The Blogs: The Helen Paradox

“Peace is for the women and the weak. Empires are forged in war.”

It is what Agamemnon said to his brother Menelaus, who wanted his wife back after Paris had carried her off to Troy, and it was the last honest sentence anyone spoke on the subject. A thousand ships set sail, officially for Helen. The poets sang of the most beautiful face on earth, the heralds spoke of honor, and the widows were told their husbands had died for love. Historians, a less romantic sort, have their doubts. Troy did not guard a woman. It guarded the mouth of a strait, the Hellespont, and whoever sat on that shore charged the rest of the world for the right to cross. The Greeks did not cross the sea for a face. They crossed it for a tollbooth. Helen was the caption history wrote beneath the invoice, and the version read aloud to those who buried the dead.

Three thousand years later, the trick has not aged a day. There is always a Helen on hand, a face lovely enough or endangered enough to make greed look like romance, or like survival. It is worth asking what is really wanted at the far end of the water. Not a woman, and not a nation, but a currency, and behind it the nearest thing to sorcery that mortal ingenuity has ever devised, the power to make money out of nothing, forever.

There was a time when money kept a certain modesty. In 1944, at Bretton Woods, the nations agreed that thirty-five dollars would always buy an ounce of gold, and that every other currency would ride at anchor beside the dollar. Each bill was a promise redeemable in metal, and the promise held the printer’s hand. It worked as long as the metal lasted. Then came Vietnam and the appetites of prosperity at home, the presses ran off more dollars than Fort Knox could ever honor, and France, minding its own accounts, began trading paper for bars and emptying the vault. On a Sunday evening in August of 1971, Nixon went on television and announced the end of convertibility with the air of a man rescheduling the trains. From that night on, the dollar rested on two supports only, faith and the fleet.

Faith needs something to lean on, and here came the shrewdest stroke of the last century. Washington and Riyadh reached a shrewd understanding: the world’s oil would be sold in dollars alone, and in exchange the superpower would keep its warships between the House of Saud and its enemies. The dollar’s collateral was no longer the gold in the vault but the oil under other people’s sand, and the navy that minded it. Anyone who wanted to run a car or turn a factory had first to hold dollars, and the oil states sent them home again by buying the debt of the very customer they were charging, in a scheme fit to bring a tear to any pawnbroker’s eye. The circle closed, gold without gold, and turned on its own.

The French called it an exorbitant privilege, and the name was exact. A country that issues the money everyone else must hoard may spend with a license it denies the rest, running deficits that in any ordinary nation would sink the currency and the cabinet by Tuesday, while the world, thirsty for dollars, lines up to buy the debt and calls it a haven. The U.S. standard of living was underwritten by the thirst of strangers, and so were the shelves, the driveways, and the wars a hemisphere away. Inflation, when it stirs, is put on a boat; the busts arrive in Bangkok, in Buenos Aires, in Brasília, almost never at the door of the U.S. Treasury. And over anyone who refuses to play hangs the one weapon the keeper of the world’s money can fire without a bang, the sanction, banishment from the pipes through which commerce breathes.

No empire milks the whole planet without the planet, sooner or later, reaching for a calculator. In 2001 an economist at a bank coined an acronym to sell four hungry markets, Brazil, Russia, India, and China, and called them the BRICs; it was a slide in a sales meeting, its author hardly suspecting he had drafted a manifesto. The label caught on. The four sat down as a bloc, and after them came South Africa, Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, the Emirates, Indonesia, until the banker’s mnemonic held two-fifths of the world’s output and half its people. And the bloc asked the obvious question, the one that keeps the Treasury awake: why do business in a stranger’s currency, paying his toll and obeying his blacklists, when you can do business in your own? So they buy and sell in yuan, in rupees, in reais, and lay payment lines around the dollar and around Swift, the network that relays nearly every transfer between banks in different countries, the one Washington reads over your shoulder and shuts when it wishes to punish you. Russia and China now settle almost all their trade without touching a dollar; Iran sells its oil to China in yuan; and every barrel sold that way is one more crack in the wall.

And here we come back to the strait, though not the one on the map. Every strait in history answers in time to a new name; the Hellespont became the Dardanelles, and the Dardanelles became Hormuz. But the true strait of our age is on no chart and flies no flag. It is the dollar, and every cargo on earth, whatever ocean it crosses, must pass through it and pay the man who keeps the gate. That is the passage that matters, and that is the passage under threat.

Which is why Iran, astride the Strait of Hormuz, is not, at bottom, a story about the nuclear danger. Let me grant the danger its full weight, because I am an Israeli and will not pretend otherwise: the government in Tehran is a genuine menace, it should never hold the bomb, and the fact that it very likely already does is enough to keep a person awake at night. All of that is true, and none of it is what sent the fleets. Iran sells its oil in another currency and threatens to shut or to tax the channel through which a fifth of the world’s crude flows. The nuclear danger is the respectable reason, the one a statesman may bellow into a microphone to applause; the invoice in yuan is the real one, and about that a prudent man keeps his mouth shut. It was for that shoreline, and not for a warhead and not for a face, that Israel and the United States rained fire on Iran this past February, in the name of survival and of toppling a regime. The Supreme Leader was killed. Hormuz closed. And the world, wincing at the pump, remembered that a narrow passage always pays a dividend to whoever sits on its bank.

Should the war fail, the world may change hands, for anyone who can seal that channel without the dollar’s leave has shown that Washington’s power has a limit after all. What is contested at Hormuz is not a warhead. It is the currency in which the earth will buy its energy for the next hundred years, and therefore who foots the bill for the comfort, the fleets, and the faraway wars. A loss there would not be a military defeat. It would be the retirement of a method of making money.

And Helen. Where is she in all of this? Where she has always stood, on the poster outside the theater. Israel is the lovely, threatened face whose name lends respectability to a very old greed, the pretext that lets a great power’s appetite pass for chivalry. This ought to grieve anyone who loves the place, because a democratic and just Israel, a country that quarrels with itself out loud and counts each of its dead by name, gains nothing by lending its face to another nation’s accounts, by letting boys of nineteen on our borders be spent like small change in a transaction whose profit is booked in a distant time zone. We were told we were Helen, the beauty the fleets had sailed to rescue. We are learning, slowly and at great cost, that the beauty they truly sail for never had a human face, and that the name Helen belongs, in the end, to the dollar standard. In that old story we were never the queen behind the walls. We were the ranks outside them, the expendable, spent to keep a currency on its throne. The cruelty is not only in the fighting. It is in charging the blood to one party and crediting the change to another, and in calling love, or survival, the plain dread of losing the toll. Agamemnon, whatever else he was, did not lie, and never once claimed the war was for Helen.

And there is the paradox the name has carried since Troy. Every war is just, for every war has its Helen. And no war is just, for behind every Helen there is a toll. Both verdicts are handed down over the same graves, and both hold. The brightness of the cause is the only tell. The more radiant the Helen a nation marches to the front, the darker and more nameless the interest it carries at the rear.