Conor here: As deranged as Trump is, here’s a scary thought: nothing will fundamentally change by removing him. That’s because in many ways he embodies the American ruling class: greedy, immoral, and overconfident. Even the hope that Trump will be the fall guy for a failed war seems like a remote possibility at this point because that would imply the US ruling class has accepted being driven out of the Middle East. Regardless of whether these dynamics ultimately lead to the US/Israel going nuclear, Rob Urie, in the following piece, argues they already have with their economic destruction that will lead to the deaths of millions.
By Rob Urie, author of Zen Economics, artist, and musician who publishes The Journal of Belligerent Pontification on Substack
US – Israeli strikes on Iranian facilities in the South Pars gas field are threatening oil and gas supply disruptions that put the lives of millions of people at risk. For months prior Iran had been warning that such attacks would be met in kind. What this implies is the tit-for-tat destruction of West Asia’s capacity to produce oil and gas. Without time to prepare for a reduced energy supply, these missile exchanges risk creating an epoch of human misery that hasn’t been known in the West since WWII. And possibly worse for the Global South.
Overnight, Iran responded to the Israeli attacks with missile and drone assaults against oil and gas infrastructure in Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE and Kuwait. Meanwhile, Trump is claiming that he had no foreknowledge regarding the Israeli attack. That the US wasn’t advised by the Israelis of the attack is implausible— Mossad is operationally integrated with the CIA. As to whether Trump was informed, how many days during the last two weeks has he played golf?
US President Donald Trump stated that Israel would no longer strike facilities of Iran’s South Pars gas field. The United States knew nothing about the attack, and Qatar was not involved in it in any way or had any idea it was coming, he wrote on Truth Social on Thursday. The American leader believes the Jewish state carried out the strike out of outrage at what was happening in the Middle East. tass.com.
Were Israel to have been motivated by rage, hopefully it has a mirror nearby to understand the source. The likely US logic is that ‘we’ have the US’s and Venezuela’s oil and gas ergo, let millions of people die. The cosmos-sized recklessness underway suggests that nuclear annihilation is but the quicker way to the same end. The lemmings in Washington and Tel Aviv are leading the way. And they are using political repression to shut down those of us warning of the cliff ahead.
Graph: WTI oil futures are predicting that oil prices will remain elevated for the foreseeable future, but with ‘backwardation.’ They are predicting a gradual decline in oil prices from current levels. Futures are amongst the likely mechanisms that the Trump administration is using to ‘manage’ the rise in oil and gas prices since the US – Israeli war against Iran was launched. While the curve isn’t signaling catastrophe, it is suggesting a slow bleed over an extended horizon. This slow bleed can cause more long-term economic damage than the short, sharp price spikes that Trump is now worried about.
The likely logic in the dark, dank environs where US foreign policy is conjured is that ‘we’ have oil and ‘they’ don’t, so screw them. But if oil is $250 per barrel on the ‘world’ market, why would Trumpco sell it to ‘us’ for less? During the first and second Gulf Wars, did Americans get a discount on the world price? Why no, we did not. We paid the world price (adjusted for local production costs). At $250 per barrel, the cost of gasoline in the US would be $7.50 per gallon. Half or more of the US lives hand-to-mouth. MAPA— Make America Poor Again, seems to be the plan.
In response, warm gas is being passed to claim that Trump could ‘nationalize’ oil and gas production in the sense of ending the export of ‘US’ oil and gas to create ‘American’ prices for these. How Trump would organize this isn’t clear. The major producers of US domestic oil and gas have global businesses. This would be Chevron, ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips. Question: if these global producers have a choice between selling oil abroad for $250 per barrel or domestically for $70, why would they choose $70?
Would Trump go ‘full Nicaragua’ and nationalize these companies to get them to do his bidding? And how would the domestic operations be parsed from the global operations in this seizure of what Americans call private property? Would there be a federal oversight board to coordinate domestic production to get supply to match demand? And most pointedly, is there any evidence from Donald Trump’s now extensive life that he gives the slightest crap about anyone but himself? Someone will put a cheeseburger in front of him and this idea will disappear.
The current scramble by Trump to ‘manage’ oil prices is missing that real supply destruction has already taken place. This occurred when Israel attacked Iranian oil and gas infrastructure and when the Iranians responded. The temporary solution via releases from strategic petroleum reserves assumes that the supply disruption is temporary. It isn’t. Capacity has already been destroyed. The question now is what will be the scale and scope of the supply disruptions to come? To date, future economic pain is assured. But mass starvation isn’t yet baked in.
Given the potential consequences, the US would presumably end Israel’s ability to attack its neighbors if it (Israel) really had gone rogue. As goes the practice, the US pretends to be outraged by Israel’s actions as it continues to fund Israel, arm Israel, and give it international cover for war crimes. If the Trumpers are looking for a Fifth Column (an internal adversary) in the US, it is Zionist. Further, because the US is an alleged Constitutional Republic, the concept of an ‘internal’ Fifth Column would mean that the American people are the enemy. Question: of whom?
The Americans who would fall under this definition of a Fifth Column would be the Christian and Jewish Zionists who use their wealth and power to deliver Western bounty to a smallish group of genocidal hicks in Israel. This isn’t to slander religious truth. It is to criticize selective and apocalyptic readings of religious texts that argue that 99% of humanity deserves to perish at the hand of their God. But Israelis aren’t leaving the perishing up to their God. They are usurpers. They are but one more iteration of the homicidal refrain ‘with God on their side.’
“it is not surprising if Satan’s servants disguise themselves as servants of righteousness, just as Satan disguises himself as an angel of light”. Second Corinthians 11:15 ESV.
What isn’t clear is what proportion of the oil infrastructure in West Asia has been destroyed thus far? Early reports have Qatar claiming that repairing its gas infrastructure from the recent Iranian attacks will take several years. If this is the result of the Iranian retaliatory attacks more broadly, then significant supply destruction has already taken place. And what that means is that no matter how quickly the war is resolved, global economic relations have already been altered in ways that cannot be undone. In the words of R.E.M., ‘it’s the end of the world as we know it.’
Given the signals intelligence and operational integration of the CIA with Mossad (and MI6), the question of who, if anyone, is keeping relevant information regarding the war from Trump would seem relevant. The bet here is that no one is. Trump has had all of the time that he needs to find trustworthy advisors, meaning that he chose the people who are lying to him if such is the case.
That the entirety of the current American case against Iran consists of Israeli talking points from 1993 suggests political sponsors in the permanent government have existed across time. Trump appears to be more a tool that the director here.
Cooperation among Five Eyes members stepped up after the September 11 attacks in 2001. Shared information has been used to thwart subsequent terrorist attacks and to coordinate military deployments, among other operations. Britannica.com.
By analogy from a thesis recently put forward by David Sirota, one of the first things that Donald Trump did upon returning to office was to demonstrate that the Democrats ‘powerless’ schtick of 1976 – 2026 is a con job. What Trump did in a few days was all of the things that the Democrats have spent the last five decades claiming that they lacked the power to do. He restructured the US economy using right-wing economic dogma from the 1930s. He gave a $4 trillion tax cut to himself and a few of his friends. And he created a de facto immigration policy using an army of heavily armed rednecks.
American readers imagining that the urgency of present circumstances will lead the Democrats to rise to the occasion have been asleep for the last five decades. Democrats are Republicans with a more convincing (to Democrats) line of crap. I’ve already suggested a ‘divided government’ strategy for 2026 with a different party controlling Congress than the White House. Recent reports, likely from Ryan Grim, have the leadership of the DNC creating ‘strategic ambiguity’ around the Dems support for Israel. That will last until election day, when they come out in full support of Israel, genocide and war.
The DCCC (Congressional Democrats) recruited both Kirsten Sinema and Joe Manchin for this very purpose. They allowed Joe Biden to pass his agenda (war with Russia, genocide in Gaza) as he postured as the Second Coming of FDR. But their real benefit came through saving Biden from having to choose between his campaign promises and his donors. Sinema and Manchin acted as foils— the role that they were recruited to fill, to keep the Democrats from crossing their donors. What Trump revealed is that this is all posturing. The Democrats are the other fascist Right.
The point: the claim that the Israelis are running US foreign policy must get past decades of US claims that the existence of Israel improves the US strategic position in West Asia. Whatever the relationship between Trump and Netanyahu, the US is following a script that was written by the Americans following WWII with the attack on Iran. US General Wesley Clark stated in 2007 that American neocons planned to attack ‘seven countries in seven years.’ To date, the US has moved systematically through the list. Iran is on the list.
What this implies is that in terms of US foreign policy, the US is neither ‘a democracy’ nor a Constitutional Republic. Voting doesn’t change anything because elected officials have little to no say in the direction of foreign policy. The CIA’s political calculation for a second Trump term was likely that Trump liked being President more than he liked being a gadfly. In fact, he was a gadfly because he wanted in.
Trump’s deference to what the US never was places MAGA deep in Goebbels land. It is a fantasy around reviving fake history. Trump and Hegseth seem so far to be low-budget versions of ordinary twentieth century fascists.
Why this matters is that the way to solve matters of war and peace is through the principals, not the proxies.
The US will “massively blow up” the South Pars gas field – the world’s largest – if Iran continues to strike Qatari energy facilities, President Donald Trump has warned. rt.com.
This is Donald Trump threatening to blow up Iranian gas fields following the Israeli attack that he pretended to criticize just a few hours earlier. He is threatening to escalate. But it was the Israeli escalation that the Iranians were responding to. Now, knowing that the Iranians will escalate to match any further US escalation means that the US is already engaged in MAD— Mutually Assured (economic) Destruction. The punchline is that MAD was intended to avoid engaging in mutually assured destruction. The threat was supposed to deter the fact.
An Israeli strike on Iran’s South Pars gas field was coordinated with the Trump administration in advance, according to three Israeli officials, despite President Trump’s assertion that the United States “knew nothing about” it. nytimes.com.
The volunteer state media in the US has been more perplexed than it usually is over the relationship of the Gulf Arab States to Iran. Conspicuously uninformed news readers can’t imagine why Iran would be attacking the puppets and pawns that the US has installed in these nations as overseers for the benefit of US business interests. Iran is attacking US military bases in these countries. To the extent that the attacks are wider, this would be to encompass the people, resources and infrastructure that support these US military occupations.
The thinking in the US appears to be that the US can destroy much of the world and that it will still emerge on the other side as an entity related to what it used to be. By analogy, Scott Ritter reported that in the waning days of the Biden administration the CIA ran an analysis suggesting that there was a better than 50% likelihood that the US would engage in a nuclear exchange with the Russians. Also reported was that the Biden administration was sure that it would ‘win’ such an exchange. What it meant by ‘winning’ is unique.
What the Biden administration meant by winning would be the deaths of tens or hundreds of millions of Americans, the destruction of every existing economic relationship, the end of the global food system and a return to very rudimentary ways of getting by. Given the underground bunkers that we, the people, have provided these psychopaths, they would still be running things even after they had killed the world. There seems to be no way to get rid of them.
Whether he understands it or not, Trump is risking similar outcomes. An extended break in global energy supplies would end modernity. And a shorter break would likely kill millions to billions of human beings. The success in spreading industrial agriculture means that wide swaths of the world will not eat without the chemical fertilizers that are now essential to agriculture. Industrial agriculture is now largely petroleum based.
Finally, RT is reporting that the Washington Post is reporting that Iranian drones have been circling the homes of US officials Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth for the last ten days. Given the record of the American press, it is safe to assume that if it is reporting it, the story isn’t true. However, the Iranians are claiming that US and Israeli officials ‘will no longer be safe anywhere in the world, not even in their own homes.” For Americans who may be unaware, Israel has been assassinating Iranian officials for as long as the Iranian Republic has existed.
What Donald Trump is in the process of creating are outcomes that he lacks the capacity to understand. He is the proverbial chimpanzee with a machete. These outcomes could be the economic equivalent of a nuclear first strike. Millions to billions of humans can die from actions that he doesn’t appear to understand the implications of. He imagines that the Iranians will blink first. But he and Israel have created the conditions whereby Iran is either victorious or no more. Iran can’t blink first.
