Our Kitchen Sink

Picture a stone, dropped to a still porcelain sink of water. The regurgitated droplets fly to make further interruptions; now in different points: unpredictable and non-uniform. As these points interweave into an amalgamated map, we try to systematise, strategise and explain. We do this through our patterns, our rhymes, and most irritatingly our irretrievably imprecise fixation on “tides”. I do not seek to drop these methods, but instead to say that once a stone has dropped the histories of ripples are inconsequential. Succinctly, this essay will study the geo-political splash.

It can be through this framing that I start, my pondering of “war line peripheries”. The presumption of a “war line periphery” situates the line of conflication as central, and as having peropheries of distant realisation. The war line periphery refers to the distant realisation of a fact on the frontline. This can be economic, securitised or cultural. Further to this, in this essay these peripheries will be temporally limited to the immediate and immediate future. For example the war line periphery of the use of nuclear power at the tale of World War Two was the immediate attempts of the Soviet Union to develop weapons, not the cultural anti-nuke movement. This essays temporal scope will be five years, not fifty, we will consider the splash regurgitations not the tidal movements.

Contemporaneous stones in porcelain sinks are far too numerous, which is sadly smooth sailing for the good, the bad and the ugly of political commentary and analysis. This essay will discuss three stones and three under analysed regurgitations: the Ukraine conflict and South American drone proliferation, the Iranian conflict and the resurgence of Arabic cooperation and Russian multi-positional aggression and new economics.

The Iran conflict as a rock; despite tidal tensions and the pronounced and considerable cultural antipathy. The conflict should be seen in its distinctness and it’s politically iconoclastic position. Reasonably unpredictable: the conflict was the undoing of established American continuity, but also the idea that American allegiance had positive guarantees. Instead dually, expectations on American intentional behaviour had been churned up out of the sink into the air and have splashed back into the sink as droplets yet to make a something new.