A tale told by an idiot

United States President Donald J. Trump (Source: here)

My heart bleeds for the Iranian people. Iranians have been oppressed without interruption since 1953 when the United States and the United Kingdom sponsored a coup, which took out the government of democratically-elected prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh.

After Mosaddegh, Iranians first had to contend with the terror regime of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and, then, from 1979 onwards, with the Ayatollahs. During all this time, Iranians were oppressed not only politically, but also economically as the Shah and the Ayatollahs both ran the country the same way as Venezuela is run, that is, as an oil company with a country attached. Iran's vast wealth has been wasted on endless populist schemes or siphoned off to shore up the country's hugely corrupt and unpopular regime of priests.  The people suffer.

Personally, I would struggle to state a clear preference for being ruled by Trump/Netanyahu or the crazy Ayatollahs in Tehran. I do not take sides, because to me both sides are equally odious. The fact that these regimes are tearing each other to bits brings no tear to my eye. My only two concerns are for the large number of innocent civilians, who will now die needlessly, and the fact that Trump's attack on Iran is both illegal and wholly un-called for.

Let us not forget that Trump tore up the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in his first term. JCPOA was a rarity - a well-functioning United Nations program that managed to contain the Iranian nuclear threat very effectively. The cost of Trump's destruction of JCPOA is now clear for all to see; we are once again at war and many people will die, in fact, many are dying already.

Good question (Source: here) 

Trump appears to have no strategic plan whatsoever, so what happens next? We can say with a high degree of certainty that there will bombing by all three protagonists for a few days, maybe even weeks. But we can also say beyond any doubt that bombing alone will not deliver a decisive outcome. Not a single conflict involving the United States since World War II - including World War II itself, the Korean War, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and numerous other US-instigated conflicts - was won by bombing and airpower alone, especially not against a country with more than 90 million people.

Personally, I think it would be foolish to rule out the possibility that Trump and Netanyahu nuke Iran, but setting aside that scenario one the questionable ground that it has no modern precedent, we should first ask whether Trump intends to put boots on the ground in Iran? In other words, will he invade?

If Trump invades Iran then we are looking at Afghanistan or Iraq-type scenarios, albeit significantly worse due to Iran's more formidable military, including its strong drone capability and control over the Hormuz Strait. We are talking maybe hundreds of thousands dead. We are also talking potentially very large numbers of American casualties, made worse by the fact that this time US ground troops will not be joined by European soldiers due to Trump's corrosive treatment of his erstwhile NATO partners. We should also expect significant collateral damage across the Middle East. In other words, we will be heading in the exact opposite direction to where Trump said he would go in his election campaign, which was to withdraw the US from foreign wars.

It also goes without saying that oil prices may rise over the coming weeks, which will push up the cost of living for Americans in an election year.

So, there are pretty good reasons why Trump should not invade Iran. On the other hand, if he is not going to invade then what, exactly, is he doing? What is he hoping to achieve?

The assassination of 86-year-old Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei changes nothing, because in a matter of hours or days we will see a new Supreme Leader appointed in Tehran. What is the point of cutting off the head if a new one sprouts forth in no time?

Moreover, the priests in Tehran recently crushed a domestic uprising, so it seems unlikely there will be massive internal challenges to the regime. Won’t we get an even more hard-line leader than Ali Khamenei in the wake of unprovoked US-Israeli attacks, especially since they took place in the middle of negotiations?

The main thing I want to point out, however, is that there is a pattern here, which, I think, is so obvious that even the most fanatic Trump supporters must surely see it too, namely that Trump's projects all start with great fanfare, but leave almost no lasting impact, that is, other than a subtle but, over time, very considerable loss of long-term US influence across the world.

Let me illustrate this point with a few examples from domestic policy. Take tariffs. This was a key policy of Trump's which was launched with big noise until the Supreme Court shut it down. Then we had DOGE. The initial promise of huge fiscal savings soon turned out to be so completely unfounded that Elon Musk was forced to retreat with his tail between his legs. And what about ICE? Kristi Noem's modern-day Gestapo police force recently had to scale down its activities considerably after utter humiliation in Minneapolis. They were then further constrained by the realisation that immigrant labour is actually critical to businesses in most Republican-controlled states. And do you remember the brash deployment of National Guard troops to Chicago and LA? Purleeeze. And then we had the commitment to draining the swamp in Washington DC! Fat chance! After the Big Beautiful Bill was passed the debt owed by the Federal Government will grow to unprecedented size, so hardworking American families can now look forward to hefty future tax rises thanks to Trump.

In foreign policy, the pattern is exactly the same. Take Ukraine. Remember Trump’s promise to end the war on Day One? Well, here we are years later with practically no progress. And China? The China Trade War was supposed to bring China to its knees, until, that is, Trump discovered America's reliance of Chinese rare earths. Trump now sucks up to the Chinese like no one has done since the great globalist Henry M. Paulson was US Treasury Secretary. And Venezuela? Again, big bold upfront action and fantastic headlines, but what has actually changed in Caracas? Nicolás Maduro has been replaced by Delcy Rodriguez from his own inner circle, so the kleptocratic Chavista regime remains as firmly in place as ever. And who can forget Greenland? Remember how Trump said that if he couldn't take the territory “the easy way” then he would “do it the hard way”? Well, all it took to ice that project as well was a bit of European unity.

The pattern is therefore clear: Trump's interventions initially cause great commotion, basically because they are crazy. They are crazy because they are not based on sober analysis of US national interest, but motivated instead by Trump's desperation to detract attention from his Epstein paedophilia. His policies are also incredibly myopic, so their impacts wear off very quickly. This means that just before they outright fail the president is forced to come up with new and even crazier schemes in order to keep the media’s attention away from Epstein and his many intellectually challenged supporters in tow.

It is tempting to think that Trump's circus will continue indefinitely, but it cannot. Every new project Trump conjures up leaves a record of failure, flops, and U-turns, which grows longer and longer. Eventually, the tail of failures begins to wag the dog.

In fact, this is already happening. I think Trump will soon be forced to do a major cabinet reshuffle to find scapegoats to carry the blame for his rising failure rate, but even this will not help him because it only eats into his stock of sycophants. In other words, a cabinet reshuffle will, like his other policies, be akin to pissing in your pants to keep warm, meaning the effect will not last long and you soon regret you did it in the first place.

Voters are getting sick of the lack of results and beginning to notice the mounting long-term costs of Trump's madness as we can all see from his declining poll ratings. At root, the big issue here - even bigger than Iran - is that Trump does not understand the concept of American soft power.

American soft power is neither flashy nor visible to the uninitiated. Yet, soft power is what has makes the United States the most powerful nation in the world. We are talking influence in international organisations, financial sector dominance, military might applied with discipline and moderation, leadership in trade relations, ability to dictate terms within defence alliances, such as NATO, and leverage through the provision of critical aid to poor countries, including vaccinations, and so on. Prior to Trump, due to soft power, the United States could do almost anything it wanted safe in the knowledge that its allies would stand by its side.

Not anymore. The real tragedy of Trump is that he is squandering America's most precious resource in exchange for mere pocket change, with a bit of fireworks thrown in for effect.

My hope is that Trump's latest ill-conceived and dishonourable folly in Iran will finally open the eyes of American voters - ideally before the midterm elections. They, like the rest of us, have an interest in recognizing as soon as possible that Trump's policies are nothing but a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

The End