A Trump Victory Makes War With Iran Much Likelier

Last week, Israel bombed the Iranian consulate in Syria, killing two Iranian generals, five officers and at least two Syrian civilians. This is a direct attack on Iran, and it is the picture of what provocation looks like. Israel clearly wants to drag Iran and the United States into a broader war, in the hopes that the mighty American army can displace its biggest regional threat to its stability (besides Israel itself). Iran is currently weighing its options and Israel is bracing itself for an attack.

I’m not one of those guys who sees WWI and WWII around every corner, but between the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the omnipresent threat of China potentially taking Taiwan, and now Israel openly trying to provoke war with Iran, there are more than enough World War I parallels to go around right now. The globe is getting more dangerous, not less, and Israel is a big reason why.

That our mighty empire has let itself be dog-walked this far into the abyss and allowed the vaunted and hollow International Order to devolve into “Israel gets to do whatever it wants without any repercussions” is a testament to the fundamental weakness of President Joe Biden. War with Iran with Biden in charge is a real possibility simply because he refuses to seriously try to rein in America’s chief client state and they want war with Iran.

However, war with Iran with Trump in office is far likelier.

You Think Israel Will Be Less Unhinged?

If this is what Benjamin Netanyahu and his genocidal Israeli regime are doing with an American administration pretending to care about Palestinian lives, just imagine what they would do with one who would drop the political pretense altogether. One truck full of famed chef José Andrés’s aid workers murdered by the Israeli government was enough to cause a serious shift in tone and policy amongst a significant portion of powerful Democrats and non-MAGA Republicans not named Joe Biden.

There are no amount of celebrity-related deaths to get Republican politicians to care about Palestine (as far as their voters go, polling tells another story though). Israel’s AI-directed genocide machine will still be operating at full capacity with Trump’s enthusiastic backing, and hey who knows, maybe they’ll bomb another Iranian consulate or three. They would probably be commended for it by a GOP-led House too.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t believe that President Donald Trump would deescalate that situation. I don’t think he even has the basic human capabilities necessary to do it. This is a man-child who wanted to nuke North Korea and blame someone else for it. Trump is so enamored with America’s nuclear arsenal that he wanted to use it on a freaking hurricane. There is absolutely no doubt that a second Trump term would create the likeliest conditions for a nuclear confrontation since the Cold War.

Neocons Have Wanted War With Iran Forever

Somewhere Dick Cheney is smiling knowing his dream of flattening the entire Middle East so his friends at Halliburton can bore a hole right through it is getting closer to reality. The reason why war with Iran is such a terrifying possibility is because an extremely powerful set of people with immense sway over the GOP desperately want war with Iran.

If it were just a Trump idea, that would be one thing, because anyone taking his claims at face value deserves to be suckered out of whatever they’re providing for it at this point. But should he win, he is reportedly going to staff his administration with more “serious” people, and in the GOP, that term typically means neocon or at least one degree removed from that swamp. His first term already crossed the neocon bridge by appointing Iran hawks like John Bolton to it, and more like him would surely follow into a second Trump Administration.

In the Bush Administration’s ideal world, war with Iran was going to be the culmination of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld thought they would waltz through those two countries and “be greeted as liberators,” and in their minds eye they were surely holding back their best laid plans for the third, most powerful, head of the hydra they aimed to decapitate.

And They Have All Their Useful Idiots Lined Up

Benjamin Netanyahu is basically Israel’s version of Trump, so before you get all flippant about a second Trump administration, just picture a hypothetical world a year from now where Trump won and Israel has bombed its fourth Iranian consulate. Every organ the neocons have inserted into American society would push us in the direction of war, and given the media’s demonstrated bloodlust and how enthusiastically they spread the lies about the Iraq War, it’s difficult to envision how they would stand as any kind of a real bulwark against a similar drumbeat of propaganda around Iran.

Hell, a lot of the same people who created the Iraq War debacle are still in positions of power. Jeffrey Goldberg was part of The New York Times’ coverage that helped launder the war to effete liberals, and he got promoted to Editor-in-Chief of The Atlantic after it. Like The Intercept’s Jon Schwartz said on the Citations Needed podcast on March 13th, given that the folks most responsible for the Iraq War have not faced any real repercussions, you can’t help but wonder if laundering war to the American public is their job.

America is a warlike nation, and the post-9/11 unhinged response that led to millions of people dead in the Middle East and terror attacks across Europe demonstrates how depraved we can get. That our Israeli client state is taking imperial evil to new heights in the wake of October 7th should be of no surprise, and our government’s lack of response to the mounting Israeli war crimes is just an indication of what they would do should we ever be attacked again.

I do not know whether I will vote for Joe Biden yet, but of all the potential Trump horrors that live rent-free in my head, war with Iran is the one I take most seriously. He has told media outlets he has some truly horrific plans for the United States—mass deportations and concentration camps just to name a couple—but these are just words right now.

Given Israel’s complete and total unhinged activity in the region and America’s unabashed support for its depravity, war with Iran is something that could happen tomorrow. Donald Trump is literally the last person on Earth that I want controlling our nuclear arsenal in that scenario.