The US President’s Day holiday seemed a fitting time to look at the bigger course of Trump’s second term so far, except it’s by design such a sprawling, chaotic exercise in use of force masquerading as useful to make it difficult to properly review. It looks more and more like a mash-up of doubling down on bad lessons from history and mythology, from the King Midas warning that relentless pursuit of wealth destroys everything of actual worth, to King Croessus on the disastrous consequences of self-serving readings of war prospects, to Machiavelli’s advice against relying on exiles for intelligence and operations, to the saying attributed to Sun Tsu, that all tactics and no strategy is the noise before the defeat.
We’ll soon turn to the ever-increasing evidence that the Trump team is so deluded that it thinks it can achieve regime change in Iran with what would be at best a few weeks of bombing, plus perhaps some more decapitation attacks and maybe additional terrorist surprises, with apparently no consideration whatsoever given to Iran’s formidable, multi-fronted retaliatory capacity, which it has made clear it will employ in full if the US strikes.
But let’s pause first to consider the destruction and failures Trump has already created. It is hard to find any successes, unless you define “success” as the raw demonstration of his and American power, with no consideration of cost and collateral damage. His poll ratings are plunging, with an astonishing fresh finding that more Americans now think the literally demented Biden to have been the better President.1 He has pushed Russia and China into a tight military and economic partnership. Although BRICS is much less far along than its boosters believe, the fact that it is getting so much attention points to both a desire and some progress in strengthening other non-Collective West alliances.
The West is losing and will lose the war in Ukraine. This is not merely a very costly and embarrassing loss of global stature. Russia’s successful continued prosecution of the war is extending its already considerable lead, not just in air defenses systems, signal-jamming, and advanced missiles, but in the conduct and management of war in the ISR era. Russia has been implementing net-centric warfare, not just on the essential level of gathering and collection of information, but then feeding it back into battlefield decisions and overall strategy. That is before getting to a long-standing foundational gap, again working to Russia’s advantage, its notion of “operational art.”Mike Mihajlovic explains that as “the orchestration of forces across time and space to transform tactical actions into strategic outcomes through multiplicative rather than additive effects” in his must-read The Calculus of Conflict: How Russia’s Military Doctrine is Reshaping Modern Warfare. By contrast, the US still seems mired in the military horse and buggy-whip era of combined arms operations and big arrow offensives.
And Trump’s response to the Ukraine debacle is yet another own goal packaged as a fake success. Trump was unduly enamored of his clever plot, that if Ukraine and the obstructionist Europeans would not fall in with his negotiations with Russia2 and insisted on trying to carry on, they could do so buy buying the many weapons they needed from the US. That has simply resulted in the over-committed US coming up short elsewhere. From a recent article in Responsible Statecraft:
Even those who hope Trump chooses to avoid military action in Iran altogether should be taken aback to hear that eight months after the last extended U.S. military campaign ended (the defense of Israel during the 12-day war and Operation Midnight Hammer), American missile defense arsenals could still be in such rough shape…
But eight months should be sufficient to return stocks of some types of defense interceptors to less critical levels. If the missile defense cupboard is truly still bare, however, something else must be going on.
That something else, it turns out, is Ukraine.
Although President Trump and his advisers are quick to argue that the United States is no longer paying for the military aid supporting Ukraine’s ongoing war, this is only one piece of a larger story. In fact, the United States is still sending billions in weapons to Ukraine, often diverting new weapons intended for the U.S. military directly to Ukraine instead. The implications of this reality are far-reaching — for U.S. military readiness, the Pentagon’s ability to respond in case of a real threat to U.S. interests, and diplomatic efforts to end the war.
But, but, but….what about Venezuela? Yes, having bribed enough Venezuelans in a country full of CIA operatives to allow for a clean and showy raid is an impressive stunt, and one not likely to be replicated elsewhere. In the meantime, Trump is find it hard to sell the booty of Venezuelan crude. It’s not clear whether he actually succeeded in cudgeling India into buying a lot of it. The majors have turned up their noses at the opportunity to spend bigly on such costly and difficult to refine stocks in an infrastructure-poor region.
And Greenland? Trump went TACO on his loudly broadcast annexation desire, whether by purchase or occupation, and accepted an announcement by NATO chief Mark Rutte, which appears to have been agreed by no one, that the US would get permanent ownership of a lot of bases. But for that to happen, Denmark would need to cede title, which would require legislative approval. Perhaps I missed it, but I see no sign of any implementation of this scheme.
What about Cuba? Sadly, Cuba is being successfully reduced to a state of crisis due to a successful fuel embargo. Where this goes is over my pay grade, but if this is a win, it is akin to seeing child rape as a successful demonstration of potency.
On the domestic front, the catalogue of what Trump may count as victories as losses for America is close to boundless. The cost of Trump’s tariffs, contrary to his PR, has fallen nearly entirely on Americans, with 90% the lowest estimate so far. And one cannot pretend that these costs helped boost domestic manufacturing;
We really did it.
We took a growing US manufacturing economy, declared it broken, started a trade war, and … broke US manufacturing.
In last 48 hours:
– Philly Fed Survey: “New orders fell sharply, from 8.7 in March to -34.2, its lowest reading since April 2020”
– NY Fed… pic.twitter.com/cv1UpX6LyP
— Derek Thompson (@DKThomp) April 17, 2025
Per the FT, manufacturing is in the worst economic position of any sector of the economy atm. The US has lost 78,000 manufacturing jobs so far in 2025.
Those tariffs sure are working great. pic.twitter.com/J1aQxw0RQs
— Hunter📈🌈📊 (@StatisticUrban) September 7, 2025
Bessent is wrong here—not only is America losing manufacturing jobs amidst the tariffs, but there’s no “burst in construction jobs” & we don’t have a “record number of factories being built”
The US construction job growth has zeroed out & factory construction is actually falling https://t.co/vH5k9vpmk8 pic.twitter.com/OY2jWHiJpe
— Joey Politano 🏳️🌈 (@JosephPolitano) January 25, 2026
Tariffs have also hammered small businesses:
Small businesses have borne the brunt of Trump’s tariff policies and bankruptcies are the highest they’ve been since the end of the Great Recession. https://t.co/LxE8oXNUgp pic.twitter.com/exd1mNKASk
— scary lawyerguy (@scarylawyerguy) December 28, 2025
Unherd points out that normally Republican-supporting workers see that the tariffs have backfired:
Earlier this week, House Republicans moved a motion which would have put off a vote on Trump’s tariffs. Three of their members, however, crossed party lines to join all their Democratic colleagues to block the motion…
It therefore seems likely that more Republican dissidents will surface in the months ahead — the total already rose to six on the Canadian vote — because the tariffs are becoming a political albatross….
Plainly put, manufacturing jobs show no sign of coming back. On the contrary, manufacturing employment continued falling through Trump’s first year back in office while in the wider economy, good jobs are getting harder to find. As Wednesday’s employment report revealed, in all of 2025 only 181,000 new jobs were created in the US, a monthly average that would have translated into a rapidly rising unemployment rate were it not that Trump’s immigration crackdown has removed so many workers from the workforce.
That, the administration retorts, is just the point — the deportations are reserving jobs for Americans and thereby boosting their earning power. But in fact, instead of workers seeing gains, the labour share of income has fallen to an all-time low. Wage growth slowed throughout 2025; especially for workers at the lower end of the income scale, the sort of voters who played such an important role in bringing the MAGA coalition to power, it is now barely keeping pace with inflation.
Most ominously, there’s no reason to expect a manufacturing renaissance will come at all under existing policies. For all the White House’s grandiose boasts about the massive investments other countries have pledged in the US — the amount varies but most recently Trump offered a figure of $18 trillion — construction of new factories is currently declining, with no end in sight.
And in an overlapping set of economic issues, Trump’s tariffs have already hurt farmers directly due to retaliation, such as Chins shifting soyaben purchases from the US to Brazil, but also the damage done to farmers by Trump’s ICE thuggery, as set forth longer form in Trump’s DHS Is Pushing the Boundaries of Probable Cause and Due Process to Fuel a Farm Labor Crisis.
We’ve gone into detail on tariffs, and it’s not hard to document similar damage on many other fronts. Trump thinks he made the US safer for white men and Zionists by going to war with US universities, gutting research budgets and driving out foreign academics and students. US leadership in research, which was already in jeopardy due to China’s rise, is now toast. His misuse of US prosecutors via dodgy prosecutions and persecutions of enemies, as well as ICE/DHS abuses, has produced such a large wave of resignations at the DoJ that cases against crooks are languishing. One YouTuber (perhaps Howard Litan?) discussed long form how the US Attorney’s office is even missing court deadlines in the Southern District of New York and having to beg judges for extensions due to lack of personnel.
And speaking of persecution, the Trump bogus criminal investigation into Fed chair Jay Powell has further dented investor confidence overseas, and produced yet another own goal. Senator Thom Tillis has reaffirmed his commitment that he will bar the markup on the nomination of Powell’s intended replacement, Kevin Warsh, until the probe is over.
And even the one business booming under Trump, corruption, is not going as well as it might. The astonishing grift of the Trump Board of Peace does seem to be moving ahead. But despite Trump’s backing, crypto has been languishing.
To keep this article to a manageable length, we’ll turn to the new and primed to be most destructive Trump action so far, that of going to war with Iran. From Reuters over the weekend in Exclusive: US military preparing for potentially weeks-long Iran operations:
The U.S. military is preparing for the possibility of sustained, weeks-long operations against Iran if President Donald Trump orders an attack, two U.S. officials told Reuters, in what could become a far more serious conflict than previously seen between the countries….
Meanwhile, Trump has amassed military forces in the region, raising fears of new military action. U.S. officials said on Friday the Pentagon was sending an additional aircraft carrier to the Middle East, adding thousands more troops along with fighter aircraft, guided-missile destroyers and other firepower capable of waging attacks and defending against them.
rump, speaking on Friday after a military event at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, openly floated the possibility of changing the government in Iran, saying it “seems like that would be the best thing that could happen.” He declined to share who he wanted to take over Iran, but said, “there are people.”
“For 47 years, they’ve been talking and talking and talking,” Trump said.
Keep in mind that even though Trump has made clear that he very much prefers a fast and clean win, which is unattainable with Iran, Israel has the whip hand. It can attack Iran and force the joined-at-the-hip US to come to its defense. Alon Mizhari explains how he sees clear signs that Israel is all in and the attack will come within a week:
The new Israel-Iran war is imminent by Alon Mizrahi
And here are all the reasons why I think this time they are not bluffing, and the decision to go to war has most probably already been made
Read on Substack
From his transcript, starting at 3:09:
I’m going to start with the three most immediate signs I’m seeing, which I consider to be of very high significance. The first is the change of tone in Israel and in Israeli media. And Israeli media for security purposes is an extension of the Israeli security state. There is no independent Israeli security media.
They say what they are instructed or led to say to the Israeli public and to countries in the region, to American presidents and so on. And there’s a very clear change in tone in Israeli media. They have shifted from war with Iran as a general possibility, as a general project that we are committed to, and we are going to carry out, but we’re not sure when, to something quite different. And this is something I see and I know from lived experience. I can tell from the language and the tone of the system where they are on the war cycle.
And they have moved from war as a general possibility to something much more concrete. This is close and imminent. And the language they use, the tone they are using is what I understand as trying to communicate to Israelis that war is coming, is imminent, and they need to be prepared. The Israeli public needs to be prepared…And what they are saying in Hebrew to Israelis tell me that they are preparing their people, they are preparing Israelis for an imminent, direct war between Israel and Iran…
I’m seeing the second sign I’m seeing is the change of tone in the US and this is also very important.
Now, since Netanyahu went and saw Biden a long, long time ago, while Biden was still president, And Israel decided to help Trump to get elected…
And I said and I predicted this many times, Iran is going to become the main issue and we are going to be flooded with items and lies about Iran and psychological warfare in order to prepare us for an American-Israeli attack against Iran….But just as I can see a change in tone in Israel, I can see the equivalent in the US. Now the possibility of war with Iran is on the table.
And enough clues have been given, enough times for the Trump administration to be able to tell Americans, should this war erupt, that you have been warned. We have given you ample warning that we may go to fight this war with Iran….
The third sign… is the buildup of forces, of American forces in the Persian Gulf and in West Asia generally.
This may not seem persuasive until you add in other sightings. From Alexander Mercouris on Sunday:
Starting at 19:30:
I have been receiving over the last 24 hours reports from the United States from people in the United States, including one person who, by the way, is well known to people who um are involved in independent media, but whom I’m not going to identify by name because this was a private via email.
Anyway, this individual who is extremely well informed about the situation in the United States says that there is a massive deployment against Iran underway, that practically all of the US’s air refueling tankers are being committed to what is increasingly looking like an massive air operation against Iran. that people who are involved in the military from all areas of the US military are receiving instructions to report to duty ahead of some major operation which can only be the operation against Iran if all of this is true.
More evidence of the buildup:
❗️❗️❗️ The first clearest indication that a military operation against Iran will begin in the near future (possibly within 14 days) —-👇
🇺🇸🇬🇧 The US has begun transporting additional F-35A aircraft (7 units) along with KC-135 Stratotanker refueling aircraft (5 units) from… pic.twitter.com/sWOjniwCpF
— The Battlefield (@TTheBattlefield) February 16, 2026
#BREAKING:
The United States has now deployed 1/3 of its Navy near #Iran pic.twitter.com/46nxofmKUe
— War_Observer (@War_Obsrver) February 16, 2026
And from a discussion among Nima at Dialogue Works, retired colonel Larry Wilkerson, and former CIA analysts Larry Johnson, Johnson explaining why the US can be so reckless as to embrace this course of action:
Starting at 6:10:
I sat in and listened to a retired vice admiral. I’ll tell you I’ll tell you you and Colonel Wilkerson off air who it was on Tuesday.
And this guy was talking about how we’re just going to fly in there and destroy all the ballistic missiles in Iran.
And because he’d been invited to this this conversation by someone, I didn’t want to embarrass him in front of the group. But immediately I thought we couldn’t stop the Houthies after seven weeks with two aircraft carriers and four destroyers and one cruiser.
And we’re gonna go now go into Iran, which has an actual air defense and an actual air force and is, you know, nine times the size of Yemen, and we’re going to find all their ballistic missiles and destroy them.
Madness. Absolute madness.
Immediately afterward, Wilkerson took issue with some of Johnson’s assumptions about refueling and what that implied about air operations. And there is the additional issue that the US may disregard the instructions of many Gulf States not to transit their airspace to bomb Iran. Critically, Wilkerson discussed why the aircraft carrier were staying 1000 miles off the Iran shoreline but that some might be instructed to move in closer for combat operations. Given those adjustments to Johnson’s assumptions, Wilkerson added at 10:00:
So, we could we we could anticipate losing a carrier. I don’t care what the vice admiral or whomever said, we can anticipate losing a carry and that means 5,000 people in the water.
And as I mentioned, I think to you earlier, had an admiral write a really brave article not too long ago in Proceedings magazine where he said, “Hey people, if a carrier gets hit, seriously hit, and there are 2,000 people dead almost immediately and say another 2,000 in the water and the others you are indetermined at that moment. think World War II and the scenes you saw um fire and water and all that sort of stuff. We don’t have enough escort ships and birth space to pick up the survivors. We haven’t done anything about that since that admiral wrote that article about three years ago. So in fact, our strike groups are even smaller now. So this is fraught with problems as Larry indicated. Even if it comes off just meticulously perfect in the first two or three waves, it’s fraught with problems.
That is separately a high odds outcome, as proven in the 2002 Millennium War games, which was to simulate invasion of an Iran-like country.
If that happens, Trump’s presidency is over. The US will to find a way to escalate against Iran, despite having already mustered a very significant portion of its deployable forces to the theater. That alone translates into high odds that the US will authorize Israel to use nuclear weapons against Iran.
Simplicius suggests that Trump is trying to find an off ramp of sorts, via other ways to hurt Iran short of war, presumably so as to place Israel and US hawks:
In the meantime, Trump continues to consider alternative options to strangulate Iran:
But I am skeptical. First, the Administration really has convinced itself that Iran is weaker than ever and one hard kick will end or critically wound it. Second, even if Trump were to go this route, Israel can always force his hand. And as we know from the Iraq War and even the buildup in the Caribbean before the Venezuela raid, big mobilizations are costly and troops can be at ready only for a certain amount of time. It’s exceedingly unlikely that Trump would invest this heavily and then retreat, absent an Iranian capitulation at the negotiating table, which is na ga happen.
Now Iran may recognize how inflammatory that outcome is and refrain from sinking a carrier. But Ambassador Araghchi, in an interview over the weekend, said that if Iran was faced with an existential threat, it would mount a suitable response:
Abbas Araghchi Takht‑Ravanchi, Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister, warned:
“It will be bad for everyone, not just Iran. All parties will suffer, especially those who initiated this aggression. If Iran sees this as an existential threat, it will respond decisively.”
This statement… pic.twitter.com/MC1iplXh4y
— The global watch X (@GalobalWatch) February 15, 2026
Nima also said, in the video above:
Colonel, one of the in one of the interviews recently with one of the Iranian generals, he said that, let me just translate it the way that he said we have the weapons of Armageddon.
We have we are prepared for Armageddon.
He literally said that in the Persian media in Persian. He said that on TV, on national TV in Iran and we are prepared to go all the way down the street if they start attacking us.
Not that readers here had any doubts about Iranian resolve and means, but that should cinch it. Iran has more than enough missiles, including long range and hypersonic missiles, to exhaust US and Israeli air defenses, and in pretty short order too, It can close the Strait of Hormuz. It really could wipe Israel from the map. It can strike US bases all over the Middle East. It could attack oil infrastructure in other countries. It would announce a fatwa, which would require Shia all over the region to come to its support.
⚡️BREAKING
Taliban Spokesman warns the US:
‘If the Americans start a war against Iran, we will be ready to use all our capabilities to help the Iranians’ pic.twitter.com/o8LoawBxmv
— Iran Observer (@IranObserver0) February 15, 2026
And Iran has repeatedly said it has a dead hand capability, with many missile launch sites so deep underground as to be protected from attack, so that even in the event of a nuclear attack, it could still unleash a devastating return massive salvo.
Yet the US and Israel are about to unleash this monster act of self destruction. And many of us will be collateral damage, economically if not physically. “Madness” is not adequate to describe this pathology.
_____
1 Trump may count as a win that Gallup, after 88 years, will no longer measure Presidential approval. Everyone I know with an operating brain cell believes this change to be the result of Trump Administration pressure. But thinking not publishing measurements fixes a popularity plunge is like thinking that throwing out the scale is the solution to obesity.
2hile we predicted that the Ukraine war negotiations would fail due to both Ukraine and European opposition, that does not mean they would have succeeded absent that. US hawks would have fiercely opposed the US accepting the Russian red lines set forth by Putin in June 2024. Given the US history of reneging on commitments, the Russians would be expected to require that any deal with the US be enshrined in a treaty, an impossibly high bar given neocon political muscle.
