President Trump invested much into the promotion of his image as a peace president. But his intellectual weakness and consequent susceptibility to 'expert' opinion, coupled with the fact of neocon dominance of US foreign policy and military mindset these last few decades, plus other factors no doubt, have all worked together to seduce Trump into an egregiously distorted view of US military power, and into acceptance of the erroneous "peace through strength" mantra. I believe this claim despite what follows in the next paragraph.
Israel's ongoing strike on Iran appears for the moment to have been very effective, intelligent, and well executed. On the evidence available so far – one part of which is Iranian silence – it looks to be a mighty blow, one Israel is well placed to capitalise on over coming days and weeks. Iran is already under pressure to successfully weather this onslaught.
And yet attacks of this character – surprise, pyrotechnic, awesome, comprehensive – often begin neocon/Israeli wars, or more accurately the military phase of neocon projects (Project Ukraine required a different approach; Russia is a peer rival). But for all their might, intelligence and detailed planning, what follows on their heels has yet to be a stabilisation of the region involved, let alone some manner of 'victory' that reshapes the world such that the US reigns more supremely as a consequence. Over the last four decades of neocon foreign-policy dominance, we have seen an unmistakable evaporation of both US hard and soft power, as well as a decline of its relative economic supremacy. Of course there is more to this story than neocon adventurism, but that in fact underscores the point I'm making. No person or group controls everything.
Even if Israel topples the current Iranian government, what happens next? The BRICS-based world can easily interpret current events as proof positive that the US is utterly untrustworthy. Perhaps tentative trust in Trump was used to deceive Iran and Russia into a false sense of the authenticity of US intentions to reach a deal on the Iranian nuclear-power and nuclear-enrichment programmes. Considering the West's casual disregard of Minsk I and Minsk II, considering its influence on Zelenskyy to walk away from the April/May 2022 peace talks with Russia in Istanbul, and other chicanery besides, all trust is gone. If Iran is toppled, I predict it will be a Pyrrhic victory. Fear holds things stable for a while, but only for a while.
As I've said before, when all you have is an army, everything looks like a war. The militaristic mindset that pervades the neocon perspective, which is in essence little more than "might makes right", is akin to an army, or an intellectual/psychological filtering process that may as well be an army. "Do as we say, or else" is the neocon way. President Trump's 'diplomacy' in the Truth Social post that heads this article oozes that mentality. So much so, the President comes across to me as a boy among (deranged) adults, a boy defenceless against their wiles and psychopathically resolute determination to have the world their way. But all of it is, in my view, in fact the way to ruin.
Roughly the first 50 days of the Trump presidency were hopeful, in my opinion. I believed they were sufficiently strongly anti-war to carry the day. I was wrong. We are now back to the reckless uncertainty of the Biden administration. Permanent-state inertia and ivory-tower arrogance have overcome what I suspect were sincere intentions on Trump's part to do things differently. But Trump's impatience with detail, his insecurities, his lack of intellectual courage, his over-reliance on the wildly unpredictable manner of his social-media 'diplomacy', have hamstrung those intentions, such as they were. It has been one embarrassing gaffe after another, and I am grossly understating the ugliness of what we have witnessed over the last couple of months.
I cannot see how the MAGA movement can continue to support Trump for much longer. I anticipate a split between the populist forces behind Trump on the one hand, and his presidency on the other, as his presidency sinks deeper and deeper under neocon waves. Furthermore, BRICS nations, and especially Russia and China, cannot tolerate a broken Iran. Therefore, the risks of a nuclear conflagration if Iran recovers sufficiently to weather the initial weeks of this strike, especially if Israel then comes to feel existentially threatened by Iran's recovery, are significantly above zero.
One part of my broader analysis is the faint expectation that a powerfully cohering awakening among the US population – namely to realise that the US permanent-state and intelligence establishment does not have The People's best interests at heart, and that this conglomeration includes US media outlets for the most part, not to mention British and other Western European outlets – might be triggered by a great disillusionment with Trump the Myth, as previously stated in Econosophy pages. But much else would have to hold for this to actually happen. The riots in LA look to be but one part of a broad destabilisation effort aimed at dragging Trump's final term deep into the belly of the neocon beast. Other actions of this type might well be in the works. Coupled with continued degradation of the US economy as AI-rooted technological unemployment gathers pace over coming months and years, could well mean such an awakening of this type has little to no chance of gaining any meaningful momentum.
And yet these are interesting times, one way or the other. Life has about it an irrepressible power to surprise, to deliver the unexpected. This power is deeper than the sort of glittering intelligence that characterises neocon cunning; none of us can be sure what the future will bring. This is an epochal historical moment. Trump's role has proved not be peace maker; he lacks the strength of character and richness of wisdom to do that noble undertaking justice. But this does not mean war will destroy us all, or turn out as its adherents expect. There is many a slip twixt cup and lip, and reality always bats last.
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