Since when did political self-immolation become fashionable?

Trump has decided to set himself on fire at the altar of a decades-old wet dream of Benjamin Netanyahu to have America destroy his enemies for FREE.

In a very fluid geopolitical environment, it’s difficult to draw many conclusions at such an early stage. However, what is clear is that the administration is struggling to find a coherent justification for strikes on a sovereign nation that clearly did NOT pose an imminent threat to US interests in the region.

In a remarkably revealing impromptu press conference by Marco Rubio on Capitol Hill yesterday, with his words, he openly conceded that the U.S. had embarked upon what, under international law, is an illegal war. The clear inference was that they had done this because Israel was going to attack Iran anyway, regardless of U.S. participation. Take a step back to process that statement. The most powerful nation on earth, with the largest economy and a population of 340 million Americans to protect, made a decision to play ‘follow the leader’ with an indicted war criminal leading a nation of 10 million, to whom the American taxpayer handed $8 billion in military aid in 2025 alone. Make that make sense.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said, and I quote:

“The imminent threat was, [wait for it….] that we knew that if Iran was attacked, and we believe they would be attacked [because Netanyahu had told them he was going to do it regardless of whether the US joined him], that they would immediately come after us. [No shit, Sherlock]. We’re not going to just sit there and absorb a blow before we responded, because the Department of War assessed that if we did that, waited for them to hit us first after they were attacked, by someone else. Israel attacked them, they hit us first, and we waited for them to hit us, we would suffer more casualties and more deaths. We went pro-actively in a defensive way to prevent them from inflicting higher damages.

These are his actual words with no edits; they are completely in context. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt that he was thinking on his feet here. However, in my view, it perfectly demonstrates US fealty to an indicted Israeli war criminal whose government has taken the US legislature hostage in pursuit of a decades-old intention to dominate the region and eliminate its enemies at the expense of the US taxpayer. I did have a little chuckle at the thought of being ‘proactively defensive’, though.

For me, this was the final nail in the coffin, on a day in which Republican lawmakers and their propaganda outlets provided a series of schizophrenic justifications from liberation, to nuclear threat, to missiles, to being caught in possession of a hijab or chador, I’m only joking about the last two by the way.

Now I have no idea why Netanyahu owns Trump, but it is beyond clear that the Prime Minister of Israel appears to be currently leading US foreign policy at the exclusion of Congressional approval, while imposing a conflict on the American people against their wishes. Netanyahu has long played Trump like a Stradivarius for the sole purpose of eliminating his enemies. After decades of trying to convince successive US presidents to attack Iran, Trump is the only idiot to have fallen for it.

As noted by Patrick Theros in Responsible Statecraft on January 12th 2024, he recalls:

After his first meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996, Bill Clinton vented his fury before his staff about his visitor’s apparent presumptions about the balance of power in the bilateral relationship. “Who the f**k does he think he is?” Clinton reportedly bellowed. “Who’s the f**king superpower here?” Twenty-seven years later, another American president should be asking himself the same question about the very same Bibi Netanyahu and the country he leads.

Strange, don’t you think that all three of these protagonists appear in the Epstein files? Geopolitics is a strange universe, don’t you think?

What has long been foremost in my mind is ‘the China connection’. Trump’s intervention in Venezuela from a US point of view certainly made China sit up and take notice, given it was a key customer for Venezuelan oil. So an attack on Iran would make sense, given its potential to severely disrupt China's oil supply. If it's one thing Trump is desperately in need of, it’s leverage with China. Had this been the claimed justification, it would have been entirely in line with the historic US's foreign policy. However, it would appear Rubio has blown a hole in that theory.

Republican leadership must be losing its mind at the moment, because anyone with an ounce of political savvy can see that Trump has set the Republican Party on fire. Every contradictory statement on Iran is just pouring gasoline on the flames of their electoral annihilation in November. The burning question is, (see what I did there?): now that the regime-change experiment has escaped the lab, what will be the wider economic and geopolitical consequences of delivering on an Israeli foreign-policy wishlist? Netanyahu must be beyond elated at Trump’s FREE pest removal service.

The unparalleled power handed to Benjamin Netanyahu to formulate and now lead US foreign policy is not a gift from the Republican Party; it’s a collective gift from politicians on BOTH sides of the aisle. It is emblematic of a legislative body that has taken 30 pieces of silver from a country led by a man now indicted as a war criminal, to shape US Middle East foreign policy and, by default, Western foreign policy. Israeli influence on US politics is a cancer that, along with dark corporate money, is devouring any attempt to deliver policy shaped for the benefit of the American people.

Trump’s decision to follow Netanyahu on his holy crusade to reimagine the Middle East and deliver on ‘The Greater Israel Project’ is a catastrophic geopolitical mistake that will haunt America for decades to come. Trump is once again making a huge miscalculation that will place American and allied interests around the world at risk and threaten the national security of the United States. We are seeing the beginning of a geopolitical butterfly effect.

The median lifetime earnings of a US worker are $1.7 million. A single Patriot missile interceptor costs an average of around $3 million (the variants cost between $1 million and $4 million); each THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defence) long-range interceptor, which intercepts ballistic missiles in low Earth orbit, costs around $13 million. On the offensive side, Tomahawk cruise missiles cost around $1 million a pop, and hundreds of these were fired at Iran on day one. If you want to take a better look at missile costs. Click here to see The Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance table of interceptor missile costs. It’s interesting to take a broader look at the site to get a sense of the true cost of war, excluding the human cost, of course.

The terrifying fact is that it takes the lifetime earnings of 2 average workers to pay for a single Patriot interceptor. It would be remiss of me not to point out that an Iron Dome missile costs a fraction of that, at between $50,000 and $100,000, but that’s still more than an annual salary for 90% of Americans. There should be little doubt in anyone’s mind why the US is mired in almost $39 trillion of debt. The DOD is spending your money like it’s going out of fashion, not to protect you; you are just a coincidental beneficiary. Your money is spent with companies owned by the same wealthy elite who already evade an estimated $1 trillion in taxes EVERY YEAR. The same wealthy elite that in 2026 will receive around $117 billion in tax cuts, as American families face an affordability crisis they are told is a hoax, as many lose health insurance, while energy prices soar. Oh, and did I mention Trump wants to give them another half a trillion dollars next year?

As reported by The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, on July 8th 2025:

Despite the United States withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 and the scaling back of the “War on Terror,” Pentagon spending and contractor revenues have continued at extremely high levels, due in large part to the military’s focus on China as the new national security challenge. The U.S. arms industry has also profited enormously from the surge in foreign arms sales tied to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza.

From 2020 to 2024, the last five-year period for which full statistics are available, private firms have received $2.4 trillion in contracts from the Pentagon, approximately 54% of the department’s discretionary spending of $4.4 trillion over that period.¹During those five years, $771 billion in Pentagon contracts went to just five firms: Lockheed Martin ($313 billion), RTX (formerly Raytheon, $145 billion), Boeing ($115 billion), General Dynamics ($116 billion), and Northrop Grumman ($81 billion). By comparison, the total diplomacy, development, and humanitarian aid budget, excluding military aid, was $356 billion. In other words, the U.S. government invested over twice as much money in five weapons companies as in diplomacy and international assistance.

My simple point is this: the combination of the tech giants and the cross-pollination into the Military Industrial Complex is creating colonies of slave labour within the bottom 90% of US society. The icing on the cake is that they intend to use AI and robotics to reduce the value of human labour to the equivalent of junk bonds.

Returning to the Iran conflict, don’t believe Trump and Hegseth's assertion that these attacks can continue for as long as it takes. It’s a lie, and they know it, as do US military planners and, more importantly, the Iranian military. As shown above, missile defence is very expensive, and stocks of interceptors, despite Trump’s bullish claims, are NOT infinite. In a report by Michael R. Gordon and Shelby Holliday in the Wall Street Journal on March 1st, headed:

U.S. Races to Accomplish Iran Mission Before Munitions Run Out

They note:

Trump says the Iran campaign might last a week or longer, but dwindling stockpiles could limit his options

Trump has always been a political Walter Mitty; what he says and the truth are very different. Once these missile stocks are gone, targets become sitting ducks. That’s why the US and Israel are desperately throwing everything at going after missile launchers. Iran has been around the block a few times. Several commentators familiar with the internal structure of the military command and control structure within the regime, note that Trump’s leadership decapitation strategy, while clearly successful, is unlikely to impede retaliation from Iran, as command and control is devolved down the chain of command to a local militia-type structure.

It is not beyond the Iranians to use cheap-as-chips drones and less accurate missiles to deplete US missile interceptor stocks, then bring out the good stuff.

There should be red flags waving across a whole host of logistical support chains, from ammunition to the extended deployment of the US Gerald Ford, which has been at sea since June 2025 and is on track for a record 11-month deployment. This would be the longest continuous mission by a U.S. warship. As reported in the Journal on February 23rd 2025, by Alexander Ward, Lara Seligman and Shelby Holliday :

Overstretched crews have previously contributed to mistakes and accidents. In April and May 2025, near the end of an eight-month deployment, the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman lost several jet fighters while countering Houthi rebel attacks in the Red Sea. A Navy investigation blamed the high operational tempo of the mission.

Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, voiced concerns about this intervention during exploratory planning, but appears to have been ignored despite reports that he stated:

If the U.S. uses up large amounts of air-defence munitions and other items that are in limited supply, it could also impact preparations for a possible future conflict with China.

In conclusion, I would say that this is a very dangerous roll of the dice, dependent on a short intervention aimed at demonstrating overwhelming force in the expectation that Iran will fold. All the historical evidence suggests otherwise, I’m afraid. We have already seen the conflict widen, applying pressure on US allies who will be economically affected by the uncertainty it creates in global markets. Trump has opened a geopolitical Pandora’s box, and Iran has donned a suicide vest to go on a tour of the region, no doubt with plans to make a guest appearance ot two on European or American soil.

It appears to me that Trump has decided to set his presidency on fire and risks not the obliteration of the Republican Guard, but the obliteration of his own Republican Party in November.

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