Has Trump lost touch with reality?
The US negotiate strategy throughout the second Trump administration has been to use negotiations as a pretext to build up military force to attack Iran. We saw that before the 12-day war in June. Again, before the US attacked Iran in February along with Israel and of course during this current two-week ceasefire period, the US has deployed a lot of additional forces to the Middle East. We now have, or will soon have, three aircraft carrier strike groups in the Middle East. This is a significant military force and so Iran thinks that the US is ready to go back to war. Trump is still making maximalist demands. So why sit down and talk with the US?
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I think this Trump where he's more of a mango maniac than he was during his first administration really does. And I've heard members of his administration say this like Marco Rubio and Pete Headset. Trump believes through his sheer force of will, he could get things done on the international stage. He thinks every deal that he's making with the country is the same way as negotiating a real estate deal in New York City where, you know, he has the bureaucrats, the unions, and all other types of officials paid off. You know, this is one of the things that Trump bragged about when he was running for office in 2016 is how he bought politicians in order to craft policy to his will. And so when he was operating in this corrupt environment in New York City and other cities around the country and building skyscrapers, sure he could impose his will to get what he wanted out of all these deals. But that doesn't exist in geopolitics. And so now every time Trump just tries to force a deal with Iran, Iran gets to say no, just like they said no, we're not showing up to the talks. And this is causing the president to act increasingly irrationally, hoping that at some point his sheer force of will will get a deal done that's favorable to the United States. But of course, when that doesn't happen, he's going to continue to climb up the escalation ladder.
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we wouldn't be in a war in Iran if the Constitution still works. Congress hasn't declared war on Iran and yet we're in Iran. The debate in Congress is whether the War Powers Act grants the president the ability to wage war anywhere in the world that he wants for 60 days without any congressional oversight at all.
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when it's Donald Trump's spy apparatus, he wants it he wants it to be as powerful as possible when it could be used against him. He wants it defamed. So that that's the president we have.
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the NSA spies, the FBI hacks into computers using zero click. You know what that is? ICE kills innocents in the streets and the military murders people on speedboats in the Caribbean because they might be guilty of a crime for which the penalty is not death. What's to restrain them at this point?
Absolutely nothing. As Donald Trump has said, the only thing that could stop him is himself, is his own mind. If he wants to do something, he's going to do it.
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they certainly hate anybody who isn't a Jewish member of the Jewish state of Israel. And so that would apply to Catholics. I think Catholics present maybe and Christians in general present a real problem to the Israelis in the Middle East because these are people who the Americans are as a Christian nation generally sympathetic to. And so when we hear about the Israelis killing Muslims in the West Bank, a lot of Americans will write it off as oh they were terrorists, the family member are terrorists or the terrorists were exploiting them. It's a lot harder to do. It's not people's natural reaction when it comes to somebody who's a Christian. And so when Israel is destroying Christian villages in the West Bank, that gets a lot more push back than even destroying 10 Palestinian Muslim villages in the West Bank or something like that. So I do think they present a unique problem to the Israelis.
what Israel has done and since 1948 to the indigenous elements in its midst whether Christian or Muslim. I mean, we have to remember Israel destroyed the historic Alomari mosque in Gaza City during its genocidal rampage throughout Gaza over the last two and a half years. It has destroyed the Grand Mosque in Bent Jabel, which is one of the major centers of resistance in southern Lebanon dating back to the Roman era. just last week. It destroyed another church in the town of Chama in southern Lebanon last week. And this took place in the village of Deel, which is a Christian village very close to the frontier with Israel. And it it signifies not just the religious fundamentalism that has taken control of the Israeli army but the mentality of Zionism which aims to eliminate all iterations of non-Jewish life in order to according to the mission of Zionism. They they they have its Hebrew term which simply means to Judaize the land.
confusion was created in the west by what happened over the opening of the straight of hormones and that is when there there was a ceasefire agreement it was agreed by Iran to increase the number of ships that could go through the straight of Hormuz which would include ships that were hostile towards Iran, after all Kuwait the Emirates Saudi Arabia these they all participated in the war on behalf of the Americans and they helped the Americans and the Israelis regime effectively by allowing the US to use their territory. So Iran was going to allow more of their ships to pass through. This was in accordance with the ceasefire deal. But as you recall, the Israeli regime began that carpet bombing of Lebanon and intentionally wrecked the ceasefire even though they were a part of it as the prime minister of Pakistan pointed out. Long story short, after 10 days, the Israeli regime was forced to accept the ceasefire and the Iranians said that we will now open the trade of Hormuz in accordance with the agreement, the ceasefire agreement. And then Trump said, I will not remove the siege though on the Persian Gulf and on Iranian ports, which he had installed a few days after the ceasefire began. So the Iranians said, "Well, if you're not if you're going to impose a siege, this is a violation of the ceasefire and therefore we are not going to open the straight of Hormuz to these new ships to to to more ships." So the Iranians within hours went back to their former position. It wasn't because Iran made a decision and then went back on that decision. It was because Trump instead of saying, "Okay, now that the Straight of Hormuz is going to be open to more shipping in accordance with the ceasefire agreement, I'm going to continue imposing the siege." And that led the Iranians to go back to the previous policy.
President Trump was kind of caught in this eco chamber of information where he would hear one thing through official channels and then he would hear it echoed through the media as well. So, Benjamin Netanyahu and then a whole assortment of Israeli officials, but then also sympathetic Americans in the media sphere, the think tank sphere really helped move that red line and make a poison pill for any negotiations that we could have with the Iranians.
The structure of the IRGC and the security and the supreme leader are in the lead and the civilians are really only responsible for such things as economic affairs. They are not according to the constitution allowed to be involved. The fact that Aarachi is negotiating is by consent of the Supreme National Security Council, not because he is the foreign minister in the way in which you know you have a secretary of state. It's not like that. So there's a great confusion about this but there's no divisions and all this story about big divisions and there are moment is just nonsense. Aarachi works perfectly well with Khalibah. Khalibah is the lead negotiator. Now they operate through consensus within the security council and with the approval of the supreme leader and whether it's uh Aaeachi or Galibbaf or any things that have been attributed to the supreme leader through his account or any of the other statements.
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although Iran has been able to export its oil during this period and has been receiving revenues bigger than they expected from the oil sales. Of course, it has taken about 13 million barrels of oil out of the market every day and America cannot replace that. it can probably, its export capacity at the moment I believe is about half a million barrels a day, very big shortfall on 13 million and so what we're seeing now is a beginning there is, if you like the vibrations are there, we can see supply lines are beginning to crumble and very shortly they will collapse. I mean we will see it physically, we will experience it. All of us will experiencing it will experience it in that there will soon be shortages of aviation fuel, maybe gasoline at the stations for the car. Food may be starting, not all together but food start you will notice some absences. You won't get aluminum foil and all these sort of things will start and then it will get serious because in about 2 weeks the supply lines will break. I mean all the economists who follow these things know because you get to a point in your manufacturing if the crucial component is not available you have to shut down the manufacturing and this is what's happening. Look at American farmers they are going bankrupt they say they can't afford to continue in production because the diesel for their tractors has gone up so much. They can't get fertilizer. If they can get fertilizer, they have to pay very much more for it. So I mean it is very clear, and at the same time I mean I would say you know from the Iran's point of view it it's quite happy for Trump to continue with his blockade, is shooting himself in the foot really. It's a useful, it's a useful tool negotiating tool for Iran. But actually in economic terms within a couple of months the pain for Europe and the United States and the world is going to grow in increase dramatically. If you ask what is the difference, I would say the amount of pain for Iran from the blockade by Trump of Hormuz is minimal compared to the acceleration of pain which is about to happen to the world markets unless something is done.
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Iran is exporting enough oil it for its it's making more money now than it ever has before off of oil. And the people that are suffering is not Iran, but America's allies in the Gulf that are not are having to close down their oil wells and shut them. And it is a problem to reopen a closed well. It takes time and it sometimes there are technical problems in it. This is going to go on even if you have the unlikely condition that there's an agreement or something and everything was stopped. The consequences the second and third order consequences of what has already happened are still yet to come and they are going to hurt.
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we see in the Hebrew press in this term people like David Bernadi who is a military correspondent says we've lost the this conflict with Iran. The war is not coming to an end. They have the negotiating advantage. They have the enriched uranium. They have their missiles. We have not won this war at all. We are losing the war. Which is why the Israelis are pressing Trump very hard. And this is clear from the Hebrew press today. The consensus around the leadership is that they must push for more war to restart the war. That's what Israel wants.
Netanyahu's view is either I make this work, I realize the greater Israel project, it becomes real as a result of destroying Iran, or we in Israel are going to have a tough time surviving in the region. And I think he's probably right. Because you can't call all of your neighbors subhuman or criminals and then expect to get along with them when the war stops. And that's his position. So yeah, I think he's in this to the bitter end and he's going to do whatever he can to obstruct any sort of arrangement that brings this conflict to a close.
Thousands of of airlines have already cancelled flights because they don't have enough jet fuel, especially in Europe. We're not in as bad a situation yet, but they're in pretty bad situation over there already. You've had, because of helium not getting out, you have problems in Asia because of fertilizers and all kinds of other petrochemicals that are supposed to have to do with agriculture. People are having a problem right now in America, in Australia, in Asia already that there's big problems with not having enough fertilizer. So even when they're in the planting season right now, they're paying higher costs, especially with diesel to get all the farming done. All their inputs are going up. That's going to have an economic impact when they harvest all of these things later this year. But then there's also the issue of the products themselves because they don't have enough fertilizer to go around. So they're having to use less than they would, which means that the product and the output is going to be less than it's supposed to be. It'll be somewhere down here. So now we're going to have potential food shortages and you'll definitely have food price. That's stuff that's going to be all the way through 2027
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the mentality in the US is they the Iranian side chance death to America and the great Satan and they've been killing us for 47 years now that it's just this mantra. No one wants to look at the fundamentals. And I tried to say look the original fuse was lit in 1953 when we had a coup against their country and then installed somebody who was exploitive of their country which caused them on their own to rise up in revolution because they were sick of the oppression that our handpicked guy was causing on them. And then we supported an eight-year war against them. And then in the 2003 Iraq war when we were attacking their the Kip Hezbollah and several other Shia militia group inside of Iraq during that war, then they were supporting them just like we're supporting Ukraine. No one wants to hear any of that.
apart from Trump's obvious mental issues and the the clear signs of early dementia or frontal lobe dementia. Nonetheless, when when Trump came out and claimed that the Iranian leadership was vastly divided and they don't know who's in charge, that's an Israeli lie that came straight from Israel. I guarantee it. It was provided as liaison intelligence. So the CIA is passing it on as according to reliable intelligence from a liaison service. This is what the state of the state is. And when in fact it's just the opposite that the Ayatollah Kami he was a member of the Iranian revolutionary guard corps when he was 17 and 18 he fought against Iraq. The same for the head Gali Galifa is that his name the head of the legislature and he's been seen as the sort of the lead negotiator uh with the United States. He too fought with the IRGC. He too fought against the Iraq war. And then you've got the current head of the IRGC. These three guys are all about the same age. They're cohorts. And you know, from guys that have fought in the same war and they and in particular, if they fought together, that strong that creates enormous bonds that last a lifetime, sometimes closer than family. So this this lie that Israel is pushing that, oh, the Iranians don't mean what they say because they're divided. Absolutely not. There's not a shred of evidence to support that. And yet Donald Trump is being told that and Donald Trump believes that. So this is this is a case where it's not just Donald Trump confabulating something. He's actually repeating what he's being told.
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the Iranians have it [the strait of Hormuz] shut down. They dramatically increased the mining last week and despite Trump's claims that there are US mind sweepers in their clearing. That's not true. That's a lie. That's false. The US so-called blockade is hundreds of miles away from the straight of Hormuz and despite the claims by Hegseth and Caine that we're got it locked down they don't. Independent sources confirmed like yesterday, the day before yesterday 34 different Iranian ships came out and got past the blockade. So roughly the United States, it doesn't have enough ships out there to actually run an effective blockade with the distance that needs to be covered. So basically they can probably stop about 10% of what's going going out and you know at this point with the ceasefire in place Iran showing no sign of attacking right now. Yeah, they're going to retaliate eventually for that. But but it also creates some additional issues for the US Navy. again, they're under staffed, undermanned, under shipped, and so when they start detaining these ships, somebody's got to watch them. So then all of a sudden, you have to start peeling off assets. So it's actually, it's just a foolish policy on the part of the United States. Counterproductive.
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we'll find out Sunday night whether we have tacos on Sunday night, whether Trump again chickens out. I hope he does. Because the Israelis are reporting that basically they get the green light on Sunday. The war will kick back on and the Iranians are prepared to go to fight. They're not afraid of that. So, you know, we're not out of the woods yet.
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President would hold that whatever the Israelis do, Trump feels necessary to do likewise. So, green light or not, orange light, he'll be in there in my view, full full force. And the reality is he doesn't have much more to offer other than nuclear weapons. He's not going to do that. My concern again is that Netanyahu may.
Well, energy markets is just about everything. Uh you have fertilizer for instance and fertilizer prices I'm told in India have already gone way up. Certainly in America they're going up to such an extent that farmers are saying if they pay for the fertilizer and for the equipment and for all the other in inputs whose price is inflated, they're not going to be able to make money on their crops. Well, of course, crop prices may go up because all over the world there's going to be a crop shortage without fertilizer, but farmers need to go to a bank and borrow before they can spend for the spring planting and the summer. And that usually entails selling the crop in advance for a guaranteed price. So, the big companies that are the crop trading companies are going to make a big profit, not the farmers. So they're really really being screwed. And of course they're the ones who are most loyal to Trump and the and the Republicans. So of course America they can afford to screw the farmers because they're his base. But pharmaceuticals are also in there that's made out of all this fertilizer pharmaceuticals. Already the helium uh has already been stopped and so that interferes with the hospital scanning machinery as well as cryogenic freezing of computer chips. Then you have just the basic energy for transportation especially the highly refined airplane fuels that have already led to huge cutbacks in the airlines planned flights for this summer for the tourist season. So energy is really the whole economy and people get the sort of simplistic economic analysis say well energy is 10% of GDP so GDP will go down 10%. But that's not very helpful because if you have all sorts of things that you need to make a profit and if you don't have energy for it then that means all the other things are not able to be employed either and you have unemployment in manufacturing industry. Aluminum has already been cut back because aluminum's really made out of electricity to do the electrolytic refining of the boxite. right down the line the effect will be more than 10%. And the genius of Iran's political stance is if you the rest of the world do not stop the United States and Israel from destroying us, which is their explicit threat, they're going to blow up all of our bridges. They're going to destroy all of our refining capacity. They'll destroy all of our electricity. They'll bring about a regime change and impose a police state like the Shah [of Iran] had that led us to have the revolution to overthrow him in 1979 to begin with. If you're just going to sit by and let the world ignore all of the body of international law and the laws of war that the United Nations charter was supposed to do, then we're not going to go down alone. We're going to take the other Arab oil producers with us. That's going to cause such a shortage that it's going to cause an international depression worse than the 1930s.
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they're not possible to have dollars. They had dollars and the United States has confiscated them. If you have dollars, the United States will immediately steal them as they stole Russia's $300 billion dollars. The dollar is unusable by any country that wants its own national sovereignty.
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the whole financial sector will be coming down. So what will be destroyed is not only physical output. It's the whole system of financialization that is led the United States to lag so far behind China for instance and countries that instead of being liberal say well the government has to play a positive role in providing for certain basic needs and to prevent uh exploitation. If you don't have a government strong enough to prevent a financial oligarchy from developing, then you're going to end up like the United States, a failed economy or like Germany and most of Western Europe, a failed economy as a result of their neoliberalism. So, I just wanted to be very careful about using that word liberalism. It's a term against government and against socialism specifically. That's what caused the whole reaction against industrial capitalism because industrial capitalism itself was evolving into socialism into government playing an increasing role in the economy by investing in infrastructure by preventing monopolies by taxing away or preventing land rent and monopoly rent and financial exploitation from occurring. So there's a whole ideological superructure that has gone by the wayside along with the collapse of uh production. Ideology is the last thing to go apparently.
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Liberalism is central planning but it's central planning not by government but by the financial sector and by the political uh military sector. That's liberalism. You have to realize it central centralized planning not by the government not by democracy but by financial wealth and the military to protect its dominance.
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The fact is that America is acting unilaterally by itself in its own interest. And so having a US military base there is essentially putting yourself as a bullseye for Iran and similar all over the world to destroy, because the United States military bases are there as a means of attack. They're not defensive, they're aggressive. And if they're aggressive against any enemy, the enemy's the opponent is going to fight back and wipe it out and they'll whip out the country that has the military base in it. So obviously that's not safe.
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This security you talk about for 70 for 80 years now has been a fiction. It's the enabling fiction to say we will provide you for security in case Russia invades uh Europe. That's as if Russia is going to invade Europe. It's a fiction to think that Europe needs security against Russia. Russia wants to be left alone by Europe and it's willing to fight Europe and to bomb Germany and England and France if they try to attack Russia as they're doing or provide Ukraine with uh missiles to attack Russian oil and refinery production uh as they're doing. Russia has already turned its back on Europe and wants to go with the east because Europe is part of a failed civilization. It's going downhill and it's Russia not only rejecting Europe economically, but its social values and its rotten political system.
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whole system that was supposed pretended to be keeping the world economy prosperous and free turned out to making it more and more unequal, more and more polarized, less and less safe, and more or less prone to leading to exactly the culmination of this irrepressible conflict that we're seeing today.
- www.patreon.com - Michael Hudson
- www.counterpunch.org - Postponing the World’s Financial Winter, But For How Long? Iran’s MAD Standoff with the Rest of the World
Oil is everything you eat. 30% of global fertilizer exports. Transit Hormuz fertilizer prices heading towards doubling. The food prices follow energy with a four to six month lag.
the Jewish historian and scholar Gersham Scholam has said that religious Zionism which is what we have today and which is supported by 70% of Israelis I mean a substantial majority operates as what he wrote some years ago as a militant apocalyptic and radical messianic movement that tries to that he says tries to force the end that and what does he mean by trying to force the end? Trying to force redemption a messiah the arrival of the messiah and redemption by demanding that the state engage in massive territorial control. Well, we recognize this. We see this this is what is called greater Israel. This is the territorial control that Israel is looking for. From across from the two rivers from the Nile to the Euphrates and demanding that the state engage in this massive territorial control in order to try and create a conquest for the end of time reasons.
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you know, we have a problem um with our lack of ability to sort of move out of this way of thinking and to see the world as having different facets to it. That it isn't just one facet secular mechanical thinking. There are other facets that come into view if you look at the world in a different way. It's all about attention. What attention do you pay? If your attention is totally focused on facts, on factual ideas, then you're missing a great deal of the understanding of what it Iran is today, for example, and to understand that Iran is not a nation state. It is something quite different. It is a revolutionary society in many ways.
As May 1 approaches, the Trump administration is running out of easy options.
Seeking congressional approval risks exposing divisions.
Withdrawing could signal weakness or unfinished objectives.
Ignoring the law could trigger a political backlash at home — and uncertainty abroad.
gulfnews.com - US–Iran war clock: May 1 deadline puts Trump under pressure
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