When Goliath faced David, he seemed to hold all the cards. Young David held only a sling.
When two nuclear-powered regimes struck Iran on Feb. 28, they acted together as one behemoth (let’s call him BenDon for brevity’s sake). Because Iran’s regime seemed so weak, BenDon believed the time had come to demolish it forever. After all, BenDon held three aces.
His first blow wiped out most leaders, their families, and scores of schoolchildren. Who could resist a ruthless force armed with three powerful aces?
But shockingly, the frail boy who seemed to lack even a pair of deuces, slung a single stone to the forehead of Goliath. The stone took the form of a humble 3-4-5-6-7 straight, but a straight always beats three of a kind, even if they are aces. How improbable that such overwhelming power could be checkmated so easily by a narrow strait!
BenDon, not willing to admit the weakness of his hand, kept doubling down with swaggering boasts and violent threats, trying to raise the stakes beyond what Iran was willing to suffer. But these increasingly toothless bluffs were unconvincing. Iran had seen its very existence threatened and continues to endure a level of pain that Israelis and Americans have been spared. But Iran knew that its capacity for pain was beyond that of BenDon and his supporters. And before our very eyes, BenDon was forced to bend down.
The point of this little parable is not to place moral judgement on either party, but to reveal the danger and the limits of asymmetrical power. For those watching everywhere, this contest prompts a practical question: would we be more able to thrive peacefully in a world where BenDon’s power was checked or in one where it was unchecked?
Donald demands unchecked dominance over the nations of the Americas and Europe. Benjamin demands the same over the nations of West Asia. And they both seek to crush any voice, whether foreign or domestic, that questions their bullying. This is the peril of asymmetrical power.
For the citizens of countries in their crosshairs — like Cuba, Greenland, Lebanon and Palestine — and for people everywhere who support self-determination over domination, there is surely relief that BenDon overplayed his hand. To them, the alternative looked like an endless nightmare.
Russia and China, though well beyond BenDon’s domination, were watching the game too. They were certainly pleased by BenDon’s troubles, but also aware that many wished them a similar fate.
BenDon’s power had sprung from the concentration of wealth into the hands of the few. The endgame of this process, Donald openly bragged, was power consolidated into the hands of the one.
Yet BenDon endlessly complained that he was the most persecuted person on the planet, the only one under real threat. His security, it follows, required the insecurity of all others.
In fact, Donald remains so fearful of humiliation, that he demands that everyone everywhere, except Benjamin, bow to his image. But BenDon finally encountered an opponent who, though not innocent, would not bow, who would rather be martyred than surrender.
BenDon could not imagine how this was possible. He had no imagination. Like the cyclops who Odysseus blinded in another asymmetrical fight, BenDon could not see the reality in front of him, but everyone else could see it clearly. He was not invincible.
Odysseus had told the cyclops that his name was “Nobody.” When the other cyclopses asked: “Who could have blinded someone as powerful as you,” the cyclops could only say “Nobody.”
BenDon has continued to insist that “Nobody” could beat him at poker. Indeed, “Nobody” could beat him at poker, the same “Nobody” that held a sling, a straight, a strait. BenDon had discovered the limits of asymmetrical power and could only flail about like the blinded cyclops.
The whole world was left to wonder: how much suffering must we endure because of your arrogant miscalculations? Now Goliath is dead, the Cyclops is blinded, and Donald posts his relentless midnight screeds, narrating his own descent into endless night.
This is not the end of the story. More scenes will surely unfold. There have been other pivotal moments like this when many could feel tectonic plates shifting and could peek above the clouds of the old stories and recognize, like Bob Dylan in 1964, that “the times, they are a-changing.”
Patrick McGreevy lives in Greenfield and welcomes comments at pmcgreevy64@gmail.com.