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About this Episode
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Trump voters thought they were voting for peace. But circumstances are conspiring to make Trump the worst kind of war president: a loser.
From a national leader’s perspective, there’s nothing like losing a cataclysmically destructive war to make people hate you and revile your memory. Just ask Hitler. (If he’d avoided that war, or better yet won, he’d be remembered as a hero.)
Trump is lucky that most Americans haven’t read Ron Unz’s free ebook Our COVID Catastrophe. If they had, they would know that the first Trump Administration created the COVID crisis by launching an ill-advised bio-attack on China and Iran.
The US bioattack on Wuhan and Qom didn’t explode into World War III, thanks to Chinese and Iranian restraint. But even while the Trump Administration was sending biowar operatives to the Wuhan Military Games in October 2019 to spray COVID all over the wet market, it was arming Ukraine to the teeth and pointing those weapons at Moscow. When Russia inevitably responded in 2022, it wasn’t just Biden’s fault, but Trump’s as well.
And let’s not forget that in early January 2020, just as the US-weaponized COVID virus was picking up steam in Wuhan, Trump ordered the murder of Iran’s greatest-ever military hero and would-have-been next president, Gen. Qasem Soleimani. Iranian retaliation injured dozens of Americans, and may have caused deaths, though that’s still classified. Trump backed down, angry that advocates of the killing had insisted that Iran wouldn’t retaliate, and even angrier that Netanyahu, who had promised to take responsibility, reneged.
The moral of all of this is that Trump, who would prefer to be a peace-and-prosperity president, has been nudged by circumstance and bad advice toward becoming the next Hitler. By that I don’t mean he’s a bad guy—I don’t think Hitler was an especially bad guy either—but rather that Trump, like Hitler, is setting himself up to lose a hugely destructive war and be reviled in the history books. And unlike Hitler, Trump may one day be prosecuted for a real, fully-documented genocide: the obliteration of Gaza.
Today’s Trump Administration 2.0 is desperately trying to repair relations with Russia so it can instead fight Iran (on behalf of Israel) and China (on behalf of US global supremacy). At first glance that may seem reasonable. After all, if you’ve driven your three biggest opponents together due to your unrelenting hostility to all three of them at once, being nice to one of them might conceivably make it easier to fight the other two.
But in this case, that superficial analysis is wrong. Russia knows full well that the US is a decaying, increasingly decrepit empire that is non-agreement-capable and totally predatory in outlook, whereas China has become the world trade and manufacturing hub with a win-win orientation to its partners. So anything Putin says to mollify Trump and get what Russia wants in Ukraine should be taken with a grain of salt.
But Trump’s real problem is not that Russia will at best only pretend to be America’s friend vis-a-vis China and Iran. It’s that those wars are unwinnable. Today, China and Iran have the power to deter all-out war, and to inflict unacceptable damage if war comes. Any way you slice it, the US will come out a loser. And the loss will likely be catastrophic, entailing the collapse of the dollar, the impoverishment of the American people, and the scapegoating or even lynching of the leader deemed responsible. Trump is setting himself up for that unpleasant fate.
Trump’s dilemma is that he is trying to solve problems that might have been effectively addressed 30 years ago. But those trains have long since left the station.
The early-to-mid 1990s would have been the time to slow China’s rise to number one power status, and to preserve American manufacturing. Had young Trump been elected—or better yet the slightly older Pat Buchanan—the US president could have decried the treason of the banksters and financiers and stopped them from moving US manufacturing abroad. He could have established a true national public bank under the auspices of the Treasury Department and made it, not the Rothschild-run Federal Reserve, the creator of American currency. And he could have established a national economic policy tasked with looking decades into the future and making optimum decisions on the basis of medium- and long-term calculations, not short-term profits. (All of these things China did, which is why they have been eating America’s lunch.)
Such policies, implemented by the mid-1990s, would have made China’s rise less meteoric, and America’s collapse less catastrophic. But I doubt they would have permanently sealed off China from #1 global power status. China’s two biggest assets are its cohesive culture and huge, highly intelligent, strong-work-ethic population. One way or another, China was going to return to its normal place as the world’s biggest economy. But it didn’t have to happen this fast. And the US didn’t have to commit suicide to enable that hyper-rapid rise.
Additionally, in the 1990s, the US had a certain military advantage over China. If push came to shove, at-least-somewhat-credible threats could have been made. Today, though some Americans pretend it’s still the 1990s, China can obviously take Taiwan any time it chooses, and the US can do nothing beyond making the loss bloodier and more disastrous. China’s short supply lines, increasing advantages in more and more key technologies, and multiple multiples of US manufacturing power will doom the US in any hot war.
Iran, Too, Could Have Been “Solved” in the 1990s
Just as a president named Trump or Buchanan could have dealt effectively with China during the 1990s, that same president could have solved America’s problems with Iran. The Iranian president at the time, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, was relatively West-friendly and pragmatic in his outlook. He was the kind of deal-maker with whom people like Trump love to negotiate. Additionally, Iran was exhausted from its ten-year “imposed war” with US-backed Saddam-Hussein-led Iraq and was in no mood for further military adventures. As with 1990s China, the US then enjoyed a strong military advantage vis-a-vis Iran that would have enhanced America’s bargaining position.
The question of Palestine, back then, would not necessarily have been a deal-breaker. Though committed to the eventual liberation of Palestine (like everyone else in the region, whether or not they admit it) Rafsanjani strongly emphasized Iran’s willingness to go along with any solution the Palestinian leadership deemed acceptable, which at the time meant the Camp David process. So had an “antisemitic” i.e. America-first-not-Israel-first US president been willing to force Israel to fully respect Camp David and withdraw from the 1967-occupied-territories in return for permanent peace, the issue of Palestine need not have been a stumbling block to a US-Iran “grand bargain.” (Note that all Palestinian parties including the Resistance are willing to embrace permanent peace in return for the complete fulfillment of the Camp David process; the hardliners like Hamas and Islamic Jihad merely reserve the right to campaign peacefully, but not militarily, for the complete liberation of Palestine in the wake of Israel’s withdrawal from the 1967-Occupied Territories.)
Repairing US relations with Iran circa 1995 should have been a no-brainer. Rabin’s assassination by Netanyahu and his friends in November, 1995 would have been a great time for the US to read “Israel” the riot act, implement Camp David, and coax Iran into assuming a moderately independent place in the then-US-led community of nations. But already by 1995 Mossad assets like Monika Lewinsky and Jeffrey Epstein were blackmailing Clinton, who had been inserted into the presidency in part by the same Israeli leaders who had planned to assassinate the alternative, George H.W. Bush, in Madrid. So the US blew its chance to fix its Mideast policy, instead letting the Likkud extremists take over, blow up the World Trade Center, attack the Pentagon, and greatly increase Israel’s power over US leaders and policies. Since then, Israeli domination of US Mideast policy has made rapprochement with Iran impossible.
Unfortunately for Netanyahu—who has been scheming to draw the US into war with Iran throughout his entire career—the military equation has increasingly favored Iran. While a US strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities might have been arguably doable in the mid-1990s, by the early 2000s Iran’s defenses had hardened, and its ability to damage US ships and bases (not to mention the oil facilities that fuel the global economy) had increased to the point that no US military leader would countenance such rash folly. The Millennium Challenge 2002 exercise made it official: If the US attacked Iran, it would lose…catastrophically.
Today, the US faces a vastly worse situation than it did in 2002. Iran’s navy, including the huge fleet of small speedboats that Gen. Riper used to defeat the US in Millennium Challenge, is much bigger now, and far more formidable, with unstoppable anti-ship missiles at its disposal. And Tehran’s land-based missile force has grown, and gotten more sophisticated, by orders of magnitude. Additionally, Iran is now a global drone powerhouse, and drones have become increasingly critical, as the Ukraine war showed. And last but not least, 2025 Iran is backed by vastly stronger allies, namely Russia and China, both of which were relative non-factors in 2002. Neither country could possibly afford to let Iran lose a war with the US. Both will do whatever it takes to stave off a war, and, in the event it comes, ensure a catastrophic US defeat.
But Netanyahu doesn’t care if the US loses catastrophically. He just wants to make the US inflict maximum damage on Iran. If the US empire suffers even worse damage—by imploding as its people lose half their purchasing power—that’s not his concern.
“If we get caught they will just replace us with persons of the same cloth. So it doesn’t matter what you do, America is a Golden Calf and we will suck it dry, chop it up, and sell it off piece by piece until there is nothing left but the World’s biggest welfare state that we will create and control. Why? Because it’s god’s will and America is big enough to take the hit so we can do it again, again and again. This is what we do to countries that we hate. We destroy them very slowly and make them suffer for refusing to be our slaves.”
~Benjamin Netanyahu – 1990. (Col. James Hanke, former chief intelligence officer of NATO’s largest command, 3rdArmy, and former Military Attache to Israel, who recorded Netanyahu as part of a US intelligence mission, confirmed to me during a Skype conversation that the quote is an authentic transcript of that recording, so don’t believe the “debunkers”! -KB)
Some might ask: Why is Netanyahu pushing for a US war on Iran now, when it is completely and irreversibly unwinnable? Why didn’t he make the war happen 20 or better yet 30 years ago, when the US might, arguably, have had a chance of prevailing?
The answer is that Netanyahu has in fact been doing everything in his power to try to draw the US into war with Iran since he was first elected Prime Minister in 1996 after murdering Rabin. The problem: The American’s weren’t buying it. America’s military leaders knew then, and know now, that a US war on Iran would be insane. So even with the leverage Netanyahu gained over the Cheney-Bush administration by blowing up the World Trade Center and blaming Israel’s enemies (while engineering a degree of US complicity as insurance) he couldn’t convince the Pentagon to rubber stamp war-on-Iran-for-Israel.
Today, Netanyahu thinks the time has finally come for his American-blessed war with Iran…not because the military odds are any better than in the past (they’re actually much worse) but because the thinks Trump is the only president the US will ever have who is crazy and/or stupid and/or Israeli-owned enough to pressure the Pentagon into undertaking such a foolhardy adventure. From Netanyahu’s perspective, the long-awaited strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities is a now-or-never proposition. The window, he thinks, is finally open. But it will soon close. That’s why Bibi is flying to Washington Monday to do everything in his power to twist Trump’s arm and force a US or US-blessed attack on Iran.
There are some signs Trump may not be quite as stupid as Bibi thinks. Last week, following his customarily blustery ultimatums to Iran, Trump walked back his bomb threats and said that if Iran doesn’t negotiate with him, they will face even worse sanctions…sanctions like the world has never seen! But wait…the sanctions were already “maximum pressure.” Some threat, that. Iran’s leaders naturally responded by refusing Trump’s demand for direct negotiations, saying that they would not negotiate while being threatened. Instead, they opened the door to indirect negotiations as a confidence-building measure, indicating that direct negotiations might follow if and when confidence has been re-established. Trump is now mumbling well, Iran’s openness to indirect and then later direct negotiations really means they’re open to direct negotiations.
Netanyahu, panicking, packed his bags to head for Washington, where he will attempt to convince Trump that by refusing direct negotiations, Iran’s leadership has humiliated the US president and needs to be taught a lesson…a lesson consisting of an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Trump, having learned the hard way about Bibi’s duplicity from the Soleimani episode, presumably will give Netanyahu a vastly politer version of the Zelensky treatment: He will fawn all over Bibi while giving him what amounts to a firm “no.”
How will Netanyahu respond to the loss of everything he has worked for throughout his political career? Don’t rule out a big false flag blamed on Iran. Or maybe a bullet will supposedly nick Trump’s other ear, and the patsy will have an Iranian name. I doubt Bibi would actually kill Trump—not because Israel doesn’t kill US presidents (it does) but because JD Vance is if anything less likely to commit national suicide for Israel than Trump is.
Then again, I may be misoverestimating Trump’s intelligence (if you’ll pardon the Bushism). The COVID bioattack on Iran and China occurred on Trump’s watch. The Soleimani assassination occurred on Trump’s watch, and with Trump’s approval. The Gaza genocide is transpiring with Trump’s complicity. And Trump did allow Netanyahu to shred the Trump Ceasefire. So maybe Trump really is the moron he often appears. Or maybe Netanyahu has something on him that’s so awful that losing a cataclysmic war and becoming a national and global villain to eclipse Hitler is a price worth paying.
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