The cataclysmic flood in Nepal is only the most recent in a number of heat-related events to hit the planet this year.

It would be easy to dismiss the sudden flood that struck Nepal last Wednesday as just another example of what insurance companies like to call “an act of God” — a natural catastrophe that no one could have predicted, much less controlled. But the torrent of mud and water that wiped out several villages and left more than 1,000 people reported as missing could also be an early warning of what to expect as global warming begins to reach a critical stage.

Europe has been hit with a murderous heat wave that has led to an estimated 35,000 deaths. Wildfires in France led to mass evacuations and threatened Bordeaux, along with the French wine crop. Both the Rhine and Danube rivers have lost so much water from the lack of snowfall and drought conditions that barge traffic that usually uses the rivers has been curtailed. The level is so low that a nuclear power plant that provides half of Hungary’s electricity had to be shut down because the pipes used to cool the plant couldn’t reach the water.

In Nepal, satellite photos confirm that the flood coincided with the collapse of a large part of a mountain in the Himalayan range that extends into Tibet. The region, known informally as the “Third Pole,” holds the planet’s third largest single mass of frozen water, surpassed only by the North and South poles. As these glaciers melt, they often form temporary lakes, and when the terrain shifts suddenly, the release of pent-up water can be dramatic.

It should not surprise anyone that the rapid melting of Arctic ice is being matched by similar melting in the Himalayas. The difference is that while relatively few people live in the Arctic, the floods resulting from melting snow and ice in the Himalayas have an impact on one of the most densely populated regions in the world.

Together, the Himalayas and Hindu Kush feed 10 major river systems, including the Ganges, Brahmaputra, Yangtze, Mekong, and Yellow rivers. The people affected by these rivers constitute roughly a fourth of the world’s population.

Photo credit: Fixed camera / Wikimedia (PD)

The international community is just waking up to the fact that what appears to be a series of isolated incidents could, in fact, be part of a cascading series of economic and political crises that will ultimately affect the entire planet.

Until now, the most visible results of climate change have been widespread wildfires and floods. As the flood in Nepal demonstrates, a disaster instantly kills some people on the spot and leaves others homeless. The aftereffects tend to last longer and be just as damaging.

The greatest danger may come from excessive heat that reduces agricultural production, leading to famines and social unrest. When people can’t feed themselves, they either fight one another to get what’s left or, if nothing remains, move on to where they see a ray of hope. Some end up in refugee camps. Others attempt to migrate to parts of the world that are still functioning. The favored landing zones have traditionally been the US or Western Europe, often with dramatic economic, cultural, and political consequences.

The US has hardly been exempt from radical changes in weather. They are likely to become even more intense this year thanks to the super El Niño. According to Climate Central, which tracks major disasters, the average number of billion-dollar weather and climate disasters affecting the US in the 1980s was about three per year. The annual rate now stands at more than 20.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disaster database estimates that weather-related disasters have cost American taxpayers more than $2.9 trillion over the last five decades. The database was created to track the cost of major weather events. After NOAA reported on 27 disasters that hit the US in 2024, the Trump administration shut it down.

At the same time, the administration proposed a $1.7 billion cut to NOAA and the elimination of virtually all its research into climate change. In order to roll back existing alternative energy programs, Trump paid another $765 million to cancel authorizations to build offshore wind farms that might have provided an alternative source of electricity. Instead, the administration tried to revive coal- and gas-powered generating plants.

The Trump administration’s motives are not hard to discern. Before the 2024 election, Trump pleaded with the heads of the fossil fuel industry to donate a billion dollars to his reelection campaign. The industry responded by donating at least $75 million to his campaign and political action committees, and fossil fuel executives contributed another $11.5 million to Trump’s inauguration.

Apparently the industry leaders got their money’s worth. Since retaking office, Trump has carried out an unprecedented crusade to eliminate nearly all the Biden administration’s efforts to shift the US toward clean energy. That includes stopping tax incentives that favored purchasing electrical vehicles and stopping a federal program to make more vehicle charging stations available to drivers.

It might be tempting to compare the administration’s approach to the proverbial frog in a pot who, being cold-blooded, fails to notice he is about to be boiled to death, except that scientific experiments indicate that any frog with a functioning brain will jump out of the pot to save itself. The frog understands something that the current administration apparently does not.

Part of the tragedy in Nepal is that until now the major causes of global warming have largely come from the industrialized world while most of the damage is occurring in countries that have no possibility of escaping or influencing the worsening situation. The industrialized world has the wealth and resources to save the planet, but refuses to acknowledge its responsibility. As global warming increasingly affects Europe and the United States, ignoring the problem may no longer be an option.

Donald Trump’s approach to the Iran crisis makes you think of a trapped bird trying to escape an enclosure by flying through a plate-glass window. After it’s knocked to the ground several times, the bird knows it can’t escape, but it keeps on trying because it can’t think of an alternative.

The glass window in Trump’s case is his potentially fatal misunderstanding of the situation. That and the fact that he has acquired a global reputation as a compulsive liar. The consequence is that no treaty or agreement that the U.S. government signs can be trusted. The word of the Trump administration, in short, is essentially worthless. Confidence building is, to say the least, at a low ebb.

Iran may have gotten the message sooner than everyone else. What they want is a solid guarantee that the U.S. won’t resume its attacks when Trump’s mood changes. It’s hard to think of what that guarantee might be beyond Iran’s ability to shut the Strait of Hormuz and cripple the world’s economy.

They have reason to be suspicious. The U.S. has launched surprise bombing campaigns against Iran during the middle of peace negotiations at least twice.

By now it should be clear that the U.S. had nothing to gain from continuing to attack Iran. Trump’s lethal mistake was to fall victim to irrational incitement emanating from Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. What Trump failed to see is that Netanyahu needs the threat of war in order to unify Israel’s voters. With multiple legal cases against him and serious charges of corruption, as well as charges that he was partially responsible for the October 7 attack by Hamas, Netanyahu needs to win elections, or risk going to jail. It’s possible to love Israel, and still ask serious questions about the effectiveness of Netanyahu’s strategy. Perpetual warfare is not a sustainable policy.

What the misbegotten attack against Iran did manage to accomplish was to notify Iran about the enormous leverage it has thanks to the fact that it can close the Strait of Hormuz whenever it wants. An additional bonus from Iran’s point of view is that it also demonstrated the U.S. Navy’s inability to convince insurance companies that they can underwrite shipping through the Straits without risking an attack that is likely to cost the insurers millions of dollars. Iran, in short, was not aware of just how much power it is able to exert over the global economy until Trump informed them by initiating his war.

Trump keeps insisting that the cost is worth it if he can only guarantee that Iran doesn’t get its own atomic bomb. The truth is that ship sailed long ago. The only way to get access to Iran’s current stock of enriched uranium is to launch an all-out ground war, which would inevitably result in thousands of American casualties.

Even Trump knows that that is not likely to happen. So stopping Iran’s nuclear ambitions is off the table. If anything, any resistance to developing an Iranian bomb has most likely been erased by Trump’s bumbled attack. The most likely argument against building a bomb these days may be that with its ability to close the Strait of Hormuz, Iran no longer needs a nuclear weapon to make itself heard.

For a long time, the U.S. has tended to regard other nuclear powers seriously and treat non-nuclear powers as second-string players. That is one reason that India and Pakistan rushed to develop a bomb that they are never likely to use. The fact that Washington has remained quiet about the fact that the crazed regime in North Korea probably already has up to 60 nuclear warheads and the ballistic missiles it needs to launch them is testimony to the power that comes from simply possessing a nuclear weapon. If Iran was not fully convinced of that before, it is now.

Iran previously had mixed feelings about the bomb. When I interviewed one of the Islamic government’s early defense Ministers, Akbar Torkan, in the 1990s, his assessment was that developing a nuclear weapon was a useless expense. It made more sense to put the money into developing a functional army.

American actions since then have changed that assessment. Trump’s blunder in Iran is simply icing on the cake. What is really at stake here is that no one really plans to use a nuclear weapon, but there’s a general consensus that it is necessary to have one if you want to establish your status on the international stage.

Plenty of American Middle East experts understand that, but the Trump administration decided long ago to push expertise to the side. Trump fired dozens of America’s most knowledgeable foreign policy experts and replaced them with sycophants with no experience at the work they were supposed to do. Trump 2.0 consists of little more than an 80-year-old man who has surrounded himself with incompetent MAGA acolytes and who tries to deal with a complex world by trusting his gut instincts. The scenario is similar to what happens when a bully, impressed with what he has learned in several youthful gang rumbles, tries to take on a black belt in Karate. The bully ends up splayed on the floor, not quite understanding what happened.

That Trump understands almost nothing about Iran should be clear after he referred to Iran’s leadership as “scum,” and declared that previous U.S. administrations had ignored Iran for the last 47 years. Previous administrations were well aware of the sensitivities in the Middle East and the danger of getting it wrong. They neatly sidestepped the risks involved, and they were well aware of the potential danger posed by the Strait of Hormuz.

A crucial step in any negotiation, or for that matter battle, is to understand what the other side thinks, and why it acts the way it does. Denouncing your opponent as “scum” is not a good beginning. It’s an understatement to say that Trump simply does not get it.

Everyone in the Middle East knows that it was America’s CIA that played a critical role in overthrowing the democratically elected government of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh and imposing the Shah in a 1953 coup. The coup followed Mossadegh’s decision to nationalize the Anglo-Persian oil company. The British government wanted continued access to Iran’s oil, and they convinced the U.S. to launch the coup. In fairness, the coup was not just about money. In World War II, Churchill realized that Britain’s defense was guaranteed by the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force. Both needed oil. Once access to the oil was guaranteed, no one paid much attention to the Shah’s increasingly repressive regime. The U.S.- orchestrated coup and the enormous wealth provided by oil overturned the traditional political balance between the Shah, the Bazaaris—Iran’s influential merchant class—and the Islamic clergy. In earlier times, the Shah had been forced to negotiate with Iran’s merchants and clergy in order ot have the power he needed to rule. The immense wealth he acquired thanks to oil meant that he no longer needed to listen to either the Bazariis or the clergy, or for that matter the mass of Iran’s population. As the regime wallowed in luxury, condemning the rest of the country to poverty, the Shah reacted by increasing repression via his secret police force, SAVAK, which in turn often engaged in unspeakable tortures that actually amounted to crimes against humanity. As most Iranians saw it, the Shah was in power thanks to the U.S., and consequently the U.S. was responsible for the Shah’s excesses. As protests erupted across Iran, SAVAK arrested the protesters, many of whom were university students. Many were killed or tortured. What both SAVAK and the Shah failed to realize was that many of SAVAK’s victims were the children of Iran’s leading families. Jordan’s King Hussein, the most able monarch in the Middle East, warned the Shah against excesses. The Shah refused to listen. The U.S. State Department also advised caution, but the Shah became particularly adept at playing the executive branch in the White House against the State Department's better advice. The repression left Iran’s mosques as the only place in which it was possible to talk about the situation freely. Inevitably, resistance to the Shah’s injustice developed inside Iran’s mosques.

The Islamic governments that followed went through a number of transformations and were often just as brutal, or even more so than the Shah, but in the minds of many Iranians that did not detract from the conviction that the U.S. had only cared about Iran because it wanted its oil. Trump’s loose talk about his various money-making schemes and his obsession with turning every transaction into a scramble for profit, either for his family or for American companies, effectively confirms nearly every prejudice Iranians have ever felt about American intentions.

Trump clearly does not see Iran as a serious threat, and despite the enormous cost of the war, which already stands at $37.5 billion and will probably eventually balloon to $150 billion while accomplishing nothing—at least for America-- Trump is nevertheless willing to forge on rather than admit that he made a mistake.

Most Americans think of Iran as distant and incomprehensible, and they probably don’t really care much one way or another. The real price tag for Trump’s mistake, however, will involve more than money. Trump has shown America’s competitors that to a certain extent American military really is a paper tiger. No question that America has enormous military power, but that power can only be exercised within limits, and Trump is squandering vital resources. The Iranian adventure has exhausted much of America’s stockpile of ammunition and sophisticated missiles, as well as confidence in the White House’s judgment.

Pete Hegseth, Trump’s self-styled Secretary of War, wants American soldiers to be lethal killers, and he’s prepared to give them injections of testosterone if he thinks they are not sufficiently manly. But modern militaries are concerned with the projection of power—not just killing. Victory depends on a well-thought-out strategy, rather than the individual soldier’s readiness to kill. Sun Tzu, ancient China’s greatest military strategist, argued that the best path to victory was the one that avoided battle and the sacrifice of men.

Starting with Vietnam, the U.S. has faced repeated military defeats. The problem has never been a lack of firepower or the determination of the soldiers in the U.S. Army. It has always been a failure to understand the thinking of its opponent and the cultural context in which the struggle was taking place.

The Vietnam War was lost before it began. It just took America several years to see the reality of the situation. The frontier running the length of Vietnam, separating it from Cambodia and Laos, was impossible to control. Impenetrable jungles made it relatively easy for enemy forces to hide, and the U.S. had realized early on that it was not ready to risk fighting a war with China. As a result, the war turned into a stalemate. The North Vietnamese could simply wait it out. The U.S., facing growing opposition at home, couldn’t. The ultimate cost was 50,000 Americans killed. Hundreds of thousands were traumatized or crippled, and nothing much was gained. The North Vietnamese lost several million killed and wounded, but given the stakes, they didn’t care. We did.

Once the war had ended, and enough time had passed, the Vietnamese, whom we had tried to kill, became our de facto allies. It really was a war fought largely because of a general misunderstanding, both of Vietnam and of the global situation. I was there in Vietnam, and I was part of the misunderstanding, but that doesn’t mean much.

American adventures in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan have been variations of the same failure to see clearly. We exercised enormous firepower, but failed to grasp the underlying issues which were certain to determine victory or defeat.

The situation in Iran is no different. Iran’s current leadership can wait out any amount of american bombing. The more we bomb, the more the Iranian public will turn against the U.S. and support the regime, no matter how bloody it is. The more Trump runs off at the momunth with his vulgar insults, the less likely we are to arrive at negotiations that return the situation to some diegree of normalcy.

The end result of doubling down, will be that the U.S. will be seen as even worse than the Islamic Revolutionary Guards that hardly anyone in Iran wants to see in power.

As far as the U.S. is concerned, nothing will be gained, except that prices will continue to rise as U.S.-Iranian tit-for-tat bombing continues to block the world’s oil and fertilizer shortages contribute to global hunger. In the meantime, the U.S. will have expended its arsenal on nothing, and its loss of credibility will encourage its global competitors—notably China, North Korea and Russia-- to take advantage of a wounded giant. The bird flying trying to escape through the picture window usually dies. That America, despite its enormous power, research and insight, is locked in an equally futile repetition is difficult to understand. Perhaps Einstein had it right when he said that repeating the same failure over and over is the definition of insanity. Let’s hope that the midterm elections give us a chance to escape the approaching madness.

In his latest book, America, USA: How race shadows U.S. anniversaries, Princeton professor Eddie Glaude notes virtually every major American anniversary has coincided with a major crisis.

The 100^th anniversary in 1876 marked the near-collapse of the government due to corruption in the administration of Ulysses S. Grant. Grant had been a brilliant Civil War general, but as president he turned out to be overly trusting of friends and associates. Much like the Trump administration today, many of them treated public access as a cash machine. Pete Hegseth may not be everyone’s choice for Secretary of Defense, or as he prefers, “Secretary of War,” but Grant’s Secretary of War, William W. Belknap, was involved in so many bribery, kickback, and general corruption schemes that he was finally impeached.

The 200^th anniversary in 1976 wasn’t much better. It found the country still recovering in the aftermath of the Watergate crisis and the collapse of Richard Nixon’s administration. Like Trump, Nixon had compiled a hefty list of political enemies, and he did his best to use the presidency to get revenge against his opponents. As the country gradually awoke to Nixon’s true personality, the end was not pretty. The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein wrote in their account, The Final Days, that the discredited president spent his last days in office delivering drunken monologues to the White House’s gallery of portraits of former presidents.

America’s 250^th anniversary doesn’t promise to be much better. After abandoning a self-inflicted war against Iran, and turning Washington’s Reflecting Pool into a gigantic swamp festering in the netherland that separates the Capitol from the Lincoln Memorial, Trump’s garish attempts at landscape decoration ended in the murder of a local population of ducks. Trump’s artificial homage to a mythical rural America, the “Great American State Fair,” staged on the National Mall, has been universally boycotted by the credible musicians and entertainers that Trump had hoped to hire. In the end, Trump’s only option was to turn the affair into yet another political rally with his less than coherent ego as a substitute star. Then we have the financial problems of the Kennedy Center, which the public boycotted after Trump put his name on the façade. The name has since been erased, but Washington’s most important cultural institution now faces possible bankruptcy. The bottom line is that this July 4^th, promises to find America just as divided as it was during earlier scandal-ridden anniversaries.

In his book, Eddie Glaude skips over the ever-present political corruption and focuses instead on the problems America has had from the start in dealing with race, the cancer embedded in American politics from the beginning. 250 years after its birth, America is still trying to decide who has the right to consider himself an American. While previous administrations attempted to discreetly gloss over the question, Donald Trump has been adamant that he thinks America would be better off if it could only be populated by the “right” people. Trump’s definition clearly excludes people of color, especially immigrants from Somalia whom he has famously denounced as garbage. His list of undesirables also includes anyone from Haiti or Africa, which he dismisses as “shithole countries,” and to Mexicans and Hispanics whom he considers to be “criminals and rapists.”

Trump’s nagging problem is that while Republicans have steadfastly relied on predominantly white voters to remain in power, the demographic makeup of America’s population is irreversibly shifting towards greater ethnic diversity. There is nothing new in that. America has always been diverse. New York was settled by the Dutch before the English arrived and changed its name from New Amsterdam to New York. Philadelphia was originally the colony of New Sweden. Florida was Spanish. Louisiana was French. Territory west of the Mississippi was originally part of Mexico. Trump himself is only a third-generation American. None of his grandparents spoke English as their native language. There is nothing unusual in that. Diversity has characterized America throughout its brief history, and resistance to diversity has been just as prevalent. Employment ads in the 1850s stipulated that “No Irish need apply.” The term was so white spread that in the end it was shortened to “NINA.” The Irish, and especially labor leader Denis Kearny, in turn, campaigned against letting Chinese laborers into the country to work on the transcontinental railroad. That resulted in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Exclusion of Asians from U.S. citizenship really only ended in 1965, when the Hart-Celler Act abolished immigration quotas based on national origins.

The country has sought unity since the beginning, but the slogan, “United We Stand,” has always been more an aspiration than a reality. The real question is what and who do we really want to be?

The Declaration of Independence declares that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with inalienable rights. That is an admirable notion, but American women in all the American states did not get the right to vote until the 19^th Amendment went into effect in 1920. The 15^th Amendment gave American males the right to vote, regardless of race or ethnic origin, in 1870, but it was not until the 1965 Voting Rights Act that African Americans were free to vote in most southern states. The Supreme Court, packed with a conservative majority due to the refusal of the Republican Party’s senate majority leader, Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, to accept a nominee of President Barack Obama, has done its best to roll back the act, which had offered at least some degree of political equality to Americans of African descent.

Even with that setback, African Americans are better off today than they were when the U.S. Constitution was first drafted. Apportionment to Congress’s House of Representatives was based on population. To avoid being outnumbered, the southern states demanded that slaves, i.e., Africans, be counted as part of the population, even though most American southerners did not consider anyone who was black to be equal to someone who was white. The compromise was to count each African slave as 3/5^ths of a human being. So much for the contention that all men are created equal.

African Americans have a right to be upset at the contradictions and injustices that were prevalent when what was to become American society was just beginning to define itself. In the end, however, the Africans fared better than the indigenous population that was brutally displaced by the European struggle to colonize what to them constituted “the New World.” The signers of the Declaration of Independence make a long list of grievances against the King. At the end of their list of complaints, they state, “He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.” To the signers of the Declaration, the American Indian was a savage to be eradicated, and consequently not really human. Hardly anyone remembered that in the French and Indian War, fought between 1753 and 1763 in a major colonialist grab for more territory, it was the French and English who paid Indian tribes hard cash for each scalp ripped from an opponent’s head. If the natives were indeed savage, Europeans had sought to use the savagery for their own purposes and in the process had accelerated the carnage.

Eddie Glaude’s take on all this is that at this 4^th of July, when we celebrate American Independence, the United States is just beginning to deal with some of its more urgent issues 250 years after its birth. We are only now beginning to come to terms with a realistic understanding of our own history. That understanding is necessary if we want to move forward. It is easy to feel depressed at the injustices of the past, but to a great extent we have moved beyond some of the most painful parts of that past.

A great deal remains to be done, but as Eddie Glaude says, as a country, we are still in our adolescence. Much of the divisiveness of the present is due to the fact that for the first time in our history, we are beginning to look at our own history in realistic terms, rather than as a fictional myth intended to create a false sense of unity. Trump and the MAGA crowd have denounced our newfound historical honesty as “woke” and unpatriotic. Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s International editor who has had a great deal of experience reporting in America, calls it “clarity.”

The real question is: knowing what we know now, do we still feel that all men are really created equal? Do we feel that they should be endowed with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or do we think that some are better than others, and that there is not enough of the pie to go around, so let’s exclude those who are not strong or wealthy enough to play in the big leagues?

One of the most eloquent comments on what it means to be an American came in a BBC interview with Abdi Nor Iftin, who emigrated to the U.S. from Mogadishu, Somalia, after receiving a “golden” visa in 2014. Abdi had not graduated from high school in Somalia, but in America he first attended a community college and then graduated from Boston College, one of the city’s most prestigious universities. After graduation, he published a best-selling book, I Am an American, and then went to work for an NGO helping other refugees integrate into American society. Trump cut funding to the NGO, which ceased operation, but Abdi found numerous speaking engagements and other assignments that have kept him busy. He told the BBC that, of course, he does not like the racism that has characterized some members of the Republican Party since Trump took over, but on the whole he still finds Americans in general to be friendly, helpful, and encouraging. His brother had hoped to emigrate from Somalia to the U.S., but Trump made that impossible, so his brother emigrated to Canada instead and is now a Canadian citizen. “Canada is a beautiful country,” Abdi said, “and I like it very much, but given the choice, I still prefer to be an American.” In a sense, Abdi’s affirmation says it all.

Life in a deeply divided America is not easy for anyone, but the fact that we are finally able to discuss our differences openly is a good indication that we have come a long way. That said, we still need to decide who we really are and, more importantly, who we want to be.

An argument can be made that the human race faces global existential issues ranging from climate change to a scramble for diminishing resources to the menace of a new pandemic that wipes out much of the race the way the bubonic plague decimated human populations in the Middle Ages. The only way to handle these problems is through global cooperation, which means looking beyond national, ethnic, and racial characterizations and thinking of ourselves as human beings rather than members of opposing factions. The U.S., if it wants, has a head start on everyone else thanks to our diversity and the best notions of the political system that the Founding Fathers gave us. Despite the pettiness of a Donald Trump, we can still be the leader of the Free World if we want to be. We may not be there yet, but at least we’ve made a start.

So many catastrophes have hit the US in rapid succession lately that the true dimensions of the twin earthquakes that tore through Venezuela a week ago have been edged out of the headlines.

No one questions that the quakes rank as a major disaster. The official death toll, originally reported as a few hundred, now stands at more than 1,700. Another 50,000 or more are still unaccounted for.

So, ordinarily, Venezuela would rate as a major catastrophe, and there is no doubt the quake is just that. But how can a tragic act of God or nature in Venezuela compete for an American audience with President Donald Trump’s obvious intention to sabotage upcoming crucially important legislative elections?

Add to that the lingering economic aftershocks from Trump’s self-inflicted war against Iran and his Napoleonic bad taste in redecorating Washington — ranging from disfiguring the White House to transforming the reflecting pool, which visually links the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial, into an actual swamp.

And if that were not bad enough, you have Vice President JD Vance visiting the Nixon Library and suggesting that, in the current climate, Watergate doesn’t look that bad, and that maybe Richard Nixon’s crimes were overrated. Then there is the Supreme Court’s use of legal sophistry to overturn more than a century of precedent in order to give Trump a green light to wreak even more havoc.

Given all that, who has time to think about Venezuela?

In the best of times, we recognize that tragedies affecting other people in distant lands are unfortunate, but after a brief moment of empathy and reflection, we get on with the life that immediately affects us. Robert Frost captured this dynamic hauntingly in the last lines of his poem “Out, Out—,” in which a community beholds a young boy killed in a mishap involving a buzz saw: “And they, since they / Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.”

That is, until we find ourselves victims caught up in a comparable catastrophe. In a sense, every disaster presents an opportunity to learn more about the universe in which we are attempting to survive. The sin is in ignoring the lesson that the disaster offers us at such high cost.

There is nothing we can do to prevent an earthquake, or any other so-called act of God, from happening. But if we are smart, we can learn and be better prepared as a result.

That goes for Donald Trump as well as the general public.

Until last week, Trump had repeatedly bragged about his brilliant kidnapping of Venezuela’s leftist President Nicolás Maduro and his wife. Once Trump intervened in Venezuela’s government and engaged in “regime change,” the US to a certain extent became responsible for the new government’s actions.

When the quake hit and Venezuela proved incapable of responding effectively, it was not just Venezuela’s government that was at fault; it was the US government as well.

After abducting the Maduros, Trump installed a successor regime made up of Venezuelan politicians whom he knew were unpopular but who would not interfere with his efforts to gain control of Venezuela’s oil. As a result, in the minds of many Venezuelans, Trump shares the blame for their government’s tragically inept response to the earthquake.

In the hours and days after the quake hit, Venezuela’s government largely remained frozen in shock. In the absence of heavy, earth-moving equipment, ordinary citizens used hand tools, and their bare hands, to dig through the rubble of pancaked high-rise buildings. A survivor told the BBC, “I could hear my son calling from under the rubble. It was not the quake that killed him; it was negligence.” The government had the industrial-scale equipment needed to clear the wreckage, but it had no plan of action to get the equipment to the disaster site.

Learning From Calamities

Disasters on the scale of the Venezuelan earthquake have many bitter lessons to teach. The first such event I covered as a journalist occurred in 1980 in a city in northwestern Algeria then known as El Asnam (now called Chlef). It registered 7.1 on the Richter scale (which measures the magnitude of the energy released) and X on the Mercalli scale (which measures the intensity of the effects on the ground). It was the worst quake to hit Africa’s Atlas mountain range since 1790, and it killed more than 2,600 people. When you arrived on the scene, the first thing that you noticed was the sickly sweet smell of rotting human corpses.

The region had suffered a similarly devastating quake in 1954. At that time, the city, then known as Orléansville, was still part of a French colony. Back then, many geologists believed that earthquakes resulted from pressure suddenly building up beneath the earth’s surface. Once the pressure was released, the wisdom held, the danger had passed. Plate tectonic theory — the notion that the “solid” surface of the earth rests on individual plates floating on magma, a subterranean region of molten rock — had met with resistance at first. It did not reach full acceptance until the late 1960s.

It’s now known that earthquakes result when the plates collide. The French architects who built high-rise buildings in El Asnam couldn’t have known that, so they built the city’s high-rise buildings on columns that resembled stilts. When the quake hit, the stilts gave way and the multistory buildings pancaked to the ground. Uncovering the collapsed floors was like opening a can of sardines, with crushed bodies at each level.

Miraculously, one wooden house was left straddling a 6-foot-wide chasm opened by the quake. The wooden beams had enough flexibility to resist the initial shock, and the integrated structure had held together independently of the ground sliding beneath it. Its survival held a lesson for future planners: Plate tectonic theory taught architects to anticipate the way the earth moves in a quake and to build accordingly. But for the dead of El Asnam, the knowledge arrived too late.

We tend to refer to earthquakes by the legalistic phrase “act of God” — which implies that nothing can be done in the face of such disasters. But that is not true. You cannot prevent an earthquake, but in most cases you can take precautions that mitigate the harm.

The second major quake that I covered was in the Allai Valley in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province. The quake, registering 7.6 on the Richter scale, sheared off the sides of mountains and killed an estimated 80,000 people. Hundreds of thousands were rendered homeless and risked freezing in the approaching winter. The Pakistani administration was for the most part paralyzed.

A number of international nongovernmental organizations rushed to provide immediate aid, and their presence prodded the government into action. When I reached the mountain villages where the quake was centered, the reasons for the high death toll became apparent. When a tribesman built a house, he simply piled flat rocks on top of each other to make the walls. There was no mortar or cement. The roof was made by laying logs across the top of the walls and then piling several feet of dirt on top of that. When the quake hit, the walls separated and the logs, weighted down by several hundred pounds of compressed dirt, crushed the inhabitants.

A Diplomatic Security Service Mobile Security Deployments team is on the ground in Venezuela supporting US urban search and rescue teams from Fairfax County, VA; Los Angeles; and Miami. Photo credit: Diplomatic Security Service / Twitter (PD)

If a quake hit at night or during lunchtime, an entire village might be wiped out to the last person. These tribesmen had been living in the region for thousands of years. How had they never analyzed the danger and found another way of building their houses?

We tend to refer to earthquakes by the legalistic phrase “act of God” — which implies that nothing can be done in the face of such disasters. But that is not true. You cannot prevent an earthquake, but in most cases you can take precautions that mitigate the harm.

For centuries, Japan specialized in designing wooden buildings flexible enough to withstand the shock of most quakes. Instead of nails, traditional Japanese architecture relies on interlocking wooden joints that create structural flexibility. Japan’s traditional ishibadate technique places wooden columns directly onto loose stones rather than fixed footings, allowing the building to slide or tilt slightly to dissipate shockwaves. Traditional walls were made of lightweight woven bamboo and mud; sliding doors were made of paper to limit internal damage.

Modern buildings, especially in quake-prone California, rely on similar techniques. Beams and columns of the latest buildings are designed to sway flexibly when subjected to sudden shocks. The X-shaped cross-bracing seen on buildings like San Francisco’s Transamerica Pyramid and Hong Kong’s Bank of China, designed by I.M. Pei, has been engineered to hold everything together when external forces twist the structure. Massive steel, rubber, and lead bearings serve as shock absorbers to isolate modern structures in quake-prone regions from underground seismic waves.

All new structures in California are required to meet stringent building codes developed to resist quakes. The damage comes from older buildings built before current knowledge became available.

Ignoring Risk, Sandbagging Science

As the American Boy Scouts used to say, it pays to be prepared, yet not everyone is on board with that philosophy. At an international conference on disaster management, sponsored by the World Economic Forum in Geneva a few years ago, it was generally acknowledged that natural disasters are increasing in frequency and severity, owing in large part to climate change. No one doubted that a major disaster could destroy a company’s fixed assets. Everyone more or less agreed that a comprehensive emergency plan is crucial to survival, yet most participants admitted that they had assigned the development of their emergency plans to newly hired interns at the bottom of the executive ladder. These new recruits were the least able to make their concerns heard by their bosses.

The US prided itself on having a reasonably good record in emergency preparedness until the Trump administration began cutting back the federal government’s role in disaster relief, not to mention sandbagging the scientific research directed at mitigating and responding to the effects of climate change.

One CEO summed up his company’s point of view: “I’m not going to spend good money on something that will very likely never happen.” At least he was honest. But the experience in Venezuela and events in the United States, ranging from Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which nearly destroyed New Orleans, to the growing number of wildfires and floods in the western United States, are proof that these things do happen, and they are happening with a much greater frequency than anyone experienced in the past.

The US prided itself on having a reasonably good record in emergency preparedness until the Trump administration began cutting back the federal government’s role in disaster relief, not to mention sandbagging the scientific research directed at mitigating and responding to the effects of climate change.

Many of the cuts to these federal agencies have effectively blinded Americans to the dangers facing them. Like the quake survivors in Venezuela, we are likely to find ourselves wringing our hands when the next disaster in our own backyard catches us unawares.

Donald Trump insists that disaster response is best left to the individual states. He apparently forgets that the federal government, which is his responsibility to manage, was created precisely to deal with problems that are beyond any state’s capacity to handle.

In a way, Trump is like the CEO who said he didn’t want to spend money on something that hadn’t yet happened. But mitigating risk is precisely what the insurance industry is designed to do, and what foresighted governments do for their people. Venezuela is a prime example of what happens when a government fails to be prepared.

Each disaster has a lesson to teach. Whether the US public is too busy or too distracted to demand foresight is another matter altogether.

At a quick glance, Scott Pelley’s claim that he was surprised at being fired by CBS might seem a bit naive.

In case anyone missed the fracas at CBS News, Pelley, a 37-year veteran at CBS and the lead correspondent at CBS’s star news show, ‘60 Minutes,’ exploded at the show’s newly appointed producer, Nick Bilton, and CBS News’ controversial, recently appointed news director, Bari Weiss. Pelley accused Weiss of trying to kill the show and Bilton of having slender qualifications to replace the show’s producers who had just been fired. Neither Weiss nor Bilton had any previous experience in TV news.

Weiss’ argument is that despite the fact that ’60 Minutes’ had increased its last season’s audience by an astonishing 9%, it was failing to keep up with journalism’s rapidly changing ecosphere. In short, social media, notably X (formerly Twitter), TikTok, and other online media, are reshaping how the country relates to news, and ’60 Minutes’ was, in Weiss’ mind, beginning to look like a has-been.

To the average viewer, Pelley’s astonishment at being fired might seem a bit over the top. He is 68. The normal retirement age is 65. His net worth is estimated at more than $18 million. With his celebrity status, he is still quite employable. In the current climate, that is not the case for most Americans.

Pelley made it clear that he definitely thinks both his immediate bosses should be fired. During a period when I worked at NBC News, I had similar feelings about NBC’s European News Director, who had been nicknamed “Genghis Cohen, the Destroyer from the East” because he had ruined so many careers. At an introductory briefing, he casually explained that foreign correspondents didn’t need to speak the language where they were posted, since the network was going to tell them what to say anyway. I dismissed him with a few unmentionable words as a complete moron, which he was. I remember his response. “We like people who like us,” he said. “People who don’t like us, we get rid of.” I went off to Morocco for a month. Came back and got a job with a different network. That’s the way broadcast journalism usually works.

The news business is not for the faint of heart. The standard advice to anyone entering the field used to be, “If you can’t stand the heat, don’t go in the kitchen.” A former TIME executive offered sound advice: “Don’t fall in love with the company; it can’t afford to love you back.” Over the years, my feelings about journalism evolved. If you haven’t been fired at least once, I eventually concluded, it probably means that you are not doing your job. For a long time, Pelley was an exception in an industry prone to fast turnovers.

Looked at from a different angle, however, Scott Pelley’s rage is easy for anyone who has covered the news in life-threatening situations to understand. Part of his anger is an expression of solidarity and commitment to the team that made ’60 Minutes’ a top investigative news show.

Although he began his career in 1989, well after the Vietnam War, he covered action in the Middle East and Afghanistan. When you are into that kind of reporting, each story involves putting your life on the line. The news is no longer something that you take lightly. Pelley notes that his former boss and producer, Bill Owen, had saved his life while covering a now forgotten combat. These are not colleagues that you easily forget or abandon.

To Barry Weiss, CBS employees may seem more like a question of numbers. To Pelley, each is a deeply felt connection to another human being that you would risk your life to protect.

Neither Bari Weiss nor Nick Bilton has the background to fully understand that, and they clearly don’t care. To them, news is a business; either it makes money, or you go somewhere else.

The competition is not about telling the truth that might discomfit the rich and famous, but instead about capturing eyeballs that can eventually be monetized. As the crowd brought in by CBS’ new owners sees it, the public wants to be entertained, so instead of news, it makes sense to offer them ‘infotainement’: a goulash of ‘news you can use’ with a few intriguing tidbits about world events intended to give the aura of seriousness. The real objective on that score is to make everyone happy to be an American and safe at home.

America is not the only country to take this route. I had a friend in France who worked for one of the major TV channels and did a story about French railway workers rising early in the morning and breaking the ice in their kitchen sink so they could wash. The correspondent’s boss was furious and said, “You showed poverty. We don’t do that. At least not French poverty.” Better to show poverty in the Third World so your viewers won’t complain about rising prices at home or the politicians who are living high off their tax dollars. In that scenario, who cares about the harsh conditions faced by a few railway workers?

CBS News used to be different. The network began when William Paley decided to advertise his family’s cigar stores on a struggling network of 16 radio stations headquartered in Philadelphia and calling itself the Columbia Phonographic Broadcasting System. Paley’s cigar sales doubled within a year, and Paley subsequently gathered a group of investors and bought the network.

As the lead-up to World War II was unfolding in Europe, Paley dispatched Edward R. Murrow with orders to find talent willing to go on the air. Murrow hired the best, brightest, and most articulate reporters he could find, and then he became one himself. He fearlessly reported from rooftops during the London Blitz while Nazi bombers rained havoc down on the city. The men Murrow hired stayed with CBS News, and they turned the network into the gold standard for broadcast reporting.

As Scott Pelley discovered late in life, all good things come to an end. In a 1960 column, New Yorker writer A. J. Liebling pointed out that freedom of the press is really only guaranteed if you actually own one.

Vietnam and Watergate proved that the press has enormous power. That was an illusion. It didn’t take long for corporate America and a handful of wealthy billionaires to decide that if you want to escape media scrutiny, the best tactic is to buy up the media.

If you don’t want journalists to do their normal thing, or in the words of American humorist Finley Peter Dunne, “Comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable,” then hire journalists who won’t ask troubling questions or look too deeply into what is going on. Russia has used that tactic for a long time. Moscow has two major papers, Pravda (Truth) and Novosti (News). The joke in Moscow is that there is no truth in Pravda and no news in Novosti. Both papers developed a reputation for engaging in the political equivalent of infotainment. Russia, of course, is a totalitarian oligarchy with some of the external trappings of a modern democracy, but run by a dictator who makes certain that everyone knows which lines not to cross. The U.S. is not there yet, but is stumbling in that direction.

The trouble with the entertainment-as-opposed-to-news approach is that the enormous power the media enjoys does not come from the individual journalists who do the reporting. It stems, instead, from the truth that is a product of journalistic reporting. In a way, journalists are stuck in the role of the child in the story about the emperor’s new clothes. Their job is to shout out the fact that the emperor is naked. Once they stop doing that, when they avoid the essential truths that really matter, they no longer serve a purpose, and the power they once had evaporates.

‘60 Minutes,’ under the guidance of Bari Weiss and Nick Bilton, may die a slow, agonizing death, but I am convinced that journalism will continue even without Scott Pelley, ‘60 Minutes,’ or CBS News.

The reason I think that goes back to exchanges that I’ve had with journalists in other countries. In Indonesia, the editor of the local equivalent of Time Magazine told me he had to deal with a hysterical reporter who had just received a cardboard box containing a human head. The objective was clearly intimidation. The editor told the reporter not to worry. “I took the box and the head to the police station,” he said, and I told them, “I think this belongs to you.”

Later, I talked with a young woman who had been editing a newspaper in Kazakhstan and was in New York on a brief visit to the Journalism Department at NYU. We discussed the dangers of reporting in a totalitarian dictatorship. “They didn’t like what I was writing,” the young woman told me. “So they cut off the head of a dog and nailed it to my door. It was a message.” That sounded pretty intimidating, and I asked her why she kept on working despite the evident danger. “It’s what I do,” she said. Scott Pelley and ’60 Minutes’ may be gone along with CBS News, but there are plenty of others out there who are more than ready to fill the gap. It’s who we are and what we do.

Pericles delivers his funeral oration to the Athenians

If aliens from another planet were to land on the Mall in Washington, D.C., they might ask themselves what Memorial Day really means in today’s America.

TV and social media offer a flood of ads promoting mattress sales and quick deals on household appliances. Travel companies claim that they are honoring veterans with cut-rate deals.

For most Americans, Memorial Day is just another long weekend’s relief from an economy under strain from rising gasoline prices. The fact that the cost of just about everything has been rising since the Trump administration engaged us in a war that didn’t have to happen seems almost incidental. This is a day for honoring the dead; let’s not make it political.

To be fair, most Americans pay at least lip service to Memorial Day. For a few moments, they make an effort to remember what the celebration is supposed to be about. Then they use the extra free time to picnic, watch a game on TV, or simply relax. More than a few confuse the holiday with Veterans Day, which falls on November 11.

Times change, and people forget. For anyone still puzzled about the difference between the two holidays, Memorial Day, originally called Decoration Day, is intended to honor those Americans who died while defending their country. It’s origins go back to the American Civil War, which killed more Americans than all of the other major wars combined.

Veterans Day, formerly known as Armistice Day, originally celebrated the end of World War I, which officially terminated in 1918 at the 11^th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. After World War II quadrupled the number of U.S. casualties, it was decided to use the occasion to celebrate everyone who ever served in the military, whether killed in action or not.

Memorial Day, is different. It was chosen to fall on the second Monday in May, specifically because no major battle was fought on that day. As a result, it commemorates all the battles that Americans have ever fought and died in.

Official protocol calls for the flag to be raised to half-mast at sunrise in honor of those who died. At noon, the flag is to be raised to full mast in honor of all those who fought and survived.

The custom of choosing a specific day in the year to honor fallen heroes goes back to ancient Greece. In 431 BC, Pericles, arguably the greatest of Athens’ statesmen and generals, delivered a funeral oration that is recorded in the second volume of Thucydides’ History of the Pelopponesian War.

While Pericles praised the heroism of ancient Greece’s fallen warriors, the main thrust of his speech was that Athens’s heroes had prevailed not just because of their physical strength and courage, but because Athens, with its emphasis on democracy, justice, and openness, was worth dying for.

In many ways, Pericles description of Athenian democracy resembles how the Founding Fathers saw America. “Our constitution does not copy the laws of neighboring states,” Pericles told the Athenians, “We are rather a pattern to others than imitators. Our administration favors the many instead of the few; this is why it is called a democracy.” Pericles goes on to declare, “If we turn to our military policy, there also we differ from our antagonists. We throw open our city to the world, and never by alien acts exclude foreigners from any opportunity of learning or observing, although the eyes of an enemy may occasionally profit by our liberality; trusting less in system and policy than to the native spirit of our citizens; while in education, where our rivals from their very cradles by a painful discipline seek after manliness, in Athens we live exactly as we please, and yet are just as ready to encounter every legitimate danger.”

In America, funeral orations grew almost spontaneously in response to the anguish felt at the end of the Civil War. That war, caused by divisiveness, obstinacy, belligerence, and a refusal to compromise, was the most destructive in the nation’s history. It led to the death of nearly 700,000 Americans compared to roughly 100,000 Americans who died in World War I, and more than 400,000 in World War II. The Vietnam War cost more than 50,000 American lives, along with several million Vietnamese.

The reasons for engaging in World War II were clear; the reasons for America’s involvement in Vietnam, and the wars that followed in the Middle East, were less clear. When a war is fought for the wrong reasons, the military bears the brunt of criticism, but it is really their political leaders in Washington who are responsible. The military simply executes the orders given by the nation’s leadership, and if those orders are given for the wrong reason or based on a faulty understanding of reality, the results can be catastrophic.

When I was still in college, I considered myself a pacifist. I admired the non-violent philosophy of Gandhi and Thoreau, and I still do, but even back then, I had read enough history to realize that there are certain moments when the use of military force may be the only option.

In the lead-up to the Vietnam War, the draft was a constant threat. Just out of college, I had struggled to find a job and had finally landed a good one at UPI Television’s New York Bureau. I was due to be promoted to office manager when I received a notice to report for induction into the U.S. Army.

It was relatively easy to obtain a deferment, but I decided against that. After analyzing the situation, I felt that America did indeed need an army and that it would be wrong to demand that others do what you would not be willing to do yourself.

The first thing I learned in Basic Training was that the Purple Heart, the medal awarded to soldiers wounded in action, was to be avoided. Certainly, it was a proof of valor, but it really signified either that one had made a serious mistake, was in the wrong place at the wrong time, or simply had bad luck. Hardened soldiers look at war realistically. They know better than the jingoism that is frequently dumped on the public. The other dictum that was drummed into us was the advice that cowards die a thousand deaths, the brave only once.

I spent a year-and-a-half in Vietnam attached to a provincial advisory team on the Cambodian border. When my tour was finally up, I left the army and went back to Vietnam to spend another 4-1/2 years as a journalist reporting on the war.

Regardless of how one feels about Vietnam, there is no question that individual American soldiers exhibited enormous heroism under harrowing circumstances. The soldiers who fight a war are not responsible for the carnage that follows. The politicians and policymakers who decide that war is necessary carry the responsibility for that.

The secret that many soldiers who have actually been in combat know is that the sudden confrontation with lethal violence is inevitably followed by a period of self-doubt. Some become addicted to the adrenaline rush of surviving imminent death. Others constantly relive the incident, asking themselves if they could have handled it differently. Most feel that, given a second chance, they could have handled the situation better. That, of course, is an illusion. No one should have to face that kind of situation, and hardly anyone is ever prepared for it. The truth is that it is not possible to change what has already been done. War teaches you things that no civilized person should ever know.

The army teaches you to act without thinking. When your life is at stake, speed counts. Events move at hyper speed, and if you take the time to think about the next move, you will probably already be dead.

Many of the most impressive acts of heroism are the result of reflex reactions instilled by countless hours of training and repetition. It’s only later, after everything is over, that one has a chance to think about what actually happened. That is often followed by “survivor’s guilt.” Where is the justice in the fact that you survived an impossible situation while others didn’t? The real truth is that war is an endlessly lethal game of roulette. It is not skill or strength that saves you. It is luck. None of it is just or rational.

In a Hollywood movie, these situations are usually presented as high drama; in real life, they frequently seem absurd.

Nevertheless, for those who have seen the carnage that war produces, Memorial Day will always be felt as something deeper than just another opportunity for mattress sales and commercial giveaways.

To the public that has only experienced war in Hollywood movies, Memorial Day comes across as a more or less abstract concept, easy to forget.

After several years in Vietnam during the war, I tried to explain to a wealthy neighbor back in the U.S. the senselessness that I had experienced there. “Who in their right mind would join the army?” he said. Right, I thought. The neighbor worked on Wall Street, drove a BMW, and had a house worth more than a million dollars. It certainly would not be him. He could buy his way out of any situation, and yet the GIs that I had known in Vietnam, mostly 18 to 20 years old, had not tried to shirk their duty; they had put their lives on the line, if not for the country, at least for their friends. They had faced the ultimate test of patriotism, and most had shown exceptional courage and maturity that surpassed anything experienced in civilian life.

In the end, it had all been for nothing. Vietnam was fought based on the “domino theory.” The argument that if Vietnam fell to the Communists, all Asia would fall in succession like a string of dominoes.

In fact, once the U.S. had pulled out, America forgot about Vietnam. It had never really made any strategic difference.

The mistakes that led to the war in Vietnam had been made, not by GIs, but by policy advocates in Washington who knew next to nothing about Asia and got it wrong from the beginning. The wars in Iraq and the fight in Afghanistan were similarly doomed, and for much the same reason. The heroes were still heroes, but the wars they fought had been based on false assumptions.

Not all of the heroism involves active warfare. In 1979, an angry mob of Pakistani protesters, incited by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, attacked and set fire to the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan.

A crowd of terrified Americans and Pakistanis huddling inside the embassy was in immediate danger of being murdered by the enraged mob. The government of Zia al Haq refused to intervene until Jimmy Carter, who was then president, threatened retaliation against Pakistan. Zia continued to hesitate. The embassy was on its own.

Marcia Gauger, who was Time Magazine’s bureau chief, stationed in New Delhi at the time, happened to be in the embassy while it was under siege. She later wrote that although Carter ultimately received credit for ending the crisis, everyone who had actually been there knew that it was really the U.S. Marines who had saved their lives. Many of them were only 17 or 18 years old. A Marine guard and a warrant officer were killed holding off the mob while politicians hesitated, trying to decide what to do. They had paid the ultimate price, but their names were quickly forgotten.

It is that kind of often anonymous courage under fire that has characterized the best aspects of the U.S. military since George Washington and the ragtag Continental Army camped at Valley Forge. It is that which those who have actually served tend to remember on Memorial Day.

It might be difficult for our current Commander-in-Chief to understand the mentality that leads to ultimate sacrifice, even though he more than willingly demands it of others. Donald Trump famously avoided the draft through no less than five deferments. In all fairness to Trump, his last deferment based on an alleged medical condition resulting from “bone spurs” occurred after the draft had already turned into a lottery. The chance of Trump actually being called on to serve was practically zero. Nevertheless, he refused to take any chances. There is no question about which side of the thin red line he had chosen for himself.

It is an axiom in the military that any true leader should be ready to face the risk that he demands of his men. Many presidents have occupied the White House without having served in the military, but Trump’s obvious relish in sending America’s military into combat based on a personal whim, now that he is personally out of danger, is unsettling.

Trump’s use of special operation troops to kidnap the president of Venezuela, his extrajudicial assassination of Iran’s leaders, his involvement of the U.S. in an unnecessary war that has spun out of control and now threatens the global economy, his destruction of our relations with former NATO allies who previously strengthened America’s defense, his vague threats to use American military power to overthrow the government of Cuba, his irrational firing of America’s top-ranking military officers and his placement of Pete Hegseth, a Fox News weekend anchor, as a bellicose, self-styled “Secretary of War,” all that gives the impression that Trump thinks of the U.S. military as a personal plaything. And that puts a new twist on this year’s Memorial Day celebrations.

The ultimate issue is the one put to the ancient Athenians when Pericles noted that Athens was worth risking one’s life and possibly dying for. Mattress sales aside, will Americans still be prepared to die in order to protect the corrupted control of government by wealthy oligarchs that Trump seeks to impose on us? Even more to the point, will future Americans be prepared to die to defend a country that voted for a man like Donald Trump? My guess is that Trump and his MAGA followers will soon be gone, but the memory of those heroes who paid the ultimate price to keep America strong will remain, and so too will Memorial Day. But that is just a hunch.

For a few minutes last Saturday, journalists and Washington celebrities attending the annual White House Correspondents’ dinner had a chance to feel what it’s like to be under hostile fire from an unknown gunman. It’s safe to say that no one liked the experience. The remarkable thing, considering that the room was filled with crack journalists, is that hardly anyone made an instant comparison of their own emotional reaction to the thoughts that must have been running through the minds of millions of Iranians and Gaza Palestinians, Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rained hellfire and damnation on them during “Operation Epic Fury.”

Thankfully, no one was seriously hurt during the attack, but the same cannot be said for the U.S.-Israeli-led action in the last few months. When a direct hit from a U.S. ballistic missile killed nearly 100 elementary school children at the Shajereh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab, Iran, the reason for their deaths was left in limbo as the Pentagon refused to acknowledge responsibility. In the end, they will very likely be explained away as regrettable collateral damage, the result of a Pentagon targeting error. The Trump administration had canceled the military department that was supposed to double-check targets, because our new “Secretary of War,” Pete Hegseth, felt that the military was acting too cautiously out of concern for civilian casualties. Empathy is not a strong suit in Washington these days.

When one’s own life is on the line, the situation looks quite different. The White House, not surprisingly, denounced the attack as driven by hatred of the American system, exacerbated by the uncompromising rhetoric of the Democratic Party. The president took it as yet another argument in favor of his tasteless plan to attach a gargantuan ballroom to the White House.

There is no question that Cole Tomas Allen, the normally mild-mannered gunman who tried unsuccessfully to break into the dinner, intended to cause harm. He wielded a shotgun, a pistol, and three knives, and he shot a Secret Service agent in the chest at point-blank range. Thanks to a bulletproof vest, the agent survived and was quickly released from the hospital. Before launching his Quixotic attack, Allen took selfies of himself, heavily armed, in his hotel room. One had the impression of a video game fanatic, imagining himself in a game of “Call of Duty,” who had finally decided to turn fantasy into reality.

Cole Tom Allen photographs himself in a hotel mirror before his failed attempt to turn fantasy into reality

When Allen tried to rush through a metal detector and then ran past a number of security agents, the agents unleashed a fusillade of gunfire. None of the bullets hit Allen, but in the confusion, he toppled to the ground and was quickly restrained. The real terror at the dinner came from SWAT teams brandishing submachine guns and looking for possible targets among the audience of reporters and celebrities. The fear experienced by the crowd was real, even if the danger was not.

What Allen really hoped to accomplish is less clear. He referred to himself in social media posts as “Cold Warrior” and “Friendly Federal Assassin.” Ten minutes before the failed assault, Allen sent a note to his family explaining what he saw as his mission. The parents immediately informed the FBI, which probably saved Allen’s life, even though the rest of it is likely to be spent in prison. The full text of the note, referred to by the press as a “manifesto,” is difficult to find on the Internet. The White House press office admonished reporters for bringing it up. It is, however, revealing.

Far from filled with hatred, the first half of the note consists of no less than six apologies to family, friends, and acquaintances for having “abused their trust” and having lied in order to carry out his doomed plan.

Allen then gives a somewhat garbled account of his reasoning. As an American, he finds it intolerable that his representatives in the government are committing crimes in his name. He refers to the representative that he has in mind as a “pedophile, rapist, and traitor.” He never mentions Trump by name, but one assumes that that is whom he is talking about. Trump admitted as much when he blurted out, “I am not a pedophile!”

The two key elements in Cole Allen’s note are: 1) He has a deep sense of guilt by association. When Trump orders illegal actions against innocent people, he does so in the name of the United States, which means that he is doing so in our name. We are consequently guilty for having allowed him to do so, just as the German public was previously held responsible for having allowed Hitler’s followers to create Nazi death camps. We are especially responsible if we do nothing to stop what we see as injustice. If we remain silent, we are all criminals. 2) Allen points out that the U.S. is supposed to be governed by the rule of law; When the government and the justice system ignore the law, which Allen clearly feels is happening now, we enter a period in which anything goes, including assassination.

An observant writer on the social media platform, Reddit, who goes by the name GC, pointed out that far from being a lunatic radical, Allen’s note is “internally consistent and logically organized.” The problem is that the logic is based on a moral premise that is not only unacceptable, but it simply doesn’t work. If Cole Allen had succeeded in killing Trump, the murder would have made Trump a martyr, and we would be more deeply mired in his goofy MAGA philosophy than we are today. In a sense, shooting the president would be similar to Trump and Netanyahu killing Iran’s Supreme Guide, Ali Khamenei, who was due to retire anyway. Killing Khamenei simply worsened the situation and prolonged the agony of Iran’s civilian population. The difference between Cole Allen and Trump is that Allen wanted to shoot someone, but failed to do so because the guardrails in place prevented him from doing any real harm. In contrast, Trump managed to remove most of those guardrails, and in his own words, would have annihilated an entire civilization if the global reality of the situation hadn’t intervened.

The bottom line is that political problems are rarely solved by assassination. If someone had explained that to Donald Trump and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu before they targeted Iran’s top leadership, we might have a better chance of exiting Trump’s mess in Iran. It’s hard to negotiate when there is no one left with enough authority to compromise.

Writing on Reddit, GC goes on to describe the psychological wound that people feel when they believe they “are being made complicit in actions they feel are deeply wrong.” GC concludes that Cole Allen’s language is not the language of anger. “It is the language of contamination. Of someone who feels his own identity is being stained by what his government does in his name.”

The bottom line is that Cole Allen felt he could no longer stand to be a “bystander to things he considered to be crimes.”

Cole Allen uses the bottom half of his note, or “manifesto,” to thank nearly everyone that he has ever met. He sounds astonished that he managed to get as close to Washington’s elite as he did. He considers the lack of security “actually insane.” In fact, once Allen revealed his intentions, the security system worked very well. The egregious error was to have the entire U.S. government chain of command, the President, Vice-President, Speaker of the House, and Secretary of State, in the same room at the same time. We’ll never know if the Trump administration had decided on a designated survivor. It’s an obvious mistake that the Iranians, who by now have become used to routine assassinations either by the Trump administration or Israel, would never have made. But then the Iranians may have a healthier view of government, in that they see their leaders as managers who can be easily replaced when necessary, rather than figures who engage in the cult of personality.

As for Allen’s future prospects, which are likely to involve spending the rest of his life in jail, he seemed to know what to expect. The bottom lines of his note read: “Oh, and if anyone is curious how doing something like this feels: it’s awful. I want to throw up; I want to cry for all the things I wanted to do and never will, for all the people whose trust this betrays; I experience rage thinking about everything this administration has done.

“Can’t really recommend it! Stay in school, kids.”

Cole Tom Allen’s ‘Manifesto’:

Hello everybody!

So I may have given a lot of people a surprise today. Let me start off by apologizing to everyone whose trust I abused.

I apologize to my parents for saying I had an interview without specifying it was for “Most Wanted.”

I apologize to my colleagues and students for saying I had a personal emergency (by the time anyone reads this, I probably most certainly DO need to go to the ER, but can hardly call that not a self-inflicted status.)

I apologize to all of the people I traveled next to, all the workers who handled my luggage, and all the other non-targeted people at the hotel who I put in danger simply by being near.

I apologize to everyone who was abused and/or murdered before this, to all those who suffered before I was able to attempt this, to all who may still suffer after, regardless of my success or failure.

I don’t expect forgiveness, but if I could have seen any other way to get this close, I would have taken it. Again, my sincere apologies.

On to why I did any of this:

I am a citizen of the United States of America.

What my representatives do reflects on me.

And I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.

(Well, to be completely honest, I was no longer willing a long time ago, but this is the first real opportunity I’ve had to do something about it.)

While I’m discussing this, I’ll also go over my expected rules of engagement (probably in a terrible format, but I’m not military so too bad.)

Administration officials (not including Mr. Patel): they are targets, prioritized from highest-ranking to lowest.

Secret Service: they are targets only if necessary, and to be incapacitated non-lethally if possible (aka, I hope they’re wearing body armor because center mass with shotguns messes up people who aren’t.

Hotel Security: not targets if at all possible (aka unless they shoot at me)

Capitol Police: same as Hotel Security

National Guard: same as Hotel Security

Hotel Employees: not targets at all

Guests: not targets at all

In order to minimize casualties I will also be using buckshot rather than slugs (less penetration through walls)

I would still go through most everyone here to get to the targets if it were absolutely necessary (on the basis that most people chose to attend a speech by a pedophile, rapist, and traitor, and are thus complicit) but I really hope it doesn’t come to that.

Rebuttals to objections:

Objection 1: As a Christian, you should turn the other cheek.

Rebuttal: Turning the other cheek is for when you yourself are oppressed. I’m not the person raped in a detention camp. I’m not the fisherman executed without trial. I’m not a schoolkid blown up or a child starved or a teenage girl abused by the many criminals in this administration.

Turning the other cheek when someone else is oppressed is not Christian behavior; it is complicity in the oppressor’s crimes.

Objection 2: This is not a convenient time for you to do this.

Rebuttal: I need whoever thinks this way to take a couple minutes and realize that the world isn’t about them. Do you think that when I see someone raped or murdered or abused, I should walk on by because it would be “inconvenient” for people who aren’t the victim?

This was the best timing and chance of success I could come up with.

Objection 3: You didn’t get them all.

Rebuttal: Gotta start somewhere.

Objection 4: As a half-black, half-white person, you shouldn’t be the one doing this.

Rebuttal: I don’t see anyone else picking up the slack.

Objection 5: Yield unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.

Rebuttal: The United States of America are ruled by the law, not by any one or several people. In so far as representatives and judges do not follow the law, no one is required to yield them anything so unlawfully ordered.

I would also like to extend my appreciation to a great many people since I will not be likely to be able to talk with them again (unless the Secret Service is astoundingly incompetent.)

Thank you to my family, both personal and church, for your love over these 31 years.

Thank you to my friends, for your companionship over many years.

Thank you to my colleagues over many jobs, for your positivity and professionalism.

Thank you to my students for your enthusiasm and love of learning.

Thank you to the many acquaintances I’ve met, in person and online, for short interactions and long-term relationships, for your perspectives and inspiration.

Thank you all for everything.

Sincerely,

Cole “coldForce” “Friendly Federal Assassin” Allen

PS: Ok now that all the sappy stuff is done, what the hell is the Secret Service doing? Sorry, gonna rant a bit here and drop the formal tone.

Like, I expected security cameras at every bend, bugged hotel rooms, armed agents every 10 feet, metal detectors out the wazoo.

What I got (who knows, maybe they’re pranking me!) is nothing.

No damn security.

Not in transport.

Not in the hotel.

Not in the event.

Like, the one thing that I immediately noticed walking into the hotel is the sense of arrogance.

I walk in with multiple weapons and not a single person there considers the possibility that I could be a threat.

The security at the event is all outside, focused on protestors and current arrivals, because apparently no one thought about what happens if someone checks in the day before.

Like, this level of incompetence is insane, and I very sincerely hope it’s corrected by the time this country gets actually competent leadership again.

Like, if I was an Iranian agent, instead of an American citizen, I could have brought a damn Ma Deuce in here and no one would have noticed shit.

Actually insane.

Oh and if anyone is curious how doing something like this feels: it’s awful. I want to throw up; I want to cry for all the things I wanted to do and never will, for all the people whose trust this betrays; I experience rage thinking about everything this administration has done.

Can’t really recommend it! Stay in school, kids.

-30-

The controversial AI-generated image that Trump posted on “Truth Social,” and then deleted, claiming he thought that it showed him as a medical doctor, not Christ.

There has been a tendency over the last few weeks to dismiss some of Donald Trump’s most unhinged comments as nothing more than a shrewd negotiating tactic known as the Mad Man’s strategy . The risk is that in providing a logical reason for Trump’s increasingly inexplicable behavior we may be making him look more rational than he really is. When Richard Nixon developed the Mad Man approach during the Vietnam War, the reasoning was that being logical gives your opponent an advantage in negotiations since it lets him predict your next moves.

By behaving erratically, the situation is no longer predictable, and the opponent has to worry that you just might do the unthinkable. In Iran’s case, that might be a decision to drop an atom bomb on Tehran.

A major weakness inherent in the tactic is that Americans expect to be included in the decision-making process, or at least kept reasonably informed. After all, we are a democracy, and at least in theory, the president works for us. We pay his salary.

The danger in trying to find rational explanations for Trump’s behavior is that we may be fooling ourselves into thinking the situation is less serious than it really is. No one wants to consider the prospect that the president, who has the wherewithal to launch World War III on a moment’s notice, might actually be going bonkers.

Not everyone is convinced that Trump is OK. There is a growing concern that Trump may be experiencing an increasingly alarming series of potentially lethal senior moments. Former CIA director, John Brennan, and more than 70 Democrats in Congress have called for Trump’s removal either by implementing the 25^th ammendment, which empowers a majority of the cabinet to decide when the president is dangerously incompetent and to then transfer acting power to the Vice-President, or through impeachment, which requires a majority of the House of Representatives and a two-thirds majority in the Senate to remove the president for actions forbidden by the U.S. Constitution. There have been plenty of those recently.

Despite the growing clamor for Trump’s removal, it is still hard to tell whether Trump really has gone off the deep end or is simply a wily political fox. At least some of the jury is still out when it comes to Iran. Trump’s current battle against the Catholic Church, or more specifically against Pope Leo XIV, however, is more difficult to explain.

At least on the surface, it looks as though Trump has nothing to gain by antagonizing the Catholic Church. At least eight members of his cabinet are Catholic. Vice-President J.D. Vance converted to Catholicism nearly seven years ago at the age of 35. Six of the nine justices on the U.S. Supreme Court are Catholic. At least 50 million Americans, roughly 20% of the U.S. population, consider themselves to be Catholic. An estimated 29% of American Catholics are Hispanic, the ethnic category most targeted by Trump’s anti-immigration campaign. Many voted for Trump, reasoning that once accepted by the U.S. it might make sense to close the door against the flood of other immigrants clamoring to get in. All that is understandable, but what was Trump thinking when he took on the church?

Trump’s primary complaint seems to have been triggered by an address given in Italian, in which Pope Leo XIV warned against “the delusion of omnipotence,” and to “break the demonic cycle of evil,” an obvious reference to launching an unnecessary and unwanted war against Iran.

Leo, an American, seemed to be stating the obvious when he suggested that hubris has led the U.S. towards a dead end in Iran and that the way out is to return to Christian values, which consist mainly of rejecting hatred and inflammatory language and a return to basic decency and consideration of one’s fellow man.

“It is here that we find a bulwark against that delusion of omnipotence that surrounds us and is becoming increasingly unpredictable and aggressive,” he said. “Even the holy Name of God, the God of life, is being dragged into discourses of death.”

Trump’s response to Leo’s gentle reprimand was a series of tirades in a similar tone to his unhinged comments about Iran. “I don’t want a Pope who thinks it’s OK for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon,” he said. “I don’t want a Pope who thinks it’s terrible that America attacked Venezuela, a country that was sending massive amounts of Drugs into the United States and, even worse, emptying their prisons, including murderers, drug dealers, and killers, into our country.”

The fact that Leo never mentioned Iran, Venezuela, or nuclear weapons, or that Venezuela was actually sending drugs to Europe, not the U.S., didn’t seem to bother Trump. These days, Trump seems unable to tolerate any criticism, no matter how softly it’s delivered. In the end, Trump’s reaction illustrated the dangers of hubris that Leo had been warning against.

Trump’s ultimate diatribe against Leo accused him of being a “liberal.” It is not clear what Trump means by the term. The Oxford Dictionary defines a liberal as “a supporter of a political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise.” That sounds pretty much like the traditional description of what it means to be an American.

Trump accompanied his tirade on his “Truth Social” platform with his famous AI-generated image of himself portrayed as Jesus Christ. Not very long ago, simply posting the image would have been considered blasphemy. Probably unnoticed by Trump, the image included a three-horned figure hovering above his head.

When I typed a query into Google’s Gemini AI inquiring about the figure, it answered: “In the Bible, specifically Daniel 7:8, the “three horns” (or three uprooted horns) represent three kingdoms, nations, or kings that are conquered or displaced by the rise of the “little horn,” which many scholars identify as an end-times ruler, the Antichrist, or a specific political power. They symbolize the overthrow of established powers.”

Trump, who rarely goes to church, was raised a Presbyterian or Calvinist, but eventually rejected that denomination and now refers to himself as “non-denominational.” Is he the anti-Christ, a figure in the Bible who pretends to be Christ, but, in fact, opposes everything that Christ stood for? How would Jesus have reacted to ICE, or Trump’s readiness to send people to Alligator Alcatraz? His support for the annihilation of the Palestinian population in Gaza, or his threat to do the same to Iran? Is Trump simply applying the Mad Man strategy to the Vicker of Christ, or has he really gone off his rocker?

In the Bible, the anti-Christ, or false Christ, appears shortly before the End of Times, in other words, the end of the world. Some Evangelicals, many of whom voted for Trump, welcome the anti-Christ as hastening Armageddon, the final showdown between good and evil that ultimately results in the destruction of the planet. It doesn’t matter if the U.S. decides to take the side of evil or blindly follows the anti-Christ; the destruction of humanity will hopefully initiate the “Second Coming,” in which Christ returns to give a final judgment on what is left of humanity. Trump, with his ability to launch a nuclear war, no doubt looks like an appealing candidate to usher in the End of Time.

Trump is clearly not a religious scholar, and it is doubtful that he fully understood the religious symbols incorporated in the image he posted. After the backlash that followed, he promptly deleted the image and then awkwardly explained that he had thought all along that it was nothing more than an imaginative portrayal of himself as a simple medical doctor, administering to the poor, in short, not much more than a humble volunteer at Doctors Without Borders, or another well-meaning NGO. As for the light emanating from his palms in the picture or the figure of the anti-Christ circling over his head, all that was incidental.

The incident and the furor that followed emphasized the dangers of mixing religion and politics, yet that is precisely what Trump’s administration has been trying to do. Despite his ever-expanding narcissism, it’s doubtful that Trump actually sees himself as a Christ figure. What gets Trump’s competitive juices flowing is the impact that Christ had on human history. Trump never got over the fact that Barack Obama, a black man, received the Nobel Prize, and yet the prize still remains beyond Trump’s reach. The mess he has created in Iran is not likely to improve matters. Trump’s narcissism may only be a cover for a deep sense of insecurity about who he really is, but that’s Trump’s problem. The MAGA effort to recruit Christian Nationalists into their campaign to turn America into an authoritarian state is much more dangerous. Figures like Pete Hegseth are all too ready to see their Christian faith as a simple matter of: “Praise the Lord, and pass the ammunition.”

Joseph Campbell, who spent his life studying comparative mythology, pointed out that much of the early organization of human society was based on myths that attempted to explain creation and existence itself. The myths ultimately evolved into religions, which proved extremely powerful in structuring human society. The problem, Campbell said, arose when obvious contradictions in the mythology cast doubts on their reliability. As the contradictions in the mythology were rejected, the social structure that the mythology held together as a kind of glue began to fritter away. The result inevitably looked like a slide into social anarchy. The conservative antidote is something closer to fascism.

In America, freedom of religion provided a refuge for a multitude of Christian denominations. Each interpreted the Bible in its own way, and that often resulted in contradictory conclusions. Trump’s self-styled “Secretary of War,” Pete Hegseth, for instance, cites different Bible texts to support his efforts to increase lethality in the military. It’s doubtful that Jesus would have agreed, but Jesus is not here to contradict Pete Hegseth.

The Catholic Church, which Pope Leo XIV now heads, fought long and hard against letting individuals interpret the Bible for exactly that reason. William Tyndale was burned at the stake in 1536 for daring to translate the Bible into English and making it accessible to the common man. There’s no telling how many people were also burned at the stake because one sect or another gave their own interpretation to difficult Biblical passages that clearly ran counter to the teaching of Jesus, who advised his followers to do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

In contrast to Trump’s ‘Mad Man’ outbursts on “Truth Social,” what Pope Leo tried to do was far from controversial. He simply observed that hubris and delusions of omnipotence often lead to lethal consequences, and that a return to basic decency and a readiness to listen to others before resorting to violence will inevitably lead everyone in a better direction. Trump inevitably failed to get the message, even though the path that led Trump to threaten the elimination of an entire civilization could well lead to Armageddon. Whether it is already too late for Trump and/, incidentally, the rest of us remains to be seen.

America’s 250th anniversary is fast approaching, just as Donald Trump has done his most to redefine what it means to be an American. At the moment, things don’t look that bright for Trump, and even less bright for the new version of America he has been trying to sell. Trump’s immediate crisis, the war he started against Iran, is about to spin out of control, and that tends to distract from his real problem, the midterm elections that threaten to transform his second term in office into a crippled, lame duck presidency. If the war in Iran escalates into regional mayhem, or World War III, Trump could face another impeachment, this time with conviction more or less guaranteed. After that, the major corruption on the part of his family, feeding off the presidency in order to enrich itself, could lead to a number of prison sentences. It’s not a cheerful future.

Taking that into account, Trump may have thought that a war with Iran would be just the trick to distract the public from his flailing presidency’s other difficulties. If that was his intention, it didn’t work out as expected. Catastrophe was temporarily averted when Trump backed down on his threat to catapult Iran back to the Stone Age. But the results of the fiasco so far can hardly be seen as an American victory.

Besides wasting billions of dollars and depleting America’s stock of Patriot missiles, the war has basically revealed three previously overlooked realities that Trump failed to consider.

The first is that from Iran’s perspective, the Strait of Hormuz is a more useful weapon than any nuclear weapon. Iran’s capacity to shut off 20% of the world’s energy by closing down the Strait of Hormuz is all that it needs to make itself heard. Iran only needs to intimidate insurance companies about the potential risk of sending a supertanker through a narrow, hostile waterway, and the rest is easy.

The second realization that the war has now broadcast to the world is that while the U.S. has enough bombs and missiles to put on an impressive fireworks display, it lacks the will and the ready manpower to finish the job by deploying troops in actual combat.

If not exactly a paper tiger, Trump has demonstrated to the world that, despite Trump and Hegseth’s unhinged threats, the U.S. is simply too soft and comfortable to make the kind of effort needed to impose a lasting change. The human carnage that characterized the 19^th Century and the loss of life created by two world wars is no longer acceptable. As a result, Trump has erased the last traces of the fiction that the U.S. was the “Leader of the Free World.” In its place, Trump has reduced America to just another bit player in a sordid scramble for global power. Trump’s statement that he wanted to split multimillion-dollar tolls with Iran for allowing ships to pass through the Strait is just another example of where Trump is coming from. You can take the scam artist out of Queens, but you can’t take Queens out of the scam artist.

A third, unintended consequence is that Trump has virtually guaranteed that Iran will not be a democracy in the foreseeable future. Iranians had hoped that the Islamic Republic’s self-styled “Supreme Guide,” the 86-year-old Ali Khamenei, would eventually either retire or reach the end of his biological tether. By killing Khamenei, but failing to dislodge Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard, the war prolonged a regime that the U.S. and most Iranians had hoped was about to meet a natural end.

At least for a short while, the sense of relief in having avoided the Armageddon that seemed likely to result from Trump’s war will very likely cover up the fact that the war, which accomplished nothing positive, quickly turned into an unnecessary drain on America’s finances and a disaster in terms of useless destruction of people and infrastructure that didn’t need to happen.

No one knows what is really going on in Trump’s addled brain these days, but taking a step or two back, it is easy to conclude that all this recent mayhem was really an attempt to distract the public from an impending series of political and economic disasters at home.

By pretending that Iran was about to blow up the world, Trump could at least blame rising prices and cuts to health care on the war, even if he was the one responsible for starting it. Americans have a natural inclination to rally around the flag when faced with an external threat, so Trump figured, why not create one?

Before launching his attack against Iran, Trump had been primarily occupied with leaving his mark on nearly every location he could find in Washington. He was, in a sense, like a dog pissing against a tree.

In rapid succession, he added his own signature to the Treasury Secretary’s on US paper currency. He had already demolished the White House’s East Wing in order to build a gigantic ballroom that threatened to dwarf the original White House. Haste led to avoidable mistakes. Plans for the ballroom folly had been so hastily concocted that the main entrance was through what looked like a servant’s door on the side of the building. When Trump shamelessly added his name to Washington’s Kennedy Center, most known performers, including the Washington National Symphony Orchestra, separated themselves from what they took to be a catastrophe in the making. With hardly anyone willing to perform. Trump was forced to close it down, ostensibly for a round of face-saving “renovations.”

Trump’s monumental pièce de résistance was intended to be a Gargantuan “Independence Arch” over the bridge leading to Arlington Cemetery. Dubbed by critics the “Arc de Trump.” The monstrosity, if built, would be 250 feet high, nearly 100 feet taller than Paris’ Arc de Triomphe. It threatened to dwarf the Lincoln Memorial at the end of the National Mall.

Trump’s blatant vulgarity inspired a mischievous artist to plant an oversized golden toilet on the National Mall.

Trump’s charm in the beginning had been a refreshing blend of political incorrectness, a readiness to say out loud what many people felt in their gut, but were afraid to voice in public. The problem is that many of the raw emotions that we feel instinctively in our gut are not conducive to civilized behavior.

Trump may have been amusing at the start. Over time, however, his tone, his disrespect for American institutions and civilized behavior, his racism and misogyny, began to look disturbingly like narcissism mixed with tinges of megalomania. We have been there before, but before Trump, the derailed narcissist was usually a foreign dictator we were trying to bring under control. Trump may earn his place in the history books, but it won’t be the one he really wants. An Ignoble rather than Nobel Prize.

Trump’s desperate attempts to solidify his legacy are one thing. What he has done to America’s traditions and standing in the world — in other words, to all the things that really did make America great — is a far more dangerous project. What Trump has put at risk is American democracy itself.

Turning a Democracy Into a Monarchy

Trump’s narcissism and egocentric bullying, which seemed awkward during his first term in office, are starting to cause permanent damage not just to the United States but to the world at large.

Thanks to Trump, the US is now engaged in an unnecessary war in which the US is the aggressor. As a result, we face a critical energy shortage, gas prices are skyrocketing, and Trump has effectively circumvented the checks and balances that for over two centuries protected the country from someone like himself.

The US, for all intents and purposes, finds itself balancing on a tightrope without a safety net.

Yet while many see extreme danger, Trump seems blissfully unconcerned. Asked during an impromptu press encounter on Air Force One about the war he started with Iran, Trump kept turning the discussion back to his ballroom.

Polls show his popularity at a new low, but at this point, Trump really doesn’t care. What he does care about is the thrill of exercising the immense power given to the US president.

Asked by The New York Times in January whether he felt there were any limits to his power, Trump responded, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

Asked a similar question more recently about US efforts to strangle Cuba, Trump replied, “I ​mean, whether I free it, take it. Think I can do anything I want with it.”

Trump may think everything is fine, but as far as the United States is concerned, we are a long way from the days of the Declaration of Independence. These days, Donald Trump sounds a lot closer to King George III than George Washington.

In theory, the president is supposed to represent the American public, not his personal whim. When he speaks, the world at large interprets his statements as representing what you and I believe as Americans. After all, a plurality of the American electorate voted for him.

Now we are stuck with him. The U.S. Constitution provides only two mechanisms for removal before the expiration of his four-year term, neither of which has ever been used successfully. After helping draft that constitution, Ben Franklin commented that we had a republic, “if you can keep it.”

We appear to be losing it.

Is Democracy Still Possible?

Two and a half centuries after the Declaration of Independence, our ability to succeed as a democracy remains in question. The paralysis, misinformation, racist ideology, and openly fascist tendencies of the current administration raise questions not only about the survivability of the United States but also about the validity of democracy itself. An intelligent colleague asked, “How can I believe in a democracy that voted for Trump twice?” Much of the rest of the world is asking the same question.

Democracy is the most valid form of government, at least for the United States, but it also depends on free speech, and that is complicated by the nature of communications in the Information Age. As the Italian novelist and philosopher Umberto Eco put it: “Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community … but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner.”

The challenge today is that the chaotic, transformational phases that are normal in any democratic debate have taken on unprecedented proportions, aided by computer algorithms that feed social media posts to millions of users, with a business incentive to channel outrage and tribalistic division. Periods of instability are inevitable. We are experiencing one of them right now.

Even in the best of times, democracy has never been a guarantee of good government. It has always been touch-and-go. The only thing that democracy really offers is an opportunity for the public to have at least some say in its own destiny. In short, democracy gives us a chance — regardless of who we are, our wealth, pedigree, or social status — to express an opinion about where it is that we want to go as a country.

In contrast, monarchies, dictatorships, and oligarchies hand control over our future to someone else, be it a single strong man or a narrow group.

In feudal times, peasant serfs were asked to trust the king to make the right choice. History proved that it was rarely in their best interest. The American Revolution aimed at a different approach. Its basic idea, that the beliefs of the common citizen are worth paying attention to, came from the Age of Enlightenment. America was an experiment to see whether that could really work. Up until now, it has.

Of course, not all democracies make the right choices. The citizens of Athens voted as a democracy to force Socrates to commit suicide by drinking hemlock. Plato never forgave Athens or democracy for that wrong-headed decision.

By its very nature, democracy is a perpetually unsettled form of government, subject to the moods of the public. Democracy can only exist if there is a rule of law that guarantees the right of citizens to express themselves honestly and is supported by a rule of law that protects the individual against arbitrary recrimination by the state. Yet, to thrive, democracy depends on the commitment of all its citizens to the commonwealth — a commitment to promote a common good that benefits everyone in one way or another.

The Ability to Freely Exploit Americans

American democracy was weakened by the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which, along with several subsequent SCOTUS rulings, enabled corporations to spend money freely in elections — giving rise to super PACs and the massive amounts of corporate “investment” in candidates we see today.

Novelist John Steinbeck wrote his book Travels With Charlie in an attempt to rediscover America after having spent considerable time in Europe. In a 1961 letter to his editor, after traveling across the country, Steinbeck wrote: “If I wanted to destroy a nation, I would give it too much, and I would have it on its knees, miserable, greedy and sick.”

Steinbeck’s observation recalls the passage in the Bible, where Jesus tells his flock: It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.

Simply put, as people enter the stratosphere of the ultra-wealthy, their commitment to the society that enabled them to become rich tends to wither away. The United States currently has nearly 1,000 billionaires, more than any other country, and yet we are told the country cannot afford to adequately fund public education or universal health care. In a recent speech, Trump singled out day care, Medicare, and Medicaid as expenditures the federal government, with its proposed $1.5 trillion military budget, could no longer afford.

Trump’s desperate attempts to solidify his legacy are one thing. What he has done to America’s traditions and standing in the world — in other words, to all the things that really did make America great — is a far more dangerous project.

California currently has a billionaire-tax proposal that is gaining signatures to appear on the November ballot. The proposal would establish a one-time tax of 5 percent on any state resident having a total wealth of more than $1 billion. Google co-founder Sergey Brin recently added $25 million to the $20 million he had already put into a super PAC to oppose the measure. If the billionaire-tax ballot initiative goes through and survives the inevitable legal challenge, it will cost Brin $12 billion of his personal fortune, currently estimated at around $247 billion.

Other California billionaires — including Brin’s former partner in founding Google, Larry Page — have already moved out of the state, notably to Florida, to avoid paying the tax. Brin may be wealthy, but his commitment to the welfare of his fellow Americans is apparently limited, or it hasn’t entered his consciousness.

In its early days, Google had a motto: Don’t be evil. You do not hear that anymore. And Google’s founders are not alone. Elon Musk, who is the world’s richest individual with more than a trillion dollars in assets, has already abandoned California for Texas, where he can do what he wishes without having to contribute to his fair share of social costs.

Even though they already have more money than they know what to do with, billionaires are more than willing to spend wads of cash to avoid having to contribute a slightly higher share of their wealth to improving the society that made them wealthy.

The California tax is intended to fund education, housing, and other vital needs in a desperately unequal society. But as today’s billionaires see it, those issues are “California’s problem.” What we are dealing with here is arguably a question of contemporary American values.

When Donald Trump talks about “Making America Great Again,” he is not referring to the foundational vision of a country governed by the people and for the people. He is really talking about the “American Dream” — the illusion that in America, virtually anyone can become a millionaire, or these days, a billionaire.

In theory, anyone can win the lottery. But for most of us, lotteries are little more than a numbers racket in which hope springs eternal while the odds are stacked against us.

In reality, the promise of the American dream has always been mostly a sales pitch intended to encourage immigrants to move to America, where they can work for low wages in hopes of one day bettering the lot of their descendants.

Against great odds, many succeeded, even if they didn’t become millionaires. But these are precisely the people that Trump is now trying to discard with his rabid anti-immigration campaign. In fact, what Trump really wants is a return to the age of the “robber barons,” when there was no income tax and no protections for the easily exploitable poor. It worked well until the false lure of unfettered capitalism — that no-holds-barred competition would bring the “good life” to all — was finally discredited by the Great Depression.

Immigrants, one and all: Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Chairman and CEO of News Corporation Rupert Murdoch, and Chairman of Palantir Peter Thiel. Photo credit: Gage Skidmore / Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0), David Shankbone / Wikimedia (CC BY 3.0), and The Prime Minister Office of Japan / Wikimedia (CC BY 4.0).

The ‘Right Kind’ of Immigrants

Ironically, many of the self-styled conservative Republicans leading Trump’s charge against immigration are themselves immigrants. Rupert Murdoch, the owner of Fox News, one of the most influential voices promoting the MAGA ideology, emigrated from Australia; Elon Musk, who recently played a pivotal role in shredding America’s civil service, emigrated from South Africa to Canada and then to the US. Billionaire investor Peter Thiel, who was largely responsible for promoting JD Vance as Trump’s vice president, was born in Germany and raised in South Africa before emigrating to the US. Stephen Miller, the dark force behind ICE and Trump’s mass deportation campaign, comes from a family that came to the US from Russia. His uncle has publicly denounced him for denying others the benefits that the US granted to his family. All of Donald Trump’s grandparents were immigrants — from Germany and a remote island off the coast of Scotland. None of them spoke English as their first language.

Trump, who personifies the current ultra-conservative Republican zeitgeist, clearly believes that the “right kind” of people have white skin and hail from northern Europe. He has said repeatedly that he believes that Africa is a “shit hole” and that Somalis are garbage, and he appears to believe that any immigrant from the Global South is a potential rapist, drug fiend, or murderer. Statistical data argues otherwise, but Trump insists that he alone knows best.

Hitler went to war based on the belief that everyone not belonging to what he considered to be a northern European Germanic master race was inferior and best eliminated in order to improve humanity itself. The Judeo-Christian concept of empathy towards one’s fellow man, he believed, represented a cultural weakness that sapped the vitality of primal man. Musk thinks along similar lines. Human empathy, he has argued, is a trap.

World War II was fought largely to prove Hitler wrong, and the American support for the postwar Nuremberg trials set that verdict in stone. But that was a long time ago.

___________

The illusion that has seized Trump, much as it seized King George III, and was ultimately rejected by the American Revolution 250 years ago, is that a single person, the right one, can independently make the decisions for all of society. Hitler was not alone. Stalin had a similar approach. What resulted was the restriction of an entire society to the limitations of one man. The truth is that no single person has the answer for everything. America’s success has always depended on cooperation and teamwork. Diversity has made it stronger—not weaker. In the spirit of the 18th-century European Enlightenment, our forefathers sought to base American society on reason and logic, not the whims of a megalomaniac.

The democracy that we have today traces its roots back to England and the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215. Britain’s King John — later valorized in the legends of Robin Hood and the Sheriff of Nottingham — faced the barons of England, who refused to support the king with tax money unless he promised to abide by certain rules. To get the funds he needed, John was forced to acknowledge that he was not above the law, as spelled out in the document later known as the Magna Carta.

Britain’s entire population at the time of King John was estimated at between 1 and 2 million people. It had already doubled since 1016 when William the Conqueror commissioned the Domesday Book as a means of determining taxation.

As England’s population expanded rapidly, English society became too complex for one man to manage alone. The king found himself increasingly dependent on the nobility, which by law wielded the power of the purse. With the Industrial Revolution and the rise of England’s commercial class, power shifted to the population at large. Parliament, which had begun as an informal discussion group among barons (“parlement” is French for “where one speaks”), gradually evolved into a vehicle for including a wider network of individuals in the decision-making process.

Failing to take the popular mood into account risked revolt. As technological advances increasingly shaped society, the ability of dissatisfied groups to sabotage a government that refused to listen made democracy the most stable form of government. The word sabotage, in fact, derives from the habit of French workers using their wooden shoes, or “sabots,” to stop industrial machinery during strikes. The bottom line is that no one imposed democracy on Western Europe or the United States; it evolved naturally because, after experiencing the alternatives, it was widely seen as the most rational system of government.

In 1947, Winston Churchill, who led Britain during World War II, summed up the argument for democracy in a speech to Parliament: “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

As we approach the 250th anniversary of the United States, none of that appears to have made an impression on Donald Trump. “I don’t need international law,” Trump told The New York Times, “I’m not looking to hurt people.” Maybe, but in launching an ill-considered war against Iran, Trump has already killed thousands of Iranians — combatants and noncombatants, including many women and children — as well as a number of American troops. He has also put the entire global economy at enormous risk.

The best one can say in his defense is that he may have thought that Iran really did represent a danger to the United States. He clearly assumed that the Iranian regime would quickly collapse under fierce bombardment from US and Israeli forces, and he may have thought that would enable him to seize control of Iran’s enormous oil reserves. If so, he guessed wrong. But guessing was never his job.

His job was to listen to military and intelligence experts and make a rational decision based on facts rather than emotion-clouded instinct or personal whims. As it turned out, his actions were driven by self-serving fantasies that overrode a careful reading of reality. Not unlike the government of King George III in dealing with the American colonies. We got rid of King George more than two centuries ago. As for Trump, the end of that story remains to be written.

Hercules Defeats the Hydra of Lerna.’ Design by Frans Floris, printed by Cornelis Cort, and published by Hieronymus Cock, 1563.

In Greek mythology, Hercules had to confront a multiheaded monster known as the Hydra. When you cut off the monster’s head, two more appeared in its place. In killing most of Iran’s known leadership, the American-Israeli bombing campaign against Iran has effectively created the modern equivalent of the Hydra.

The Iranians had already seen what an American-Israeli attack could be like during the massive American-Israeli bombardment last June. That attack was designed to knock out Iran’s nuclear program, but missed its cache of highly enriched uranium. Forewarned, Iran’s leadership created four layers of replacements for commanders who might be killed in a new assault. In addition to picking ready replacements for key personnel, they decentralized their forces, dispersing them into 31 semi-autonomous command centers, each equipped with its own supply of missiles and ammunition, and support troops. It’s a safe bet that any of the independent command groups have enough asymmetric firepower to keep the Strait of Hormuz closed, effectively paralyzing the global energy supply.

The assassination of Ali Larijani, a brutal but pragmatic politician who had headed Iran’s security apparatus, is just one example of the possible negative effects inherent in murdering Iran’s top leadership. Larijani may have been a reprehensible character, but if the US decided it needed to end the confrontation, he was one of the few people who had enough authority to convince Iran’s different commanders to stand down. The danger now is that one Iranian faction may agree to a ceasefire while another continues the attacks on Gulf shipping.

As it stands now, neither Donald Trump, Steve Witkoff, nor Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, knows who on the other side can be trusted to begin negotiations. It’s doubtful that the Iranians know themselves. The likelihood is that the individual commanders will need to go through a turbulent period before they can decide among themselves who is really in control.

What is apparent is that the government is now firmly in the hands of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Iran’s civilian population has suffered. The IRGC is more in control than it was before the bombing began. Not long ago, there was some speculation that different ethnic groups, notably the Kurds, might challenge the Guard’s authority. That option seems to have vanished as the Guard and its militia component, the Basij, have tightened their control over a shell-shocked population. It is a safe guess that if Iran was not really serious about building a nuclear device before, it certainly will be now.

In effect, Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu kicked a hornet’s nest when they attacked Iran. Now it’s not clear how they will get out of the mess that they created.

The Greek myth about the Hydra was, of course, an allegory, an attempt to explain the situation the Greeks faced in ancient times by relating the problem and its solution to a simple story that everyone could understand. Hercules eventually realized that cutting off the heads of the Hydra couldn’t work. Instead, he used a torch to burn the heads to a stump. In today’s terms, that would mean stamping out each of Iran’s autonomous command centers. That’s unlikely to be done from the air.

The situation recalls a routine lecture I heard during the first day of US Army basic training. The lecture was delivered by a general whose name I’ve forgotten, but I remember his key point: “Air power and artillery are impressive,” he said, “but in the end it is always the rifleman on the ground who delivers victory.”

Donald Trump currently has two Marine expeditionary groups headed for Iran, along with another 2,000 troops from the 82nd Airborne Division, roughly two-thirds of America’s available rapid deployment force. The total is around 7,000 men. The Pentagon is refusing to confirm or deny a story that ran in The Wall Street Journal that Trump is now considering sending an additional 10,000 troops into the region.

In Vietnam, at the peak of US deployment, more than 500,000 US troops were on the ground. During the Iraq War, roughly 170,000 US troops were deployed. Both wars ended in failure, but it was really Vietnam that constituted a near-perfect study in the dangers inherent in asymmetric warfare. Wars are asymmetric when one side has overwhelming power, and the other has next to nothing, except ingenuity and a gift for doing the unexpected. The classic example was the duel between David and Goliath.

In the current struggle, the US and Israel find themselves playing the role of Goliath. Goliath’s fatal weakness was hubris, a failure to understand what the other side can suddenly come up with. What really matters in combat is not always obvious. Who could have imagined, in the case of David and Goliath, that a simple slingshot would prove more powerful than a sword?

Anyone can fall victim to hubris. In Vietnam, I remember an American Army colonel casually commenting that the war was all about money. “Whoever has the most,” he said, “wins.” I was dismayed at the colonel’s cluelessness. The US clearly had the most money, and it was clear, even then, that it was losing. “There are a bunch of guys out there dressed in black pajamas and wearing sandals made from airplane tires,” I told him, “and they are making fools out of the US Army. I don’t see how you can say it’s about money.”

In Vietnam, the US used helicopter-borne sophisticated sensors that could detect a human presence moving beneath a seemingly impenetrable jungle canopy. Once the sensors had detected a mass troop concentration, B-52 strikes were called in. The North Vietnamese caught on fairly quickly and began hanging plastic bags of urine in the trees. The odor tricked the helicopter-borne sensors into believing the enemy was still there, even though it had long since moved on. Countless B-52 strikes dropped hundreds of thousands of dollars of bombs on empty jungle. The only thing that had been accomplished was to blow up a bunch of trees and the US economy. The US has always been tempted by new technology that proved inconsequential or useless on the battlefield.

Vietnam’s total population during the war was less than half of Iran’s today. Iraq’s population during George Bush’s war there was less than a third of Iran’s population today. Considerably more than 7,000 men will be needed on the ground if the US really wants to control the situation. It may not be worth the effort. It is hard to see how the US can prevail in Iran, so it may make more sense not to try.

The Vietnam War was lost from the start because the US knew from the beginning that if it passed a certain limit, China would enter the war and overwhelm the US with sheer numbers. From the start, the whole affair became a war of attrition in which the US had a great deal to lose and nothing to gain.

The Iranians are considerably more technically sophisticated than Vietnam, and it is clear that Russia and China are more than ready to help Iran from behind the scenes. A number of Iranian missiles have been at least partially reengineered from Russian models. It is not clear how Russia and China will react if the US rampages through Iran the way it did in Vietnam and Iraq. Pushed too far, the situation could be the spark that ignites World War III, although it’s not likely to come to that. The more likely scenario is that Trump’s initiative will lead to some serious American casualties.

Trump may have been told that a few crack American combat groups can seize and hold Kharg Island, effectively cutting off all Iranian oil exports and strangling the country into submission. Holding Kharg Island, however, will make some of America’s crack troops a target for drone and missile attacks, which will not only lead to casualties but also exhaust US resources.

Part of the asymmetry of the current conflict is that Iran can produce its Shahed drones for as little as $20,000 a piece, and it is producing thousands of them. In contrast, a Patriot missile costs at least $3 million. The US burned through $2.4 billion worth of Patriots in just the first five days of its attack against Iran. That’s a boon to American arms manufacturers, but it is ultimately unsustainable as far as the US Treasury is concerned. Even if US troops survive a ground war in Iran, the damage to the flow of oil and gas needed to keep the world functioning would do critical damage to the entire world economy. None of this had to happen, but the fact is that Donald Trump made it happen.

Of course, not everyone sees the war as a bad thing. Saudi Arabia and some of the Gulf emirates have encouraged Trump to keep the attack going for a bit. The Saudis are concerned that fossil fuels may be on the way out, and the war gives them a chance to make billions on the increased cost of oil. The oil companies that invested millions in getting Trump elected are already earning billions of extra dollars from the surge in prices. Refueling at an admittedly notorious gas station in Los Angeles has already hit more than $8 a gallon. Russia has experienced a surge in profits, and even Iran is managing to make a bundle.

Trump insists that the US doesn’t need the Strait of Hormuz because it is a net oil exporter and isn’t afraid of shortages. But the price of oil depends on the total global supply. Energy costs will skyrocket everywhere, especially in the US, which transports nearly everything by truck. That said, Trump has done his best to sabotage alternative energy. In the midst of the bombing, he refunded nearly a billion dollars to the French oil company, Total, in order to take back its leases on a potential offshore wind farm that Trump wanted to kill. The condition was that Total promised not to invest the refunded money in wind energy.

Speculators also stand to gain from the war. During the Russian occupation of Afghanistan, the Kremlin became experts at dumping gold on the market just after they had created a crisis, and then watching the price skyrocket. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that a flurry of activity hit the American stock market just 15 minutes before Trump posted on Truth Social reassuring investors that a resolution was in sight and that oil supplies might not be shut off.

It’s not known if there was any connection, but Forbes and other news media reported that the Trump family holdings have nearly doubled since Trump took office, from $3.9 billion to from $6 billion to $7.3 billion. California Rep. Robert Garcia (D), and Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden (D) both wrote complaints to the White House, charging that Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner was carrying out negotiations in the Middle East for the US government while simultaneously attempting to raise millions of dollars from the Saudis as private investment in his personal equity fund.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has repeatedly stated that the US is no longer interested in “nation building.” Trump made it clear during his kidnapping of Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro that he doesn’t really care what kind of government is installed after the US has engaged in regime change, as long as it agrees to do business with the US on Trump’s terms. Trump may have similar plans for the Middle East. From a regional point of view, the massive bombing campaign looks very much like an attempt to reestablish colonialism, only this time with a larger share of the region’s oil going to the United States. It goes without saying that hardly anyone in the region is willing to accept that without a fight.

The real losers in the mess that Trump has created are ordinary Iranians who had hoped for a change in government once the 86-year old Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei had been forced to retire. With the IRGC now firmly in control, liberation from that brutal regime may not happen for decades. Australia has already begun refusing visas to Iranians, fearing a new surge in refugees fleeing the country. The only sensible resolution will ultimately have to come from diplomatic negotiations, and that will be difficult as long as the US and Israel continue attempting to bomb the country back to the Stone Age.

The rational approach is to let things cool off and eventually begin talking again. Unfortunately, as long as immense profits can be made from the chaos, it’s difficult to get anyone in Tehran or Trump’s administration to think rationally about long-term consequences.

In Greek mythology, Hercules had to confront a multi-headed monster known as the Hydra. When you cut off the monster’s head, two more appeared in its place. In killing most of Iran’s known leadership, the American-Israeli bombing campaign against Iran has effectively created the modern equivalent of the Hydra.

The Iranians had already seen what an American-Israeli attack could be like during the massive American-Israeli bombardment last June. That attack was designed to knock out Iran’s nuclear program, but missed its cache of highly enriched uranium. Forewarned, Iran’s leadership created four layers of replacements for commanders who might be killed in a new assault. The Iranians had known all along what to expect and, in addition to picking ready replacements for key personnel, they decentralized their forces, dispersing them into 31 semi-autonomous command centers, each equipped with its own supply of missiles and ammunition, and support troops. It’s a safe bet that any of the independent command groups probably have enough asymmetric firepower to keep the Strait of Hormuz closed, effectively paralyzing the global energy supply.

The assassination of Ali Larijani, a brutal but pragmatic politician who had headed Iran’s security apparatus, is just one example of the possible negative effects inherent in murdering Iran’s top leadership. Larijani may have been a reprehensible character, but if the U.S. decided it needed to end the confrontation, he was one of the few people who had enough authority to convince Iran’s different commanders to stand down. The danger now is that one Iranian faction may agree to a ceasefire while another continues the attacks on Gulf shipping.

As it stands now, neither Donald Trump, Steve Witkoff, nor Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, knows who can really be trusted to begin negotiations. It’s doubtful that the Iranians know themselves. The likelihood is that the individual commanders will need to go through a turbulent period before they can decide among themselves who is really in control.

What is apparent is that the government is now firmly in the hands of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard. Iran’s civilian population has suffered. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard is more in control than it was before the bombing began. Not long ago, there was some speculation that different ethnic groups, notably the Kurds, might challenge the Guard’s authority. That option seems to have vanished as the Guard and its militia component, the Bassij, have tightened their control over a shell-shocked population. It is a safe guess that if Iran was not really serious about building a nuclear device before, it certainly will be now.

In effect, Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu kicked a hornet’s nest when they attacked Iran. Now it’s not clear how they will get out of the mess that they created.

The Greek myth about the Hydra was, of course, an allegory, an attempt to explain the situation the Greeks faced in ancient times by relating the problem and its solution to a simple story that everyone could understand. Hercules eventually realized that cutting off the heads of the Hydra couldn’t work. Instead, he used a torch to burn the heads to a stump. In today’s terms, that would mean stamping out each of Iran’s autonomous command centers. That’s unlikely to be done from the air.

The situation recalls a routine lecture I heard during the first day of U.S. Army Basic Training. The lecture was delivered by a general whose name I’ve forgotten, but I remember his key point: “Air power and artillery are impressive,” he said, “But in the end it is always the rifleman on the ground who delivers victory.” Donald Trump currently has two Marine expeditionary groups headed for Iran, along with another 2,000 troops from the 82^nd Airborne Division, roughly 2/3rds of America’s available rapid deployment force. The total is around 7,000 men. The Pentagon is refusing to confirm or deny a story that ran in the Wall Street Journal that Trump is now considering sending an additional 10,000 troops into the region.

In Vietnam, at the peak of U.S. deployment, more than 500,000 U.S. troops were on the ground. During the Iraq War, roughly 170,000 U.S. troops were deployed. Both wars ended in failure, but it was really Vietnam that constituted a near-perfect study in the dangers inherent in asymmetric warfare. Wars are asymmetric when one side has overwhelming power, and the other has next to nothing, except ingenuity and a gift for doing the unexpected. The classic example was the duel between David and Goliath.

In the current struggle, the U.S. and Israel find themselves playing the role of Goliath. Goliath’s fatal weakness was hubris, a failure to understand what the other side can suddenly come up with. What really matters in combat is not always obvious. Who could have imagined, in the case of David and Goliath, that a simple slingshot would prove more powerful than a sword?

Anyone can fall victim to hubris. In Vietnam, I remember an American army colonel casually commenting that the war was all about money. “Whoever has the most,” he said, “wins.” I was dismayed at the colonel’s cluelessness. The U.S. clearly had the most money, and it was clear, even then, that it was losing. “There are a bunch of guys out there dressed in black pyjamas and wearing sandals made from airplane tires,” I told him, “and they are making fools out of the U.S. Army. I don’t see how you can say it’s about money.”

In Vietnam, the U.S. used helicopter-borne sophisticated sensors that could detect a human presence moving beneath a seemingly impenetrable jungle canopy. Once the sensors had detected a mass troop concentration, B-52 strikes were called in. The North Vietnamese caught on fairly quickly and began hanging plastic bags of urine in the trees. The odor tricked the helicopter-borne sensors into believing the enemy was still there, even though it had long since moved on. Countless B-52 strikes dropped hundreds of thousands of dollars of bombs on empty jungle. The only thing that had been accomplished was to blow up a bunch of trees and the U.S. economy. The U.S. has always been daled by new technology that proved inconsequential or useless on the battlefield.

Vietnam’s total population during the war was less than half of Iran’s today. Iraq’s population during George Bush’s war there was less than a third of Iran’s population today. Considerably more than 6,000 men will be needed on the ground if the U.S. really wants to control the situation. It may not be worth the effort. It is hard to see how the U.S. can prevail in Iran, so it may make more sense not to try.

The Vietnam War was lost from the start because the U.S. knew from the beginning that if it passed a certain limit, China would enter the war and overwhelm the U.S. with sheer numbers. From the start, the whole affair became a war of attrition in which the U.S. had a great deal to lose and nothing to gain.

The Iranians are considerably more technically sophisticated than Vietnam, and it is clear that Russia and China are more than ready to help Iran from behind the scenes. A number of Iranian missiles have been at least partially re-engineered from Russian models. It is not clear how Russia and China will react if the U.S. rampages through Iran the way it did in Vietnam and Iraq. Pushed too far, the situation could be the spark that ignites World War III, although it’s not likely to come to that. The more likely scenario is that Trump’s initiative will lead to some serious American casualties.

Trump may have been told that a few crack American combat groups can seize and hold Kharg Island, effectively cutting off all Iranian oil exports and strangling the country into submission. Holding Kharg Island, however, will make some of America’s crack troops a target for drone and missile attacks, which will not only lead to casualties but also exhaust U.S. resources. Part of the asymmetry of the current conflict is that Iran can produce its Shahed drones for as little as $20,000 a piece, and it is producing thousands of them. In contrast, a Patriot missile costs at least $3 million. The U.S. burned through $2.4 billion worth of Patriots in just the first five days of its attack against Iran. That’s a boon to American arms manufacturers, but it is ultimately unsustainable as far as the U.S. treasury is concerned. Even if U.S. troops survive a ground war in Iran, the damage to the flow of oil and gas needed to keep the world functioning would do critical damage to the entire world economy. None of this had to happen, but the fact is that Donald Trump made it happen.

Of course, not everyone sees the war as a bad thing. Saudi Arabia and some of the Gulf emirates have encouraged Trump to keep the attack going for a bit. The Saudis are concerned that fossil fuels may be on the way out, and the war gives them a chance to make billions on the increased cost of oil. The oil companies that invested millions in getting Trump elected are already earning billions of extra dollars from the surge in prices. Refueling at an admittedly notorious gas station in Los Angeles has already hit more than $8 a gallon. Russia has experienced a surge in profits, and even Iran is managing to make a bundle.

Trump insists that the U.S. doesn’t need the Strait of Hormuz because it is a net oil exporter and isn’t afraid of shortages. But the price of oil depends on the total global supply. Energy costs will skyrocket everywhere, especially in the U.S., which transports nearly everything by truck. That said, Trump has done his best to sabotage alternative energy in spite of the oil. In the midst of the bombing, he refunded nearly a billion dollars to the French oil company, Total, in order to take back its leases on a potential offshore wind farm that Trump wanted to kill. The condition was that Total promised not to invest the refunded money in wind energy.

Speculators also stand to gain from the war. During the Russian occupation of Afghanistan, the Kremlin became experts at dumping gold on the market just after they had created a crisis, and then watching the price skyrocket. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that a flurry of activity hit the American stock market just 15 minutes before Trump Tweeted on X, reassuring investors that a resolution was in sight and that oil supplies might not be shut off. It’s not known if there was any connection, but Forbes, as well as other news outlets, reported that the Trump family's holdings have nearly doubled since Trump took office, from $3.9 billion to $7 billion. California Congressman Robert Garcia and Oregon Senator Ron Wyden both wrote complaints to the White House, charging that Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner was carrying out negotiations in the Middle East for the U.S. government while simultaneously attempting to raise millions of dollars from the Saudis as private investment in his personal equity fund. Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, has repeatedly stated that the U.S. is no longer interested in “nation building,” Trump made it clear during his kidnapping of Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro that he doesn’t really care what kind of government is installed after the U.S.has engaged in regime change as long as it agrees to do business with the U.S. on Trump’s terms. Trump may have similar plans for the Middle East. From a regional point of view, the massive bombing campaign looks very much like an attempt to re-establish colonialism, only this time with a larger share of the region’s oil going to the United States. It goes without saying that hardly anyone in the region is willing to accept that without a fight.

The real losers in the mess that Trump has created are ordinary Iranians who had hoped for a change in government once the 86-year old Khamenei had been forced to retire. With the Islamic Revolutionary Guard now firmly in control, liberation from that brutal regime may not happen for decades. Australia has already begun refusing visas to Iranians, fearing a new surge in refugees fleeing the country. The only sensible resolution will ultimately have to come from diplomatic negotiations, and that will be difficult as long as the U.S. and Israel continue attempting to bomb the country back to the Stone Age.

The only rational approach is to let things cool off and eventually begin talking again. Unfortunately, as long as immense profits can be made from the chaos, it’s difficult to get anyone in Tehran or Trump’s administration to think rationally about long-term consequences.

The use of airstrikes and missile attacks to kill important Iranian leaders such as Ali Larijani, the head of Iran’s security network, and Esmaeil Khatib, Iran’s chief of intelligence, may look like the road to victory, but it’s a strategy that can easily backfire. In general, assassination is a tool that should be used sparingly.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Larijani, and Khatib were known quantities, and their approach to warfare was understood by Western intelligence agencies. The actions of their replacements will be harder to predict.

In short, the Trump-Netanyahu strategy has had the effect of substituting a future opponent we don’t know for one that we did know fairly well. Not only that, but the new leaders who step in to replace the ones we have just killed are likely to have less experience and consequently less judgment than their predecessors. That can make them harder to deal with, and the situation can easily turn into a downward spiral, leading to escalating violence rather than victory. In fact, after the Israeli-American bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities last June, the Iranians had prepared themselves for just this type of shock-and-awe attack. Khamenei and Larijani had created four layers of replacements for key commanders. As soon as one leader was killed, an alternative was ready to take his place. Instead of firing all their missiles at once, the Iranians fired their less effective missiles first, saving the more powerful ones for an extended campaign. As a result, Iranian resistance is proving to be far more resilient than either Trump or the Israelis expected. Trump was in effect caught in a trap, and the U.S., along with him.

Trump’s confusion over Iran is not hard to understand. Both he and his “Secretary of War,” Pete Hegseth, have a fundamental distrust and disdain for what they consider to be the “deep state,” and which everyone else considers to be the Washington establishment. That includes the US State Department, the CIA, the National Security Agency, and, in Hegseth’s case, the Pentagon.

Trump fired a wide range of career diplomats who together represented decades of painfully acquired expertise. Hegeth dressed down America’s military command, sneering that they were not lethal enough and too afraid of taking risks.

The result in both Trump’s and Hegseth’s cases has been a venture into dangerous new territory that neither is equipped to handle. Instead of turning to American diplomats with a proven track record in the Middle East, Trump appointed his real estate buddy, Steve Witkoff, and his own son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to try their hand at navigating a diplomatic minefield that had previously baffled America’s best and the brightest.

Witkoff, who had no previous diplomatic experience, lacked the technical expertise to understand what the Iranians were actually saying. He apparently thought that enriched uranium intended for use in a US-manufactured reactor was actually going to be used for a bomb. He was unaware that the reactor had been modified to operate on less highly enriched uranium and that the uranium in question posed no threat.

Other diplomats felt that Witkoff should have taken the Iranian offer to Washington, where it could be examined by people who had a better understanding of technical issues.

A more serious problem was that Trump, having rejected the State Department’s expertise, found himself increasingly influenced by Netanyahu. It’s doubtful that Trump ever fully realized that Netanyahu and the US have very different agendas in the Middle East.

Trump’s hope is to hurt Iran enough so that it will agree to his terms. Netanyahu’s goal is to kill everyone in Iran’s leadership so that there is nothing left except disorganized factions squabbling with each other and too weak to pose a threat.

The US is primarily interested in regional stability, which is a requisite for business, which is what America is really about. The ultimate American goal has to be a peaceful solution.

By contrast, Netanyahu represents a country with a population of only 10 million people, only 7.7 million of whom are Jewish. He is trying to survive in a hostile environment in which Israel appears hopelessly outnumbered. His strategy for the last several decades has been to divide and conquer. He may not be able to definitively defeat the overwhelming numbers that want to do Israel in, but he can at least weaken them by setting one faction against another, and creating a semipermanent state of chaos.

Netanyahu’s strategy, in effect, calls for a perpetual state of war in which no one has enough power to challenge Israel. The strategy worked to a degree in Lebanon, which was already defined by the artificial divisions imposed by colonial powers after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire following World War I. But Iran is much larger and strategically far more important.

The conflicting American and Israeli goals leave Trump in a bind. His vision is to hurt Iran enough so that it will agree to his terms. Netanyahu’s goal is to kill everyone in Iran’s leadership so that there is nothing left except disorganized factions squabbling with each other and too weak to pose a threat.

Trump would like to get out of Iran, but there is no one left to negotiate with. At least there is no one that Trump can identify as having the power to negotiate. After the mayhem that the American-Israeli campaign has wreaked on Iran, it’s unlikely that anyone would negotiate with Trump in any case.

For Trump, there is no ready exit. The Strait of Hormuz is likely to remain closed, and the US will have to deal with the financial consequences.

Netanyahu also faces a difficult situation. Having decapitated Iran’s leadership, he now has to deal with a dispersed command that the Iranians call their “mosaic defense” strategy. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has established at least 31 relatively autonomous command centers, each capable of making decisions and acting independently. Ali Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba Khamenei, was supposed to be the unifying element, but if he goes, the different commands can operate without him.

That’s already started to happen with independent rocket attacks against countries in the Persian Gulf. The dispersal of command has made it hard to predict what Iran will do next, or how anyone will get all of the centers to agree to a ceasefire.

The only solution is to send in troops on the ground. Israel doesn’t have sufficient manpower to do that, and the US doesn’t have the will. Iran is much bigger and more complicated than Iraq or Vietnam.

As far as the dispersal of command goes, Italy faced a similar situation when it isolated the heads of the Italian Mafia by imprisoning them on a remote island in the late 1990s. The tactic eliminated the Mafia as a coherent organization, but the central leadership was replaced by dozens of independent groups, each of which had to be dealt with separately. The autonomous groups proved even harder to deal with than the old hierarchy.

An irony in Iran is that despite the regime’s anti-American rhetoric, many Iranians remained surprisingly pro-American. After the Trump-Netanyahu shock-and-awe bombing campaign, it’s doubtful that any pro-American sentiment will remain. Hegseth has made it abundantly clear that he wants nothing to do with “nation building.” Nation destroying is a different matter.

Ali Khamenei’s son and successor, Mojtaba

What are the chances that Donald Trump will simply declare victory and forget about the war he created in Iran?

No one doubts that Trump and his machismo-driven “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth have put on a remarkable display of shock-and-awe destruction in Iran, but what has it really accomplished?

American and Israeli missiles vaporized Iran’s 86-year-old Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, along with much of Iran’s top leadership, but Khamenei was due to retire anyway. He has now been replaced by his second son, Mojtaba Khamanei, who is rumored to be just as fanatical as his father.

Mojtaba is only 56, so he can expect to be around for many years. Like his father, Mojtaba was a mid-level cleric before being named ayatollah; he also served as an officer in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which his father helped create and which ultimately became one of the main sources of his support. The IRGC is one of the main reasons Ali Khamenei was able to maintain a steel grip on power for 37 years — longer than practically any other leader in the Middle East.

After the American-Israeli onslaught, the IRGC clearly sees Mojtaba as the necessary theocratic frontman it needs if it wants to continue exercising control over the country. Mojtaba’s advantage is that he is a fresh face. It was his father, not Mojtaba, who was responsible for shooting thousands of protesters. Fanatic though he reportedly is, Mojtaba may begin with something approaching a clean slate.

If Iran was not serious about building a nuclear bomb before the current attacks, it very likely is now. What Trump apparently missed in his assessment of last June’s attacks against Iran’s nuclear centrifuges is that Iran had already enriched enough nuclear material to build anywhere from six to nine bombs. Although the centrifuges were destroyed, the nuclear material was moved to another location. Nate Swanson, a key figure in helping formulate American policy towards Iran, told the BBC that Iran could probably finish the enrichment of that material in an accelerated time period that might range from a few days to a few weeks. Swanson also felt that Khamenei expected another American-Israeli attack and was convinced that Iran should not accept yet another ceasefire unless the U.S. and Israel could guarantee that they would not attack Iran again in the future.

Even if Mojtaba were not, a priori, a fanatical hard-liner, Trump’s Israeli-inspired joint bombing campaign is believed to have killed the new leader’s mother, wife, and son, along with his father. It’s not hard to guess his future attitude towards both the United States and Israel.

If Iran was not serious about building a nuclear bomb before the current attacks, it very likely is now. Trump and Netanyahu have given Iran every incentive to obtain whatever weapons it needs, and it looks increasingly as though Russia’s Vladimir Putin is willing to help. China may step in as well.

If Trump hasn’t realized it yet, taking on Iran is promising to be a lot more formidable and involves considerably more unpredictable unknowns than kidnapping an unpopular president of Venezuela. It’s not hard to see why Trump may be tempted to declare victory and forget about the mess that he has created.

He may not have that option.

Somewhat ominously, Iran’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Abbas Araghchi told NBC News’s Meet the Press over the weekend that Iran doesn’t want a ceasefire, at least not at this point. “There needs to be a permanent end to the war,” Araghchi said. “Unless we get to that, I think we need to continue fighting for the sake of our people and our security.”

Araghchi didn’t deny reports that Russia has been providing Iran with intelligence about US and Israeli movements. Equally ominous, observers have pointed out that although Iran has been firing missiles at a number of countries in the region, it also appears to be holding back on the number that it fires, which may be an indication that it is settling in for the long haul. Meanwhile, the US has been reduced to asking Ukraine for assistance in fending off Iran’s Shahed drones.

The Iranians may not have the equipment needed to produce an American-Israeli-style demonstration of shock and awe, but they have one simple advantage that may prove critical — the Strait of Hormuz.

The strait is roughly 20 to 30 miles wide at its narrowest point. The northern coast of the strait belongs to Iran; the southern coast to Oman. Any ship exiting the Persian Gulf has to follow Iran’s coast and then make a 90-degree turn and continue following Iran’s coast into the Arabian Sea. Of the eight islands in the strait, Iran owns seven, and it has maintained a military presence on most.

The strait is an extremely vulnerable bottleneck, and a fifth of the world’s oil supply and a quarter of its natural gas must run a gauntlet that Iran has now vowed to keep closed. Trump has suggested that US Navy ships might be used to escort tankers through the strait but, with Iran’s access to increasingly sophisticated missiles, that might risk losing a Navy ship as well as a tanker.

In any case, no insurance company has been willing to take the risk, and it’s been estimated that around 300 ships are currently bottled up in the Persian Gulf. Making the area safe for shipping would very likely require sending in American troops on the ground in one of the more inhospitable places on the planet.

For the moment, there is enough oil outside the Gulf for most countries to continue functioning, but if the strait remains closed for long, it could trigger a world financial crisis. That’s what happened during the Arab-Israeli war in 1973, when OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) clamped an embargo against the US and other countries for supporting Israel.

The price of a barrel of oil quadrupled in the US, and that led to inflationary price increases on just about everything. More than fuel costs were affected: Products made from petroleum byproducts — such as fertilizer, plastics, even the glue used to make plywood — suddenly became unobtainable.

Richard Nixon, who was president at the time, imposed a 55-mile-per-hour speed limit on highways in a desperate attempt to limit fuel consumption. Nixon was eventually forced to make a number of costly concessions to Middle Eastern oil producers, and the embargo was lifted in 1974.

Most Americans living today either weren’t born in 1973 or, like Trump and Hegseth, may be forgetting or simply ignoring the lessons of what happened then. The Iranians, however, are acutely aware of that history, and they seem increasingly confident that, despite the 10 days of deadly US and Israeli bombardment, and Hegseth’s braggadocio, they still have options. Financial ruin for a large part of the world might be one of them.

The war with Iran could be just beginning.

Pete Hegseth: Don’t you guys get it?

America’s self-styled “Secretary of War,” Pete Hegseth, appears definitely convinced that “Epic Fury,” the massive US and Israeli military assault against Iran, will topple the regime in Iran without the U.S. having to fight yet another lengthy war.

“No stupid rules of engagement,” Hegseth told his first news conference since the attack began, “no nation building quagmire, no democracy building exercise, no politically correct wars. We fight to win, and we don’t waste time or lives.”

“This is not Iraq,” Hegseth continued. “This is not endless.”

Maybe so, but as a famous quotation, often incorrectly attributed to Albert Einstein, puts it: “Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity.”

The U.S. failed in Iraq, largely because the Republican administration of George W. Bush launched a war without a clear plan for what was likely to happen once a military victory had been achieved. Now, the Trump administration appears to be repeating the same mistake. Hegseth is right about one thing: Iran is not Iraq; it is three times the size of Iraq and more strategically located. It is also nearly two-and-a-half times the size of Vietnam when the U.S. faced defeat there. There is plenty of opposition to Iran’s current repressive theocratic regime, but that doesn’t mean that most Iranians are ready to have either Israel or the United States decide their future.

Trump’s plan initially called for spending several days bombing Iran, and then leaving it up to the Iranians to figure out what to do next. The plan, in short, was to spread mayhem without an exit strategy. To say that this approach makes no sense is an understatement. Even the operation’s title, Epic Fury, has an ironic twist. It expresses Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s testosterone-fed fury with Iran, but it could just as easily be applied to the uncontrolled fury that the collateral damage to civilians from indiscriminate bombing is likely to trigger in Iran.

What can the Iranians really do to confront the combined might of the United States and Israel? As it turns out, quite a lot. Trump’s operation has already closed the Straits of Hormuz, the key gateway for the transport of a fifth of the world’s oil and gas supply. The shutdown was not only Iran’s; the deciding factor was insurance companies' refusal to cover ships exiting through the straits.

To no one’s surprise, the assault ordered by Trump led Iran to immediately launch missile and drone attacks against several countries in the region that had been hosting U.S. bases. As a result, Kuwait accidentally shot down three American fighter jets. The crews ejected safely, but the friendly fire incident is only the beginning.

More potentially damaging, the joint Israeli-American operation makes future negotiations with Iran even less likely to produce desired results. The fact that the U.S. pretended to negotiate seriously while secretly planning a surprise attack makes it unlikely that America’s word will be trusted anytime soon.

The Iranians are not the only ones who have a right to be angry at what they no doubt see as a betrayal. Despite the U.S. Constitution’s insistence that the president obtain or at least listen to the advice and consent of Congress before going to war, Trump bypassed the American system and committed each and every one of us to a potentially destabilizing war based only on his personal judgment and limited knowledge. In effect, he acted as a dictator, not a president. As for the compliant Republican majority in Congress that was elected to provide meaningful oversight, it was away on holiday when the attack took place.

It will take a while for the full repercussions to be felt by the American public. But it is safe to say the impact will eventually hit home. If the Straits of Hormuz remain closed, oil and gas prices will increase dramatically, and that will drive up the price of just about anything that requires any form of transportation.

The idea of keeping the war limited to a few days of airstrikes is also unlikely to survive. Trump has already suggested that the operation may need to be extended to four or five weeks and that additional American troops will need to be sent into the region.

Far from crumbling, the regime in Tehran has remained remarkably intact. Iran’s top leadership, notably the Supreme Guide, Ali Khamenei, has been eliminated, but Khamenei who was 86 was due to be replaced anyway. After last June’s attack against Iranian nuclear sites, the Iranians made a point of choosing designated survivors. Khamenei’s assassination only accelerated what was already a done deal. It has been clear for a long time, and especially to Iran’s leadership that an eventual regime change was inevitable. The difference this time around is that instead of a repressive theocratic government that at least felt that it had to make a pretense at following Islamic laws, the new replacement is likely to emerge from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the group that had served as Khamenei’s enforcer and the source of most of Iran’s previous adventures into international terrorism.

Of course, it is always possible that a sudden jolt from Epic Fury just might clear the way for a more open and humane government to take over, or at least a government that is actually open to dealing with the U.S. and Israel. The history of the region, however, suggests that that is an unlikely outcome.

Any number of experts in the U.S. State Department could have explained the reality of the Middle East to Trump if he hadn’t already fired them. Instead of expertise, we have Pete Hegseth, a former weekend TV anchor for Fox News, and Tulsi Gabbard, an ex-Army nurse who now oversees U.S. intelligence operations, attempting to explain how the world works to a president suffering from a critically short attention span. The safety net of at least semi-knowledgeable advisers that helped save Trump’s first term in office has been replaced by a cabinet of sycophants ready to execute Trump’s bidding without question.

Most Americans are not equipped to know what will happen next. Americans, for the most part, have stopped reading newspapers or paying much attention to foreign news. When prices start to rise even higher than they are now and Americans begin dying overseas, we will ask ourselves what happened and why. By then, it may be too late. As the experts might have warned us if we had deigned to listen, it is easy to start a war; it is much harder to end one.

Orbán at the White House last November

It is not hard to see why many Europeans are still trying to decide what to make of US attitudes to the rest of the world. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s presentation to the Munich Security Conference last week was considerably more sensitive than the speech JD Vance delivered a year ago, saying, “There is a new sheriff in town.” But once European analysts had a chance to deconstruct what Rubio actually said, the message looked very much the same: The US is no longer interested in any commitment to being “Leader of the Free World.”

A number of non-MAGA Americans, including California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), did their best to calm the nerves of America’s former European allies, but it was all too clear that the real power in Washington, at least for the moment, is still Donald Trump and his obedient allies in the administration. The fact that a majority of Americans now disapprove of Trump doesn’t make much difference. Regardless of what most Americans think, unless he is impeached or dies in office, Trump is still president for the next two years. He effectively speaks for the entire United States, and that means that, as far as the rest of the world is concerned, what he says might as well be coming from you or me.

That’s a little unsettling, because Trump, who openly admires Vladimir Putin, has been ramping up his flirtations with Russia. While Putin may be friendly with Trump, Russia is no friend of the United States. As far as Europeans are beginning to see it, there is no point on counting on the U.S. to defend democracy anymore. That train has already left the station.

European skepticism was heightened by Rubio’s unexpected decision to have a special meeting with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. The meeting came across as an unusual and extremely awkward effort to reassure Hungary’s embattled prime minister that Trump is still behind him and that the current White House fully supports him.

What Trump and Rubio actually hoped to accomplish is anyone’s guess. Orbán’s openness to Russian President Vladimir Putin, despite Putin’s continued bombardment of Ukraine, has made him unpopular, both at home and with fellow Europeans, many of whom would be more than happy to see Orbán excluded from the European Union

In Hungary’s upcoming parliamentary elections, Orbán, who lags behind in pre-election polls, will almost certainly try to rig the outcome. He may also hope that Putin can save him from electoral defeat, even though that may not be possible. Although Trump’s sympathetic reassurance may be heartfelt, but it’s not likely to make much difference to Hungarian voters or Orbán, unless, of course, Trump hands Orbán a bundle of cash similar to the $20 billion lifeline that he used to shore up Argentina’s embattled president, Javier Milei.

The real question is why Rubio and Trump are so anxious to save Orbán’s already tainted political future when the U.S. as a country has nothing to gain from interfering in Hungarian affairs..

If most Americans aren’t asking themselves that question quite yet, Western Europeans certainly are. The answer may be that Trump himself feels threatened. His poll numbers are tanking, like Orbán’s, and, unless Trump can successfully derail the upcoming midterm elections, he looks very likely to spend the last two years of his administration as a lame duck.

In showing support for Orbán, a darling of today’s far-right MAGA Republicans, Trump may be making a final effort to rally conservative solidarity throughout the world, to shore up his own prospects at home.

If that makes Trump sound delusional, he’s in good company: The pattern is common to many of the narcissistic authoritarians that Ruth Ben-Ghiat describes in her book Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present.

The narcissist, Ben-Ghiat maintains, begins life afraid of the world around him and consequently learns to act as a bully. When the bullying succeeds, the bully gains confidence and pushes the strategy further. The more he succeeds in intimidating those around him, the more isolated he becomes from reality. His decisions become increasingly erratic, and before long, he becomes dangerous to himself and to the people around him.

In functional democracies led by a parliament, the narcissistic bully can simply be voted out of office and ushered into early retirement. In more authoritarian countries, revolution or assassination may be the only alternatives. That was the case with Mussolini, Hitler, and more recently, the Congo’s Mobutu Sese Seko, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, and Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi. The US, with its four-year appointments and complex impeachment procedures, falls somewhere between the two.

Unfortunately, violently deposing a narcissistic tyrant who has remained in power for an extended period of time may lead to considerable collateral damage.

The more troubling cases occur when a country finds itself halfway between democracy and authoritarianism. Orbán is not quite a full dictator yet, but he has taken steps to convert Hungary from a parliamentary democracy to a semi-totalitarian state. He has suppressed the press, tampered with elections, and done his best to suppress dissenting opinions.

Especially disheartening for a nation that fought a desperate, if losing, attempt to throw off the yoke of Russia in 1956.

After perestroika — the failed attempt to reform and modernize the Soviet communist state — Putin finally dropped the Communist label and focused instead on Russia’s expansionist ambitions. To just about everyone’s surprise, the Ukrainians have proven extraordinarily resilient in resisting Putin’s efforts to restore what he sees as the lost glory of the former Soviet empire.

Any pretense at Russian communism is long gone, but Putin is nevertheless doing his best to reconstruct the former Eastern Bloc that once existed behind the Iron Curtain. The new Russian empire that Putin is trying to put together is based on money and oligarchy. No longer paying even lip service to communist ideology, it tends to be right-wing and semi-fascist. That’s whom Orbán is flirting with. And Rubio and Trump are playing a similar game.

It’s clear that the Russians feel the US under Trump is more susceptible to joining forces with the Kremlin than it has been at any time since World War II.

The latest bait dangled by the Russians is that if Trump can only swing Washington into aligning itself with the Kremlin, and at the same time get it to drop its economic sanctions against Russian trade, then as much as $14 trillion in business deals could be waiting. How could a band of former real-estate promoters like Trump and his side-kick, real-estate magnate Steve Witkoff, resist an offer like that?

Of course, none of it makes any sense. Russia’s whole GDP is only $2.5 trillion. What Putin is really talking about is getting America to invest in Russia. He’s offering US companies a chance to join his own oligarchs in pillaging what is left of Russia’s natural resources and its people.

Putin may not expect American companies to go for the proposal. But there’s always a chance that Trump will be attracted by yet another chance to make a financial killing.

Before the 2016 election, the Kremlin looked at Trump as just another useful idiot. As a former KGB officer, Putin is well aware that useful idiots often make the best assets. He may hope that Trump is just desperate enough to take the bait, and Marco Rubio’s meeting with Viktor Orban had to be seen as an indication both to the far right advocates of authoritarianism in the U.S. as well as to Putin’s oligarchs in the Kremlin, that in Donald Trump their bet on what they took to be a useful idiot has paid off. For how long, remains to be seen.

A number of Middle East experts have warned Donald Trump that a new military attack against Iran might trigger a much larger conflagration that risks enveloping the entire region. Trump has continued a military buildup anyway, and is talking about sending yet another aircraft carrier into the region.

Despite the TACO nickname(Trump Always Chickens out), Trump’s dominant characteristic until now has been a readiness to trust his own instincts rather than rely on the experts. Trump and the MAGA crowd are obsessed with what they see as the “Deep State,” or in simpler words, the Washington Establishment. Mostly, they are frustrated that what used to be considered the Establishment now sees them as uncouth outsiders, ignorant of history and with little understanding of international relations or diplomacy. This time around, Trump might do well to listen to the experts.

The difference between the Trump administration and what remains of the U.S. State Department is decades of experience. Despite its traditional nickname, Foggy Bottom, the State Deparment is all too aware of what can happen when an administration in Washington gets it wrong. A not too distant example of how things can go wrong is the case of George W. Bush’s efforts to topple Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.

As Bush discovered, using America’s overwhelming military superiority to defeat a weakened Iraqi regime was not difficult. The mistake that the administration’s key strategists, Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney, made was to stop the State Department from drafting a plan for what was likely to happen once Saddam’s regime was gone. Rumsfeld’s concern was that victory in Iraq would be hamstrung by bureaucratic red tape. What he failed to realize was that the procedures he distrusted had been put in place to prevent the kind of disaster that eventually consumed Iraq because of a lack of planning.

Not just Trump, but Republican administrations in general have long felt impatience at what they saw as an overly cautious approach by U.S. State Department experts and America’s professional intelligence agencies. They have always felt a temptation to shoot first, and clean up the mess later. Unfortunately, what Hollywood scriptwriters might have mythologized about the Wild West of the late 1800s rarely works in real life. In today’s world, considerably more is at stake.

As it turned out, Bush’s ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’ triggered a war that lasted nearly eight years from 2003 to 2011, and cost the lives of more than 4,400 U.S. servicemen, along with another 37,000 wounded. The actual fighting cost somewhere between $700 billion and $800 billion . Helping American veterans recover from the war added another $2 trillion dollars to the U.S. budgetary costs.

The justification for going into the war had been a series of highly suspect reports that Saddam might be developing a weapon of mass destruction. The reports turned out to be false.

The situation in Iran appears more serious. There is no question that Iran has made progress towards producing a nuclear weapon. What is less clear is why, or what it would do with a bomb if it had one.

Both India and Pakistan developed functional nuclear weapons and then promptly forgot about them. Simply possessing the weapon seemed to be enough of a deterrent.

At a World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, a few years after the 9/11 attacks against the World Trade Center, former U.S. president Bill Clinton acknowledged that the roots of the problem with Iran could be traced back to the 1953 coup, which deposed Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosadegh, and restored the Mohammed Pahlavi as Shah, with complete power to do with iran whatever western powers asked of him. The coup had been instigated by British intelligence, which asked America’s CIA to help carry it out. Mossadegh’s error had been to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian oil fields and to ask the Soviet Union for support.

What no one had counted on was that over the years, the Shah would increasingly turn into a monster who imprisoned and tortured huge numbers of his own people, including a large number of protesting students, who in many cases belonged to some of the country’s elite families. That was unfortunate in itself, Clinton suggested, but what, he asked, did anyone think that Iran was really going to do with a nuclear weapon? The Iranians had to know that as soon as they did anything, they would be obliterated by a retaliatory blazing inferno. The odds were that the Iranians were bluffing.

The real villain in Iran was the temptation resulting from the sudden wealth produced by oil. Traditionally, politics in Iran had been influenced by three sources of power: the monarchy run by the Shah was counterbalanced by the economic strength of the Bazaaris, Iran’s dynamic merchant class rooted in Iran’s many basaars. The third pole was Iran’s Islamic clergy. These three groups counterbalanced each other and provided a government that was more or less in tune with public opinion, which expressed itself in Iran’s parliament and elections. The coup and oil changed all that. With the coup, the Shah was forced to realize that he was in control because of Western military power, and that power could remove him if he failed to listen. At the same time, the enormous wealth produced by oil meant that he no longer needed to listen to the Bazaaris or the clergy. Western power and sudden wealth were all he needed. The separation from Iran’s traditional power base led to a gradual separation from Iran’s people. When protests erupted, the Shah relied on SAVAK, his secret police, and his Imperial Guard to keep order. If things got really out of hand, he realized that the Western powers needed him, or at least the oil, as much as he needed them. As protests grew, so did violent repression and unspeakable torture. SAVAK was everywhere and heard everything. In the end, the only place that people could speak freely was in the mosques during Friday prayer. Events paved the way for the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini.

In the late 1970s, I was working as a freelance reporter in Paris, France. TIME Magazine assigned me to work on a story dealing with torture as a political tool. The issue was not whether torture was right or wrong, the question was did it work. I interviewed a great number of political refugees living in Paris who had previously been tortured by various regimes in Africa and the Middle East. One of the interesting interviews was with Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, who headed the Iranian Students’ Union in Paris. Sadegh casually mentioned that SAVAK was not only closely allied with the CIA, but had been trained by the CIA in particularly sadistic approaches to torture. I asked Sadegh how he knew it was the CIA. “When a new, innovative form of torture suddenly appears in a dozen countries that have no connection with each other except the CIA, it’s pretty obvious,” he said. I had no way of proving whether Sadegh was right or wrong, but it didn’t really matter. Iranians clearly believed that hwat he was saying was correct. Sadegh went on to become a chief advisor to Khomeini on European affairs, and after the Iranian Revolution in 1979, he became the new government’s first minister of foreign affairs. He was later executed by the government he had helped put together. It was suspected of involvement in an attempt to overthrow Khomeini. Revolutions can be dangerous for the people who help lead them.

In 1978, Khomeini moved from exile in Iraq to the Paris suburb of Nauphle-le-Château. Because I knew Sadegh, I was able to attend Friday prayers with Khomeini. I mentioned to a political officer at the U.S. embassy in Paris that a lot seemed to be going on in Nauphle-le-Château and that someone in the U.S. embassy might want to talk with some of the key players. “We can’t,” he said. “If we were to do that, it would be seen as sending a signal that we approved.”

In January 1979, the Shah fled Iran and installed himself in Egypt. The ABC Paris bureau began sending camera crews to Iran regularly, and the news coming back was not encouraging. Towards the middle of January, I went to Tehran as part of an ABC News team to cover the increasingly violent demonstrations that would eventually result in Khomeini’s takeover.

The U.S. embassy seemed unaware, at least publicly, of what was happening. I spoke with an American political officer, who showed me a video of a demonstration. “See,” he said, “the protesters are hurling stones at the police.” On the video, I watched an Iranian protester walk up to a police officer, rip his shirt open, and dare the policeman to shoot him at close range. As he fell to the ground, another protester took his place and did the same thing. After several instances, the police couldn’t take it anymore. They simply gave up and disappeared.

Not long after the Iranian Revolution, I signed on with TIME as a staff correspondent covering the Middle East, based in Cairo, Egypt. When Khomeini died, the magazine sent me to Tehran to see how the Islamic government was evolving without its supreme leader. In an interview with

Akbar Torkan, the government’s first defense minister. I asked about rumors that Iran might be developing a nuclear weapon. “Nuclear weapons are useless,” Torkan said. “They cost a great deal of money, and you know that no one is ever going to use them. You are simply wasting your resources. You are better off spending the money on training and equipping a functional army that can actually fight.”

I mentioned Torkan’s comment to a friend in Paris, who knew a great deal about Iran. “They’re lying,” he said. “They are spending a lot on developing a weapon.”

The friend may have been right, but simply having a weapon is not enough to be a genuine threat these days. It’s necessary to have the means to deliver it, and also to consider the consequences if one gets it wrong. As Clinton pointed out at Davos, a nuclear attack that does not succeed in completely destroying each and every one of its opposing nuclear enemies with the first strike is likely to trigger a retaliation that results in total destruction.

A more likely scenario is that, like North Korea, Pakistan, and India, Iran wants a nuclear device not only as a guarantee against foreign attack, but also because the way the world is today, you need to have a nuclear weapon in order to be taken seriously. It’s the ultimate ticket to sit at the table with the adults.

Iraq’s Saddam Hussein tried to make the world think that he had a weapon of mass destruction in order to intimidate his neighbors and to make himself appear too dangerous to attack. He was also angry that the support he had received from the U.S. and the Gulf states when Iraq was considered to be an essential feature in containing Khomeini had dried up once Khomeini was no longer considered a threat. Saddam was bluffing, and the miscalculation backfired, costing Saddam his life.

That was unfortunate for Saddam, but at the time, many Middle East experts had advised the Bush administration that Saddam was already pretty much finished, and that if left alone, his regime might have ended with considerably less collateral damage. The egos of different administration officials pushed those calculations aside. No doubt some in Washington thought that the “shock and awe” against Iraq was just what the American public, still recovering from the shock of 9/11, really needed. Hubris can be costly, both in lives and in money.

In any case, conquering Iran would be a much more serious undertaking than subduing Iraq. Iraq has a population of 45 million. Iran’s population is 92 million, double Iraq’s. Although Iraq had caused Britain problems during colonial days, it had never really engaged in a serious Middle East conflict until the Iran-Iraq war, which ended in a stalemate. Iraq’s Army could intimidate smaller countries in the region, but it did not really amount to that much as an organized force. Iran, on the other hand, eventually proved itself not only to have an impressive military capability but also an effective strategy and an astonishing capacity to develop formidable allies including Hizbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, and the Houthis in Yemen.

During an Israeli incursion into Lebanon in 2006, Israeli troops were surprised to discover that the Hizbollah troops had become much more formidable than in the past. They had received professional training from Iran. Faced with unexpectedly high losses, the Israelis pulled out of Lebanon.

When Saddam mounted his invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, I was in Saudi Arabia. The concern was that Saddam’s military force would simply knife through Kuwait and grab the oil fields in northeast Saudi Arabia. There was literally nothing to stop him. The U.S. flew the 82nd Airborne Division into Saudi Arabia to provide a blocking force. What no one knew at the time was that the U.S. paratroopers only had enough ammunition to hold out for 48 hours. The rest was a bluff. The U.S. flew in fighter-bombers and stationed them on the Saudi runway. Reporters flying into Saudi Arabia were paraded past the stationed aircraft in order to create the impression that the U.S. presence was much stronger than it actually was.

I was invited, along with a TV crew from Bahrain, to visit a U.S. Navy Antietam-class guided-missile cruiser. The TV crew and I were ushered into the ship’s command center, where the Persian Gulf was outlined on a giant wall-sized computer screen, and virtually the entire region’s defenses were displayed. I remember thinking that the Russians would give anything to be in that room. What was a Bahrain TV crew doing there? The Bahrain TV station almost immediately broadcast a three-hour special detailing the formidable defenses that the Navy had on call.

Saddam looked like toast, but this time around the real bluff was American. It took six months, from August until January, before the U.S. felt that it really had enough force in place to take out Saddam’s army. When the American onslaught finally happened, Iraqi prisoners-of-war, delighted to be removed from the action, asked their American captors, “What took you so long?”

It is pretty obvious that that would not be the case in Iran, particularly if the adminsitration thinks that what Iran really wants is to go back to the Pahlavi monarchy. Trump, who likes to act on instinct, has suggested that the U.S. might engage in “regime change” by knocking out Iran’s Supreme Guide, Ali Khamenei, who is due to retire pretty soon anyway. Eliminating Khamenei and the current government, however, would simply clear the way for Iran’s brutal Revolutionary Guard to seize power without Islamic pretensions. The result could be another version of Saddam Hussein, only this time the dictatorship would be equipped with the basic knowledge needed to acquire a workable bomb.

If the IRG were not able to take power, the country would very likely disintegrate into outright civil war with competing tribes and clans killing each other, convinced that supremacy is necessary for their own survival. The result would very likely be an exodus of refugees spreading throughout the Middle East. That would destabilize the entire region, which still remains the source of a significant portion of the world’s energy supply. Stopping the flow of energy would lead to the spread chaos throughout the entire world. In any case, as we learned in Iraq, bombing does not make dangerous troublemakers disappear; it simply encourages them to move somewhere else.

The mistake that was made in the Iraq war by Bush’s plenipotentiary, L. Paul Bremer, was to dismiss Saddam’s administration and the Iraqi Army’s officer corps without bothering to consider what they would do next or where they would go. That mistake cost thousands of American lives, not to mention the destitution of what remained of Iraq.

George W. Bush had at least had a few advisors, who, if occasionally misguided, were unquestionably intelligent. Donald Trump is not even there. We now have a director of national intelligence whose qualification is the fact that she is a former U.S. Army nurse. She has no experience with intelligence at all, and it is questionable whether she even knows what intelligence is. We have a secretary of defense whose qualification is a bit of brief service as a part-time member of the National Guard followed by part-time work as a weekend anchorman on Fox News. The Trump administration is flying blind. As far as any real national defense goes, the U.S. is naked.

A British friend once said that America’s approach to the rest of the world is like handing a loaded shotgun to a toddler and waiting to see what happens next. That description fits Trump perfectly. It is a safe bet that anyone who knows the Middle East will rejoice if Trump pulls yet another TACO and finds an off-ramp, sidestepping what could turn out to be another unnecessary disaster in a region that has known plenty of them. If he gets it wrong, Trump will have lost, but we will all be losers along with him.

It’s increasingly clear that Donald Trump’s embarrassingly narcissistic and needlessly insulting performance before an international economic and cultural elite at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, has finally succeeded in convincing Western Europe and much of the rest of the world that the United States can no longer be trusted.

In the minds of many of America’s former allies, the MAGA slogan has turned from “Make America Great Again” to “Make America Go Away.” Trump’s inexplicable longing to personally own Greenland has done even more to convince the world public at large that the American president has a screw loose or has become hopelessly delusional.

It is, in fact, likely that Trump will eventually either slip into full-blown dementia or opt for a financially cushioned retirement, but with the U.S. presidency changing every four years, Europeans are acutely aware that there’s no guarantee that a future U.S. president won’t be just as unpredictably nutty and destructive as Trump. The U.S., in short, can no longer be relied on for either leadership or national security.

With America’s credibility in the slag heap, it’s better not to count on America at all. Of course, Trump is not the only villain here. His openly sadistic chief of staff, Stephen Miller, is clearly convinced that when it comes to scaring immigrants wanton cruelty is an effective mechanism. In the process, he has frightened nearly everyone else away as well. Trump may soon be gone, but the damage he has done to America’s credibility will linger long after him. Among the immediate casualties, we can list America’s former role as titular “leader of the free world.”

In a podcast interview with the New York Times’ Ezra Klein, Tom Friedman noted that the coming global competition will almost certainly be for dominance of the global economy, and it will involve a global showdown between the U.S. and China.

Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Friedman pointed out, doesn’t really count. Russia’s economy is little more than an oligarch-shackled basket case. Russia manufactures nothing of value, and its only reliable source of income consists of oil, gas, extortion, and the unsustainable extraction of natural resources. Russia has virtually no place in global markets. Who do you know who wants to buy a Russian camera, watch, or even a laptop? China, on the other hand, is a manufacturing powerhouse, thanks mainly to American corporate eagerness to exploit China’s cheap labor for quick profits.

Friedman questioned how the U.S., which represents a market of about 340 million people, can compete with China, whose population now stands at more than 1.4 billion, and is more than four times that of the U.S.

Of course, size isn’t everything, but when one looks at the pool of talent available to each country, China definitely looks intimidating. For example, the U.S. graduates fewer than 200,000 engineering students a year, while China graduates more than 1.3 million. From a statistical point of view, the chances of China spotting superior talent are overwhelming.

The waning signs are already there. In terms of quality of output, Harvard, formerly the world’s leading university, has slipped to third place, already superseded by Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, and Shanghai’s Zhongshan University, according to the CWTS Leiden Ranking.

The New York Times points out that the Trump-led Republican onslaught against higher education in America, along with visa harassment of foreign students, has further contributed to America’s slipping in world rankings.

In his interview with Ezra Klein, Friedman suggested that the obvious approach to surviving China’s ascension to economic dominance was for the U.S. to combine forces with the European Union, which represents a market of roughly 450 million people. Trump shot that down with his performance at Davos. The new agreement between the European Union and India to create a relatively tariff-free economic market that includes more than a fourth of the world’s population, or roughly 2 billion people, and excludes the U.S., can be counted as the second after shock following Trump’s trip to Davos. The first was Canada’s decision—formerly America’s leading trading partner—to sign a similar deal with China. The Canadian decision to explore shifting a significant portion of its trade from the U.S. to China was soon followed by a similar gesture from Britain. Instead of America being great again, Trump has managed to leave America excluded, isolated, and alone in the cold.

Obviously, thinking ahead, Trump, still smarting at what he sees as being “denied” the Nobel Peace Prize, may be counting on his “Peace Board” to maintain his legacy after he leaves the White House. But who are the members of this board, who are asked to contribute a billion dollars each and accept Trump’s lifetime presidency? Apart from Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a random assortment of friends, and the man he previously dismissed as “Little Marco,” the countries that have signed on to the Trump plan sound like an anemic version of the Non-Aligned movement. They are Belarus, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Bahrain, Qatar, Kosovo, Paraguay, and Uzbekistan, not to mention Jordan and Europe’s notorious troublemaker, Hungary. Millet’s Argentina, and Indonesia are also on the list. Vietnam and Cambodia have signaled an interest in joining. Canada was invited, but after its deal with China and a little straight talking from Prime Minister Mark Carney, Trump noisily retracted the invitation. The future emperor of the world accepts no backtalk or criticism from inferiors, but in reality, he represents nothing of value.

The irony in all of this is that while Trump was busy overturning three-quarters of a century of policy decisions that actually did make America great, or at least made it a worldwide superpower, America’s future competitors were actually listening to America’s advice and adopting the concepts needed to advance economically.

For decades, America argued for free trade through both GATT (the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) and the World Trade Organization. The American approach moved the entire world economy forward, but it primarily helped turn the U.S. into a superpower. In 1980, the U.S. GDP (Gross Domestic Product) was $2.9 trillion. Today it is $30.6 trillion, a tenfold increase. Most of the rest of the world has prospered as well, although not to the degree that the U.S. did before the arrival of Donald Trump.

It would be easy at a quick glance to dismiss Trump as being stupid, uneducated, or uninformed, but it seems more likely that his objective in becoming president was not the welfare of the country or American society, but rather to take advantage of a group of already wealthy billionaires and corporate giants anxious to skim the cream off the American economy. The motto among American business men such as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel is “move fast and break things.” In a sense, the operating mode in a significant slice of the investment world can be described as “Vulture Economics.” If the U.S. economy really is in decline, then it makes sense to grab what you can and move somewhere else. The fact that a businessman like Musk can attain a personal wealth of a trillion dollars, while national education flounders and poverty increases, is an indication that any consideration of the future of America as a society has fallen by the wayside.

Until recently, the normal White House approach to problem- solving has been to rely on experts to thoroughly examine all of the implications of a policy decision so that the president can make an intelligent choice of the best possible option. Trump has reversed the process. Instead of engaging experts, he is relying on his own limited knowledge and then turning to a group of sycophantic “yes” men and women to execute his whim of the moment. The presidency no longer serves the country. It serves the narcissistic fantasies of a single, limited individual whose primary interest is his and his family’s personal wealth.

Where does that leave the rest of America? Anyone who understands basic economics knows that tariffs are just another name for a sales tax, which the government imposes on all its citizens, whether they can afford it or not. Tariffs provide an instant source of cash for government coffers, but they also exact a heavy price on both development and trade, and they destroy future markets. That is why pre-Trump America fought against them for so long.

A major difference between now and the period immediately after World War II is that after the war, the U.S. was virtually the only major economy left standing, whereas today, there are other alternatives. When Trump threatened tariffs on China, Beijing simply turned to Argentina and Brazil to meet its soybean demand. American farmers were left in the cold. Trump offered to take some money out of the tariff bonanza to keep them afloat. That may work for a year or so, but by then the market that those American farmers depend on will very likely have moved on. Some of the lost market share may return briefly, but the fact is that the U.S. is no longer the only game in town. The deals between Canada and China, and the European Union and India, now hint that the U.S. may no longer be the most attractive proposition. The post-colonial, previously undeveloped “Third World” is no longer undeveloped. It evolved into the “Emerging Markets,” and today, many of those markets have already emerged.

In 2015, I went to India to report on a project for the International Trade Center (ITC), a bridge organization linking the World Trade Organization and U.N. Development efforts. Britain’s Department for International Development (DFID) had decided that India had become a middle-income economy and no longer really needed British funding. DIFD, nevertheless, still had £20 million on the books and decided to use the remaining funds to encourage companies in India to mentor countries in East Africa, where a substantial Indian community had moved to work in Britain’s former colonial administration. DIFD’s reasoning was that India, having recently emerged from colonialism, might be better suited than Westerners when it came to advising formerly colonized Africans.

East Africa had long been a major source of Arabica and Robusta Coffee, but lacked knowledge of modern marketing requirements. The region also produced enormous quantities of leather but had no real understanding of how to treat it properly to meet modern standards. India needed leather but could not obtain it locally because of Hindu attitudes towards protecting cows.

As part of the project, I toured several factories in India, including those producing ultra-high-end products for exclusive fashion houses in Paris, Milan, and New York. I was surprised at the high level of sophistication in the factories that I visited.

“The buyers keep making more and more complex demands on our production,” the head of one of the factories said, while showing me a piece of leather that had been treated to have a metallic glow. “We do the best we can, and we are meeting the demand, but it is not easy.”

The other part of the Anglo-Indian project dealt with computer production and software. Africa is currently one of the world’s fastest-growing markets for business software. And thanks to India’s first prime minister after Independence, Jawaharlal Nehru’s insistence on creating advanced technology research centers across India, the subcontinent has always had an impressive supply of computer experts. The ITC trip to India made it abundantly clear that India has the potential to eventually equal or surpass the accomplishments of China. All it needs is a bit of outside help and the deal signed with the Euopean Union promises to deliver that.

From the U.S. perspective, it’s worth noting that more than half the tech workforce in Silicon Valley comes from Asia, while roughly 10 percent of the valley’s tech CEOs are Asians. With many Asian tech workers convinced that they face a “bamboo ceiling” preventing them from rising to higher management levels, the lowering of India’s tariff barriers with the European Union, combined with Trump’s harassment of foreigners is likely to lead to a major exodus of talent on the grounds that it’s more attractive to work in Europe or in their soon-to-be booming home countries than be hassled by an isolationist administration in America.

The re-emergence of India and China as future global superpowers should not be surprising to anyone with even a basic understanding of world history. India, after all, was responsible for developing key features of the global approach to mathematics. It was an Indian, Aryabhatta, who suggested that the addition of the zero was essential to basic arithmetic. The decimal system came from India. Much of algebra, trigonometry, and calculus, not to mention the game of chess, traces its origins to India. Europe uses Arabic numerals for its mathematical calculations. Much of the Arab world still uses the Indian number system.

At the beginning of the 19^th Century, China accounted for a third of the world economy, although much of China’s economic production was consumed in China. Helen Thomas, who teaches at England’s Cambridge University, points out that the emergence of the United States as a world power occurred around 1890, largely thanks to the fact that European colonialism and internal political problems had led to the collapse of the Chinese empire effectively removing China temporarily from the world stage.

The American Civil War in 1860-65 led to a dramatic increase in manufacturing. When the war ended, American manufacturing began looking for new markets to absorb it excess production. The result was an increased focus on international trade that gave the U.S. an increased global presence. The isolationism of China, crippled by its political disintegration, meant there was no real competition. That situation is quite different today. This time the political disintegration is in America, and it is accentuated by the mindless contradictions resulting from the Trump administration.

Trump, who clearly prefers a Hollywood-style romantic mythology to a realistic account of history, might remember that Columbus’s discovery of the American continent was driven by a search for a route to India and the riches it once possessed.

Power and wealth tend to skip from one spot on the globe to another. Baghdad once played the role that New York did in the 1960s.

India had previously wanted to sign a deal with the U.S. Now it finds that the European Union is a more attractive partner. Reduced to relative poverty at the end of World War II, in the years since, Western Europe has managed to gain an arguably larger, better-educated, and more productive population than the U.S., which, despite its obvious wealth, is beginning to show signs of decline. During his college days, Trump attended the University of Pennsylvania’s prestigious Wharton School of Business. He appears to have slept through most of the classes. Now, it looks like the rest of us will be asked to pay the price for what he failed to learn.

The Trump administration created a sensation when it launched its 29-page National Security Strategy in November. Unfortunately, it’s probably safe to say that few people bothered to read the actual document. That is a mistake.

More than a simple description of security threats against America, the self-styled strategy dishes up a helter-skelter collection of meaningless political slogans and then promotes a radically new direction for America and, more importantly, for what it means to be an American. If the Alt-Right were to draft its own version of the Communist Manifesto, this would be it.

The newspaper, Le Monde, France’s equivalent of The New York Times, described the White House release as a final divorce separating the United States from Western Europe. Le Monde could just as easily have added that the strategy advocates a separation from Western civilization.

As for genuine threats to the United States, there is practically no mention of Russia’s expanding nuclear capabilities, the recent addition of hypersonic missiles to the Kremlin’s arsenal, or of Vladimir Putin’s efforts to build an empire on the remains of the former Soviet Union. Putin’s obsession with launching ballistic missiles and bomb-carrying drones against women and children in Ukraine also received short shrift.

The “strategy” glides just as easily over Xi Jinping’s human rights violations in Hong Kong and against Uyghurs, not to mention Tibetans. Elsewhere, Xi’s dreams of establishing himself as an emperor for life, while China quietly nibbles away at the rest of the planet.

Apart from these omissions, the strategy seems to have already accepted the division of the world into mutually cooperative totalitarian regimes—Trump’s vision of the USA being one of them. It’s as if an unspoken agreement already exists that lets China do what it wants in Asia, while Russia gets to ride roughshod over Europe, and the U.S. is hopefully left in peace to do as it pleases in North and South America. Trump’s gunboat diplomacy intimidation of Venezuela may be just the beginning. The Russians and Chinese won’t interfere as long as we let them gobble up the rest of the world.

The really serious threats to America, the document suggests, are DEI, global migration, and America’s loss of sovereignty due to its foolish participation in international organizations seeking world peace and advocating the extension of the rule of law to other nations.

A prominent target is DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion), which is blamed for spreading mediocrity and incompetence and must be stopped. Although the acronym DEI is really just a rephrasing of the famous French slogan, “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity”-- the three elements which until now have been considered important features of any democracy-- what the Trump administration really appears to object to is “Affirmative Action”—the principle that a special effort needs to be made to make up for the more than a century of violence, racism and discrimination that followed the Civil War and that imposed a near permanent state of poverty on a sizeable chunk of America’s population. Any concessions to mistakes of the past, the document suggests, are now and forever over.

Healing the aftereffects of slavery, America’s original sin, has admittedly been a lingering problem ever since the Civil War ended. The Trump administration’s solution is to simply eliminate one of the most embarrassing blemishes on American democracy by pretending that history does not exist and then ridiculing anyone who insists on referring to the past as being cripplingly “woke.” Nearly all mentions of DEI have already been erased on Trump’s orders from federal records and communications. The new strategy does its part in providing what it hopes will be yet another nail in DEI’s coffin.

The paper’s next bugaboo is immigration. The strategy argues that Europe risks being erased by foreigners and that the worldwide migration of desperate people needs to be stopped in its tracks. No one seems able to explain just how that will be accomplished.

What has Republican white supremacists boiling over is the fact that whether one likes it or not, demographic projections make it clear that the majority of America’s population will belong to one minority or another by 2045. Most will not be white. They can either be included in the American system as full-fledged citizens, as the U.S. Constitution commands, or excluded and rendered permanently impoverished. The National Strategy hints at exclusion. But that approach defies simple logic. The formula is pretty simple. If you do not want to be surrounded by people who are unable to fend for themselves, the best solution is to invest in education and culture. People are defined by what they think—not the color of their skin.

Apart from that, the strategy overlooks the fact that the U.S. has profited enormously from immigration. Immigrants have traditionally provided a steady supply of farm workers, construction workers, and restaurant staff willing to work long hours for rock-bottom wages. Immigration not only fuels the bottom strata of the economy but also powers the high end. More than half the tech workers in Silicon Valley are foreign-born. More than half of the tech startups in the San Francisco Bay Area were launched by foreign-born CEOs. Mustafa Suleyman, who currently heads Microsoft’s AI,is a prime example. Suleyman emigrated from Syria to Britain and then to Palo Alto, California. His father was a taxi driver in Damascus. Suleyman is a key figure defining the future of AI.

The National Security Strategy finds that Europe is particularly threatened by its efforts to adapt to a globalized economy. The strategy’s authors warn that Europe’s GDP declined from 25% of the world’s wealth in 1990 to 14% today.

“The larger issue facing Europe,” the authors argue, ”includes activities of the European Union and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty, migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birth rates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence…”

The authors apparently failed to grasp that the European Union was formed largely because individual European countries had to admit they were too small to compete effectively with the U.S. market's massive size. The solution was to put aside petty grievances and combine their resources in order to create their own significant market. forces to create. Today, the EU represents a market of more than 450 million people and 5.5 per cent of the global population. Considerably larger, better educated, and more dynamic than the U.S. market, it has become a significant influence, setting manufacturing standards for much of the rest of the world.

Another point that the authors seem to have missed is that much of the global turbulence over the last 80 years didn’t just happen spontaneously; it was the predictable aftershock that resulted from the dramatic collapse of worldwide colonialism that took place in the 1950s and 1960s, and was itself an aftereffect of the destruction caused by World War II. The abrupt departure of European colonial overlords left the former colonies without a financial footing and forced them to struggle to define their own national character while competing in an increasingly competitive world market. Once lumped together as the Third World, these countries soon transitioned into “emerging markets.” Today, it’s safe to say that many of these countries, notably Singapore, South Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, etc., have already emerged. In the wake of Trump’s tariffs, for instance, Brazil and Argentina have easily stepped in to replace American farmers, who were previously their major suppliers of soybeans. China once needed the production of American farmers. It doesn’t anymore. The wealthiest countries are still wealthy, but as the rest of the world comes online, their wealth is no longer as exceptional as it once was.

According to the World Economic Forum, the world’s population has doubled since 1980, while global wealth has increased more than four times. The share of wealth held by the richest nation may seems less in proportion, but, in fact, that is because there is more wealth to go around. The real difference is that 20-25 percent of the world’s population is no longer alone in consuming 80 percent of the planet’s resources.

A perceived loss of sovereignty to international institutions is another of the strategy’s complaints. What it fails to mention is that nearly all of these international institutions were, in fact, created and shaped by the United States. Even more important, the 80 years they have been in existence represent one of the longest periods in human history without a violent conflict between the world’s major powers.

These institutions may need to be adapted to a changing world. For instance, France and Britain are permanent members of the UN Security Council, but Italy, Spain and Germany are not. India, Brazil, and Argentina have considerable economic heft, not to mention Singapore and South Korea, but they are still on the sidelines when it comes to the decision-making structures embedded in many of these original institutions. Reform is needed, but it seems foolish to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The last thing that the world needs at this point in time is to return to a world that lacks a mechanism for discussion or reaching a productive vehicle for international coordination.

Probably the strategy’s most glaring omission is its failure to mention climate change. Much of the rest of the world sees the accelerated increase in climate disasters as an existential threat—in other words, a threat to the future existence of the human race. It’s one thing to note that the human population has doubled since 1980. It’s another to consider what will happen if, like Americans, more than a billion Chinese or Indians decide that two cars are really necessary to have a comfortable life.

These problems cannot be resolved in isolation, and they are increasingly serious. In 2023, NOAA, the National Ocean and Atmospheric Agency, recorded 28 major climate disasters in the U.S.—the most in history. The cost to U.S. taxpayers was $98 billion. We can expect both disasters and their cost to continue to increase steadily unless something is done.

And climate change is only part of the problem. The Trump administration is deeply concerned about uncontrolled immigration, but that immigration is due mostly to economic imbalances and inefficient management of the planet’s resources. The only way to eliminate the pressure caused by uncontrolled immigration is through international development. No one wants to leave their home if they don’t have to. The answer is to provide an alternative, and that requires international cooperation, which means thinking through these problems on a global rather than a purely nationalistic basis.

There is always the risk that international aid can create dependency, but modern development strategies are acutely aware of that danger and have found ways around it. To be effective, development needs to be carefully thought out, and that requires maintaining a dialogue through international institutions.

Looked at closely, this latest National Defense Strategy tries to provide a roadmap for the future, yet instead of promoting a new age in which everyone can prosper, it appears to advocate a return to white supremacy, xenophobic nationalism, and the right of the wealthy to hold on to their riches at a cost to nearly everyone else. What we have here is a transactional equation based on the principle that your gain is my loss.

Many of the idea expressed harken back to the isolationist thinking of the 1930s, and even earlier to the “Know Nothing” party of the 1850’s. That movement, as virulent as today’s MAGA crowd, opposed the massive immigration of Catholics (“Papists”) from Ireland. Back then, the Irish were desperately seeking relief from mass starvation caused by a water-borne mold that destroyed Ireland’s potato crop, the main sustenance for the country’s poor, who had been reduced to tenant farming largely because they were under British rule.

The strategy’s rhetoric bears an even closer resemblance to the “America First” movement of the 1930’s. Although the America Firsters argued that the U.S. should mind its own business and not allow itself to become involved in trying to stop Hitler or the progressive elimination of European Jews and other minorities, it was also at least partly motivated by a discrete admiration for the imagined efficiency of European fascism. In Italy, Mussolini made the trains run on time. Hitler also smashed established institutions, advocated making “Germany strong again,” and opposed what he saw as deviant behavior by homosexuals, free thinkers, Bohemians, and modern artists who produced work that he considered frivolous and impossible to understand. Much like conservatives on today’s U.S. Supreme Court, supporters of a fascist new world order favored a “unitary executive” that could cut through public debate and make quick decisions leading to a well-defined course of action. The weakness in the concept is that it depends on the character of the individual. The Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius might have been a great emperor. No one considered that a Caligula or Nero might be less so.

The America First movement attracted a number of well-respected American luminaries, notably Charles Lindbergh, who had achieved hero status by managing the first non-stop flight across the Atlantic. Lindbergh became a leading isolationist and found Germany’s dynamism and direction under Hitler to be “thrilling.” Lindbergh never praised Hitler directly in public, but as with Trump’s bromance with Vladimir Putin, and the current National Security Strategy, Lindbergh and his wife found more to criticize in Hitler’s opponents than in the Führer himself.

An even more blunt supporter of the “unitary executive,” was William Dudley Pelley, who founded the pro-isolation “Silver Legion,” in 1931, recommended scrapping the U.S. presidency altogether and installing a dictator, to be known as “the Chief.” While Hitler dressed his militia in Brown shirts, and Mussolini put them in black shirts, Pelley had his followers wear silver shirts. He ran briefly for president but lost to FDR.

The isolationists’ major error was to believe that the world’s two major oceans were sufficient to protect the U.S. from outside influences. The Surprise attack against Pearl Harbor proved just how wrong they were. Japanese Imperial Army troops captured roughly 30,000 American prisoners of war in the Philippines and slaughtered others in what came to be know as the Bataan Death March. Lieutenant General Jonathan Wainright, the highest ranking American prisoner of war, said that the crime had been to be unprepared.

It’s clear that whoever drafted the current National Security Strategy document has had little experience either in the military or international diplomacy, and that raises a serious question about who actually wrote it.

Far from an isolationist, Donald Trump appears ready to engage the U.S. in 19^th-century gunboat diplomacy with Venezuela. It is true that Trump has no love for Europe, and he is adamantly against anything that favors diversity, equity, or inclusion, but even for Trump, known for his “weave,” much of the wording of the paper seems incoherent and inconsistent. One suspects that Stephen Miller, Trump’s current Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, and Russel Vought, who heads the Office of Management and Budget, may have played a role in the paper’s drafting.

That raises the question of who is really running the White House these days? Trump, who is reaching the end of his biological tether and reportedly has reduced his working hours from noon to 5 PM, may simply have dropped out altogether, leaving the nation’s future direction in the hands of his unelected staff, and possibly the politically accident-prone J.D. Vance. It has happened before. Woodrow Wilson was comatose after a stroke left him incapacitated during the last 18 months of his presidency.

A “unitary executive,” or let’s call it what it is, a dictatorship, might be fine when a strong man is in charge and acting to the full strength of his abilities, but when the “strong man” is only a mask for an unidentified group of followers seeking power for themselves, the results can easily turn catastrophic. The Romans invented the concept of a “dictator,” in effect a unitary executive who could serve a limited term of 6 months of absolute power in the event of an emergency. The most famous, Cincinnatus, assumed the position twice to defend Rome, and twice returned to being an ordinary citizen. When Julius Caesar challenged a Roman Senate that had become as supine as today’s Republican Congress, he effectively declared himself dictator for life. In fact, his life was not that long. He was assassinated by the very members of the Senate who had originally applauded his rise to his power. Caesar was quickly disposed of, but the democracy that had ruled Rome was lost forever. It’s a cautionary note well worth remembering. Those who are ignorant of history are condemned to repeat it.

Pete Hegseth, our new ‘Secretary of War,’ may think that the Geneva Conventions are a joke, or at least not to be taken seriously. He is wrong.

The truth is that he and his nominal commander-in-chief have only a shaky understanding of the basic logic that makes the American government, and, for that matter, the world, function.

When six Democrats in Congress produced a video reminding members of the U.S. military that they are not obliged to obey illegal orders, the lawmakers were simply repeating an important principle that is prominently embedded in the Uniform Code of Military Justice (better known as the UCMJ), the system of laws that renders the U.S. military coherent and able to function.

The warning against following illegal orders was couched in general terms, but on Friday, November 28, the Washington Post reported that in an early September operation, the U.S. had not only destroyed a boat suspected of carrying drugs, but had then returned to the boat’s burning wreckage and spotted two survivors of the initial attack. The Post cited two sources who said that they had been in on the operation. According to their account, the strike team had asked what to do about the survivors desperately clinging to the boat’s wreckage. They reported that Hegseth’s answer had been to kill them all. If their account is true, the order was in clear violation of the Geneva Conventions, international law, as well as the U.S. Military’s Uniform Code of Military Justice.

The UCMJ mandates that military personnel must refuse to follow an order that violates the U.S. Constitution, involves the commission of a crime, or violates international law. The reason that those rules are there has a great deal to do with the War Crimes trials at the end of World War II.

The acts perpetrated by Nazi officers, especially those in the Waffen SS, Hitler’s private militia, were so heinous that it was impossible to let them go unpunished. In their defense, Nazi officers claimed that they were simply “following orders” when they murdered six million Jews, not to mention thousands of other individuals that Hitler’s Reich considered inferior to his conception of a master race.

Normally, U.S. legal thinking holds that a specific law needs to be on the books before anyone can be convicted of a crime. You cannot simply convict someone “ex post facto.” If a law forbidding the act did not already exist before a crime was committed, the perpetrator cannot be prosecuted after the fact. Their guilt was considered too obvious to be ignored. In the case of the Nazis, the Allied Powers and especially the U.S., decided that simply “following orders” could not be used as an excuse. The worst of the Nazi offenders were hanged. The rule that “following orders” could not be used as an excuse for committing an outrage in war or against humanity was prominently written into America’s Universal Code of Military Justice.

Of course, no one is likely to compare Pete Hegseth to the worst of the Nai war criminals, but the trajectory from violating civilized norms to becoming a monster is slippery. What looks like a bold action today can cross the line into an atrocity before anyone, most of all the perpetrator, realizes the full extent of what is happening.

In the case of the alleged Venezuelan narcotics smugglers, the justification for blowing the boats out of the water without first stopping and investigating what they are actually doing is questionable at best. The U.S. Navy is more than capable of intercepting and boarding boats coming from Venezuela and determining if they are actually carrying drugs. Even if they did turn out to be smugglers, drug trafficking is reprehensible, but it cannot seriously be called terrorism, except by a wild stretch of the imagination. A high-powered speed boat hardly represents a direct threat to the United States.

The real reason for using aircraft or drones to bomb the boats is either to avoid the legal red tape involved in arresting a suspect in international waters or to terrorize the Venezuelans into avoiding the ocean altogether. In the latter case, it is Pete Hegseth, who is attempting to use terror as a tool to achieve an end, not the hapless drug smugglers, however reprehensible they might be. Once the boat had been destroyed in the September attack, there was no possible excuse for attacking the two doomed survivors clinging to the wrecked hull, unless the intention was to terrorize the Venezuelans by resorting to a brutal murder. Stripped pf motive, the second attack against the sinking boat was the equivalent of shooting a prisoner of war in cold blood. The problem from Hegseth’s perspective is that the Trump administration asserts that we are not officially at war with Venezuela or the drug smugglers. Going to war requires a Declaration of War from Congress, and Trump is not prepared to do that.

We will probably never know whether the murder of Venezuelan survivors of the initial U.S. bombing of an unidentified Venezuelan boat was due to Hegseth’s orders or simply someone taking one of Hegseth’s careless comments to its natural conclusion. Hegseth left little doubt that he was in complete agreement with the attack when he jokingly posted a cartoon on X over the weekend. The drawing shows a cartoon Ninja turtle firing a rocket grenade at Venezuelan speed boats from a Vietnam-era U.S. “Huey” (UH-1) helicopter. The title reads “Franklin targets narco-terrorists.” Hegseth suggested at the top of his post on X that the murder should be on everyone’s Christmas wish list. Since the unexpected furor over the incident, the White House has tried to justify the assaults by insisting that the victims were “narco terrorists,” and at the same time quietly shifting the blame from Hegseth to Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley, the commander of the operation. Hegseth and Trump no doubt hope that Bradley will graciously agree to fall on his sword, a tradition in ancient Rome, when commanders were required to commit suicide to absorb the shame of their superior officers. The men and women who staff the Pentagon know differently. Failure to take responsibility for a command decision amounts to cowardice and cowards are useless as leaders. Hegseth is clearly not a leader.

What we do know at the very least is that Hegseth is manifestly unqualified to serve as Secretary of Defense. Forget about his aspiration to be a Secretary of War.

Hegseth may have deluded himself into believing that he is a ”warrior,” but the fact is that he was never part of the Regular Army. He did serve in the National Guard, an auxiliary state militia, where he reached the lower-middle rank of major. He had no comprehensive command experience, at least not at the level required to manage a massive organization such as the Pentagon. The military is, in fact, a giant system that functions as an immense machine. Soldiers are taught to act, not think. Strategy is left to the generals who must think, or everything will be lost. They are driving the machine. When the U.S. Army promotes an officer to the rank of general, it usually first sends him to the U.S. Army War College or for advanced post-graduate training at a leading university. The idea is to broaden his vision and polish his talents, in effect, to finally clue him into what managing this gigantic machine actually requires from a leader who must control all the moving parts. Hegseth had none of that. What he was, in fact, was a weekend TV anchor on Fox News, a television operation better known for its delusional right-wing opinions than its grasp of either journalism or reality. The cluelessness that led to Signal Gate was an early warning indicator that when it comes to national security, Hegseth is nothing more than a rank amateur.

The most disturbing aspect of this whole affair, however, is Hegseth’s readiness to kill even when it is not necessary. He wants the U.S. military to be more lethal, but to what end? Most military experts are convinced that the U.S. military is already frighteningly lethal. But that is not what the military is really about. Shooting people or blowing everything up may sound exciting and, to a certain extent, it is how Hollywood sees the military, but the military’s real function is to project power when and where it is needed. Killing people is a means to an end, not the end by itself. The object of the modern military is to show power without necessarily having to use it unless one is faced with an extreme situation. Few people who have seen real combat want to experience it again if it can possibly be avoided.

The Geneva Conventions trace their roots back to the Battle of Solferino in 1859, when 130,000 troops under Napoleon III joined Sardinians under Victor Emanuel II and fought an Austrian army under the Austrian emperor Franz Joseph I. The battle left unspeakable carnage in what had until then been a peaceful mountain village. A Swiss businessman, Jean-Henri Dunant, organized the villagers to help the wounded and dying. He later recounted the trauma he had experienced in a book entitled A Memoir of Solferino. Dunant’s account shocked the public and eventually led to the founding of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva. That was followed by the Geneva Conventions and international treaties in which competing powers agreed that there were certain lines of inhuman behavior that should never be crossed, even in warfare. The conventions opened the way to a steadily expanding body of international law designed to avoid warfare whenever possible. It is that body of law and the Geneva Conventions, as well as basic human decency, that Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump would carelessly cast aside. They do so at their own peril and at ours.

Trump’s AI-confected video, including his dump on the American public, says it all

It’s hardly a secret that Hitler hated Jews. For Donald Trump and his MAGA followers, it’s skin color and ancestry south of the Rio Grande that’s a problem. The prejudices are different, but the tactics of both men are strikingly similar.

By singling out undocumented immigrants, whom he frequently castigates as rapists and murderers, and then lumping them together with anyone who has less than lily-white skin or ancestry south of the border, Trump is able to label a significant segment of America’s population as belonging to a separate group that somehow seems less American and therefore less qualified to receive the legal protection than “real” Americans.

That’s what Hitler did with Jews. Creating that separation is often followed by the next step, which in Hitler’s case was deportation, followed by physical elimination in gas chambers and death camps. We know how Hitler’s vision ended. The future under Trump is less clear, but it does not look promising.

If you are white and your family has lived here for a few generations, Trump’s sleight of hand may be only mildly disturbing. If you are African-American or Hispanic, or if your skin just happens to be a bit off color, you have reason to be concerned.

Trump isn’t Hitler, at least not yet, but then neither was Hitler when he was just getting started. The evolution from elected politician to tyrant is a gradual process. When Trump posted a video in which he pilots an F-16 dropping excrement on protesters marching in the “No Kings” protests, he made it pretty clear where he stands.

It may be the first time in American history that an acting president boasted about sh*tting on the American public. An estimated seven million Americans marched in 2,600 protests across the country. Trump clearly wasn’t listening. To make his point, the video, constructed with artificial intelligence, culminates with Trump placing a crown on his own head.

Given that Trump now has total control over compliant majorities in the U.S. Congress and U.S. Senate and has backing by a conservative-packed U.S. Supreme Court as well as the Justice Department and FBI, protests are just about the only option left to those Americans who disagree with what Trump is doing.

Hitler violently repressed dissent with the Waffen SS, a secretive, violence-prone, private militia which answered to him and the Nazi elite alone. Trump has the appropriately named ICE, which he now wants to finance, under his “Big Beautiful Budget” with a whopping $75 billion over the next four years. As with the Waffen SS, ICE offers the advantage that it ultimately answers to one man. Its troops owe their position and their privileges to Trump, not the Pentagon or Congress. The $75 billion used to finance ICE will apparently be taken from funds currently used to finance Medicaid and school lunches for children from economically challenged families. Volunteers for ICE won’t have that problem—at least as long as Trump is still president. Without Trump, most of this gang would be back on the street, looking for work. That’s an incentive, if any were needed, to follow orders no matter how reprehensible or unconstitutional.

The incident that enabled Hitler to move from elected official to open tyranny was the Reichstag fire that burned Germany’s parliament building to the ground. Imagine setting fire to the U.S. Capitol, or just watch some TV footage of Trump’s gang actually assaulting the Capitol. It was never really known who set the Reichstag blaze. It doesn’t really matter. What counts is that it provided the excuse that Hitler needed to declare martial law, and that enabled him to use military force against the entire country.

Trump has been toying with imposing the U.S. Insurrection Act of 1807, which provides an exception to “Posse Comitatus,” the principle that Federal troops cannot and should not be used for domestic police actions. Were Trump to use that option, the U.S. would effectively make the transition from democracy to dictatorship.

With Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court neutralized, there is really nothing to stop Trump now except for public opinion. In order to swing opinion in his favor, Trump needs his own version of the Reichstag fire.

For a while, it looked as though sending ICE and the Texas National Guard into urban centers might provide the pretext that Trump needed. The use of an “agent provocateur” --inciting violence in order to justify a crackdown on any opposition--is an old trick that comes in handy when a potential tyrant needs to masquerade as a national savior. Hitler’s crackdown was presented as a necessary action to prevent terrorism by left-wing fanatics. Trump has used similar language, denouncing Democrats as “the enemy within.”

The strategy might have worked if the protests last weekend had turned violent. As it turned out, they didn’t. Instead, the protesters relied on satire. Taking a hint from protests in Portland, Oregon, demonstrators showed up wearing inflatable frog costumes, or dressed as chickens, roosters, or rabbits. In most cases, the atmosphere was jubilant. Who is going to shoot an inflatable chicken? Even the few ICE agents who watched the demonstration caught the humor in it. Yet, while the satire avoided giving Trump the excuse he needed to deploy military force against America’s cities, the current situation is anything but funny. A U.S. Court of Appeals overturned a lower court’s ban on deploying National Guard troops to Portland, Oregon, even though Posse Comitatus makes the legality of that deployment highly questionable.

While Trump seems primarily interested in using the presidency to enrich the Trump family, his acolytes, waiting in the wings, will likely use the precedents that Trump has created to seize power for themselves. White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, budget director Russell Vought, and Vice President J.D. Vance, who clearly hopes to replace Trump someday, have made it clear that they intend to end the vision of America as a country run by the people for the people and change it into one that responds to only some of the people. If it takes armed troops to impose that vision, well, the chances are that ICE will be there.