I recently read two articles, one of them was from Znet, I'll try to find it.
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"War Against Iran: The Big Picture" by Daniel Axelrod. The other one was from Craig Murray, "Seeing Trump Clearly".
I'm mentioning them together because they deal with a subject that is somewhat important and which I have wrestled with here at this blog. Axelrod's essay focuses more on the long-term continuities of US policy towards Iran over decades, and how Trump's actions actually fit seamlessly within that established framework. Murray's piece argues that Trump's buffoonery is an act. Like Axelrod, Murray shows how weakening Iran is long-term US policy and that, for all his seeming oafish stupidity, Trump is winning victory after victory, in Iran, in Venezuela, and now in Cuba.
I think there's much to be learned from both essays, but there are some things I take issue with.
With Axelrod, I think he discounts the importance of the various levels of agency of all the actors involved as well as the clear differences between the personalities and policies of someone like Barack Obama, who signed a treaty with Iran (and other nations) to regulate its nuclear program, and Trump, who unilaterally tore it up.
Axelrod also discounts the influence of Israel and Trump's possible vulnerability to the revelations of recorded images of his raping adolescent girls.
The US’s strategic goal in the Middle East for decades has always been dominance for US economic interests. In line with this long-term strategy, the present US/Israel war against Iran is fundamentally about three interrelated things: oil, China, and nuclear weapons.
But first, we must recognize what this war is NOT about. Despite what the corporate-backed politicians and billionaire-owned media suggest, the war is NOT mainly about the obvious personality defects of US and/or Israeli leaders, nor irrationalities of Islamic or Zionist actions based on historical theologies, nor a deliberate distraction from the Epstein files, nor the influence (and money) of the “Israeli lobby” that buys American politicians through AIPAC and others. All of these factors exist but they are NOT the root causes. The US is NOT being jerked around by Israel (the “tail wagging the dog’ theory); clearly the US can cut Israel off and collapse its military and economy anytime it wants. But it chooses not to do so.
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The current attack against Iran is not in response to anything specific that Iran has done recently. Rather, the US currently is trying to reverse Iran’s long-term recurrent tendency to defy rather than buckle under US demands for control of Iranian oil.
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The US also imposed a long series of severe economic and banking sanctions on Iran ever since 1979, in an effort to foment a counter-revolution. The present attack on Iran is clearly not new: it is a continuation of the policy of the last 47 years.
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Control of Middle East oil is the real reason that the US supports Israel as a military arm. That support has little to do with moral sympathy for the descendants of the surviving victims of the World War II Holocaust. ... The US and Israel share an extensive and deep overlap in military, intelligence, military secrets, surveillance, and high tech weaponry industries. So Israel is not jerking around the US; both nations have common interests, with the US the dominant partner because it is much larger and supplies all the money.
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The US corporate elite class may be unified internally in their opposition to sharing its wealth with working people (who are the real enemy from their perspective), but it still does have a range of views, depending on where its investments reside. Some in that class want the US policy to “pivot to Asia” (meaning East Asia), directly competing with China over land, resources and military power. Others want to place a hegemonic economic and military clamp upon the Western Hemisphere (South and North America, including Greenland). But the Middle East remains a consensus zone of interest and contention, both for its oil and its strategic location near shipping lanes around the Red Sea and Persian Gulf.
This context explains why the US urgently wants to take back Iran after the debacle of the 1979 Iranian Revolution and why it uses Israel to achieve that goal. The goal is NOT to “protect Israel”. In fact, the US policy greatly endangers the people of Israel, as they currently experience heavy retaliatory bombing after foolishly poking a hornet’s nest.
Likewise, the US policy is NOT molded just by the “Israel Lobby”, a circle of super-rich donors in the US consisting of Bible-thumping Zionist Jews and Christians who boast of their ethnic or moral superiority, allegedly granted to them thousands of years ago by a supernatural being. As usual in history, organized religion is used as a tool of the dominant economic class to secure property and recruit fanatics. It is true: the Israel Lobby buys US politicians and staffs executive offices and mainstream media outlets, while smearing, denouncing, and harassing (and sometimes getting the government to beat and deport) many people, including many US Jews who do not support Zionism.
But the real engine driving this war is the pressing need felt by the US capitalist class to slow its decline relative to China, in part by securing control of oil in the Middle East. Securing that control, with all its world-wide geopolitical benefits may well involve nuclear weapons. Introducing nuclear weapons into a conventional conflict is a well-established part of US nuclear strategy.
Murray, meanwhile, says that Trump's entire public persona is a charade, meant to mask his ruthless, amoral cunning:
What if Trump’s apparently chaotic thought processes and intuitive decision making are all a blind, a charade? What if we are really witnessing, in the Middle East and more widely, a carefully constructed plan with very definite objectives? Has Trump in fact “planned each charted course, each careful step along the byway”, while flinging the chaff of apparent chaos? I realise that this is not intuitive, but bear with me…
What kicked off my thinking was the revelation by Lockheed Martin that they had been instructed by Trump, months in advance of the attack on Iran, to massively increase production of interceptor missiles, with a short term goal of quadrupling capacity of THAAD. In January, before the start of the current conflict, Fox News was already reporting on various deals, including a trebling of PAC3 MSE interceptor deliveries, having been finalised between Lockheed and the Department of War.
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While obviously there are supply chain and production line constraints on the ability to ramp up production within months, the urgency of this activity – almost entirely focused on interceptor missiles – that started in 2025 is in hindsight a clear indication that early war with Iran was expected. It is plain evidence of premeditation.
The second thing that triggered my thought that this is all carefully planned, is the nature of the breakdown of the nuclear deal talks. It appears there was a broad consensus that Iran offered concessions which made a deal very practical, in particular giving up its stocks of enriched uranium into trust (a proposal Iran had historically rejected when Putin offered to hold the material). Both the hosts, Oman and the British thought a deal was there.
The failure of the talks is being spun as due to the incompetence and lack of technical knowledge of Witkoff and Kushner. But I just don’t buy this. The sending of unqualified negotiators was part of a ploy to use the negotiations as cover for an attack – the second time in a year that the United States had pulled the same trick.
They didn’t need competent negotiators, because they had never intended a good faith negotiation.
The attack on Iran was always planned by Trump. He was not “bounced into it” by Israel. It had been in gestation for months. That fact had been held within a very tight circle to avoid both political opposition and institutional opposition from the US military and intelligence community.
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Now factor in another apparently random act by Trump – the astonishing kidnapping of President Maduro of Venezuela on 3 January, a month before the attack on Iran.
Trump’s naval blockade of Venezuela’s oil has secured a US monopoly of its sale and distribution. As with Iraq, only US-approved contractors can buy the oil and payments are made to a Trump-controlled account in Qatar, from which revenue is given to the Venezuelan government entirely at Trump’s discretion.
This audacious imperialist grab of the world’s largest oil reserve further insulated the USA against the effects of the forthcoming closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
Again, the narrative is being spun that Trump did not foresee the closure of the Strait by Iran. That is plainly a nonsense – every commentary on a potential Iran war for half a century has focused on the Strait of Hormuz. The only possible explanation is that Trump does not mind the closure.
While, as Trump says, the United States does not need the oil that comes through the Strait, the apparent weakness in his case is that higher oil prices are universal and hit Trump’s support, particularly as Americans fill their gas tanks. But to concentrate on this is to make the fundamental error of imagining that Trump cares about what is good for the American people. He does not. He cares about what is good for Donald J. Trump and his immediate circle.
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Not to mention, of course, that the really big fortunes will have been made in oil and derivative commodity futures by those who knew this war was coming (acting through proxies).
The $200 billion Trump is requesting from Congress to continue the war is going to make an awful lot of well-connected people even richer.
So the plan is the making of fortunes, the strengthening of the military-industrial complex and the ratcheting up under cover of national cohesion in war of the authoritarianism that has reduced freedom of speech and outlawed dissent against Israel across the Western world.
To benefit Israel is the other predominant motive.
Trump’s thrashing about to articulate objectives for the war in Iran is performative, a blind to cover his true and steadfast objective – simply the annihilation of Iran as a functioning state, the infliction of the maximum amount of death and infrastructural damage, the reduction of Iran to the condition of Libya.
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But a linked and crucial objective is the elimination of the source of the only physical resistance to the expansion of Israel. Iran and its allies in Yemen and Lebanon have been the sole support of the Palestinians for years.
The colonial settler state of Israel is central to the projection of imperialist power in the Middle East. Its expansion is an essential part of the plan.
Destruction of Iran on the scale envisaged will take years of hard pounding. Again, it is planned – you don’t ask Congress for an instalment of $200 billion for a war you plan to wrap up in a month. Again, Trump’s taunts about having already won, objectives being achieved and about possibly finishing soon, are all just smoke and mirrors. The scale and horror of what is planned for Iran has to be obfuscated to limit a public revulsion that would be echoed in parts of the state apparatus.
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It is comforting to see Trump as a buffoon, to accept the facade he presents of a blustering and ill-educated ignoramus, who swings wildly between policy options, and who does not understand the world of geopolitics.
But that is nonsense.
I have no hesitation in characterising Trump’s genius as evil, focused on personal gain and willing to inflict any amount of death, maiming and deprivation on innocent civilians to attain his goals. But he is indeed attaining his goals on the world stage.
Trump has forced the Security Council to underwrite his Board of Peace. This was a quite astonishing diplomatic triumph over a helpless Russia and China, both of which decided that other negotiations with Trump were more important. Trump has presided over Israel expanding on the ground by the day. Trump has taken Venezuela’s oil, the largest reserves in the world. Trump is currently killing the people of Iran and destroying their infrastructure, while feigning indecision.
You should hate Trump: but he is no clown.
On the question of Trump's intelligence (or lack thereof) or his mental stability, I confess to having an opinion that lies somewhere between that of the corporate-liberal media and the corporate-liberal Democratic leadership (which holds that Trump is a complete imbecile, a weak man who believes whatever the last person he spoke with tells him, and who has no long-term goals beyond his increasingly brazen scams and shakedowns) and Craig Murray, who is saying that it's all an act.
Last April, when Trump announced his "Liberation Day" tariffs, many critics looked at the idiocy of it all and pronounced Trump to be essentially brain-dead. And while I agreed that "Liberation Day" was disastrous so far as a protectionist re-industrialization policy went, I had to push back against the notion that it was simply that. That it wasn't just the case of Trump being the equivalent of a four-year old making a mess in the kitchen.
Again, I realize the irony of thwap, the guy who said that stephen harper and Dick Cheney were not evil geniuses, or even evil competents, but genuinely stupid, is now warning people not to underestimate ("misunderestimate"??) Trump. But it's because I believed then and I still believe that harper and Cheney were considered by too many people to be intelligent when they were serial blunderers (with harper on numerous occasions coming almost to the point of tears as his stupidity was exposed). And I honestly believe that the depiction of Trump in the liberal media has him as so bottomlessly stupid that it makes people complacent and dismissive of how actually dangerous he is.
When people said that george dubya bush was only pretending to be a shit-head I always asked why he would pretend to be a shit-head. What was gained by pretending to be a stammering moron, with his "fool me once, shame on, ... shame on, ... [looks lost] ... you! [looks completely lost] ... Fool me, you can't fool me again!" How did THAT benefit dubya? "Put food on your family." That bizarre silence during his debate with Kerry. All a 19th-Dimension chess game. How??? I mean, he NEVER got the better of anyone. that's a fact. His goal was to serve the wealthy and he did that. But that's the goal of every president, Republican or Democrat. A good president is known by his ability to use the wiggle room the office has to benefit others besides the rich. And, in that context, dubya was a failure. Everything he ever tried to do diminished the power and the standing of the USA.
And so, with regards to this war ... Of Course there is a continuity of US policy. The USA wants to control the world's energy supply. It wants to maintain the petro-dollar. Iran is a large oil producing nation that rejects US-American hegemony, therefore it must be brought to heel. All presidents since Carter have sanctioned Iran, and Reagan attacked Iran via Saddam Hussein's Iraq. But up until Trump, most presidential administrations have recognized that Iran is too strong to attack directly. Barack Obama, a scumbag, but perhaps the best president that the degenerate USA political culture was capable of producing, negotiated the JCPOA, which was actually pretty punitive on Iran, but did promise some sanctions relief and would have probably provided for Iran to re-enter the US-led "international community" which would have led to US-orchestrated subversion of the Iranian elite, and etc., etc., ... but we'll never know because Trump unilaterally tore it up. And then the stupid, increasingly senile, lifelong zionist, Joe Biden, with the ultra-zionist human garbage Antony Blinken as his Secretary of Shit, never returned to it. And then, thanks to the Democratic party's shit-for-brains decision to allow the demented Biden a chance for a second term, which proved to be as disastrous as anyone who didn't have shit-for-brains did or would have predicted. So Biden anointed the word-salad cretin Kamala Harris and she defecated on the enthusiasm generated by not forcing Democratic loyalists to vote for a zombie by sticking like glue to senile Biden's support for Israel's genocide of the Palestinians.
And all this hubris and stupidity and incompetence and cowardice led to Donald Trump genuinely winning a second term. The point of all of this being that while there are obvious continuities in American foreign (and domestic) policies, and while US presidents are servants of the oligarchy, they all bring their individual flourishes the job. Dubya and Cheney were dedicated to finding a "new Pearl Harbor" to justify going to war in West Asia. Obama thought the invasion of Iraq had been a mistake and wanted to focus on Afghanistan. For the most part he wanted to limit the USA's use of its military to air and drone strikes.
US-American foreign policy is also the product of what has become known as "the deep state" that persists across presidential administrations. But US presidents aren't just obedient servants of the bureaucracies of the CIA, the NSA, and etc.,. It was Dick Cheney who leaned on the CIA to fabricate evidence of Saddam Hussein's involvement in the 9-11/2001 Al Qaeda attack and of his violations of agreements not to build offensive weapons, including chemical weapons.
Also, while some oligarchs expect to get their orders followed in Washington, not all of them are deeply invested in foreign policy. I doubt that the owner of Home Depot concerns himself all that much with details of NATO's expansion or what weapons get stationed in South Korea. Such issues are the domain of arrogant swamp creatures, ... usually deranged individuals like John Bolton, Robert Kagan and Victoria Nuland, William Kristol. To the extent that foreign policy is left in the hands of these chickenhawk scumbags, all the oligarchs in the various industries in the USA can find themselves dragged along into wars they didn't want like all the rest of us.
A day or two after starting this post I came across another good essay on the topic from CounterPunch "The Empire Versus Iran: Which Side Are You On?" by Richard Rubenstein.
I learned in the sixties that despite personalized slogans and chants (“Hey, hey, LBJ, How many kids did you kill today?”) the war in Indochina was not Lyndon Johnson’s or Richard Nixon’s war. It was an ultra-violent struggle to preserve and extend the U.S. Empire, with the Americans acting as successors to the French, the former imperial rulers of Vietnam. In the same way, the current “war of choice” against Iran waged by the U.S. and Israel is not just Trump’s or Netanyahu’s adventure but another imperialist campaign led by the Americans, this time acting as successors to the Middle East’s British and French colonizers.
Not just Trump’s war but the Empire’s. Why is this description important? Because other characterizations lead well-meaning opponents of the war to misunderstand it and to advocate ineffective cures for the systemic disease that produces it. For example, if the war in Iran is primarily a product of Trump’s megalomania or Netanyahu’s desire to stay in office, the cure is to replace these rulers with calmer, more diplomatic, more enlightened and liberal leaders. Right?
Wrong. The quality of leadership can make a difference, but if the system that the leader serves is an empire, he or she will finally act like an emperor. It was Lyndon Johnson, elected in 1964 as a liberal “peace candidate,” who began a war of choice against Vietnamese rebels that killed several million Vietnamese and more than 50,000 U.S. combatants. A generation later George W. Bush, the “compassionate conservative” who insisted that “America has never been an empire,” invaded Afghanistan and occupied Iraq, killing and maiming close to a million civilians in those state-building interventions. Bush’s successor, Barak Obama, an icon of liberalism and diplomacy, conducted more than 500 drone attacks against suspected terrorists in Asia and Africa without Congressional authorization and presided over the destruction and dismemberment of Libya by U.S. and NATO forces. And Joe Biden, his former vice-president, supplied Israel with weapons and intelligence used for genocide in Gaza, vetoed anti-Israel resolutions in the Security Council, struck the Houthis in Yemen with U.S. missiles, and authorized military operations labeled “counterterrorist” in 77 other nations.
With liberal diplomats like these as his predecessors, it’s no wonder that Donald Trump decided to run for president as a peace candidate!
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But the transformation and the wars that attend it are not just manifestations of Trump’s personality and ideology; they are also products of the Empire’s deep structure.
The outlines of that structure are well known. Imperial institutions are designed to project the power of a ruling elite beyond a nation’s borders to subject less powerful territories and peoples to its economic, political, and cultural control. ...
The politicians provide the empire with taxpayer funds, civilian and military manpower, and (to the extent possible) popular ideological consent. Together, these leaders create and fund a military-industrial complex that enables the imperial state to overwhelm its opponents with violent force.
No doubt, some leaders are more violent or crazier than others. Nevertheless, no matter who leads, the imperial structure generates three characteristic types of violence: rebellion/repression, civil and regional wars, and world wars.
Again, ... One can't really deny the continuities of US imperialist foreign policy. But one can't also argue that the USA isn't an imperial power in decline. Or that Biden and Trump and their entire administrations aren't indicative of that decline, and the increasing incompetence and moral degeneracy of the elites. I agree with the arguments against "great men of history" books that have individual leaders much more important than the environments that produced them. At the same time, I don't think we should discount the important influence that particular individuals can have on the particular events of which general currents are comprised.
I'll quote a bit more from Rubenstein on the influence of Israel on Washington D.C. policy and then I'll try to sum things up.
What has been said thus far makes it clear, I trust, that the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran (which has now spread into Lebanon) is a classic imperialist war of aggression. Yet some critics and opponents of the war, including analysts whose work I admire, insist that “It’s Israel, Stupid!” These commentators, whose views range from moderately left to far right, allege that for one reason or another having little to do with empire — Donald Trump’s impulsive egotism, Benjamin Netanyahu’s con man persuasiveness, the financial clout of the pro-Israel Lobby, the Christian Zionist hope for the Second Coming — the US has been tricked or pressured into fighting “Israel’s war” against Iran. Even Jacobin, which advertises itself a socialist journal, reviews the alleged evidence for this theory and comes to the “inescapable conclusion that America is fighting this dreadful and rapidly escalating war not with Israel but on its behalf.”
This is not only inaccurate; it is slow-witted. It is what people say who have no real understanding of what imperialism is and how it works. Empires have subjects, some of whom (since it divides and rules) are also clients. Client groups of long standing are often favored by the imperial elite and have some influence over them; ...
Especially favored clients may succeed now and then in embroiling the elite in their local disputes. But the notion that they are tails wagging the dog – that the empire’s rulers will fight major wars on their behalf at the expense of their own imperial interests – is absurd. Worse than that, such an overestimation of the power of imperial subjects implies an equally serious underestimation of the power of the elite.
What sort of evidence is there for the “dog-wagging” theory? Its primary source is an allegation by Secretary of State Marco Rubio that Netanyahu threatened to start the war against Iran himself, exposing U.S. assets in the region to retaliation, so that Donald Trump had no alternative but to join in. But even if Netanyahu made such a threat, of course Trump had alternatives! He could have threatened to leave Israel hanging in the wind or to cut off its military aid, and the American public, most of whom opposed the war, would have applauded.
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The dog-wagging theorists, as mentioned earlier, range from ultra-conservative America Firsters, several of whom have a nasty fixation on alleged Jewish conspiratorial plots, to self-declared leftists with a disconcerting habit of asserting that groups that they oppose are in the pay of some foreign power and are not sufficiently concerned about “America’s national interests.” ...
If U.S. rulers can fight a war against that enemy that relies on Israeli intelligence sources, exposes Israelis, but not Americans, to hypersonic missile attacks, and places Israeli boots, but very few American boots, on the ground, it will be playing the classical imperialist game in classical imperialist style.
No, the tail does not wag the dog. The dog-wagging theorists would do well to consider the remark often attributed to the Austrian socialist, August Bebel: “Antisemitism is the socialism of fools.” Just because the Zionists have mis-defined and weaponized antisemitism by equating it with anti-Israelism doesn’t mean that it has ceased to exist, and the idea that an all-powerful Jewish State and Jewish Lobby are dictating policies of war and peace to the world’s most powerful empire is right out of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. There are Jewish oligarchs, Jewish weapons manufacturers, and corrupt, power-addicted Jewish politicians; I wish there weren’t. But they do not dominate or manipulate the capitalist oligarchy or the American state and empire that do its bidding. If we want to get rid of that empire, we will have to reform that state. And if we want to reform that state, we will have to dispossess that oligarchy – or at least subject it to popular control.
Rubenstein is a good thinker and writer. But I fear that here he is using too wide of a brush. He seems to be saying that because Trump had options to any of Netanyahu's schemes, he must have deliberately chosen not to use them, because the course of action that he followed was seen to be in the best interests of the USA's oligarchy. International Affairs scholar John Mearsheimer was on "Useful Idiots" recently, and he stated that the very existence of AIPAC, or "The Israel Lobby" shows that the Israelis have plans that they have to coordinate with US-American politicians. Wall Street has lobbyists and often gets what it wants. Fossil fuels has a lobby. Health Insurance and pharmaceuticals have lobbyists. The oligarchy in general has a list of demands, the bulk of which require the hollowing-out of the country's manufacturing base, the growing impoverishment of the bulk of the population, the increasing debt of the public sector, the continued deterioration of infrastructure. Selfish, short-sighted, delusional policies of personal aggrandizement, that contributes to the weakening of the USA as a whole.
So, yes, Israel, which was supposed to be an ally and defender of British interests in the early-20th Century, is now supposed to represent the USA's interests in strategically important West Asia. But while serving the interests of American imperialism, and Christian zionist weirdos, Israel is controlled by Jewish zionists, who have for their own agenda, the creation of a "Greater Israel" which threatens the USA's client Arab dictatorships.
If American presidents are quite capable of destroying the USA's manufacturing base to help capitalists keep more profits, or any other actions that weaken US society in the long-run, they are also capable of acquiescing to the Israel Lobby, and the powerful domestic constituencies of the Military-Industrial-Complex and Christian zionism, regardless of the long-term consequences.
I'm just going to conclude that Donald Trump, through his own personal failings (massive narcissism, corruption, penchant for raping young girls, advancing mental decline, cowardice, hypocrisy) is vulnerable to MOSSAD blackmail. He got a lot of money from zionist financiers, especially the Adelsons. I believe that Donald Trump is an erratic individual and something of an idiot. But he is not the equivalent of an easily controlled three-year old as he's portrayed by CNN or whatever MSNBC is called now. I think he got enough information to let him know that an attack on Iran could lead to a disaster, and he would have preferred to avoid it. But Netanyahu needs war to keep himself in power because he's in legal trouble if he falls. Last June showed that Iran is capable of destroying forever the creation of a Greater Israel. It was now or never. And if Yaweh has given Israel the pedophile/rapist Trump to blackmail into going along with this, then it would be denying Him to let the opportunity pass.
Trump really hoped that a decapitation strike and "shock and awe" would cause the Iranian government to capitulate. When they didn't, and all the adverse consequences he was warned about began to come to pass, his military, commanded by the drunken imbecile Hegseth, flailed about, and so did Trump, blustering from one instantly contradicted statement to the next.
This war of 2026 wasn't a foregone conclusion. It's part of a general process of imperialism, imperialist decline, and the declining quality of the US-American ruling class. Of whom, the rapist, grifter, racist, narcissist, Donald Trump is the current symbol.
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