Der iranische Igel gegen den amerikanischen Fuchs

Karim Sadjadpour: “America’s most powerful military assets have now convened in the Middle East, encircling Iran and preparing to strike it from land, air, and sea. These assets include 10 advanced warships and dozens of fighter jets capable of flying at twice the speed of sound to deliver 20,000-pound payloads. Iranian officials have responded, with characteristic bombast, that they will ‘never submit,’ have their ‘fingers on the trigger,’ and are prepared to strike ‘the heart of Tel Aviv’ and to harm thousands of U.S. soldiers in the Middle East.

“Beneath this sabre-rattling is a test of wills between two men—President Donald Trump, age 79, and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, age 86—with clashing personalities and worldviews. The best framework to understand them comes not from political science but from a short 1953 essay by the British philosopher Isaiah Berlin, called *The Hedgehog and the Fox*. Borrowing from the ancient-Greek poet Archilochus, Berlin divided ‘writers and thinkers, and, it may be, human beings in general’ into two distinct categories. ‘The Fox knows many things,’ he wrote, ‘but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’

“Hedgehogs … [describe] Khamenei, whose four-decade reign has centered around the idea of ‘resistance’: against America, Israel, and now much of his own population.

“Foxes, meanwhile, Berlin wrote, ‘pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related to no moral or aesthetic principle.’ While his supporters and critics would disagree as to whether Trump should be commended for his agility or criticized for his incoherence, they might agree that he is the Jackson Pollock of grand strategy. No American president has kept both allies and adversaries on their toes more than Trump … 

“This philosophical asymmetry—Trump, the fox, has no fixed beliefs, whereas Khamenei, the hedgehog, has one fixed belief—is the engine of the current crisis. Trump thinks that everyone has a price; Khamenei holds that suffering is a price worth paying for his singular aim. Trump cannot understand why pressure and threats don’t break Khamenei. He assumes that every man can be bought and every nation has a breaking point. But Khamenei,who espouses resistance and martyrdom, and who believes that ceding to pressure projects weakness, cannot be persuaded with material blandishments … 

“So who wins the battle between the fox and the hedgehog?  According to Charles Darwin, survival belongs not to the strongest species, nor the most intelligent, but the one most adaptable to change. For Khamenei, abandoning his ‘one big thing’—resistance—would mean ideological suicide. But his refusal to adapt may now ensure his extinction.:

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