Trump now finds himself with his options narrowing by the day. He thought he’d found a new toy in the military to create an opportunity for self-enrichment. He looks at what he did in Venezuela as his new model of war for profit.
Open with shock and awe, pressure the victim of his geopolitical greed assault to fold under the threat of more and more destruction and death. He then selects someone from within who is allowed to hold power as long as he, or in the case of Venezuela, she does his bidding.
Trump believes that might is king when it comes to extorting the victim of his attention; hence, he’s already turning his focus to Cuba and other South American nations as he examines their mineral and resource wealth. He’s a geopolitical kleptomaniac.
He’s hinted in his incoherent press conferences over the past week that he can’t understand why Iran hasn’t rolled over. He’s deluded himself into believing that they are an inferior enemy that cannot resist the might of his army. In his mind, it’s already over. He clearly has not studied the Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan wars.
Trump thought he’d be sending in Witkoff and Kushner to set up his skimming operation by now to sign contracts for oil and reconstruction, after the death and destruction his military has delivered. It’s a rinse-and-repeat operation, he believes, that can be used wherever he sees an opportunity for profit.
There’s just one problem with his delusion: it’s deeply flawed. Iran is NOT Venezuela. He has targeted a country that he should recognise as a mirror image of the society he himself aspires to rule. One in which a ruler has absolute control over the population. Where a secret police terrorise communities, one where women have no role, and dissent is crushed. He’s staring in a mirror at his own ambition.
If he stopped to think, he’d understand that the theocracy he’s attempting to establish in the U.S. has been established in Iran for close to half a century. It’s an ideology that mirrors his own: the people are irrelevant; they do as they are told or face the consequences. Corruption is rampant, and the government retain power through fear and retribution.
Once again, Trump is blinded by arrogance and an inability to understand cultural differences. The Iranian leadership is a mirror image of him, but they have the jump on him when it comes to an existing culture of religious subjugation. Yes, the young have protested in their hundreds of thousands, but Iran is a nation of 93.2 million, and religious conservatives will defend the regime to the death, quite literally.
Even in this moment of existential threat, tens of thousands of Iranians took to the streets to celebrate the selection of a new Supreme Leader. The point here is that Trump can keep taking these people out, but there are plenty more radical clerics to step up to the fight.
It is impossible to effect regime change without boots on the ground, and in this case, it would take hundreds of thousands of troops plunged straight into an insurgent war where the enemy doesn’t wear uniforms to identify themselves. I would bet the house on the fact that NONE of his military advisors have the appetite for that.
Trump now faces the identical dilemma that Netanyahu had after October 7th 2023, when he stupidly claimed he could eradicate Hamas in Gaza. Two years on, Hamas is still causing Israel problems because no conventional army can ever defeat a determined insurgent enemy driven by ideology.
Even if Trump raised Iran to the ground, he could not claim mission accomplished, because the more the destruction and death, the more people join the insurgent opposition. It’s a self-perpetuating conflict that just sucks up millions of dollars, which it’s currently doing at a rate of almost a billion dollars a day. All in prosecution of a war that can’t be won, no matter the fairytale being fed to what I can only assume Trump sees as an idiot population.
He’s forced every day to say what every parent says to a child on a long journey, ‘We’re almost there.’ The markets are his children, and he’s anxious to assure them the war will end soon to stop them from throwing a tantrum. He’s effectively manipulating the markets, but that only works until they lose patience.
Hegseth can claim all day long that there is an endless stock of expensive precision missiles to defeat the bargain basement drones Iran is aiming at regional targets designed to inflict global economic pain. No matter what the threat from the U.S., Iran knows that rendering the Strait of Hormuz off-limits is a potent weapon, and mining it will take a long time to clear. They have planned this for a long time, and they have many arrows in their quiver.
Trump has made a monumental miscalculation. The reason he can’t define a clear objective or endgame is that there isn’t one. Just like Putin’s ‘Special Operation’, he assumed it would be all over in a matter of a week or so. He’s now facing the prospect of uncertainty, repeating the same errors the U.S. has made in the Middle East TWICE already.
His military, as he sees it, has become his personal geopolitical weapon of choice with which to build a legacy as a leader of the world’s newly minted imperial power. He’s looking no further than that. As with all things Trump, it’s a fantasy and one that I believe is about to teach him a very long, hard and painful lesson.
What he might have thought was yet another distraction with an inbuilt opportunity for self-enrichment is turning from a dream to a nightmare. One that has every chance of setting fire to both his presidency and the future political fortunes of the Republican Party.
As the midterms loom ever larger, he’s desperate to control the election process. He feels Iran has given him an opportunity to declare them a threat to election integrity, while taking legislative steps to select the voter pool through the Save America Act.
The US economy now has an arterial bleed when it comes to jobs; it’s bleeding them, while tariffs are a continuing threat to inflation, with foreign investors running for the hills in search of refuge elsewhere.
The country’s fortunes are being propped up by a handful of Tech companies, while the top 10% are propping up consumption by spending like drunken sailors. From a public perspective, he finds himself in a room where nobody is distracted anymore. The Epstein files still loom large on the horizon, and now he’s at war with a country with an ideology as radical as that of his own evangelical right.
Regardless of where you stand politically in this moment, the walls are closing in, and Chad Scott nails it with his military assessment in the attached video clip, which perfectly complements my observations.
Buckle up, people, it’s going to be a dangerous and bumpy ride, and people are going to die.
🎥 TikTok - vm.tiktok.com/ZNRutmkAQ/
