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Prediction: Iran is “Trump’s Vietnam”

Having been in Paris for eight days and then boarding the Queen Mary 2 in Le Havre heading to New York (with stops in Cherbourg and Southampton) along with many French, Danish, British and other European passengers.  One thing is very clear, the Felon is deeply loathed by most in Europe, but the animosity does not extend to individual Americans especially if one is polite and friendly.  The reception is even better if one makes it clear you loathe the Felon as much or more than they do,  We have had particularly interesting conversations with four Danish citizens onboard the ship.  The other things that are notable are (i) that Europe is all in on green energy and in each port we passed through we saw materials for constructing wind turbines, and (ii) Chinese electric cars are making inroads - up close, they are stylish and seem popular.  Of course, in America, the Felon has attacked both green energy development and subsidies to support a robust electric car industry.  The over arching issue, however, is the Felon's disastrous war of choice against Iran and the adverse impact on both the European economies and global economy.  While the Felon has claimed again that a peace deal is close - for the 37th or 38th time - no end to the war is in sight and all such pronouncements do is offer insider trading opportunities for the Felon, his sleazy family, and his billionaire buddies.  A piece at Salon looks at what some experienced government officials see as the parallels between the Felon's misbegotten war and the Vietnam debacle. Here are excerpts:

Leon Panetta has been in politics as long as any of us can remember. . . . and for his final chapter in government served as Barack Obama‘s CIA director in the first term and defense secretary in the second. To say he’s got extensive experience would an understatement.

Panetta has always been a centrist, and I’ve been critical of his “maverick” track record over the years — he’s had a tendency to burnish his own reputation to the detriment of those he works for. But at age 87, from his perch as the head of the Panetta Institute for Public Policy, it’s hard to imagine he now thinks he has anything left to prove. So when Panetta appeared on CNN to talk about the Iran war, a subject he is well qualified to discuss, and says that it’s shaping up to be “Trump’s Vietnam,” you can’t help but be a bit startled. If anyone still in public life knows how much freight that phrase carries, it would be him.

That comparison might sound hyperbolic . . . . But Panetta drew the comparison based on the argument that Donald Trump‘s war was an equally terrible miscalculation of the adversary’s resilience and commitment, where we’re dealing with misinformation and propaganda coming from the U.S. administration and an untrustworthy negotiating partner on the other side.

In other words, Americans have once again overestimated their own prowess and underestimated their enemy; our own government is constantly lying about the war, and the Iranians are unlikely to stick to any deal without solid verification, which is going to be difficult to manage at best. To state the obvious, the U.S. under Trump is equally untrustworthy, having torn up the hard-fought nuclear agreement negotiated under Obama, which by all accounts the Iranians had been honoring.

We can add another dimension to this misadventure that makes it much more complicated than Vietnam. That war had a dreadful human cost but it did not threaten the entire world economy the way this one does. The protracted and unresolved dispute over the Strait of Hormuz and the enormous amounts of crude oil that travel through it is pretty dire, and not likely to get better anytime soon.

Fuel prices have spiked around the world since the war started, for obvious reasons. But in fact, they haven’t gone up quite as precipitously as we might have expected, considering that about 25% of the world’s oil supply has been bottled up in the Strait of Hormuz for the past few months. That respite is about to end. Last week, Chevron CEO Mike Wirth said that the “buffers and the shock absorbers” in the global petroleum market “are being steadily drawn down, and the ability for the market to absorb this imbalance is drastically diminished today versus where we started.”

According to Politico, industry executives have been privately warning the White House that prices are about to surge dramatically over the next month. but Trump officials claim they haven’t heard a thing about it. In fact, they insist there’s no supply problem and that as soon as the strait is open, fuel prices will go back down to where they were in February and everything will be hunky-dory. Anyone who buys that line is going to be very disappointed. One expert told Politico, “I’ve never seen inventory numbers fall so much so quickly. It is stunning.”

There are other reasons why the prices haven’t risen more sharply, one of which is arguably a huge positive for the long term. As Ryan Cooper writes in The American Prospect, one surprising factor that’s keeping the supply somewhat steady is been green energy. Since much of fossil fuel energy can be replaced by solar power, wind power and battery-powered electric vehicles, Cooper reports, “Chinese exports of solar and EVs are soaring, and even very poor countries are buying in bulk.”

In countries like Egypt, where sunlight is ample and the price of oil has created a massive burden on consumers, renewable energy is an absolute necessity. It’s a godsend that many of these new technologies are available off the shelf right now, and this crisis will likely speed up the energy transition all over the world. Sadly, the U.S. is likely to be left behind, both in consumption and in manufacturing, since our government has perversely placed all its chips on fossil fuels. This week, Trump pledged $700 billion to reinvigorate the dirty, failing coal industry and he’s been halting renewable energy projects left and right, . . . So the U.S. is already well behind the curve, and that’ll get worse if the Iran war turns into the Vietnam-style quagmire that Panetta predicts.

Trump’s antiwar stance was always a joke. But a lot of his followers believed it, and along with the economic stress it’s causing, this “excursion” — in his infelicitous phrase — is creating a new set of calculations for Republicans.

It’s hard to imagine that this GOP will muster the courage to confront Trump directly, but then this war has been massively unpopular from the get-go as well as extremely costly. Everyone who’s been paying attention knows it was a huge mistake made by a president who refused listen to those around him who knew this would probably happen and tried to warn him off, even if many of those people won’t admit it now. We’ve been here before: That sounds an awful lot like Vietnam, which was an epic disaster that the country has never really gotten over.

Let’s hope it doesn’t take 20 years to end this war, but there are no signs that it’s going to be over anytime soon, whether Trump declares victory or not. Panetta says he thinks America will be back fighting Iran again in a few years, no matter what happens now. Donald Trump has started another forever war, which was exactly the thing he promised he would never do.

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Putin and The Felon: Both Trapped in Losing Battles Against Reality

The Felon is a huge admirer of Vladimir Putin - perhaps in part due to Kompromat Putin has on him - but also because in many ways the two man are narcissistic megalomaniacs cut from the same cloth who view themselves as smarter and more able than those around them. Both also seem to embrace a toxic view of masculinity as they malign and denigrate - or, in Putin's case, murder - those who oppose them  The Felon's temper tantrum on Meet the Press where he walked off when Kristin Welker refused to accept his lies demonstrates both the fact that he is not as strong as he pretends and that he lives in his own false reality.  These shared personality traits, delusions and refusals to accept objective reality are on display in the wars of choice both launched against Ukraine in the case of Putin and Iran in the case of the Felon.  This inability to accept objective reality and the fact based advise of counselors and others have put both men in situations where their wars that they boasted would result in quick victories are dragging on with no victorious end game in sight.  A piece at The Guardian looks at the traps of their own creation and their inability to find a "win" to save face.  Here are excerpts: 

The strongman president, self-styled redeemer of national glory, is trapped in a conflict he can’t win but doesn’t know how to end without looking like a loser. A cult of infallibility prevents the leader admitting a strategic blunder even to himself. It could be Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin; Iran or Ukraine.

The conflicts and the regimes involved are also dissimilar in important ways. Russia’s campaign to eradicate a neighbouring democracy is nastier in conception and bloodier in execution than the bungled US effort to dislodge a dictatorship in Tehran. It has also gone on much longer. The first world war was shorter than a “special military operation” that was supposed to capture Kyiv within weeks. The Soviet Red Army repelled Nazi invasion and marched on Berlin in less time than it has taken Putin’s forces to occupy a tranche of eastern Ukraine, and they are not making any significant advances. The war has burned trillions of rubles and sacrificed hundreds of thousands of lives for no discernible dividend in national greatness.

The failure is too big for the Kremlin’s propaganda machinery to hide. Civilians hundreds of miles from the frontline see the plumes of black smoke from the oil refineries struck by long-range Ukrainian drones. They feel the depletion of their wages by inflation. They noticed how last month’s Victory Day parade, the high holy day of Russian militarism, was strangely modest.

Official opinion polls have shown a drop in support for Putin, albeit from impossible heights to improbable ones. Since the data-collecting agencies are under state control, the blip is best interpreted as a symptom of factional jostling for influence within the regime. Pragmatists in the civilian administration might have flashed a glimpse of presidential vulnerability as a warning to hardliners in the security apparatus that their approach isn’t working.

Any internal Russian lobby for ending the war runs into the problem that Putin sees the conflict as an existential struggle to avenge national honour against the perfidious west. He casts himself as the incarnation of national destiny, reaffirming Russian civilisational supremacy over borderlands to which it is historically entitled. Such a man doesn’t easily accept the prospect of dealing with Volodymyr Zelenskyy on equal terms as legitimate president of an independent country.

Trump’s worldview is less cluttered with antique mythology, more pumped with celebrity narcissism, but the effect is the same. He shares Putin’s concept of alpha powers whose interests override any sovereignty claims of lesser nations in their neighbourhoods. He was easily persuaded that Ukraine’s cause was hopeless and that Putin held all “the cards” because it would have offended his own sense of majesty to believe that someone in Zelenskyy’s geopolitical class could be a winner.

If the US president had been interested in the reality of Ukraine’s defensive campaign he might have observed the levelling effect of drones, allowing a smaller force to thwart an apparently overwhelming onslaught. He might even have considered the relevance of that asymmetry when judging whether Iran could be bombed into unconditional surrender. He might then have taken advice from people in the state department and CIA who had war-gamed an all-out campaign against the Islamic Republic under previous administrations. They concluded that regime change couldn’t be achieved from the air and that closure of the strait of Hormuz was a viable Iranian countermeasure with devastating economic consequences.

That would have required a capacity for strategic analysis that recognised practical constraints on what the US can achieve. Since Trump sees no boundary between himself and his country’s power, and treats every interaction in zero-sum terms, factoring Iranian advantages into the military equation would be like admitting limits to his personal potency. Intolerable.

Like Putin, Trump is marooned on an island of autocratic delusion, surrounded by advisers and ministers who are too cowardly or too blinded by ideology to survey the distant shore of reality and suggest a way back. For the Russian president there might be some compensation in seeing the US humbled in the Middle East, but the gains are fewer than they appeared at the start of the war. The revenue boost from higher oil prices has been largely cancelled out by the costs and logistical impediment of Ukrainian drones landing on industrial infrastructure.

Meanwhile, a Trump administration bogged down in negotiations with Tehran has no bandwidth for Ukraine. That shifts the odds against Putin in his bet that Zelenskyy can be bullied by the White House into conceding territory that Russian soldiers haven’t been able to seize on the ground. It also creates a space for more proactive involvement of Ukraine’s European allies. They feel the need to check Kremlin aggression more urgently than anyone in Washington.

That agenda has become easier to pursue since Viktor Orbán’s defeat in Hungarian elections earlier this year. The removal of Putin’s favourite spanner from the European works led to a prompt unblocking of aid to Kyiv. There are signs of momentum behind a Europe-led peace initiative. At a recent meeting of EU foreign ministers there was discussion of candidates to lead negotiations with Moscow. This week, Keir Starmer hosted Zelenskyy, along with Germany’s Friedrich Merz and France’s Emmanuel Macron for a summit in Downing Street.

It still isn’t clear what a “coalition of the willing” would really be willing to do to keep the peace in Ukraine without the US. But Putin’s confidence that the decadent west would not stay the course when confronted with Russia’s inexhaustible supply of manly valour has also not been vindicated.

This is something else he has in common with Trump, or that Russian ultranationalism shares with Maga mania. Both movements view Europe as a decrepit civilisation in the death throes of cultural suicide by overdose of immigration and liberal degeneracy. It is a diagnosis repeated by many nationalists and mainstream conservatives across Europe, assisted on their ideological journey by campaigns of overt and covert online influence originating in Russia and the US.

It is also an underestimation of liberal democracy’s defining strength, which is the resilience afforded by pluralism and institutional acceptance of legitimate opposition. The authoritarian strongman, seeing no difference between his will and the nation’s destiny, treats dissent as an assault on his authority, tending towards treason. He sits atop an edifice of power that promotes loyalty at the expense of truth, until reality itself is banished from his court.

In the US that process can still be corrected by constitutional checks and balances, fair elections, a free press and independent courts. Not in Russia. That is why European democracies must prove that their system of government is not only better in principle, but stronger in practice. And the way they do it is by embracing Ukraine’s struggle as their own.

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