TRUMP FINALLY HANDED IN HIS HOMEWORK…HE FLUNKED

The ill-advised military action against Iran, which turned into a hundred-day shooting war, was both started and ended by Donald Trump. He didn’t care how it started, and he obviously didn’t care how it ended.

It was a war that never should have happened. It did not have congressional approval. In fact, Congress was never consulted. Trump simply went to war, like he has done everything else in this Trump 2.0 version of his regime, because he felt like it. And in doing so, he dragged both the United States and the world into its consequences un-consulted.

Trump’s war began with war crimes and ended in surrender. Not the surrender of Iran, but the surrender of Donald Trump. However laden with Trump’s fingerprints this disaster might be, however, he, unfortunately, represents the United States as the country’s head of State. And so, Donald Trump has handed his defeat and capitulation to us, the American people and our representatives. And thanks to his hijacked GOP’s acquiescence and complicity, the defeat is ours to bear. And the shame of it in the world rests on our reluctant shoulders.   

In 2016, on taking office the first time, Trump vowed that he would tear up the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the Iran nuclear deal that the Obama administration before him had so painstakingly negotiated along with five other nations including three allies and two rivals: Germany, France, the United Kingdom, China and Russia, as well as the European Union. It was, then, a deal that had the signed consensus of the most powerful nations on earth.

Just as he had promised and eventually achieved the destruction of the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obama Care, that had brought health insurance to millions of Americans who had never had it before, Trump did, in 2018, effectively tear up the JCPOA. Trump and his sycophantic MAGA-led GOP didn’t do either of these things because they were bad deals—although that was the excuse. They did it, to the cheers of their white-supremacist supporters simply because these were major achievements of the administration of the first non-white president in the history of the United States.

In both cases, Trump promised that he would replace the ACA and the JCPOA with something much better and stronger. In neither case has this promise—like so many other Trump promises—come true. Like the wanton—and also un-consulted—destruction of the historic East Wing of the White House, which Trump also ordered, all that remained where something good had stood before, was rubble. It was, in short, a unilateral pissing contest in which Obama refused to participate. Instead, the former president has sat back and watched as Trump keeps urinating on democracy and diplomacy while digging himself into a deeper and deeper hole.

The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) stands as one of the most significant diplomatic achievements of the twenty-first century because it accomplished something exceedingly rare in modern geopolitics: It peacefully neutralized a major nuclear proliferation crisis through multilateral diplomacy, verifiable enforcement mechanisms, and international consensus, without firing a shot. By contrast, the newly revealed 2026 Iran Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) negotiated under the administration of Donald Trump amounts to an extraordinary strategic retreat that delivers Iran major concessions while extracting virtually nothing that was not already achieved more effectively more than a decade earlier. In effect, it is not a diplomatic victory for the United States, but capitulation dressed as negotiation through military might.

In this sense, the JCPOA and MOU could not be more contrary in their effects and substance. While it should be pointed out that the MOU is basically a negotiation to negotiate, it will be impossible for the US under the Trump regime to achieve a better deal than the JCPOA—unless  Trump manages to get Iran to sign a carbon copy of the deal he tore up nearly a decade ago. It is, indeed, thanks to that willful and malicious action on Trump’s part that we are where we are today, since the JCPOA was working, and working well. All Trump had to do was leave it alone, or, appeal to proper diplomacy—with regional experts, attorneys, career diplomats and the secretary of state doing the negotiating, rather than Trump’s son-in-law and some real estate guy—to seek even better terms. Instead, as is his “solution” for everything, he bulldozed it.

The JCPOA succeeded because it imposed the most intrusive nuclear verification regime ever negotiated with a non-nuclear state. Iran agreed to reduce its stockpile of enriched uranium by 97percent—and only started enriching beyond the limits of the Obama agreement again after Trump pulled the US out of the pact—to slash operating centrifuges by roughly two-thirds, to cap enrichment levels at 3.67 percent, to redesign the Arak reactor to prevent plutonium production, and to submit to continuous monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The agreement extended Iran’s estimated “breakout time”—the time needed to produce enough fissile material for a nuclear weapon—from only a few months to roughly one year. Independent fact-checking organizations note that these provisions were functioning and compliance was repeatedly verified before US withdrawal.

Former Secretary of State John Kerry

This was diplomacy operating at its highest level. The agreement was not a bilateral improvisation like the MOU. It required coordination between the United States, Iran, Britain, France, Germany, Russia, China, and the European Union. At a moment of escalating regional hostility, the Obama administration, with Secretary of State John Kerry at the head of the negotiating team, demonstrated that adversaries with fundamentally opposing ideological systems could still reach enforceable agreements serving mutual security interests. Few, if any, diplomatic achievements this century can claim a similar level of complexity or effectiveness.

Then came Trump’s unilateral withdrawal in 2018. The stated rationale was that the JCPOA was “the worst deal ever negotiated.” Critics argued it failed to address Iran’s ballistic missile program, regional proxy activity, and contained sunset clauses. But history has rendered a harsh verdict on that decision: Abandoning the deal produced none of the promised strategic gains. Instead, Iran gradually ceased compliance, expanded uranium enrichment dramatically, deployed advanced centrifuges, restricted inspections, and moved materially closer to nuclear threshold status. Even critics of the original agreement now acknowledge that, however imperfect, the JCPOA “bought time” and successfully constrained Iran’s nuclear capabilities. Backing out of the deal gave Iran an inducement to expand its nuclear program because of the hostility emanating from Washington under the Trump regime.

The irony is profound: After spending years denouncing the JCPOA as weakness, Trump has now negotiated a memorandum that is dramatically weaker than the one he destroyed. The newly proposed  MOU commits the United States to lifting sanctions, unfreezing Iranian assets (a hundred times more assets than those freed up by the Obama administration, which, at the time, drew shouts of indignation from the GOP), easing restrictions on oil exports, reducing military pressure in the Persian Gulf, and—the cruelest cut of all for Americans—providing the bloody dictatorial regime in Iran with reconstruction funding estimated at nearly three hundred billion dollars. One conservative pundit described this last as akin to “giving the Marshall Plan to Germany while the Nazis were still in power,” which is spot-on accurate more than hyperbole.   

In exchange, Iran merely reiterates, as it had already agreed in the JCPOA, that it will not pursue the creation or acquisition of nuclear weapons, and that it agrees to enter into a vague sixty-day negotiation framework for future talks. Critically, the agreement contains no durable new enforcement architecture—Trump says it isn’t necessary—leaves missile programs untouched, leaves proxy militias active, and fails to substantially dismantle Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. In other words, core strategic issues remain entirely unresolved.

The central contradiction is that Donald Trump, on a personal whim, withdrew from a functioning agreement that imposed concrete, measurable, internationally verified restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program, only to re-enter negotiations eight years later offering broader concessions for weaker commitments. In strategic terms, Trump destroyed the leverage the United States once possessed, and he now appears willing to pay enormous economic and diplomatic costs simply to restore a lesser version of the status quo.

Worse still, this substantially strengthens Iran’s radical, repressive, Islamist regime itself. Think tank analysts this week warned that the draft MOU leaves Tehran in a “stronger strategic position.” To say nothing of the fact that it flies in the face of Trump’s broken promise to liberate the Iranian people through democratic regime change. Economic relief—the lifting of sanctions, the enormous injection of formerly frozen assets, and a three hundred billion-dollar reconstruction bailout—will enable the hostile Iranian regime to stabilize its domestic economy, replenish State revenues, and potentially redirect resources toward the very regional networks Washington has long opposed, including Hezbollah and broader “Axis of Resistance” alliances. Rather than weakening Iran’s regional influence, the agreement risks financing its resurgence, in detriment to US regional allies.

From a Middle East power-balance perspective, this weakens US credibility dramatically throughout the region. America’s Gulf partners are confronted with an uncomfortable reality: Washington abandoned a strong agreement for ideological reasons, pursued years of coercive pressure that failed, and, after basically losing Trump’s war, ultimately returned to negotiations from a far weaker bargaining position while granting greater concessions.

The broader lesson of all this is unmistakable. The JCPOA demonstrated disciplined statecraft: multilateral cooperation, rigorous verification, and peaceful conflict management producing measurable security gains. Trump’s MOU demonstrates the opposite, destroying a working framework, squandering leverage through maximalist rhetoric, and then settling for substantially worse terms while irrationally proclaiming “victory”.

In the end, history will not only judge the JCPOA as a highly successful nuclear agreement, but also as a case study for how diplomacy can solve problems that war cannot. Meanwhile, it will judge Trump’s MOU as proof that ideological grandstanding, delusional thinking and a might-makes-right foreign policy can destroy strategic advantage. It also shows that the neighborhood bully’s loud-mouthed promises of “strength” by brute force nearly always end in whimpering surrender.

 

TRUMP’S WAR OF IMBECILITY

 

Last week, chickenhawk warlords Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth were using the word “war” every other sentence, repeating over and over their confession to launching an unlawful war on Iran.  Now Trump is referring to it as “a short excursion”.

Before the markets tanked and gas prices shot up (the only two things he had going for him in the economy), Trump was talking about an Iran war that would end only in “unconditional surrender”. It’s a term he must have heard in a movie, because it is clear he has no idea what it means. The last time the US demanded or accepted unconditional surrender was at the end of World War II, when both Germany and Japan were on their knees and had no choice but to accept the terms of surrender as written by the Allies, and then only after a devastating war that cost the world 60 million lives and unquantifiable treasure. Judging from his most recent acts, Trump seems keen on repeating that experience.

But Trump is really in no condition to be discussing any sort of surrender on Iran’s part. Even though the US and Israel can admittedly inflict devastating damage on an Iran that was still sitting at the negotiating table when it was treacherously attacked, as things stand right now, Iran has the upper hand. For one thing, for the past half century, Iran has controlled the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 percent of the world’s oil is shipped. Under new management since the first US-Israeli airstrikes in this phase of hostilities killed the reigning Ayatollah, Ali Khamenei, Iran's new leadership has promised an "energy war", which, between that regime’s drone and missile strikes on the energy infrastructure of neighboring US Middle East allies, and its concentrated defense of Hormuz, has the potential to bring not only the US economy, but also economies worldwide to their knees.

Furthermore, it should be remembered that the overriding trait of the Trump regime, from the president down, is supreme and arrogant ignorance. In recent days Trump has boasted that “no other president had the guts to attack Iran.” In real-world terms, the fact is that no president before Trump was stupid enough to attack Iran directly. If Trump thought attacking Iran was going to be a weekend walkover like the performative invasion he carried out as a prelude in Venezuela, he has another think coming. The same is true if he committed the crass miscalculation of thinking that the Iranian theocracy would bow down, deal with him, and hand over the oil in order to stay in power the way the Maduro regime, minus Maduro, did in Venezuela. Iran is a whole other animal.

Iran is the seventeenth largest country in the world in terms of both territory and population (92 million people). It is also home to one of the world’s oldest continuous civilizations, dating back to the seventh century BC. Throughout its long history, Iran has lived through every sort of invasion and revolution imaginable and has learned from every one of those experiences.

Beyond the Trump regime’s unsubstantiated claims that Iran had missiles that could reach the US, or that it was about five minutes from inventing a nuclear warhead, Trump has used regime change as an excuse for targeting that country, pretending concern for the severely repressed and harshly governed Iranian people. After the first devastating airstrike—in which one of the first US hits was on an elementary school, where nearly 170 people, mostly little girls ages seven to twelve  were slaughtered—Trump began calling on Iranians to rise up and overthrow their repressors. But in neither of his terms as president has Trump lifted a finger to help Iranians make that any sort of real possibility. And indeed, free-thinking Iranians have every incentive (though not the means) to want to break the chains of what is truly a murderous regime.

If the US—indeed, if Trump— had actually been interested in a humanitarian-based regime change, Washington would long ago have been providing intelligence, training, arms and funding to Iranian pro-democratic revolutionaries. Instead, Trump has started an impromptu war that promises to make the lives of Iranians even worse than before in every aspect, and on the sole say-so of his Middle East puppet-master, Bibi Netanyahu. Netanyahu’s goal: Middle East hegemony for Israel, even at the risk of starting a world war. Trump’s goal: Oil…and a major distraction from the persistent Epstein files, which have Trump worried about more than “just” being perceived as a pedophile. Those are the goals. And the people be damned. Indeed, the world be damned.

Heading up the post-ayatollah’s regime is Ali Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba. The 56-year-old heir to the Khamenei regime isn’t an ayatollah, which is a religious rank he has never attained. He is, instead, an enforcer—by all accounts, the man behind the murders of thousands of Iranian protestors seeking a democratic opening in recent popular uprisings, which the Trump regime has basically ignored, except as a prop to justify the president’s own ends. Khamenei is inextricably linked to the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC. If we compare the IRGC to something more familiar historically, this would be like Hitler's SS—or perhaps, on a lesser, more pedestrian scale, Trump's ICE in the US.  As soon as Mojtaba Khamenei was named Iran’s new leader, the IRGC pledged allegiance to him. Iran-watchers say there is a dual message behind this: It means that the IRGC is loyal to Khamenei as long as he is loyal to them. In other words, as long as their interests are the same—maintaining the regime and opposing the United States—Mojtaba commands the IRGC and, conversely, the IRGC is where all of the new leader’s power lies. As I say, they are inextricably linked.

There is a theory among analysts that, had the US simply waited out the 86-year-old Ayatollah Khamenei until he died of natural causes, there might well have been a greater chance for a semi-democratic opening in Iran, with political moderates demanding greater autonomy after the ayatollah’s 36-year reign. Clearly, that was nothing that concerned Trump. With his foolhardy “excursion” into an illegal and illegitimate war of aggression, we’ll never know, because a huge wave of nationalist fervor has now coalesced in the face of foreign attack, and by submersing the country in war, Trump has not only not weakened the regime, but has strengthened it.

Now on a war footing, the all-powerful IRGC is bound to tighten its grip, and the ayatollah’s son, motivated by Islamist radicalism, raw nationalism, and now, a thirst for vengeance, will take a hardline stance both in terms of war strategy and on any eventual negotiations. In other words, Iran will very likely be unwilling to negotiate, unless it can do it from a position of strength and getting major concessions.

Trump stupidly and ill-advisedly thought that he could bend Iran’s will with an air-war and no boots on the ground. He didn’t even listen to the warnings of his sycophantic chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan Caine, when he reportedly tried to admonish the president that going to war with Iran was a losing proposition. Trump obtusely thought it was a military decision and that he was qualified to make it. It wasn’t and he wasn’t. It was always “about the economy, stupid.” And in the process, Trump has painted a terrorist target on the backs of every American living anywhere in the world, including the United States.

Perhaps that is why, after all the “unconditional surrender” bluster, Trump is now saying, “We’ve already won!” He is clearly realizing, at least at the back of his mind—despite his pernicious narcissism’s preventing him from admitting it—that he has made a terrible mistake, one that, at the very least, could cost him the midterms, and at worst, could get him impeached (again), while sweeping the US and the rest of the world into a global conflict. In Trumpspeak, “We’ve already won,” means, “I need an off-ramp quick.”

In watered-down assessments, on-the-fence politicians and Big Media commentators alike are choosing to use the euphemistic term “war of choice” to describe American military action taking place in Iran on the sole say-so of one man: de facto US dictator Donald J. Trump. Let’s be clear. It is not a “war of choice”. It is a war of aggression. Every bit as much so as Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, but unjustifiable to an even greater degree, since Iran is not a neighbor of the US, nor was it seeking to join an alliance against the US. It was, then, not at all within the fast-fading US superpower’s immediate sphere of influence. Or in other words, though these lawless acts by both Putin and Trump are equally illegitimate, even as rank imperialism goes, Trump’s un-consulted, unauthorized and unhinged war of imperialistic aggression on Iran is even a greater stretch than Putin’s illegal war of aggression on Ukraine.

Although (or perhaps because) the Trump regime is a lawless centralized government that refuses to obey the law on principle—be it constitutional, federal, state or international law—it is still worthwhile noting what international norms dictate regarding wars of aggression, since these rules are the gold standard for international peace and justice set following World War II. And the fact is that international law unequivocally prohibits wars of aggression, deeming them the "supreme international crime."

More specifically, such wars contravene the UN Charter and are classified as a violation of international peace, as well as a crime against humanity. Under international law, those crimes trigger individual criminal responsibility and State accountability. That is to say, American critics accusing Trump of starting “a private war” (and I include myself here) are missing an important point. Namely, that if a despot like Trump starts wars of aggression, it’s not enough for Congress to shrug and say, “This is Trump’s war. He didn’t ask us, so he owns it.” Under international law, if the other branches of government permit Trump, by omission, to pursue wars of aggression, the US as a whole becomes accountable, and therefore subject to any international consequences that may occur. That is to say, everyone participating in this illegal war on Trump’s say-so is responding to unlawful orders.

Growing numbers of traditional European allies are warning the US that they are taking an entirely defensive stance with regard to the war. Some have made it clear that they will not allow the US to launch new attacks from their territories, even when there are American bases on their soil, while others are indicating that they will defend their own assets in the Middle East, but will not allow themselves to be dragged into a war that they weren’t even consulted about, and that is illegal from the get-go.

While European governments have so far shown their shock and displeasure, they have, nevertheless, tiptoed around the unhinged US authoritarian leader as best they can, while holding emergency meetings to talk more about a coordinated response to the new reality that caught them on their back foot, and left them scrambling. It is obviously not business as usual for our Western allies. Who among them would ever have thought that they would one day have to be having the kind of discussions about the US that they used to only apply to the Soviets and then to Putin? But in the Era of Trump, everything is, as the saying goes, ass over teakettle.

US allies in the Middle East, meanwhile, have been much more outspoken in their criticism. Countries in the Persian Gulf region that have shown restraint in their relations with Iran up to now, have become targets of Iranian attack through no fault of their own. They are angered by the fact that the US-Israeli joint attacks on Iran have made them targets by mere association. And they are complaining to Washington that they weren’t even warned in advance so that they could prepare for the veritable deluge of surprise drone and missile strikes being rained down on their territories without permitting them to mount an adequate response.

Gulf-state officials say that the US has also focused entirely on defending US and Israeli troops while leaving the sitting-duck neighboring countries to fend for themselves. At least one Gulf-state official said that in his country, the stock of interceptors is “rapidly depleting.” Gulf officials are stonewalling when questioned by the international media, but reports point to surprise and anger in government circles in Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which all feel betrayed by the Trump regime. Bottom of Form

While official reactions by the Gulf nations have been less than forthcoming, some public figures have made clear their view that Trump has allowed Israeli Premier Bibi Netanyahu to buffalo him into a needless Middle East war. The country most upset by this would appear to be Saudi Arabia, which is also one of the most anti-Israel nations in the region.

Saudi Prince and former intelligence chief Turki al-Faisal told CNN last week, “This is Netanyahu's war. He somehow convinced the president (Trump) to support his views.”

As such, in the world view, the US has become a rogue state that is unpredictable for allies and enemies alike. And both are hedging their bets. 

Perhaps that will be the epitaph for the Era of Trump when its history is written. The time when America went from being the leading nation in worldwide stability and security, to being a loose cannon bent on worldwide chaos and destruction.

 

A FEW LIKELY CONSEQUENCES OF TRUMP’S WAR OF SELF-CONVENIENCE

 

Americans learned through Donald Trump’s Truth Social propaganda network this past weekend that we are at war with Iran. That’s right. Both the president and his “Secretary of War” (that’s how they like to dub the US Department of Defense) are referring to it as such. And in doing so they are tacitly admitting to yet another overt violation of the Constitution by this regime.

The fact is that the current autocratic American head of  State has long since decided to dispense with the Constitution, the rule of law, international law, and the US justice system. Trump has also decided basically to do away with Congress, saying repeatedly that “he doesn’t need Congress.” Of course, if he weren’t acting as a de facto ruler, whether he thinks he needs Congress or not isn’t the issue, but rather that the Constitution dictates that he must work with Congress as a co-equal power. Shamefully, the skimpy GOP majority in the Senate and House are letting him get away with trampling the Constitution, their authority, and their duty to the American people.

And so, the GOP has become complicit by omission (among other blatant constitutional violations), in permitting this president to launch an unauthorized war, which is both domestically and internationally illegal. A war which promises to have truly seismic consequences both domestically and worldwide. It is—as much as any war launched to date by Russia’s dictator, Vladimir Putin—a war of aggression that, among other things, is as illegal as Putin’s Ukraine invasion, in terms of specific not only US laws, but also international laws and the Charter of the UN, of which the US is a founder, signatory and member of the Security Council.

These violations are made even more flagrant by the fact that the US was involved in direct peace-related negotiations with the Iranian theocracy when Trump’s regime launched the surprise attack. Indeed, there was optimism last Friday from Oman Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi who had been tapped by Washington to mediate in US talks with Iran. In Washington to meet with US Vice President JD Vance, Albusaidi told the CBS News program Face the Nation that,  "If the ultimate objective is to ensure forever that Iran cannot have a nuclear bomb, I think we have cracked that problem through these negotiations by agreeing (on) a very important breakthrough that has never been achieved any time before. If we can capture that and build on it, I think a deal is within our reach." He estimated that a finalized accord could be reached within three months.

Clearly, then, the Trump regime duped Iran—much in the same way that Putin had pretended to negotiate with Ukraine while regrouping and planning a major new offensive—by lulling it into thinking negotiations were advancing well, while never seriously entertaining a peaceful solution. It should be recalled that these latest negotiations were just reaching a semblance of the Iran Nuclear Accords finalized in 2015, after intensive negotiations between Iran, the European Union and the Obama administration. That pact was hailed as a major achievement that promised to bring Iran back into the concert of nations. But during his first week in office in 2016, Trump unilaterally pulled the US out of those accords in a move that was a slap in the face not only to Iran but also to US allies in Europe. As a result, that agreement collapsed.

The US airstrikes were as much a surprise for Americans—including Congress—as for the Iranians and the rest of the world, since in Trump’s State of the Union address a week ago, Iran got barely a mention, while negotiations were continuing. But on Saturday, just four days later, the first devastating air attacks were launched. Now, more than a thousand people have already been killed in this war that Congress never authorized.

Perhaps the Americans most taken by surprise were the at least 500,000 (some estimates say as many as a million) US nationals who currently reside in the Middle East. They had no advanced warning whatsoever from the US government. There was no evacuation plan in place, and there still isn’t. Some 300,000 of those Americans reside in numerous countries currently under alert as a result of Trump and Netanyahu’s obviously unplanned and ill-prepared attack.

The US “strategy” for getting those US citizens out of harm’s way became clear this week when Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued an advisory through consular offices urging Americans in the region to “get out now.” It was the kind of evacuation order issued for random weather phenomena—except with a lot less advanced notice. Basically, no advance warning. Nor was any suggestion made as to how hapless Americans at the mercy of their own government were supposed to accomplish that task. Consular advice to the stranded Americans is, basically, to get out however they can because they’re on their own.

Indeed, in most of the area where Americans reside, there is currently no air service, and the entire region presents a huge hole in the sky if you observe the map of international air routes. Advisories to maintain airspace closed are currently in effect for  Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, the occupied West Bank and Gaza, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen. Those are all areas where aviation advisories are warning operators not to fly until further notice due to the risk from missiles, air defense systems and interception activity.

Current validity for the advisory runs to March 6^th, but could easily expand as military operations develop. So this is the situation: Hundreds of thousands of Americans overseas have merely been left stranded,  and to their own devices by the US government, as autocrats Trump and Netanyahu wage their private war of convenience, with no knowledge of or concern for the probable results, which appear bleak indeed. This has the potential to make the much-maligned Afghanistan withdrawal—agreed to by Trump in his nefarious deal with the Taliban and inherited by President Joe Biden on whom the GOP would heap all the blame—look like a Saturday picnic in the park.

The ones who were quickest on their feet and the most savvy travelers probably figured out that the only alternative early on would be to head north any way they could and connect via Caucasia and  Afghanistan (an iffy choice at best), or to head south and grab an air link through Egypt and Saudi Arabia. But those routes are now under very heavy demand, and are also becoming vulnerable.  

So all of that rhetoric about Trump being the president who would “keep Americans safe”…well, not so much. And whether anyone realizes it or not, the Trump regime just put all Americans at greater risk at home and all around the world, as the potential for random attacks by Islamist sleeper-cell and lone-wolf extremists just burgeoned exponentially.

But these dire situations appear almost minor compared to the mind-bogglingly major potential consequences to the world order of this mindless and unauthorized act carried out by the Trump-Netanyahu “mutual admiration society”. First, it should be noted that while Iran was indeed at the center of the ever-ongoing power struggle among three Middle East superpowers—the other two being Israel and Saudi Arabia—it posed no imminent threat whatsoever to the United States.

Let me say that again. Despite Donald Trump’s recent bloviating about Iran’s possessing intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), and about how it was a minute away from having a nuclear weapon, there is absolutely no credible intelligence to suggest that either of these things was true. In fact, the “nuclear threat” argument flies in the face of what Trump told the nation just last June when the US, at the behest of Bibi Netanyahu, flew joint missions with Israel to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities out of existence. It was Trump himself who assured Americans that, thanks to that devastating bombing mission, Iran’s nuclear enrichment and development capacity had been “totally obliterated.”

So does Trump now want us to believe that, after a scant eight months, Iran’s nuclear team went from being “totally obliterated” to getting back up and running and on the verge of boasting a home-grown nuke? Really? If so, the US should, perhaps, hire them instead of trying to bomb them out of existence because they would appear to be world-class miracle-workers.

This was, without a doubt, at least from the US point of view, a completely avoidable and, clearly, an inadvisable move on the part of Washington. And, as Washington was in the midst of negotiations with Iran—even if by its sham “diplomatic” team consisting of the president’s son-in-law and his old real estate buddy, neither of whom have any diplomatic credentials at all—Trump would also have been well-advised to tell Israel to stand down.

John Brennan, the highly-respected 25-year intelligence veteran, former CIA director, and former head of US counterterrorism under Barack Obama, says he believes the plan for these attacks on Iran “was all hatched by Netanyahu”. He indicates that, just as Netanyahu did last June, he managed to talk Trump into it.

Rubio appeared to confirm this theory, though he later denied it, when he told reporters that Israel was on the verge of attacking Iran and the Trump regime realized that, if that happened, Iran would strike back at not only Israel but also at US military targets in the region. As a result, Trump decided to preempt the Israeli attack, and that’s why the US is now at war.

What? In other words, what he was saying is that US foreign policy is a mere reaction to Israeli foreign policy? That is to say, Bibi Netanyahu is dictating US military actions abroad? If that’s the case, there is something very wrong with this picture.

But this isn’t just about that. This is also about both Donald Trump and Bibi Netanyahu trying by any means to stay out of court and out of prison. Trump, as usual, went off half-cocked and with no plan, no contingencies, and no regard for the consequences, simply because he needed yet another big diversion to take attention off of the bane on his regime—the Epstein files. It is not likely to be a coincidence that this military action—which has very real potential to spark a world war—comes just as revelations are emerging about a DOJ plot to cover up or completely destroy evidence of criminal behavior on Trump’s part linked to the Epstein Affair—including his alleged rape, assault and battery on a minor who was 14 at the time. 

As Trump’s defense team leader Pamela Bondi, who masquerades as attorney general, is coming under increasing pressure to comply with the law, and release the millions of still missing files, and as more and more obstruction allegations are accumulating against her, the president’s plausible deniability is on ever shakier ground. Among files that have seen the light of day, and which are being reported on by the independent media, this was all predicted by an unlikely observer: Jeffrey Epstein. In communications with far-right political idealogue Steve Bannon in December of 2018, Epstein held out the possibility that Trump would be fully capable of starting a war with Iran if threatened with revelations about his dark past. Specifically, Epstein speculated that if Trump felt cornered by political pressure, he would trigger a larger conflict, such as bombing Iran, to create a crisis and rally public support.

In separate exchanges with former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and attorney Reid Weingarten, Epstein described Trump as “borderline insane.”

When Bannon seemed unconvinced that Trump would go so far, Epstein wrote back saying, “You guys need to understand that he is psychotic... if I go down, I'm taking everyone with me. Cornering a rat, never a good idea”.

From Bibi Netanyahu’s standpoint, the advantage is twofold. On the one hand, he was taking advantage of a passive moment in Iran as the government continued to negotiate. Strategically, he saw a chance to actively strengthen Israel’s position as a regional superpower while dealing a devastating blow to Iran’s regional power.

On the other hand, for Netanyahu as for Trump, this aggression and the initiation of a new conflict provides a great distraction at a time when the war on Gaza is losing momentum and when he is increasingly under pressure to negotiate an end to the hostilities. His personal vulnerability is the ghost of corruption charges that are still pending against him in the Israeli courts, in which he could end up not only losing his political power but also his freedom. It is a win-win short-term move for Netanyahu, and he very well knew that, given Trump’s situation, getting the US to go along was likely to be an easy lift. Turns out, he was right.

Meanwhile, the enormous collateral effects of this overnight initiation of a major conflict in the Middle East are not easy to summarize or predict, and I will be writing a great deal more about them as events develop. But here are some foreseeable consequences:

1.  The death of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, marks a major geopolitical rupture. It promises to cause upheaval not only in Iran but throughout the Middle East. It will profoundly affect not only Iranian politics and geopolitics but will bring seismic effects in energy markets, global trade, shipping and Middle Eastern security as a whole, with the entire region suddenly becoming a potential war zone.

2.  Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are acting as if, with a few airstrikes, and the targeted executions of some key players in the theocracy and military, the US has freed the Iranian people from the cruel theocratic dictatorship that has ruled them up to now. If that was the plan, they obviously know nothing about Iran or that regime.

The theocracy has already reestablished its authority, choosing a new supreme leader, and is backed by the powerful and slavishly loyal IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps), which is likely to be even more ruthless in crushing dissent, after killing thousands of people while Ali Khamenei was still alive. Underscoring this are reports that the new Ayatollah is  Mojtaba Khamenei, the 56-year-old son of the US-slain leader. Mojtaba Khamenei is much more radical than his father, has close ties to the IRGC and is thought to have been in charge of much of the repression that the Iranian opposition has suffered in recent years.
US Middle East military experts like retired General Mark Hertling and security experts like Brennan are making it clear that no regime change will take place unless there are American boots on the ground. And then, only after major and prolonged fighting. Regime change, in other words, cannot be effected from the air and will likely involve the US in another forever-war in the Middle East.
Beyond all of this, the sad news for common everyday Iranians taking Trump at his word and hoping that this is the end of their theocratic nightmare, is that Trump has said publicly that he will be employing “the Venezuela template” in Iran. This is, of course, a contradiction in terms, since Iran and Venezuela are radically different countries and cultures. But on hearing the false hope that Trump is extending to them, Iranians need to look at what he did in Venezuela. He blasted strategic targets in the capital city of Caracas, snatched President Maduro and his wife and spirited them back to the US. Then, he blithely returned power directly to Maduro’s regime, in exchange for oil, while ignoring the winners of prior elections that Maduro had voided. Venezuela remained, and still remains, a dictatorship ruled by the same harsh de facto regime that was in charge before US intervention, with Maduro’s vice president simply moving to the presidential office.
Venezuelans were duped and Iranians will be duped as well. If Trump can strike a largely commercial (oil) compromise with Khamenei’s son—by making him an offer he can’t refuse—the regime will remain in power, and the Iranian people will be worse off than ever before.
Had the US really cared about the people of Iran rising up and shaking off the chains of the Islamic theocracy, it would long ago have been backing anti-regime guerrilla movements in that country with intelligence-sharing, training, money, arms and military advisors. Because without that kind of backing, no regime overthrow would ever be possible. But the US learned long ago to be careful what you wish for, since, short of setting up a US-backed puppet regime—something which history tells us never works in the long-run—there is no way to know what sort of government would follow this one, or whether it would align itself with the US which has a long history of unpopularity in Iran.

3.  Another contingency is that prolonged fighting could lead to a much weakened Iran that would slip into the sort of chaos some other Middle Eastern countries did following the Arab Spring. In that case, a power vacuum could form and government could become fragmented with the help of bad actors seeking to destabilize the area. That is the sort of action that might well be backed by far-right Israel, with Trump-backed Netanyahu taking advantage of a debilitated Iran to continue to bolster Israel’s military dominance in the region—the far-reaching consequences of which would be the further destabilization of the Middle Eastern region as a whole.

4.  A fifth of the world’s oil passes through the Hormuz Strait—a narrow neck of water that connects the Persian Gulf with the Gulf of Oman. A significant share of liquefied natural gas (LNG) also moves through that strait. Iran, to a very large extent, currently controls that passage, and has, in the past, also used its Houthi allies in Yemen to aid it in that task. In the immediate term, disruptions to shipping traffic in the Hormuz Strait will cause oil and shipping, shipping insurance and container prices to spike. Experts indicate that sustained disruptions could fuel worldwide inflation and spark a corresponding worldwide recession, with the hardest-hit areas being Europe and Asia, but also with development progress in Southeast Asia and Africa being strangled.

5.  At least one expert in international law has described US worldwide actions under the Trump regime as “the great unraveling” of international law. Through his complete disregard for both international and domestic norms regarding the use of force, and with regard to the sovereignty and self-determination of nations—principles that have governed Western foreign policy since the end of World War II—Trump has basically instituted piracy as his regime’s foreign policy. In a US policy speech that Secretary Rubio made at a world security forum in Munich a few weeks ago, he faced off against criticism of the unprovoked US attack on Venezuela and on fishing boats in the Caribbean as actions unconstrained by law and “necessary leadership” in a fractured world order. This was huge, in that it signaled a US policy shift from the rules-based postwar order to one of might-makes-right, in which the US is simply doing what it does because it can, and because no one else can stop it.
Add to this a statement this week by the DOJ’s Hegseth, in which he said that the US would be applying “no stupid rules of engagement” in its unauthorized war on Iran, and America has just joined the Nazis in applying the same sort of Hitlerian policies that Germany pursued during World War II.
In other words, the Trump regime is bent on turning back the clock to a world where the most powerful regimes make up the rules as they go along and the rest of the nations are rendered vassal states.

Donald Trump was supposed to be “the president of peace”. At least that’s what he told us when he was trying to make Democrats out to be warmongers. But then again, if there is one thing that is consistent about Trump, it is his complete disconnection with truth and sincerity. Sometimes, it is hard not to see his attacks on Venezuela and Iran, his threats against Mexico, Canada and Greenland, and his verbal and economic aggression against our Western allies as anything but retribution against the world for not recognizing him as “a man of peace.” We know that, from his first day in office in 2016, he coveted every one of his predecessor Barack Obama’s virtues. What he couldn’t destroy with the stroke of a pen, he wanted to garner, without ever doing the hard work of earning the honors bestowed on others who did.

Don’t tell me I’m exaggerating. I saw with my own eyes, as did you, when he made a big deal out of accepting a made-up consolation “peace prize” created as a bespoke ego stroke by the FIFA world soccer entity. And when he whined about not getting this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, for all the made-up wars he’d “solved”, until winner, Venezuelan opposition political activist María Machado, offered him her medal to shut him up—and he became an even greater embarrassment than usual to the people of the United States by actually accepting it. And then, after his illegal invasion of her country, had the audacity to back the very regime that had repressed, cheated and jailed Machado.  

Could Donald Trump be that shallow and vindictive, you ask? Short answer: Yes. Definitely. The man has all the depth of a pancake griddle and the moral character of a wharf rat.

Many of the often salt-of-the-earth type people who bought Trump’s false promises and barefaced lies, and voted for him (twice), are the very same people whose families produce the military personnel who actually fight America’s wars. These relatives of military members voted for Trump in part because he promised to keep their sons and daughters, and brothers and sisters out of harm’s way.

It didn’t seem to matter to them that he had called America’s heroes “suckers and losers” or that Trump—a five-time draft-dodger from the Vietnam conscription era—had stood on the hallowed ground of Arlington Cemetery and asked, “What was in it for them? ” They simply bought his vow to be “the president of peace”, to bring the troops home, and end America’s forever-wars on Day One. They believed that he would use America’s Armed Forces for the purpose for which they were meant: to ensure US defense, not to go off to foreign lands to start forever-wars of aggression. They too have been duped.

In this latest action in Iran, after news of the first fatal American casualties was released, Trump confirmed that US service members have already died and that more will likely die or become casualties in the future, but added, “that’s what happens in war.” He said it as if he’d had nothing to do with it, when he had, in fact, personally and without Congressional authorization, lit the fuse for another forever-war that was completely avoidable. And in doing so, had painted targets on the backs of every US service member currently deployed in the Middle East. His Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shrugged the casualties off with yet another cliché, saying, “War is hell.”

“That’s what happens in war.” The subliminal message to MAGA supporters who voted for the “president of peace”? Soldiers get killed in wars. That’s a fact. Get over it.