical history (or even the slightly more recent Koranic history) matters less. But ancient history can still matter; it tells us some pithy stories about war trophies.
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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
