The Iranian government knows how to deal with bullies, perhaps because they’re bullies themselves:
• Iran’s new leader: Iran has named Mojtaba Khamenei the country’s next supreme leader, state media reports, following the killing of his father Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. US President Donald Trump previously said Khamenei’s son would be an “unacceptable” selection. The announcement came hours after Israel launched fresh strikes which hit oil storage sites in Tehran. [CNN/Politics]
Bullies are never appeased, they just take more and more. President Trump will no doubt be puzzled by this selection, since he – in his mind, the biggest bully on the block said it could not be so, so it shouldn’t be – doesn’t have a sophisticated understanding of how the world works. He thinks he’s the biggest, so he wins. All those other enemies don’t matter.
But Iran’s government understands that knuckling under will make them dirt under the fingernails of Trump, and that’s unacceptable for a country that’s been more or less united for 1900 years. Not to mention a religious psychosis as big as most of its enemies’, which is the source of the iron in their backbone.
So don’t look for the new Khamenei to roll over and play dead on Trump’s say so. Iran will continue fighting until it’s been reduced to rifles and rocks, and even then former leaders with no future will retreat into inaccessible areas and try to become guerillas. In the process, Trump’s international reputation will degrade and he’ll be known as a buffoon. Well, that’s already common. I need a better thesaurus, maybe.
And Big Law (a name for a collection of law firms that work with the largest of companies), Paramount/CBS, and other institutions who calculated it’d be more profitable to make deals with Trump the Bully than defy them will not learn, not learn until their sources of revenue dry up and the boards in charge of the CEOs fire them for making the biggest mistake of their careers. For some such institutions, such as Paramount/CBS, that may never happen, as boss David Ellison and his father, Larry, have too much money to be fired, and thus that institution may be doomed. But in the area of Big Law, we’ve already seen such discharges occur. Look for more. Don’t invest in those corporations with CEOs that made that egregious error, unless they find a way out of it.
