Patrick Henningsen is one of the best geopolitical analysts on the planet. This discussion covers range of critical issues. It begins with a discussion of the resignation of Trump’s Counter-Terrorism Centre director, and diehard MAGA supporter, Joe Kent. Kent has left the regime over the war, which he steadfastly opposes. This is very likely to focus the minds of many others, as opposition to the war is increasing rapidly, including in the military. The regime is lying about casulaties, which are much higher than they admit.
Yesterday Trump demanded that the American vassal states, including the rest of NATO, but also Japan and South Korea, help him force open the Straits of Hormuz. Today every single one of them declined to do so, because they know perfectly well that they’d be throwing away their ships and their men. French General Michel Yakovleff just compared joining Trump’s war to “buying cheap tickets for the Titanic” after it already hit the iceberg. In addition, Trump has been removing air defence from these places, and from all the Gulf countries, demonstrating that American equipment was never there for the benefit of these states, but for the sake of a protection racket. The equipment extracted is all being sent to Israel, which goaded the US into this war in the first place.
Many of these countries had previously been strong-armed by Trump, under threat of punitive tariffs, into commiting to significant investment in the US, although no actual trade deals were ever signed. All those agreements are now unlikely to be fulfilled, and since the tariff regime has been struck down by the Supreme Court, Trump’s ability to threaten foreign nations economically has likely gone anyway. The US will not be reindustrialising on the backs of its vassal states, and those vassals are beginning to notice that the man who wants to be the global emperor has no clothes.
The Straits are under the full control of Iran, with armaments dug into the hillsides along the coast, combined with the capacity to place mines, use missiles or artillery, use airborne drones, use submarimes, use manouverable torpedos etc. They are not short of options, and there’s nothing the US can do about it. Trump plans to send thousands of marine to Karg Island, in an attempt to take over the oil installations there, but this will simply mean thousands of dead marines. This war will end on Iran’s timetable, not America’s, and it won’t end until the empire has been driven out of the Middle East (actually West Asia) entirely. In the meantime, Iran has said the ships of friendly nations can pass through the Straits if the currency they use for the trade is Chinese yuan. They can break the petrodollar, which has been the support under the American economy for decades.
Iran is not stuck in 1979. It has evolved significantly. It is no longer the extremely repressive theocracy it was directly after the revolution. That revolution was a response to the brutal regime of the Shah, who’d been installed as a western puppet after the overthrow of the previous democratically elected leader, and who had introduced a secret police every bit as feared as anything under Eastern European communism. Mossadegh was deposed in 1953 for having had the temerity to say that Iranian oil should benefit primarily Iranians. Foreign interference in Iran goes back many decades, and they have had enough. This time they will fight to the end, and under Shia Islam, martyrdom is an honour. The US recently bombed a demonstration of over a million people in the streets, but no one ran. They are not afraid.
The days of the empire are coming to an end, despite Trump’s declaration of undying supreme power. The US is caught in Thucydides Trap, where an old empire in decline tries to maintain dominance in the face of the rise of a new centre of power. Global naval power under the anglosphere is losing its grip after hundreds of years, and land-based powers are rising. Iran is the lynchpin for the development of hegemonic power in the Asian heartland, as the power connecting Russia, China, and India. This is why it’s now a target, but the empire has over-reached, as all dying empires do, and it will break its back on the mountains of Iran.
Trump’s declarations of early victory are laughable. He’s completely unmoored from reality, and his increasingly insane pronouncements are dividing not only his voting base, but also his own cabinent and the military. A military coup is a distinct possibility.
Trump is also strangling Cuba through the most punitive sanctions, amounting to collective punishment of a country that has never been a threat to the US. The entire Cuban power grid has now collapsed and people are desperate. Trump is saying he can do whatever he wants with Cuba, and that taking it would be “an honour”. He also wants Greenland, Canada, Mexico, Panama, Nicaragua, and Venezuela (so far), under the so-called ‘Donroe Doctrine’. This is simply delusional.
