In August 2025 I suggested the semiotics of the thirst for peace that drives at least certain members of the Trump Administration, with the President at its core. ( "President Trump is the President of Peace" Reflections on the Power of Presidential Self-Revolution (自我革命), the Republic's Social Revolution (社会革命) and the Presidential Message: "President Trump Brokers Another Historic Peace Deal" ). That theoretical elaboration--and its operational consequences bears repeating now--especially now in the midst of the confusion about the nature and objectives of the U.S. - Iran engagements. Both States have been blowing stuff up to suit their interests--the Iranians to obliterate the Jews and dominate Sunni lands; the U.S. to expand and protect markets and trade routes, and when it suits them, the Jews. They have now each blown up bits of this or that in sufficient quantity and with the appropriate background noise to be able to come to a deal--a peace, that might suit each of their quite different needs
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Chinese New Era Theory stresses the critical importance of self-revolution for the sort of social revolution that carries a political collective forward ( Social Revolution (社会革命) as Self-Revolution (自我革命) and the New Quality Production of CPC Modernization: 习近平 深入推进党的自我革命 [Xi Jinping, Deepen the Party's Self-Revolution] (Part of a speech at the Third Plenary Session of the 20th Central Commission for Discipline Inspection on January 8, 2024)). Of course, one does not have to embrace Chinese Marxist-Leninist theory to apply context relevant trajectories of self-revolution and social revolution.
One of the most interesting journeys of self-revolution, and with it of the social revolution that follows in its wake within liberal democratic lebenswelt, has been that of the Trump Administration, with Donald Trump at its core. That progression can be measured from self-constitution of the Administration as it progressed along its development pathways from the start of resident Trump's first term (2016-2020) and the first several hundred days of President Trump's second term. At the center of this self-revolution is the (re)constitution of the President as a positive force for peace. This idea--and the chronicling of its actualization--has been nicely framed for the Republic in a recent Media Release from the Trump Administration--President Trump Brokers Another Historic Peace Deal (accessed via this link and also following in full below). The specific context is the final resolution of the current round of violence between Armenia and Azerbaijan (my interview on that situation here). But it is clear that the President's message meant to draw clearly both lessons and principles that could be shared with the Republic's masses at home, and the Republic's friends, competitors and adversaries abroad.
Pix credit here We now understand that “President Trump is the President of Peace." (President Trump Brokers Another Historic Peace Deal). It ought to follow that the Republic is now, collectively, a Republic of Peace--self-revolution ushers in a state of social revolution. That, one might be excused for thinking, is the thrust of President Trump's message to the Republic. This is a message that has been underscored and elaborated by Secretary of State Rubio, whose discussion of the notion of peace, and states of peace brokered by a strong Republic reflects the more fundamental self-revolution of "transactional-merchant phenomenology and its understanding of peace as an essential element of something larger: "As they say in some movies--peace, like death, is not an end but a doorway. That acquires a quite interesting aspect in transactional spaces." (The Phenomenology of Peace and the Price of the Deal--Text of and Reflections on the Interview: Secretary of State Marco Rubio with Brian Kilmeade of Fox Radio).
What, then, is peace? Perhaps Secretary Marco Rubio describes it best under conditions of transaction framing merchant realities--peace is the absence of war. War is understood as violent conflict, one that either destroys valuable objects (infrastructure, productive capacity and the like), or human the consumption of whom is the essential element of the process of production (workers, family units, consumers, and operators of economic, social, religious, and cultural productivity) and the object (collectively) of productivity (at its extreme here) and curated. Societal self-pleasuring is the ultimate aim--however that is defined and made suitable for the times; and self-pleasuring consists of the proper interaction of objects and people agreeably arranged and ordered in ways that permit a movement toward the maximization of their own self-and social value and that of the collective. This comes in many flavors of course (and ideology provides one of several languages for constituting these "flavors" in form suitable for both consumption and framing the human condition). But at its heart is the fundamental postulate--that without the end of destruction there can be no movement toward.
Pix credit here Nonetheless, peace is not its own object. It is a state of (dis)engagement that permits the fundamental logic of the operation of self and social systems toward the realization of its apex goal and purpose--the regularization of spaces in which transactions may be undertaken for the further fulfillment of self and social revolution. It might be understood as movement toward development (or modernization, however these terms are understood) that improves (or in some systems perfects) things and conditions of life for individuals and collectives. In other words, the object is not peace; the object is the achievement of a state of stable transactions--iterative, perhaps even purposeful beyond the value of the transaction--that then manifest desired states of being. Peace is the predicate condition for the merchant; and the merchant is the predicate actor in development (not either the functionary or the warrior); and the work of the merchant is essential for the operationalization of transactional frameworks deployed to whatever ends suits society engaged in its endless processes of self-actualization, and for some, the attainment of states of perfection (at least until they die and a new generation starts the process again). That provides the framing of reality that serves as the foundation of the peace mission of the Republic with the President at is core.
With one exception--the merchants of violence, those whose highest purpose is to produce those objects essential for the maintained of peace through violence, or its potential. But that is a story for another day.For today; for today it is for us to contemplate the nature, function, and states of peace into which we are all traveling toward. . . . one way or another. Self-revolution and social revolution leads the Republic toward an embrace of the ordering principle that peace is a predicate to development; and that development is the foundation of transactional cultures in which individuals and collectives prosper, each in their own way--until the contradictions of transactions in context moves both back to not-peace. That, in turn, sheds light on the ordering framework of the dialectics of the human condition: Conflict-peace-transactions-conflict-peace. What is peace? Peace is truce; peace is a condition of managed conflict; peace is a state of ritualized engagement; peace is a temporal space and a platform. Managing peace, not conflict, becomes the key--perhaps that is so. Conversely managing conflict, not peace, is the key of equal value. The temporal objectification of both makes it possible to better use them; perhaps that is also a possibility. I leave that to others.
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In order to understand the terms of the U.S.-Iranian peace (A New Treaty of Amity, Friendship, and Trade Between the U.S. and Iran?: US reads terms of memorandum of understanding to reporters) one might start with the presumption that nothing that a merchant never says what they mean and never mean what they say, even if the person attempting the role of the merchant-type started out of something else (The Sleeper Awakens: Text of Senator JD Vance's Remarks Delivered at the Munich Security Conference 18 February 2024 and Some Reflections). It is the same, of course, for the official-bureaucrat and for the warrior-priest type, but the context and meaning changes. That core presumption applies with to the current efforts to "sell" the deal to the American masses (European leaders and economic elites required no such selling, if only because it was in their interests, measured as it was by the calculus of the bureaucrat rather than the merchant-type) (see President Defends Deal on Iran War at G-7). And the Vice President, in a role that helps cement a persona that appears to appeal, was tasked with a bravura performance (by the standards of the time) of castigating the Jews along traditional lines ("“Donald J. Trump is the only head of state in the entire world who is sympathetic to the nation of Israel at this moment in time,” Mr. Vance said. He added, “If I was in the cabinet of the Israeli government, I might not be attacking the only powerful ally that I have anywhere left in the entire world.”" HERE). The object is to convince, rather than to justify. In this case the object was not peace, but markets; the objects was not resolution but transactions; the object was not directed inward toward Iranian popular determination but to the protection of supply chin infrastructure that affected American interests (in the sense of economic stability).
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It works as well as any other approach. . . perhaps. We will find out. Yet that is not the point of this performance. What is important, more important, are the structural pathways that are being created around the notion of peace. It is not an institutionalist-bureaucrat-administrator's peace that aims at resolution and stability at the level of institutional collectives (to "solve" a problem as a function of whatever the character of values of the moment). It is the peace of the merchant-priest that aims to create a space in which conflict is not disruptive enough to interfere with transactions. In that context, the absence of peace, like the peace conferencing itself, is merely an instrument for the creation of such spaces for such time as it serves the interest of transaction, and of course, of those who are the merchant-priest princes of the times. Sanctions are bad for business; nuclear weapons should only be available to apex states; reconstruction funds means more deals; supply chain pathways are critical to market and supply chains; bringing states within global financial systems enhances control and the continued power of the Dollar; subordinate states and non state actors are expected to behave until it is in the interest of superior powers that they misbehave in the context of using geopolitical situations for transactional bargaining; etc. The essence is this: "Trump threatened Iran with more attacks if they didn't abide by the terms. 'If they don't honor that, we'll probably go back to bombing them until they honor it,' he said. (here)
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Well, if not the Americans, then the Israelis, will bomb again. A mistake really to think that the American leadership core, can play the Israelis and then hang them out to dry Ukrainian or pre 1940s Czech style. The history of US -Israel relaitons appears opaque to our friends from certain elite schools and their political-economic "mentors." Who better than the Israelis, the quintessential merchant-type existing, for as long as they can, within the dar al-harb. That is the Souq (سوق) within which transactions are undertaken between merchants, priests, and warriors, all of whom have become adept at playing the larger empires under conditions of the sort of peace that the American Merchant princes may now come to understand as truce punctuated by violence. The rest is negotiation in which everything is an instrument of the deal, and deals have a very short half-life.
The nascent U.S.-Iran deal faced fresh challenges on Friday after Switzerland said that the next phase of talks had been postponed and as Israel launched new strikes in Lebanon following a deadly attack on its soldiers there. Israel said its military had struck more than 80 targets belonging to the Iran-backed Hezbollah militia, killing dozens, in response to an attack on an Israeli tank crew that left four soldiers dead in southern Lebanon. The Lebanese Health Ministry reported that Israeli airstrikes overnight had killed at least 18 people and injured 33 others. (here)
The Iranians want the Israelis dead--or at least their Jews, or in a more humane turn converted back to dhimmi status; the Israelis want Hezbollah and Hamas dead to avoid dying themselves. In the absence of a mass conversion to Judaism what is left is good old fashioned clan warfare exploited by the successors of the Sassanians and the children of Rome. The from Lebanon to the ends of the Arabian peninsula. That is a stable state of sorts. The rest is propaganda dressed up as morals, or religion, or ethno-psychosis of the sort that now appeals to the mandarins in international institutions, or that serves as a cover for the imperial aspiration of middle and apex powers.
