It's hard to keep up with all the failures and perfidy of the current administration, but here's my take today:
The days of imperialist aggression are over. Trump got away with it in Venezuela because that economy was on the verge of collapse anyway from both internal failures and external sanctions that had gone on for over a decade in multiple American administrations AND he just happened to have a Venezuelan V.P. who thought it was better to make a deal fro her people than to try to maintain a failed state and be subject to destruction and death - probably her own too.
That doesn't work in a theocratic state like Iran that is driven by religious mandate to kill all Jews, eliminate big and little Satans - America and Israel respectively. That's too deep to change and the people were slaughtered by the same regime Trump wanted to change. So, slaughtering the people more meant nothing (except an express road to Paradise to them). He can't conceive of anyone who doesn't do anything for money or power either; he's too much of a narcissist to understand anything else.
Worse, the Pentagon has been broken like everything else and its core competency is gone or smothered by the most incompetent Dept. of Defense, er, War, in history. Deserving officers are not promoted or even fired because of the color of their skin or their sex (Hegseth doesn't believe in gender being different from sex either). Stupid emphasis on muscle over brains means American soldiers will get slaughtered in any ground invasion too, much like the Russian soldiers are that Trump admires so much. He wants to be a dictator like Putin.
Iran, for its part, realizes they have no reliable partner with which to make a deal and that Trump breaks every deal ever made, including his own. They've hired 4 psychologists to advise them because they believe Trump is literally mentally ill, correctly. Trump posts AI slop. Iran gets under his skin with Lego movies. It's such madness that if a novelist wrote such a story, no publisher would believe it could happen. Yet, here we are.
We may be headed for a oil-shock depression, especially since about the only thing holding up the economy now is AI and that bubble is already deflating. High oil prices and severe scarcity once the reserve finally runs out will mean 1970s style gas lines, exacerbated by Trump's killing of ever green energy initiative. Like our military, Trump is living in the last century, maybe even the 19th century with his love of coal and of imperialism (BTW, Putin suggested to Trump that he should treat the Western hemisphere, minus Europe, as his to conquer, while Russia does the same in the Eastern hemisphere, plus Europe. And Putin is one of Trump's most trusted advisors. Putin is a master KGB-trained manipulator that Trump can't even see coming).
We may still be on the path to WWIII. At the very least, we have no more allies at all. They won't bother attacking the U.S. There's nothing our former allies want here anyway and they are too weakened besides, and busy fighting off Russian and Chinese threats that Trump has enabled with his non-support of NATO. I hope we can survive this Administration, but the odds are getting longer against it every day. Trump keeps slipping nuclear options into his public and private talk, even trying to force a general to give him the nuclear codes for Iran. Of course, if he nukes Iran, Russia will feel free to nuke Ukraine and then it's off we go"
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