America and Iran: Two ‘Republics’ Under the Thumb of Dictators
We broke our country. Do we still own it?
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Donald Trump’s war against Iran seemed to have caught the leaders of the Islamic Republic by surprise. How, one may ask, did that happen?
Iran didn’t need Israeli-grade intelligence to see this attack coming. In fact, they didn’t need any intelligence at all. A scan of The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal should have sufficed. Well, that coupled with a rudimentary understanding of the mind and character of our president.
Basic reporting would have tipped them off that Trump would launch “Epic Fury” because his domestic situation had deteriorated past all hope of legitimate political rescue.
He was not only far, and ever-further, underwater in both overall approval and just about every area of policy, but his Epstein reckoning was closing in fast, and a free and fair midterm election would spell his political, if not personal, doom.
So it was time to wag the dog, and not just garden-variety wag the dog but a special kind with promise of a “national emergency” allowing the Trump regime to take control of, and rig, the crucial upcoming midterm election.
Tehran’s Faulty Assumption
Iran’s regime was, like so many other entities domestic and foreign, caught calculating in the Trumpocene with old, expired parameters — an assumption about how major powers, particularly democratic powers, conduct themselves on the world stage: tough talk, buildups, but always aiming for stability. That’s been the basic world order — pace George W. Bush — since the end of the Second World War.
Tehran seems to have extrapolated that dynamic into the present situation — without paying sufficient attention to Trump’s uniquely diseased psyche paired with his increasingly desperate domestic situation. Like so much else of a destructive nature that Trump has done, Epic Fury was inevitable.
It had to happen, just as an attempt to rig the midterms has to happen. Along with whatever else is necessary to enable Trump to hold onto power and avoid accountability, which is the sole imperative driving his bus. To an extent that would a short time ago have been hard to fathom, Donald Trump is the new world order.
Iran, apparently, just didn’t get it; they even seemed to believe the US under Trump was negotiating with them in good faith. One explanation is that, as we’ve seen in reverse since the days of Hitler’s rise — through Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, along with dozens of other smaller misadventures — reading other countries and cultures can be surprisingly difficult. Much about the US may be opaque to the mullahs and their strategists, though they have certainly been no stranger to the threats posed by internal resistance.
Democracy Made Him Do It
They do not, however, have to worry, as Trump and his party do, about elections. Democracy may be a gleam in the eye of millions of Iranians, but Trump is facing a fixed due date in November.
The American people — if the midterm election is free and fair, and in spite of a huge billionaire-driven Republican fundraising advantage — can vote out his party and thereby place serious and potentially crippling limits on his executive power, something that has not been possible in Iran since a US-backed coup ended Iranian democracy in 1953.
There is also the fact that, for all the turmoil in the Middle East, in which Iran has had a prominent role for decades, its leaders have been satisfied to maintain a kind of equilibrium, with chronic hostility mediated by a priority on self-preservation. They have, in short, behaved more or less rationally: measured aggressions, measured responses, reliance on proxies, carefully coded rhetoric sending the kind of signals that keep enmity from exploding into war.
They seem to have expected Trump to do the same — behave rationally — just as so many here in America expected Trump in 2016, and even in 2024, to govern, to stay within bounds and guardrails, to regress to the mean or somewhere near it.
The Iranians couldn’t grasp how mortal a threat plain old ordinary democracy is to Donald Trump. And therefore couldn’t imagine that he would start a war of choice — with real potential to spread and intensify into a Third World War, with nuclear powers facing off — all to avoid the reckoning that democracy held in store for him.
And in a crucial sense Trump has behaved rationally — if his imperative is not the welfare of his people or the planet but rather self-preservation, self-enrichment, and self-aggrandizement.
This is, I think, where the Iranians went wrong. They couldn’t grasp how mortal a threat plain old ordinary democracy is to Donald Trump. And therefore couldn’t imagine that he would start a war of choice — with real potential to spread and intensify into a Third World War, with nuclear powers facing off — all to avoid the reckoning that democracy held in store for him.
Yes, of course there are other factors to consider: the war profiteering for friends and family, including amazing opportunities for market manipulation and insider trading (hint: try saying the war is “very complete, pretty much” during Wall Street trading hours, then walking it back after market close!); the relentless lobbying by Bibi Netanyahu; the potential legacy as a great liberator; and the fact that Cadet Bone Spurs has discovered the joys of blowing things up and is overcompensating mightily.
A lot may have gone into Trump’s decision to start this war — and all on the “positive” side, as Trump has never been one to let thoughts of negative consequences get in his way.
Some of this may have been transparent to the Iranians, some of it opaque. But in believing they could count on rationality, they failed, I think, to consider just how Trump-rational it would be for the beset president to save himself by starting a war that he could assume would lead to some sort of deadly retaliation on American soil, that would in turn usher in a national “emergency,” that would then give him the excuse he’s desperately seeking to alter the conduct of the election that he believes will spell his doom.
An entirely logical, if insane, Goldbergian scheme from a chaos agent grown accustomed to regarding democracy as an impediment.
Repression and tyranny take a different form in Iran. For all the atrocities committed by Trump’s ICE goons — including the high-profile, cold-blooded murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, two American citizens participating in peaceful resistance — the kind of mass killing of protesters engaged in recently by the Iranian regime is still outside the Overton window here in the US.
Unlike that regime, if Trump wants to survive and prosper, it will most likely have to be through his party maintaining political control, which this year means emerging victorious from what looks increasingly like an unwinnable election.
The SAVE Trump Act
From Trump’s standpoint, the only way to do that is by taking control of the election process, and his options for doing that have been fast narrowing to executive action in response to a national emergency, real or ginned up.
It may not be a coincidence that Epic Fury followed hard on Trump’s evident failure to persuade the GOP-controlled Senate to nuke the filibuster in order to pass his diabolical SAVE America Act, which effectively targets Democratic constituencies with its voter suppression provisions and would put heavy, and quite possibly decisive, red thumbs on the electoral scales in November.
Related: Will Senate GOP Kill Filibuster to SAVE Trump?
Trump has not entirely given up on SAVE — in fact, just this past weekend he demanded that Congress pass an even more extreme version of the bill, saying that he refuses to sign any other legislation until SAVE passes — but there has been, all along, a parallel push for executive action to accomplish the same goal without congressional involvement.
So Trump will keep the bombs falling (as will Netanyahu, who finds himself in a comparable personal pickle), bellow about “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER,” prepare to send in ground troops, spend hundreds of billions of dollars to do hundreds more billions in damage, kill thousands more Iranian civilians, and tell his fellow Americans that some of them too can expect to die here at home.
Because unless that happens — unless the Iranians or their sympathizers take the bait and bring the war to American soil, via the dreaded terrorism that Trump seems to be welcoming by, for example, giving no ground in the dispute over ICE guardrails that is currently keeping the Department of Homeland Security unfunded and shuttered — for his purposes this war is all for naught.
Strange, isn’t it, and ironic that two nations are at war because neither has a viable mechanism for taking power away from their respective dictators.
Viewed through that lens, Iran’s installation of Ali Khamenei’s hardliner son, Mojtaba Khamenei — whose father, mother, wife, and child Trump’s war reportedly has just killed — would be, for our president, a promising development.
Related: Invitation to a New 9/11? Trump and Patel Open the Door Wide
More in Common Than We’d Like to Think
Strange, isn’t it, and ironic that two nations are at war because neither has a viable mechanism for taking power away from their respective dictators.
Both nations are called “republics” — one Islamic, the other traditionally secular and democratic but waxing Christian and authoritarian. So arguably two RINOs, of which the latter, ostensibly coming to the rescue of the oppressed populace of the former, has failed miserably to keep its own house in order and stop its own rot.
Just like the Iranian regime, Trump is now banking on power rather than popularity: the power to rule by decree, the power to control elections, the power, when all else fails, of deadly force.
Historians, no doubt, will find all kinds of excuses — reasons Americans were either as blind to Trump as were the Iranians or, worse, saw him plain enough and decided he was what they wanted.
But the fate of Iran — whose political structure today, it would behoove us to remember, owes much to Cold War–era American meddling — may turn out to be easier to explain than the fate of America.
Trump and his entourage will not go gentle. There will, as he predicts with a shrug, be blood. How much remains an open question. But we, like the Iranian people, are in for it.
You might say, of our beloved country, “We broke it. We no longer own it.” The question is how much of ourselves are we willing to spend — We the People — to buy it back?
