The Warrior's Shadow

The Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa composed his cinematic epic Kagemusha — The Warrior's Shadow at the turn of the 1980s, to immortalise the story of a courageous warlord who had defied the feudal powers of the sixteenth century. He fell in battle, even though his soldiers had not spared their bodies in protecting him from the enemy's arrows. Yet the command chose to conceal his death and find a double to carry the war forward, and the paradox lay in the fact that this perfect replica was drawn from the dregs of society, a common thief.

After the fashion of great filmmakers, whose dazzling spectacle raises questions and dilemmas of unsettling depth, Kurosawa lays bare the fragility of the military edifice, for all its mass and violence, since it suffices that the death of the exceptional commander — the one whose eye does not blink in the face of death — be announced for the whole structure to collapse. He also strips naked the system of political illusion that governs the masses and the soldiery, and perhaps even the most senior officers and the closest members of the inner circle.

The tragedy tinged with irony came when the thief-double so completely inhabited the original's skin that he led the army from one loss to the next.

At the time of the film's release, a year had passed since the arrival of Imam Khomeini at the helm of power in Iran, and the country had ceased to be an empire ruled by a shah and become a republic placed under the authority of the Supreme Leader.

Now that the filmmaker has departed this world, he does not know that the death of the second Supreme Leader, Imam Khamenei, was announced without delay, nor that the Iranian leadership immediately proclaimed the designation of his son, the ailing Mojtaba, as heir to the position.

What the two situations share is that the reasons which presided over the choice of the ailing son are precisely those that Kurosawa had addressed in his film, namely the importance of the solidity and cohesion of command and the necessity of ensuring its continuity. Without which collapse might be inevitable. To this is added the very principle of the wilayat al-faqih and the necessity that a standard-bearer always be present, which serves to prevent political collapse while feeding the great illusion that drives millions of followers to continue fighting. Except that the new Guide is, reportedly, injured and unable to address his public by voice and image in order to reassure his devotees.

In the time of the director of The Warrior's Shadow, generative artificial intelligence did not yet exist, which might have allowed for the reproduction of an entire persona capable of speaking and moving, rendering the figure of the double superfluous. But the partisans of the new Guide need to see him among them, to hear him harangue them, to shake his hand, to receive his sermons and directives, rather than having to deal only with the commanders of the Revolutionary Guards, who conduct this game solely for the purpose of preserving military cohesion and the survival of the regime.

And so people, awaiting the one they hold dear, give everything they have.

With Trump

The American president has managed to impose his unusual style in the handling of great and small affairs alike, with a disconcerting evenhandedness: he directs his attacks at his Venezuelan, Cuban or Iranian adversary, and in the same breath does not forget to humiliate his aged predecessor Biden, or to threaten a friendly country of the stature of France or the Sultanate of Oman.

Trump is today striving to finalise the document of proposals regarding a truce, consolidating the part that can be sold both domestically and abroad, and turning against any clause that would be difficult for him to exploit or defend, should it prove less convincing than what Barack Obama had achieved a decade earlier. One thus witnesses a game of ping-pong between Washington and Tehran over proposals and amendments, a game that serves to prolong the duration of the negotiations and open new avenues for both parties.

After his visit to Beijing, which overwhelmed him with ceremony and magnificence, Trump was able to feel the components of Chinese soft power and gauge the limits of American hard power. The impact of the visit on him therefore extends far beyond what was concretely accomplished, which remains modest measured against his ambitions for great and spectacular deals.

He perceives now the negative consequences of his relationship with President Putin, particularly on European allies, as well as the combined role played by Moscow and Beijing in preventing the Iranian regime from being defeated or compelled to capitulate easily before the will of the White House. This joint military, security and informational support has provided the Iranian leadership with the means to deploy its accumulated expertise in the art of complex and interlocking negotiations, as was observed last month during the elaboration of the memorandum of understanding and the reordering of priorities, where the weaker negotiator scored important points against the stronger one.

Vice President JD Vance failed in his mission and returned to the White House with the conviction that the Iranian was no easy prey, despite his weaknesses and heavy losses. As for the flexibility that Vance had attempted in Pakistan, it could not be defended domestically. Successive initiatives aimed at reformulating a preliminary roadmap had nonetheless convinced Trump to regard it as a new point of departure, capable of being refined and implemented. But the haste with which he committed, combined with the emergence of firm opposition from some Republicans and a majority of Democrats, led Trump to back away from his initial commitments, to turn against the mediators as well, and to unleash a storm of anger against anyone who stood in the way of his pressing desires or failed to respond with the speed he demands.

With Trump, it is impossible to trust either the validity of a stated position or its sincerity, and it is precisely this reality that the Iranian leadership internalised in entering the negotiations with a permanent readiness to face reversals at any moment and for any reason. The commanders of the Revolutionary Guards kept in reserve the use of whatever weaponry remains to them for military provocations against American fleets, provocations calibrated to cause no real damage, yet allowing them to claim a posture of courage, while serious retaliation against Gulf countries, so as to inflict genuine harm, is carried out without the slightest hesitation. This reveals the poverty of Iranian military power, and more so still the political illusion that accompanies it, the moment the American target is replaced by the Gulf target.

In this Iranian posture, the baseness and cowardice of the Revolutionary Guards become transparent, with none of the courage one might associate with a warrior in the samurai mould. The horizon nonetheless remains open for the elaboration of a new memorandum that might pave the way for an acceptable settlement, with the certainty that the next failure will not lead Trump back to war, a fact from which the Revolutionary Guards intend to profit for as long as possible, since they care little for losses and their only genuine desire is to ensure the regime's continuity and prevent its collapse.

Who is the Victor?

The narrative of each camp aims to demonstrate its own victory according to differing and carefully tailored criteria, forging new definitions for worn-out words: truce, ceasefire, steadfastness, achievement, survival, losses, manoeuvre. And if the strong party fails to reach the objectives for which it went to war, the weak party sees in that failure a victory of its own, so that resistance in the strait becomes the compensation for every loss, even if substantial concessions are made that genuinely realise one of the strong party's war aims.

This is what we witnessed over the past two weeks between Washington and Tehran, and it is liable to continue in various forms with new justifications, until the scene is reduced to a single element: the Revolutionary Guards' control of the strait. The decisive factor of power here lies in the American position and in a military conduct that refrains from the adventure of opening the strait by force, for reasons rooted in the Pentagon's calculations before any other consideration. It is precisely this that supplies the Iranian narrative with the arguments for its claim to power, rather than the drones or missiles it still possesses.

The Iranian leadership has also drawn benefit from the convergence of Sino-Russian interests in support of the survival of a regime that serves their interests within the Eurasian axis: Moscow reaps what the Middle East's turbulences bring its way, while Beijing can afford to endure some losses of its own for a while, so long as the maintenance of the regime matters more to it at the heart of Central Asia.

As for the third factor of power from which Iran benefits, it resides in the rational and considered strategy of the Arab Gulf states. These have practised a policy of active defence and deployed their political weight, both regionally and internationally, to produce a comprehensive diplomatic solution to the most dangerous international and regional crisis of our time.

One may therefore say plainly that the factors of power from which the commanders of the Revolutionary Guards profit are neither theirs by right nor of their making, just as one may say that Washington's strategy and President Trump's mode of leadership have not yet produced what might validate the narrative of the long-awaited American victory. Equally, Israel's strategy, which floats its policies on a sea of blood in the region, particularly in Palestine and Lebanon, has produced nothing but massacres, destruction and annihilation. And there is Netanyahu with his generals, at the height of their fury at Trump, unleashing everything the Israeli army possesses in destructive power in pursuit of a victory, in Gaza, in the West Bank, in Lebanon.

It is for this reason that one may affirm, with calm and confidence, and on the basis of a concrete political observation of the course of the negotiations, that the strategy of the Gulf Cooperation Council states and its convergence with the strategies of Egypt, Turkey and Pakistan, as well as their shared capacity to interact directly and effectively with American, Chinese, Russian and European international strategies, have demonstrated their ability to produce an effective mediation that has opened a new course of events and a peaceful horizon toward a solution. They have also succeeded in reducing escalation, in containing Iranian folly and extremism, and in altering the course of policies at the very moment when the triangle of extremism, American-Israeli-Iranian, had reached the outermost limits of violence most hostile to human nature.

To re-read the scene from the moment of the first and then the second American-Israeli strikes, and to take the measure of the catastrophes this war has visited upon humanity, beginning with the Iranian, Arab and Muslim peoples, is to understand that the frantic quest for victory will not be found on the side of the murderous triangle of extremism, but on the side of those who raised the banner of opposition to war, endured Iranian treachery, American impulsiveness and Israeli derangement, and persevered tirelessly in their effort to produce a political and diplomatic solution along the path of moderation and principled firmness.