Nobody Voted for This War. Nobody Gets the Old World Back.

by

The American presidency, in the wrong hands, with every institutional check removed, is powerful enough to destroy countries and break the interdependent global systems the modern world runs on.

The Leadership

I never fully understood how powerful the President of the United States actually is until now. When that position is held by a man with no capacity for consequence, no institutional check left to slow him down, and a circle of people who know exactly how to use him — he can destroy a country.

By late February 2026, Trump was facing mounting domestic pressure — special elections going to Democrats, nationwide protests by millions, losses in courts, the Epstein files surfacing and other political challenges were mounting. A man with his psychology does not sit with that kind of exposure; he distracts by escalation, creating drama, controlling the narrative. On February 28, he started a war.[1]

This is a narcissist without impulse control, operating without the institutional checks and balances that previous presidents — competent or not — had to navigate. He makes decisions by “feelings” and “instincts.”[2] His Press Secretary said he attacked Iran because he had a feeling about the nuclear threat.[3] His own intelligence community disagreed about the threat of Iran. He bombed anyway. He told Time magazine in March he wanted to be “involved in the selection” of Iran’s next leader, then told the nation on April 1 that regime change was never the goal.[4]

On Easter Sunday, April 5, 2026, the President posted this on Truth Social: “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”[5] There were no Easter greetings. Marjorie Taylor Greene posted that he “has gone insane” and that “this is not making America great again, this is evil.”[6] When your once-most-reliable political supporter believes you are unfit for office, you have a problem.

Behind him stand people who know exactly what they want and have waited a long time for someone like him. The hawks who have wanted this war for decades. The military industrial complex that needs it. Pete Hegseth, a man with obvious psychological damage of his own,[7] who was handed the most powerful military on earth and is using it to settle personal scores while thousands of troops move toward combat. These are not serious people executing a strategy. They are people with specific needs — for war, for contracts, for vengeance, for dominance — and a president who will not say no.

The financial architecture underneath the war is not subtle. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner was installed as a top Iran negotiator while his private equity fund collects $25 million annually from the Saudi sovereign wealth fund — Iran’s chief rival, and the government that privately urged Trump to launch this war.[8],[9] Steve Witkoff, the other Iran negotiator, co-founded World Liberty Financial with Trump — the family crypto venture — and his son used Witkoff’s diplomatic access to sovereign governments in the region to sign cryptocurrency deals while his father negotiated the war.[10] Norm Eisen, former Obama ethics czar, called it the “World Series of corruption” — a US envoy simultaneously soliciting investments from the governments whose foreign policy he is helping to shape.[11] Iran rejected both Kushner and envoy Steve Witkoff as unreliable and not constructive, and refused to negotiate with them.[12] Sixteen minutes before Trump announced a pause in strikes on Iranian power plants, $580 million in oil futures flooded the market with no public news to explain it.[13]

This is what it looks like when psychologically compromised people reach civilization-scale power with nothing left to stop them.

The Iran War

We are destroying a country of 90 million people. Real people, living real lives, in a country with a civilization older than ours by several thousand years.

Iran has never initiated a modern war. The Iranian president wrote a letter to the American people making that case. The historical record supports it. He asked a question worth sitting with: “Exactly which of the American people’s interests are truly being served by this war?”[14]

Power plants, hospitals, schools, refineries, ports, bridges, cultural sites that survived empires and centuries of upheaval — gone or burning. Doctors working without electricity. Children with nowhere to go. Millions displaced. Toxic rain falling over Tehran after fuel depot strikes coated streets, cars, and skin with oil. Al Jazeera has confirmed more than 760 schools and 350 health centers bombed.[15] Fifty-six historical sites have been damaged or destroyed, including UNESCO-listed areas in Isfahan that survived the Mongol invasions, the Safavid wars, and two centuries of imperial interference, only to be hit by American ordnance in the fifth week of a war the United States started during active peace negotiations. On February 28, a US strike hit a girls’ elementary school near Minab; Iranian state media reported more than 175 people killed, mostly children. UN human rights experts characterized it as a potential war crime under the Rome Statute.[16] On April 2, US strikes collapsed the B1 bridge between Tehran and Karaj — the highest bridge in the Middle East — while Iranian families were gathered in the parks below to celebrate a national holiday. Eight people were killed, 95 wounded. Legal experts assessed it as a possible war crime.[17]

Trump posted that the US military “hasn’t even started destroying what’s left.”[17] The Pentagon, anticipating war crimes accusations over Trump’s public threats to bomb power plants and desalination facilities, began reclassifying civilian infrastructure as dual-use military targets — building the legal cover story in real time for strikes the president had already promised.[18]

The 2015 nuclear agreement — the JCPOA — was signed by Iran, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, and China.[19] The US withdrew unilaterally in 2018 and reimposed sanctions so aggressively that European companies pulled out of Iran regardless of what their governments pledged.[20] The economic relief Iran was promised evaporated. Iran complied for a full year anyway, then began releasing its commitments gradually and transparently, announcing each step publicly and explaining why.[21] Right up to the day the bombs fell, US and international analysts assessed that Iran was not a nuclear threat and had no active nuclear weapons program. The IAEA confirmed it. Trump’s own intelligence community confirmed it.[22] After Trump bombed Iran anyway, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that President Donald Trump had a “feeling, again, based on fact” that led him to his decision to attack this sovereign nation.[3] We were in active negotiations when the first bombs dropped. The agreement being negotiated was a rebuilt version of the same treaty Trump unilaterally voided in 2018.

Iran complied with that treaty long after everyone else abandoned it. Iran signaled every step of its eventual response. Iran sat at the negotiating table through June 2025, through the Israeli strikes, through the restart of talks in early 2026. Iran’s foreign minister described a historic agreement as within reach days before the attack. None of that was enough. The bombs fell anyway, during negotiations, against the explicit assessment of American intelligence, because a president had a feeling.[4]

Trump campaigned on ending forever wars and making America affordable again. Gas is above four dollars a gallon. Thirteen Americans are dead. The Iran war has raised diesel and jet fuel costs, grocery prices, airfares, mortgage rates, fertilizer and food supplies, medication availability, and overall inflation.[23] Stock markets have been turbulent and reactive. The allies who might have shared this burden were never asked — and when governments dependent on Gulf oil expressed concern about the closed strait, Trump told them to go get their own oil. From a strait he closed.[24] European governments have refused to send warships. Saudi Arabia, a partner of seventy years, signed a defense pact with Ukraine while Trump mocked its crown prince on a Saudi-funded stage.[25]

Building relationships in the Middle East has always been complicated, in part because of America’s own history there. Decades of real progress, if limited, are gone now.[26] The Palestinian-Israeli track was damaged long before this war by excessive and one-sided American support for Israel, with AIPAC functioning as a long-running extraction mechanism shaping that policy. What was left to work with has been replaced by a hardening Middle East bloc — one that now includes new strategic partnerships between Europe and Gulf states that no longer run through Washington[27] — and generations of people who will not forget what was done to their country.

The Cost

The world that existed on February 27, 2026 is not coming back.

Iran is converting the Strait of Hormuz into a sovereign toll road. Ships seeking passage submit cargo manifests, crew lists, and ownership details to IRGC intermediaries, receive a clearance code, and are escorted through a new corridor hugging the Iranian coastline by IRGC naval vessels. The fee is approximately $2 million per transit, collected in Chinese yuan or cryptocurrency.[28] Commercial traffic through the strait has collapsed by 95%. Iran’s parliament has approved the Hormuz Management Plan — formal legislation codifying Iranian sovereignty and control over the waterway and establishing the toll as permanent law. It awaits a full parliamentary vote, Guardian Council review, and presidential signature. The Iranian MP who chairs the relevant committee stated the purpose plainly: to formally codify Iranian sovereignty while creating a permanent revenue stream.[29]

This is the first toll imposed on an international strait in more than 160 years. When the war ends, the law remains.

The mistake is assuming that when the shooting stops, the world reorganizes back to what it was. It doesn’t work that way. When Trump’s first-term tariffs drove China to buy soybeans from Brazil, China did not go back to American soybeans when the tariffs ended. The supply relationships had reorganized. The contracts had been signed elsewhere. The trust was gone. American soybean farmers lost market share that has not been recovered, and Brazil permanently expanded its position as the dominant supplier. The strait is the same mechanism at civilization scale. Insurance infrastructure has been rebuilt around alternative routes. Supply relationships have reorganized. Gulf states are building new security partnerships that no longer run through Washington. The financial instruments that once priced in a reliable Hormuz now price in a world where Hormuz is an Iranian toll road. Fertilizer supply chains serving American agriculture have been disrupted. Livestock feed costs are rising. These are agricultural cycles that take seasons to correct even after the underlying cause ends.

The rerouting around Africa adds weeks to shipping times and tens of millions in costs per voyage — permanently, because the insurance infrastructure and logistics networks being built around those routes are not dismantled when a ceasefire is signed. Electronics and semiconductors that moved through Gulf supply chains are more expensive and less reliably available. Helium, critical to medical imaging and semiconductor manufacturing, flows through regional infrastructure now disrupted. The efficiencies that made global manufacturing cheap — just-in-time supply chains, predictable transit times, stable insurance rates — are gone.[30] The world spent three years rebuilding supply chains after COVID disrupted them temporarily. This is not temporary. The global economy that ran on those efficiencies is not coming back either.

The world is not returning to February 27.

Trump campaigned on sweeping tax cuts. The One Big Beautiful Bill delivered them — to corporations and the wealthiest Americans. In order to do this, it cut healthcare, food security, and farm support from everyone else. Before the first bomb dropped, the reallocation was already underway. Defense was already the largest item in the federal budget. Then came the Iran war. Congress approved $901 billion in defense spending for 2026. The Pentagon requested an additional $200 billion supplemental for Iran.[31] The 2027 defense budget proposal stands at $1.5 trillion — the largest in American history. Budget analysts estimate that proposal alone could add $5.8 trillion to the national debt through 2035. The war is costing over $1 billion a day. Homeland Security, funded at roughly $100 billion in 2026 when reconciliation spending is included, is now the second largest budget category in the federal government by a significant margin.

The DOD budget at this scale is not primarily a defense mechanism. Cost-plus contracts, no-bid awards, and the revolving door between the Pentagon and its contractors ensure that money flows reliably upward regardless of outcome. Business is booming for defense contractors.[32] The contracts outlast the war.

The Institutional Collapse

Pete Hegseth was chosen for the Pentagon precisely because he felt “spit out” by the Army. A man with a personal grievance against the institution he was handed, given an explicit mandate to reshape it in Trump’s image. What followed was the systematic removal of every source of institutional knowledge, operational experience, and professional integrity the military had built.

The destruction started immediately. General C.Q. Brown, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Admiral Lisa Franchetti, Chief of Naval Operations. General James Slife, Air Force Vice Chief. Admiral Linda Fagan, Coast Guard Commandant. General Timothy Haugh, who headed both the NSA and US Cyber Command. Fired or pushed out, most with no stated reason, none charged with any wrongdoing or incompetence. DEI was the stated justification. Vengeance and loyalty were the operating logic.[33]

Then the war started and the purge continued. On April 3, the day after Trump’s first formal address to the nation on the Iran war, General Randy George was called on a Thursday afternoon and told to retire immediately. George is a West Point graduate and career infantry officer who served in the Gulf War, Iraq, and Afghanistan — four decades of accumulated judgment about how wars actually unfold. Two other generals went the same day. George’s replacement is Hegseth’s former personal aide, a man who was a two-star general two years ago.[34] Pentagon staff have taken to calling Hegseth “Dumb McNamara.”[35] A senator’s public assessment of why experienced generals keep getting fired: they are telling Hegseth his Iran war plans are unworkable, disastrous, and deadly.[34]

In the middle of a war, America has lost decades of accumulated knowledge about how wars actually unfold — what happens when supply lines break, what an adversary like Iran is actually capable of, what the difference is between a plan that works and one that sounds good in a briefing room. Hegseth does not want people who can identify problems. He wants people who will execute without question. The Senate confirmed him anyway.

Every check was removed before the first bomb dropped, most of them long before anyone was talking about Iran. The United States is now fighting its largest war in decades with a Pentagon run on cronyism, a defense secretary settling personal scores, and a president who makes decisions by feeling. The deliberate dismantling of democratic institutions does not produce one consequence. It produces conditions. The war is one of them.

And Here We Are

This did not happen by accident.

Concentrated wealth has always required a story. The story cannot be “we are transferring your wages, your public assets, and your government’s attention to ourselves” — that story does not hold an electorate. The story has to be about threat. Someone is taking what is yours. Someone is replacing you. Someone is coming for your way of life. The more visceral and immediate the threat feels, the less attention the electorate pays to the mechanism underneath it.

The media ecosystem that exists today was built to deliver that story. Not by accident and not by algorithm alone, but by investment. Concentrated wealth funds the platforms, the networks, the political operations, and the campaign finance infrastructure that determines which stories get amplified and which don’t. Fear drives engagement. Engagement drives revenue. Revenue drives more fear. The cycle is profitable at every stage, and the people who profit most from it are the same people who benefit most from a population too divided to organize against extraction.[36]

The political investment is clearly visible, if not publicized. The corporations that dominate defense contracting, private detention, and financial services spend billions on campaign finance, lobbying, and media influence. They fund the politicians who defund oversight. They fund the networks that tell specific populations their problems were caused by immigrants, or coastal elites, or the other party — anything except the system that is actually transferring their wealth upward. When people are angry at each other they are not angry at the mechanism. That is the point.

Over decades, this produced a population filtered into groups that cannot talk to each other, primed to see political opponents as existential threats, and conditioned to respond to the language of restoration and revenge. Trump did not create this technique. He is its most successful product and most useful tool; a candidate perfectly calibrated to a population that had been prepared to receive exactly his message. The 2024 election was the culmination of a system that has been running for a long time.

That system is now running at full scale. A war started on a feeling. An entire country being destroyed. The world’s most important waterway converted into a toll road. Institutional checks and balances gone. The people who might have provided wisdom removed. Money is flowing to contractors, and the people are paying for it.

This is what extraction politics looks like when it has no friction left.

We Now Know

I never fully understood how powerful the President of the United States actually is until now.

Now we all know.

A country of 90 million people is being destroyed. The world’s most important waterway has been converted into a toll road, written into law, enforced by naval escorts, and denominated in Chinese yuan. The global supply chains that made modern life possible have been permanently restructured around their own disruption. The institutions that accumulated decades of public service knowledge and experience have been gutted and replaced with devotion to an individual. The population that might have prevented this was sorted, primed, and delivered a candidate perfectly calibrated to their manufactured fear.

None of this is coming back. The strait will not return to what it was, the relationships will not reassemble, and the officers who understood what Iran was actually capable of are civilians now. The countries that built alternatives to American security guarantees are not dismantling them. The precedent that a president can start a war during active negotiations, against his own intelligence, without congressional authorization, and then fire everyone who objects — that precedent is now set.

We built a system with this much concentrated power in one office and assumed the institutional checks would always hold. We now know they don’t. We now know what happens when they’re gone. We are watching it happen in real time, to a country of 90 million people as well as to our country of 350 million, and to a world that will not be the same.

References

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  32. Business Is Booming for Defense Contractors. Reuters Graphics; 2024. https://www.reuters.com/graphics/BUSINESS-DEFENSE/lbvgmjwxrvq/
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  34. Hegseth Has Asked US Army Chief of Staff to Step Down. Reuters; 2026. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/hegseth-has-asked-us-army-chief-staff-step-down-cbs-news-reports-2026-04-02
  35. Pete Hegseth Trump Iran Nickname ‘Dumb McNamara’. The Independent; 2026. https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/pete-hegseth-trump-iran-nickname-dumb-mcnamara-b2946740.html
  36. The Great Transfer: 2025 Government Wealth Extraction. Dittany; 2026. https://dittany.com/the-great-transfer-2025-government-wealth-extraction/

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