fic: the tourists' war: a melancholy, if slightly cynical, retrospective (original!fic, g)
Shit, it's almost one and I haven't started reviewing macroeconomics yet. But I suppose that writing this short story sort of made up for it?
Title: The Tourists' War: A Melancholy, If Slightly Cynical, Retrospective
Author: V.M. Bell
Summary: Once upon a time, the United States went to war with Iran. The catalyst for conflict was straightforward: a handful of anonymous Iranian radicals seized handful of anonymous American tourists.
Rating: G
Warnings: Copious amounts of economics, vaguely pretentious narration, a dash of political incorrectness
Word Count: 1,620
Author's Notes: The goal of this assignment was to write a story beginning with the line, "Once upon a time, the United States went to war with Iran," while maintaining perfect macroeconomic sense. I went over the two-page maximum (to which I say lol, Econ Teacher will have to deal), which might be an indication that I may have developed an unhealthy infatuation with this particular academic discipline. Anyway, any economic and/or political missteps within are mine.
All comments, reviews, and concrit welcome!
--
Once upon a time, the United States went to war with Iran. In the following generations, this seminal conflict was incorporated into several grand and sweeping narratives. The historians pointed to the ancient divergence between West and East. The politicians, unto perpetuity, debated the merits of military force against those of diplomacy. The analysts assessed the new world that emerged, a world that lacked a center or even two, a world fragmented by war. And the pseudo-intellectuals employed the most incomprehensible prose conceivable, littered with allusions and -isms, and dismissed the idea of a grand and sweeping narrative. Over coffee and cigarettes, they insisted that it such a thing was nothing more than a fictitious construction, all the while oblivious to the fact that, perhaps, their contempt of these constructions was a grand and sweeping narrative in itself.
Their opinions no doubt varied immensely, and they argued, railed, and ranted, everyone convinced that his truth was obviously the most truthful of them all. But few of them admitted one crucial fact: they were historians, politicians, analysts, and pseudo-intellectuals of the years after the Tourists’ War. Those who lived through it, and there are some six billion of them, remembered it in a slightly different manner:
Once upon a time, the United States went to war with Iran. The catalyst for conflict was straightforward: a handful of anonymous Iranian radicals seized handful of anonymous American tourists (hence, the epithet “the Tourists’ War,” disparagingly bestowed by some of the war’s detractors). This time, however, the United States did not bother with diplomacy or sound bites like “making the world safe for democracy.” Humiliated by its recent pullout from neighboring Iraq, where a zealously Islamic government had just garnered a convincing victory in recent parliamentary elections, and fearful of losing its status as the world’s sole superpower, the United States quickly put its proverbial foot down at the price of an Iranian government ministry building and thirty-four civilian lives.
Iran, a regional power in its own right (that is, ten percent of the world’s estimated supply of oil lies within its borders), quickly retailed in two ways. First, it imposed an immediate embargo on oil exports to the United States and urged its Middle Eastern neighbors to do the same. Second, in a solemn affair draped with Iranian flags, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad appeared on television channels the world over, the Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei seated at his side. Eyes downcast, he implored his all of humanity to grieve for the thirty-four persons whose lives were stolen away by this senseless act of violence. It was, superficially, not a political declaration but a eulogy, and with this simple speech, he stirred the collective heart of the developing world (and not a few hearts among the apologetic Left of the West), especially in the Middle East. Unwilling to offend their subjects and their Persian idol, the other governments in the region eventually complied with the oil embargo.
Congress officially declared war a week later amidst a jingoist chorus and the bluster of a Democratic president hoping to shore up his credentials as a foreign policy hawk. Patriotism was the order of the day. The United States would not lose this time, they said, but military operations had barely begun when the optimism of the American people started to fissure. The oil embargo precipitated a dramatic fall of in the supply of oil, and prices responded by rising in an equally dramatic fashion. Drivers were not alone in their disgruntlement: business owners nationwide were forced to raise prices, and as inflation bore down upon the economy, unions called for higher wages. Under public scrutiny, businesses could not very well refuse the demands of the working American, so wages and, therefore, input costs increased. Reluctant to impose a further price hike upon consumers, the pink slip became increasingly prevalent.
The Federal Reserve stood above the fray as all un-democratic institutions are wont to do, and the Chairman of the Board of Governors watched all of this unfold. His usual preoccupation, inflation, was now joined by the concern of economic stagnation. But as he cast his eyes abroad, watching the bombs litter Tehran, he found it reasonable to assume that the war would allow the government would spend its way out of any recession. It was thus decided that inflation should remain the Federal Reserve’s key objective, and it was with a measure of hope that the chairman authorized the sale of U.S. Treasury bonds and watched the rate of interest rise.
At first, the hope that the Fed could control inflation was not entirely irrational. Under more normal economic circumstances, increased government spending would have allowed the economy to continue growing, while the Federal Reserve’s upward urging of the interest rate, coupled with the increased rate of interest that would result from higher levels of government spending, would have tamed the resulting inflationary effects. Furthermore, the appreciating dollar ought to have made imported oil cheaper. However, the circumstances now faced by the United States deviated greatly from normality. Iranian ally President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, soon joined the oil embargo imposed by most of the Middle East, thus aggravating the supply-side shocks that characterized the 2010s and interfering with all government attempts to rectify the situation. Archives from The Economist indicate decreased GDP growth at this time, dropping from 3.0% at the start of the war in early 2013 to 1.2% a year later. In the third quarter of the year 2014, official figures reported that American output was now shrinking.
Here, it must be noted that Iran and its fellow participants in the embargo understood that there was great economic risk attached to it. The United States was, after all, a major consumer of imported oil: could any country afford to forgo the influx of American money? A decade prior to the Tourists’ War, the answer would have been a definitive no. Since then, a far more lucrative customer had emerged: the great economic tiger of Asia, China. As long as China’s appetite for black gold continued to grow, Iran gambled that the losses incurred from the oil embargo could be more than compensated elsewhere. What Iran - and, truth be told, most of the world - failed to realize was that the interdependency of the international economic system would eventually return to plague Iran itself.
As the American economic giant stumbled, its dominant economy teetering, its imports fell, and the veritable mass producer of exportable goods, China, watched its own growth falter. Social, economic, and political tensions, long obscured by the promise of limitless expansion, suddenly burst into the open. Villages rose up in protest against corrupt local officials, students took to the streets to rally for more liberal rule, and the Communist regime in Beijing found that there was too much to suppress and not enough resources to do as much. As Chinese expenditures turned inward, other parts of the developing world, deprived of the foreign investment and demand that had powered their resource-based economies, fell into disarray.
Meanwhile, Iran’s European neighbors had been suffering through the entirety of a war in which they had remained decidedly neutral. The appreciating U.S. dollar had caused the euro to depreciate, making oil far more expensive in Europe and placing European economies in a situation they could ill-afford to occupy. Economic recession now took their gradual toll in all parts of the developed world.
When Iran noticed that its oil revenues were shrinking precipitously, its actions had already become irreversible. Likewise, the United States was slow to realize that the magic hand of government could not cure the country through neither Keynesian economic theory nor through the promotion of flag-waving. The war, sought through such self-righteousness, was belatedly drawn to a close, signaling the second consecutive defeat dealt to the American military. The foreign policy establishment aside, the American people hardly batted an eye at this defeat. Economic difficulties had drained away their enthusiasm for nationalistic adventures as easily as oil had emptied their wallets.
The cessation of the war brought a sudden drop in government spending; the inflation problem that had puzzled many a policymaker eased away, only to be replaced by a deepening recession. The lifting of the oil embargo after the negotiation of terms for peace was a welcome economic stimulus for the entire world, and slowly, the world recovered. But it did not recover unchanged. The United States has since shied away from leadership on the world stage, and no country has yet been able to harness enough military, cultural, and economic clout to replace the void. China has been undergoing a painful transition from one-party rule to civil unrest, and now, it is fitfully democratizing. Iran has been humbled, the Arab governments shamed in their complicity. Europe emerged largely whole after the Tourists’ War and returned to its previous place of prominence, where prominence is largely synonymous with glorious irrelevance. Latin America and Africa cannot even lay claim to a modifier for its own irrelevance (unless it is something like utter), but as long as contagious diseases are not emerging from their jungles, the world will assume them to be progressing well enough.
Indeed, that the world has been repairing itself since the conclusion of the war should not be surprising: it has always shown remarkable propensity for self-healing, and perhaps that is why the hardships of this time are easily forgotten by the world of today. It is far too simple to begin a historical retrospective with the fancy-free “once upon a time” and to hide the realities that economics forced upon an entire generation. Economics, after all, is hardly of grand and sweeping stuff.
--
Signing off, V.M. Bell
Title: The Tourists' War: A Melancholy, If Slightly Cynical, Retrospective
Author: V.M. Bell
Summary: Once upon a time, the United States went to war with Iran. The catalyst for conflict was straightforward: a handful of anonymous Iranian radicals seized handful of anonymous American tourists.
Rating: G
Warnings: Copious amounts of economics, vaguely pretentious narration, a dash of political incorrectness
Word Count: 1,620
Author's Notes: The goal of this assignment was to write a story beginning with the line, "Once upon a time, the United States went to war with Iran," while maintaining perfect macroeconomic sense. I went over the two-page maximum (to which I say lol, Econ Teacher will have to deal), which might be an indication that I may have developed an unhealthy infatuation with this particular academic discipline. Anyway, any economic and/or political missteps within are mine.
All comments, reviews, and concrit welcome!
--
Once upon a time, the United States went to war with Iran. In the following generations, this seminal conflict was incorporated into several grand and sweeping narratives. The historians pointed to the ancient divergence between West and East. The politicians, unto perpetuity, debated the merits of military force against those of diplomacy. The analysts assessed the new world that emerged, a world that lacked a center or even two, a world fragmented by war. And the pseudo-intellectuals employed the most incomprehensible prose conceivable, littered with allusions and -isms, and dismissed the idea of a grand and sweeping narrative. Over coffee and cigarettes, they insisted that it such a thing was nothing more than a fictitious construction, all the while oblivious to the fact that, perhaps, their contempt of these constructions was a grand and sweeping narrative in itself.
Their opinions no doubt varied immensely, and they argued, railed, and ranted, everyone convinced that his truth was obviously the most truthful of them all. But few of them admitted one crucial fact: they were historians, politicians, analysts, and pseudo-intellectuals of the years after the Tourists’ War. Those who lived through it, and there are some six billion of them, remembered it in a slightly different manner:
Once upon a time, the United States went to war with Iran. The catalyst for conflict was straightforward: a handful of anonymous Iranian radicals seized handful of anonymous American tourists (hence, the epithet “the Tourists’ War,” disparagingly bestowed by some of the war’s detractors). This time, however, the United States did not bother with diplomacy or sound bites like “making the world safe for democracy.” Humiliated by its recent pullout from neighboring Iraq, where a zealously Islamic government had just garnered a convincing victory in recent parliamentary elections, and fearful of losing its status as the world’s sole superpower, the United States quickly put its proverbial foot down at the price of an Iranian government ministry building and thirty-four civilian lives.
Iran, a regional power in its own right (that is, ten percent of the world’s estimated supply of oil lies within its borders), quickly retailed in two ways. First, it imposed an immediate embargo on oil exports to the United States and urged its Middle Eastern neighbors to do the same. Second, in a solemn affair draped with Iranian flags, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad appeared on television channels the world over, the Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei seated at his side. Eyes downcast, he implored his all of humanity to grieve for the thirty-four persons whose lives were stolen away by this senseless act of violence. It was, superficially, not a political declaration but a eulogy, and with this simple speech, he stirred the collective heart of the developing world (and not a few hearts among the apologetic Left of the West), especially in the Middle East. Unwilling to offend their subjects and their Persian idol, the other governments in the region eventually complied with the oil embargo.
Congress officially declared war a week later amidst a jingoist chorus and the bluster of a Democratic president hoping to shore up his credentials as a foreign policy hawk. Patriotism was the order of the day. The United States would not lose this time, they said, but military operations had barely begun when the optimism of the American people started to fissure. The oil embargo precipitated a dramatic fall of in the supply of oil, and prices responded by rising in an equally dramatic fashion. Drivers were not alone in their disgruntlement: business owners nationwide were forced to raise prices, and as inflation bore down upon the economy, unions called for higher wages. Under public scrutiny, businesses could not very well refuse the demands of the working American, so wages and, therefore, input costs increased. Reluctant to impose a further price hike upon consumers, the pink slip became increasingly prevalent.
The Federal Reserve stood above the fray as all un-democratic institutions are wont to do, and the Chairman of the Board of Governors watched all of this unfold. His usual preoccupation, inflation, was now joined by the concern of economic stagnation. But as he cast his eyes abroad, watching the bombs litter Tehran, he found it reasonable to assume that the war would allow the government would spend its way out of any recession. It was thus decided that inflation should remain the Federal Reserve’s key objective, and it was with a measure of hope that the chairman authorized the sale of U.S. Treasury bonds and watched the rate of interest rise.
At first, the hope that the Fed could control inflation was not entirely irrational. Under more normal economic circumstances, increased government spending would have allowed the economy to continue growing, while the Federal Reserve’s upward urging of the interest rate, coupled with the increased rate of interest that would result from higher levels of government spending, would have tamed the resulting inflationary effects. Furthermore, the appreciating dollar ought to have made imported oil cheaper. However, the circumstances now faced by the United States deviated greatly from normality. Iranian ally President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, soon joined the oil embargo imposed by most of the Middle East, thus aggravating the supply-side shocks that characterized the 2010s and interfering with all government attempts to rectify the situation. Archives from The Economist indicate decreased GDP growth at this time, dropping from 3.0% at the start of the war in early 2013 to 1.2% a year later. In the third quarter of the year 2014, official figures reported that American output was now shrinking.
Here, it must be noted that Iran and its fellow participants in the embargo understood that there was great economic risk attached to it. The United States was, after all, a major consumer of imported oil: could any country afford to forgo the influx of American money? A decade prior to the Tourists’ War, the answer would have been a definitive no. Since then, a far more lucrative customer had emerged: the great economic tiger of Asia, China. As long as China’s appetite for black gold continued to grow, Iran gambled that the losses incurred from the oil embargo could be more than compensated elsewhere. What Iran - and, truth be told, most of the world - failed to realize was that the interdependency of the international economic system would eventually return to plague Iran itself.
As the American economic giant stumbled, its dominant economy teetering, its imports fell, and the veritable mass producer of exportable goods, China, watched its own growth falter. Social, economic, and political tensions, long obscured by the promise of limitless expansion, suddenly burst into the open. Villages rose up in protest against corrupt local officials, students took to the streets to rally for more liberal rule, and the Communist regime in Beijing found that there was too much to suppress and not enough resources to do as much. As Chinese expenditures turned inward, other parts of the developing world, deprived of the foreign investment and demand that had powered their resource-based economies, fell into disarray.
Meanwhile, Iran’s European neighbors had been suffering through the entirety of a war in which they had remained decidedly neutral. The appreciating U.S. dollar had caused the euro to depreciate, making oil far more expensive in Europe and placing European economies in a situation they could ill-afford to occupy. Economic recession now took their gradual toll in all parts of the developed world.
When Iran noticed that its oil revenues were shrinking precipitously, its actions had already become irreversible. Likewise, the United States was slow to realize that the magic hand of government could not cure the country through neither Keynesian economic theory nor through the promotion of flag-waving. The war, sought through such self-righteousness, was belatedly drawn to a close, signaling the second consecutive defeat dealt to the American military. The foreign policy establishment aside, the American people hardly batted an eye at this defeat. Economic difficulties had drained away their enthusiasm for nationalistic adventures as easily as oil had emptied their wallets.
The cessation of the war brought a sudden drop in government spending; the inflation problem that had puzzled many a policymaker eased away, only to be replaced by a deepening recession. The lifting of the oil embargo after the negotiation of terms for peace was a welcome economic stimulus for the entire world, and slowly, the world recovered. But it did not recover unchanged. The United States has since shied away from leadership on the world stage, and no country has yet been able to harness enough military, cultural, and economic clout to replace the void. China has been undergoing a painful transition from one-party rule to civil unrest, and now, it is fitfully democratizing. Iran has been humbled, the Arab governments shamed in their complicity. Europe emerged largely whole after the Tourists’ War and returned to its previous place of prominence, where prominence is largely synonymous with glorious irrelevance. Latin America and Africa cannot even lay claim to a modifier for its own irrelevance (unless it is something like utter), but as long as contagious diseases are not emerging from their jungles, the world will assume them to be progressing well enough.
Indeed, that the world has been repairing itself since the conclusion of the war should not be surprising: it has always shown remarkable propensity for self-healing, and perhaps that is why the hardships of this time are easily forgotten by the world of today. It is far too simple to begin a historical retrospective with the fancy-free “once upon a time” and to hide the realities that economics forced upon an entire generation. Economics, after all, is hardly of grand and sweeping stuff.
--
Signing off, V.M. Bell