We are on a path to more war. Trump could (and should) have declared victory and simply walked away from Iran, but that would have cast him as ‘a loser’ (a prospect that he cannot tolerate). Secondly, he is — for whatever reason — in thrall to Netanyahu and Israel.
Tucker Carlson in August 2024 spoke directly to Trump: “You will not win this war [with Iran]. You will lose it and it will destroy your Presidency. Furthermore, Netanyahu and the Zionist donor class do not like you. They hate you”. “I know” was Trump’s only response. That was then.
From Trump’s UN General Assembly address, saying that Iran must either capitulate by his midterm deadline, or else he, Trump, would have to decide whether or not to “quickly annihilate” them — all who heard these words took this to be a threat to use nuclear weapons.
And indeed, since then, Trump has harked back several times to this threat of annihilation, using one synonym or another — always underlining, together with his close associates, the repeated demand that Iran may not have a nuclear weapon, ever.
In parallel, Netanyahu is claiming that Israel has fresh intelligence precisely pointing to Iran taking concrete steps towards a nuclear weapon (though the security and defence community in Israel say that no such evidence exists). “They’re trying to develop nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them to every city in the US”, Netanyahu again repeated to CBS this week.
The crux here is that Trump wants a victory over Iran and cannot find the kinetic ‘silver bullet’ by which to defeat them. The pre-midterms’ war narrative thus has switched to emphasise that Iran’s hold over Hormuz has been broken (Bloomberg ‘confirms’ we are indeed back to near pre-war levels of Middle East oil flows), and that the US financial siege will have Iran bankrupt within two weeks — so asserts Treasury Secretary Bessent.
Earlier this week, an all-out propaganda campaign broke out to convince people that the Strait of Hormuz is basically open. As Philip Pilkington writes:
“‘80% open’ was the talking point peddled by Bloomberg’s Javier Blas … [it] felt like the latest oil glut media operation: Oil is trading at near or over $100 a barrel, yet the flow through the Strait is back to about its pre-war norms. Call it Oil Glut 2.0.”