[Here’s a must-read, as far as I’m concerned. (At least, I never miss it.) I’m thinking about retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and historian Bill Astore’s Bracing Views Substack. If you haven’t already visited it, do check it out! And while you’re at it, also check out his all too aptly titled book American Militarism on Steroids: The Military-Industrial Complex, Unbounded, Uncontained, and Undemocratic. Tom]
Hey, Donald Trump couldn’t have made it clearer that he wanted to go to war with Iran, could he?
You would think that even he wouldn’t have been dumb enough to start a war with that country, given the U.S. record of (not) winning wars anywhere on Earth since World War II ended 80-plus years ago, not to speak of his repeated promises, when running for office again in 2024, that, unlike just about every president in recent times, there would be “no new wars,” not all-American ones anyway, once he was back in office -- nope, nowhere on Earth. (Whew! That was a lot to get into a single Trumpian sentence!)
As “our” president bragged after his first term in 2023, “I was the only president in modern history who did not have any new wars.” (Okay, he did indeed fight ISIS for a while in Syria, but that, at least, was a passing moment.) And yet, just in case you missed it, here’s what he said relatively recently about Iran when questioned by an interviewer about the possibility of sending U.S. troops there: “I absolutely feel that, yes, I don’t think there’s any question.”
Oh, wait, excuse me, I got confused (something that does happen to 82-year-olds). He actually said that in -- yes! -- 1980. Can you believe it? Admittedly, at that time, Iran was holding some U.S. diplomats and other Americans prisoner. Still, how strange that it’s actually been on his mind for quite so long and, of course, in 1980 he wasn’t president of the United States yet and so couldn’t put his passing thoughts into action. Now, of course, he is, a second time around and so... sigh... he has indeed gone to war with that country (no matter that Iran hasn’t held a U.S. diplomat in almost half a century)... and so... sigh... here we are -- or do I mean here we no longer are, or even here we aren’t?
When it comes to war, it seems as if there simply is no learning curve, no curve at all in fact, for American presidents and certainly not for the one who now has the urge, among other things, to raise the Pentagon’s yearly budget from a mere trillion (yes, trillion!) dollars annually to a mere trillion and a half dollars (no, that is not a misprint!) a year, the largest suggested single year increase since the Korean War more than three-quarters of a century ago! (And no matter how many times I see that $1.5 trillion figure, I still can’t believe that he truly plans to try to do that, though I’m afraid that tells you more about me, despite my endless years covering American wars and military budgets, than it does about Donald J. Trump.)
As time passes and he even claims to be trying to make peace with Iran, his threats have also continued to rise, though anything he says could be contradicted 47 seconds later. He began, of course, by insisting that, if Iran didn’t reopen the Strait of Hormuz fast, “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” That might even have been an implicit threat to use nuclear weapons. And when that Strait didn’t reopen anyway, he promptly backed down, only to more recently claim that a “duplicitous” Iran had just “one last chance” to make a deal or catastrophe would follow, militarily speaking.
And so it goes in the world of Donald J. Trump, or rather so it’s gone for the last -- yes, can you believe it? -- six months! And as New York Times reporter Steven Erlanger recently made clear, and as the situation in Iran has indicated, President Trump has succeeded in turning the U.S. into “an unpredictable instrument of global disorder,” while leaving Iran and Oman in charge of the fate of the Strait of Hormuz (and global trade more generally), while creating “a new form of forever war.”
“I Want to Give Them Every Last Chance Before Decapitation”
And yet in the strange world of You Know Who, everything could end more or less peaceably before this article even comes out or simply go directly up in flames. On the other hand, the American president who is not really known for his attention span could turn back to Greenland (which he’s been eying greedily for years) and respond to the closing of the Strait of Hormuz by a revenge act of closing the Northwest Passage (no matter that it has no relation to Iran at all).
And in truth, whatever happens as far as Iran is concerned (or for that matter Greenland) by the time this piece appears, who among us won’t have long known that, with such a president, we simply couldn’t be in a stranger, more happenstantial, less predictable universe? For all I (we) know, by the time it comes out or anytime thereafter, “our” president could be doing more or less anything, including, say, kidnapping the first secretary of the communist party and leader of Cuba, Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez. After all, if he could do so for Venezuela’s leader, why not Cuba’s?
The truth is that Donald Trump’s brain, returned to the White House by 49.8% of American voters in 2024, should make us all anxious (even them). At any moment, any thought might enter it and the next thing you know... well, unfortunately, you already do know that, whatever it might be, we’re not likely to know until it smacks us all in the face!
As I was writing this, for instance, he said, of the Iranians, “I want to give them every last chance before decapitation. … We’ll see what happens.” And added, “The Strait [of Hormuz] is going to be open very soon, or they’re going to [be] hit very hard, and then the Strait is going to be open.” Or, of course, closed or flipped upside down or sent to the moon, or... well, you can fill this in, since your guess is as good as mine.
Now, just before I end, think about that quote of his for a moment: decapitating Iran is certainly no small thing and who knows what he actually means by that (not even him, likely as not)?
But let’s say one thing for certain: being in Donald Trump’s presidential world is (or at least should be) a deeply unsettling matter. Unsettling enough these days that even his MAGA loyalist base seems to be shrinking all too rapidly.
As for what’s going to happen next, well, who knows and, should you want to know, don’t ask Donald Trump of all people. I suspect that, his second time around as president, he might be the last to know and if that isn’t a strange world to be in, I honestly don’t know what is.
The philosopher Hegel said:
"What we learn from history is that
[nations] do not learn from history."
Hey Tom, thanks for the recommendation! And for writing an intro to the volume. :-)