My life began in wartime -- World War II -- and, if Donald Trump has anything to say about it, will evidently end in war, too. The president who, as advertised, didn't go to war in his first term in office, also insisted then that the U.S. should stop engaging in "endless" "forever wars." Even while running for office a third time in 2024, he swore that his task on returning to the White House would be to remove "warmongers and America-last globalists" from power and "turn the page forever on those foolish, stupid days of never-ending wars. They never ended."
As the 2024 election results suggested, his followers appeared to deeply agree with him on that goal. In fact, back in April 2016, in a New York Times op-ed, J.D. Vance (of all people!), while insisting that "Mr. Trump is unfit for our nation's highest office," did make a single exception. As president, Vance was convinced, he wouldn't take our country to war again. As he put it then, "Anger about the wars isn't the only reason voters support Mr. Trump. But his willingness to say what other G.O.P. candidates won't reflects what people like most about him: his complete break with the party elite."
Well, J.D., these days, think again (and again and again). Welcome to the new world of Donald Trump. Now, it seems, he is eternally at war. Of course, that may be because the Trump we once knew, for all his faults, didn't yet consider himself a god or imagine himself as -- yes! -- the modern equivalent of Jesus Christ and so capable of doing anything his heart desires.
As it turns out, he was led into war in the Strait of Hormuz by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (whose Iranian regime-change scenarios CIA Director John Ratcliffe once termed "farcical"). Yes, a number of his cabinet members and Vice President Vance, as the New York Times reported, "warned Mr. Trump that a war against Iran could cause regional chaos and untold numbers of casualties. It could also break apart Mr. Trump's political coalition and would be seen as a betrayal by many voters who had bought into the promise of no new wars."
A betrayal indeed! And yet, Operation Epic Fury began anyway and, of course, as a disaster in the making, it has yet to end. Now, with all of that in mind, let TomDispatch regular Alfred McCoy, the author most recently of the must-read new history book Cold War on Five Continents and an analyst who has long been aware that warring in the Strait of Hormuz would be a formula for U.S. imperial decline, put the present U.S. disaster in Iran in deep historical perspective. Tom
American "Micro-Militarism"
Or How Defeat in the Iran War Will Accelerate American Global Decline
By Alfred McCoy
Writing more than 2,000 years ago, the Greek historian Plutarch gave us an eloquent description of what modern historians now call "micro-militarism." When an imperial power like Athens then, or America now, is in decline, its leaders often react emotionally by mounting seemingly bold military strikes in hopes of regaining the imperial grandeur that's slipping through their fingers. Instead of another of the great victories the empire won at its peak of power, however, such military misadventures only serve to accelerate the ongoing decline, erasing whatever aura of imperial majesty remains and revealing instead the moral rot deep inside the ruling elite.
There is mounting historical evidence that America is indeed an empire in steep decline, while President Donald Trump's war of choice against Iran is becoming the sort of micro-military disaster that helped destroy successive empires over the past 2,500 years -- from ancient Athens to medieval Portugal to modern Spain, Great Britain, and now the United States. And at the core of every such ill-fated war-making decision lay a problematic leader, often born into wealth and prestige, whose personal inadequacies reflected and ramified the many irrationalities that make imperial decline such a painful process.
During that demoralizing downward spiral, imperial armies, so lethal in an empire's ascent, can err by plunging their countries into draining, even disastrous "micro-military" misadventures -- psychologically compensatory efforts to salve the loss of imperial power by trying to occupy new territories or display awe-inspiring military might. Although such micro-militarism often chose targets that proved strategically unsustainable, the psychological pressures upon declining empires are so strong that they all too often gamble their prestige on just such misadventures. Not only did such disasters add financial pressures to a fading empire's many troubles, but in a humiliating fashion, they also invariably exposed its eroding power while exacerbating the destabilizing impact of imperial decline in the capitals of empire (whether Athens, Lisbon, Madrid, London, or Washington, D.C.).
In our moment, when the bombs stop falling and the rubble is finally cleared from the streets of Tehran and Beirut, the impact on U.S. global power of such a de facto defeat will become all too clear -- as alliances like NATO atrophy, American hegemony evaporates, legitimacy is lost, global disorder rises, and the world economy suffers.
Let me now turn from the disasters of the present imperial moment to the lessons of history to explore the sort of lasting damage that Donald Trump's micro-military misadventure in the Middle East might be inflicting on this country's declining imperium.
The Defeat of Athens in Sicily
The date was 413 BC. The place was ancient Athens, then the seat of a powerful empire, long dominant around the rim of the Aegean Sea but losing influence to a sustained military challenge by Sparta. At the port of Piraeus, a "certain stranger," as the historian and philosopher Plutarch recalled, "took a seat in a barber's shop, and began to discourse [on] what had happened as if the Athenians already knew all about it." Stunned by this stranger's report of a military debacle in far-off Sicily, the barber "ran at the top of his speed to the upper city" of Athens, where the news sparked "consternation and confusion."
What that stranger described was the greatest military disaster in the history of the Athenian empire. Two years earlier, in the midst of the protracted Peloponnesian Wars, the aristocrat Nicias -- an indifferent, indecisive leader who used his inherited wealth to court popularity with lavish spectacles -- persuaded the citizens of Athens to deliver a theoretically bold blow against a rival imperial power, Sparta, by attacking its ally Syracuse in Sicily in hopes of crippling the enemy, capturing riches, and recovering Athens' ebbing hegemony.
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