Thoughts on Iran

Can Trump "Weave" His Way Out?

It’s been strange monitoring the Iran situation, as I don’t feel strong emotional attachments to either side. Unlike Ron Paul-type libertarians, I’m not a clean self-determinationist. The whole mess in the Middle East strikes me as downstream of American efforts to undermine colonialism after WWII, and the US preference to rule by proxy rather than directly. If England were still England, Iran, Israel, and broader Middle East would be better off under cool-headed Anglican adult supervision by His Majesty’s viceroys, or else a pragmatic General MacArthur, as the region features primitive religious systems that are cruel¹ as they are silly (“half devil and half child” as Kipling put it), reflecting their respective populations’ capacity for self-government.

And considering the strategic importance to all of humanity of keeping oil flowing, it was a mistake to allow the accidents of geography to determine their sovereignty over the same. There was a strong argument not so long ago that God intended the sons of Britain, that world-changing combination of Anglican prudence, Presbyterian muscle, and Methodist zeal, to govern the Earth as the most capable of doing so².

So I’m not automatically opposed to the assertion of American authority in the area, as such would be an improvement on the region’s domestic situations, if Americans would rule instead of engaging in fantasies of nation-building³. I’ve held off on commenting, as these things take time to play out, and I was hopeful that it would somehow work out well. That now seems less likely, as even a strategic victory appears to be a disaster politically.

1. The origins of the operation seem to be linked to a unilateral action planned by Israel that the United States joined. The strategic reason for this, presumably, is that if Israel were making a move for which the US would be considered a co-belligerent, it would be better to more severely reduce Iran’s response capability with a joint US force.

2. This, however, doesn’t quite make sense. Iran historically has blustered a lot about treating an Israeli attack as an American one and promising total destruction upon their enemies, but their response last year to a limited bombing campaign was mostly symbolic. Iran’s government is more a Boomer kleptocracy than a theocracy in practice. They care more about retaining power than ideological consistency.

3. So why did Trump order a major engagement? One story is that he believed Netanyahu’s claim that regime change by air would be easy, and perhaps he was overconfident coming off the success of the Maduro raid, despite the warnings of senior US military leaders that the Israelis always exaggerate. But this seems to sell Trump short, as I think he’s too smart to believe Netanyahu at face value.

4. The subsequent episodes with Netanyahu and the Israelis escalating to derail cease-fire efforts are a particular tell as well. Trump wants to end it quickly, but somehow cannot.

5. I generally hate indulging in conspiracy theories, but it cannot be dismissed that the Israelis might have some kind of compromising information as leverage. I highly doubt this involves Trump himself or any direct relationship with Epstein. Jeffrey Epstein’s MO was helping rich dorks who can’t pull women on their own connect with vulnerable teenagers and trafficked women from Eastern Europe.

6. In fact, one of my contrarian theories about Trump is that he’s not as promiscuous as he likes people to think he is. Trump is a germaphobe and a natural monogamist, at least serially, and he compensated with all of the “John Barron” leaks to the Times about his supposed sexual escapades. He has talked of his fear of AIDS in the 1970s (which never posed a significant risk to heterosexuals using anatomy as designed). He even has a strong personal preference for specific brands of hand sanitizer. In relationships, given his opportunity space, he’s a fairly normal secular male who cheated on his first wife, probably got cheated on by his second, and has remained married to his third. In each of those cases, he married women who were 22 (when he was 28), 30 (at 47), and 34 (at 58), respectively. This is not a pattern that indicates a paraphilia for teenagers. There’s simply no evidence he was interested in anything Epstein could offer. Thus, I think any intel the Israelis might have involves Trump family members, and while there are public clues as to what this might be, I won’t speculate here. This might be more effective leverage, as while Trump is pretty shameless about his own behavior and will defend almost anything about himself, he would be more sensitive to those around him.

7. Israel’s behavior is more perplexing. Trump’s foreign policy, without war, had delivered the best security in their history, including de facto recognition by the Gulf States. They had a free hand to handle Gaza, though they seemed to have managed it poorly in the post-television and post-smartphone era. They have claimed that Iran is “months away” from a nuclear weapon for twenty years. Yet it also seems this is a quixotic concern because a) the long-run odds of suppressing an 80-year-old military technology from a large nation-state with East Asian, European, or Central Asian scientific capability are almost nil, and b) mutually assured destruction is demonstrably the world’s best security regime, halting the horrific early-to-mid-20th-century industrial war meat grinder in its tracks. This is even true for lower-tier cultures with higher baseline irrationality, like India and Pakistan. There is no reason to think the same disincentives wouldn’t hold for Iran. Israel’s insistence on not leaving well enough alone and destabilizing the situation, unfortunately, feeds antisemitic tropes about Jewish paranoia and seems bearish for the region and Israel itself.

8. One hopeful alternative hypothesis is that Netanyahu’s particular circumstances might better explain Israel’s erratic behavior. He’s facing serious criminal accusations of corruption in Israeli courts, and the Iran war is serving the same purpose of delaying court proceedings that the Gaza crisis did. As a native of the Mediterranean-influenced culture of Louisiana, I can say this means the graft must be pretty bad, especially when you strip out Christianity’s higher ethics in the case of Israel. No Prime Minister of Israel nor governor of Louisiana is going to be indicted by their states for common pig-at-the-trough self-dealing, but rather for outlier hogs-get-slaughtered-scale behavior that even those cultures find beyond the pale. It means Netanyahu exceeded the petty personal enrichment that is expected as a matter of course in such jurisdictions and attempted to grab the chips of other power centers with their own means of state retaliation.

9. It is indeterminate at this moment if the war will end up somehow serving American interests. It’s hard to see how it does, as all we need from Iran is to produce and sell oil, which they are perfectly happy to do; however, the UAE’s recent departure from OPEC is good for us. But Trump, thankfully, is a pragmatist without ideological or theological commitments. He may be able to pull a rabbit out of his hat like he has so many times before and turn this into a win on the merits. If he can, it will be his greatest political triumph, as inflation is always extremely unpopular with voters, even if temporary, because prices are sticky and wages rarely keep up.

10. But this may not matter. The concerning problem is an unrecoverable fracture of the MAGA coalition post-Trump. This country can roughly be divided into 35% conservative, 30% liberal, and 35% independent.

11. The Trump electorate can be described as an amalgamation of anti-war independents and anti-immigration conservatives. The independents don’t care as much about immigration, but they hate war and religious nuts who foment wars unnecessarily. The extended Dubya wars were traumatic for the nation, particularly for those who served in the military. And while Dubya wasn’t a dispensationalist, his motivation for the war was adjacent to evangelicalism’s “main character” narratives surrounding personal testimonies. As a former drunk, Dubya could have seen himself as less qualified to lead because of the addict’s fundamental selfishness, and consigning himself to a quiet life working with his hands (which seems to be how he copes now, painting portraits of men he caused to be wounded). But evangelical culture made him think he was more qualified to lead because of a special connection to God, which is just the same narcissism in religious garb. The same idiocy resulted in a conviction that all Middle Easterners needed was “freedom” and the gospel of liberal democracy to turn around their innate pathologies. The country as a whole, especially independents, correctly identified this hypocrisy / stupidity and hated it.

12. Nothing radicalizes a person like comrades who died, got maimed, or were hollowed out psychologically for a pointless war. Many of those people correctly identify Zionist neoconservatives as key agents fomenting that war. Trump’s breakout moment in 2015 was his bullying of Jeb over Dubya’s folly. I fear war-motivated voters will never trust Trump or Republicans again⁴.

13. I have been working for some time now on a piece on the “postwar consensus,” seeking to synthesize several threads from the Dissident Right. I had hopes that a new coalition would be possible, given the Left’s seeing Western Civilization broadly, Heritage America, and Israel as essentially the same thing: oppressive white colonizers.

14. Unfortunately, I’m not sure this is politically viable after the Iran debacle. The war is so unpopular, and more realist members among Israeli nationalists, like Bill Ackman, seem unable to restrain their bloodthirsty Boomers like Miriam Adelson, and by extension, Benjamin Netanyahu. This is really bad for Jewish / Israeli interests long-term, as their cause is now almost universally hated among the young, and feelings search for rationalizations that are difficult to reverse once popular. Why would forward-looking conservatives expend effort and political capital debunking, say, Holocaust denial, when doing so would alienate potential voters? Play stupid games, get stupid prizes.

15. What I mean here is that any association with the ultra-Zionist wing is politically dead on arrival, which makes it hard to appropriately nuance, for public consumption, alliances with more reasonable, realist Zionists. There’s not really an upside to an alliance for the rising Right. A majority of Americans, independents, liberals, and young conservatives now have sharply negative views of Israel, all for very different reasons. The public will assume any such combination, including even realist Zionists, will undermine the stated agenda, and the ultra-Zionists will use their power to push for wars not in the American interest. Given that’s what they just did with Trump — manipulating the administration into a needless conflict, selfishly burning political capital and thus disrespecting other members of the coalition by hindering the domestic agenda for a generation with their foolishness — the public’s skepticism is not without cause. This is not to predict a general anti-Jewish bias at the individual level, but rather that anyone, regardless of ethnic heritage, becomes a liability if they are a public lackey for Israel. Stephen Miller is in, but Ted Cruz is out.

16. Incumbents like Cruz will continue for a time, given the ignorance of voters makes incumbents difficult to unseat and strong support among the fading demographic of older dispensationalist Christians in the American South. But in any open seat, Cruz-style glazing for Israel will become a liability. I predict a major split in the 2028 Republican primary. A soft Israel skeptic will arise, possibly Vance, leading to the bitterest primary since 2015, and perhaps exceeding it. A watershed moment will occur when Zionist money cannot overcome the will of the voters.

17. Netanyahu and his generation of leadership have made grave political mistakes. As Israel gained strength, they continued to lean on the Holocaust as carte blanche for Israeli actions. American Jewish organizations such as the ADL alienated conservatives by smearing them as racists and anti-Semites for years, relying on the irrationally motivated dispensationalist wing of the Republican Party to maintain right-wing support. Young conservatives largely reject this theological mythology and, in private conversations, pin many of our societal problems, like ubiquitous pornography, on Jewish influence⁵. Further, the Holocaust-as-raison-d'être gambit is a classic “if you win, you lose” fragile strategy, for the lesson of the Holocaust is that the weak are privileged, and strength is always suspect. To the broader world, as Israel gained strength, it looked more like the Nazis and less like victims. The Palestinians outmaneuvered them in the media by successfully copying the tactics of the best 20th-century leftist agitators.

18. Rational Zionists must make a clean break and pin this on Netanyahu. In fact, the only way for Trump to put the band back together would be make Netanyahu a scapegoat for the entire war. Trump would be well-served to ensure he dies in prison, and that Israeli interests commit themselves to reasonableness going forward and accept being a “normal” country: okay with diplomatic half-loaves like everyone else. Short of this, what’s happening here, whether deliberate or not, looks like the Boomer’s last ride, from goofball useful idiot old dispensationalists like Mike Huckabee to Netanyahu himself, who may see Trump’s presidency as his last best chance to reset the diplomatic table militarily before US support becomes more limited in the future. They severely underappreciate the worldwide reputational damage being done to the Zionist cause and their ability to contain it in the social media era.

19. Anti-Jewish stereotypes are, ironically, becoming out-of-date even as they strengthen. The New York Times this past weekend published a piece on Israeli use of trained rape dogs. Whether the allegations are true or not, and more remarkably if they’re not, it’s clear that “Zionist control of the media” is not currently the situation⁶. Netanyahu is now reduced to a common schmuck forced to sue a newspaper for defamation after the fact.

20. Economically, the most interesting aspect of the situation in Iran is the durability of cheap oil. Extreme anti-war types continue to predict economic catastrophe real soon now with the Strait closed, but people with money on the line don’t agree. As I write this, oil delivered in January 2027 is selling for $76.

    

    If the market is right, it means Iran and the Middle East don’t matter as much. American petroleum engineers can ramp up production with advanced fracking technology that changes a lot of the geopolitical assumptions. A professor at Texas A&M, the world’s leading petroleum engineering program, puts it this way:

    The potential $90/bbl price is geographical fiction. Operators are pulling crude from the earth at $15/bbl using advanced computation, while the global market panics and pays $90 simply because a surface tanker cannot safely cross a conflict zone. Producers are not slowing down; they are drilling relentlessly for the cash flow required to service debt and sustain operations, completely ignoring the surface-level geopolitical chaos and silently adding to the massive, hidden global glut.

    Most petroleum molecules are in the shale, at least 4:1, and that’s just known reserves. We find more when we look. We’re headed for an unbelievably massive abundance long-term with cheap oil. F-250s aren’t going anywhere. And the oil glut, of course, makes the case for this war being in the country’s interest much less plausible. If we can produce all the oil we need in places like Midland, why do we need to be involved in Bronze Age feuds between dueling Christ-denying religions?

1. The convergence of both religious systems, when taken literally, on various cruelties, from an unwillingness to use the best pain-minimizing technology to slaughter animals to minimizing child sexual abuse, is notable.

Anti-Zionist rhetoric will often focus on Talmud passages like Ketubot 11a–11b, where rabbis debate this: “Rava said that this is what the mishna is saying: An adult man who engaged in intercourse with a minor girl less than three years old has done nothing, as intercourse with a girl less than three years old is tantamount to poking a finger into the eye. In the case of an eye, after a tear falls from it another tear forms to replace it; similarly, the ruptured hymen of the girl younger than three is restored.”

You’d get the idea from their selective quoting that Islam was fairly progressive by comparison. But Iran’s Tahrir al-Wasilah, Volume 2, Kitab al-Nikah, mas'ala 12, states, “It is not permissible to have sexual intercourse with a wife before she completes nine years of age, whether the marriage is permanent or temporary. As for other pleasures, such as lustful touching, embracing, and tafkhid [thighing], there is no objection — even with a nursing infant. And if he has intercourse with her before [she completes] nine years and does not cause ifda' [rupture], he has not committed a sin other than the prohibited act itself. But if he causes ifda' to her — meaning he unites her two passages, the urinary and the menstrual, or the menstrual and the rectal — then it is forbidden for him to have intercourse with her ever after, but his obligation to maintain her does not lapse, and she inherits from him. The most cautious view is that he must support her as long as she lives and as long as he lives, even if he has divorced her and she has married another, though [this lifelong support obligation] is not without doubt [as a legal matter].”

To be fair, most Jewish and Islamic religious authorities do not take these passages as imperatives, but it has to be quite embarrassing to qualify them in the light of Christian morality. No one has to write comparable apologetics for the Book of Common Prayer.

2. There’s an irony in extreme right-wing types in the Anglosphere fetishizing Nazi Germany, when it’s very clear that much of German ultra-nationalism was a reactionary inferiority complex relative to their Anglo-American cousins. The Kaiser and Hitler alike were embarrassed that, despite German overachievement in many areas, they remained a regional, land-based power while the sun never set on the British and American empires. Those actually engaged in master-race-type activities don’t feel compelled to talk about it, because talking about it is bad for business, undermining moral authority and legitimacy. Nazi atheism didn’t help either. “You and me baby ain’t nothing but mammals” is less conducive to effective rule than divine commands like “slaves, obey your masters.” Teutonic culture, in making the implicit explicit, proved too autistic to effectively govern others.

3. Maybe a just way to do this would be to provide our voluntary military forces with equity in our conquests. Invading and taking over, say, Cuba, would be a win-win if we actually take their stuff — our guys get rich, the local population gets the rule of law and a growing economy. The men doing the fighting become lords (maybe a small royalty tax on Cuban property values expiring in 100 years), like William the Conqueror’s incentive program. Giving American men the option to become soldiers of fortune would likely do a lot to fix the fertility problem as well, as nothing inspires a Baby Boom like men returning from a successful war victorious and rich. Make Filibustering Great Again?

4. A more lasting consequence of the 20-year Iraq / Afghanistan quagmire is that Americans will find it more difficult to trust their government in the future to support wars in the national interest. The trust and patriotism briefly on display after 9/11 may be irrecoverable for a long time. Maybe attacking Iran is in the national interest, but how would a citizen know this with confidence, given the circumstances?

5. Strangely, Billy Graham, a dispensationalist, seemed to agree in private conversations with President Nixon.

6. The history of the NY Times’ controlling family, the Ochs-Sulzbergers, is illustrative. The current chairman’s most recent ethnically Jewish ancestor was a grandfather, and the family is nominally Episcopalian. The decline of Zionism is the story of Jewish intermarriage, which is now the majority of Jews.