Against All Enemies

Foreign and Domestic

This morning, I watched a video of a US fighter plane, an F-15 Eagle, spiral towards the ground after it had been reportedly hit by Kuwaiti air defenses in a friendly fire incident. It was one of three such planes shot down. Each comes with a roughly $120 million price tag. The pilots seem to have ejected safely. It’s hard to think of a better image that sums up the present than that of a US plane twirling into the earth below. And W.B. Yeats’ The Second Coming, perhaps the most overquoted poem in history, feels unavoidable:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Mere anarchy. There is no effort to legally codify or even rationally justify this lurch into war. They will not even do the American people the courtesy of lying to them. It just doesn’t matter to them. Trump’s strategy, if you can call it that, is vague and amorphous. Essentially, “Maybe this will happen, maybe that will happen.” We have no idea what will happen, and neither does Trump. Here’s him talking to the New York Times:

The president offered a variety of often inconsistent visions of how a new government could take shape after the targeted killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who ruled the country for more than three decades until he was killed by an airstrike on Saturday.

When pressed on his plans for a transition of power, Mr. Trump said he hoped Iran’s elite military forces — including hardened officers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps who have held substantial influence and profited from the existing regime — would simply turn over their weapons to the Iranian populace.

“They would really surrender to the people, if you think about it,” he said.

“If you think about it:” That’s someone riffing. He may have come up that scenario on the spot. Already, some of his “plans” have come to nought. The pace of Israeli and American assassinations has eliminated some of Trump’s favored candidates to run the country. He told ABC News, “The attack was so successful it knocked out most of the candidates. It's not going to be anybody that we were thinking of because they are all dead. Second or third place is dead." It sounds like he’s still doing The Apprentice. Netanyahu may have some grandiose plan for the future of the world, but for Trump, as always, this is about television images.

The domestic context for this war is clear. In almost every respect, this is a failed administration. Its trade policy is in tatters. Its authoritarian push on immigration faces resistance and public rejection. Because of years of bad practice and ignoring the Constitution and the laws, the President’s hand is freest in foreign policy and war. The irony is that this administration, which was supposed to be a populist broom and new beginning, has been taken over by one of the hoariest DC lobbies, “the bomb Iran,” crowd. As Trump used to look for depressed properties to scavenge, now the neocons inhabit the decaying hulk of Trumpism.

In November 2024, I wrote about what the “fascism thesis” would predict; Here was one point: “An aggressive, jingoistic war to cover up a domestic failure. Trump’s supposed dovishness may come into play, but there are a lot of ‘neocons‘ in that administration already: if we intervene in Mexico to go after cartels, say, or pick a fight with Iran, I think fascism is back on the menu.” This broadly fits the pattern of fascist wars. The Italian antifascist exile Gaetano Salvemini wrote of Il Duce’s Ethiopian gambit: “The war was willed primarily by Mussolini…because something had to be done to restore the prestige of the Fascist regime in Italy…[which had] steadily declined during the six years of world depression…The Ethiopian war was the way out of domestic stagnation.”

Like Mussolini or Hitler with their foreign adventures, Trump and his gang seem to want to redeem in one fell swoop all of America’s frustrated and failed imperial projects: Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran. But those 20th-century wars were meant to mobilize the restive populations and get their support for the regime. There is no effort at all here to mobilize the American population or win their consent; No concern with public apathy or opposition to war after years of disastrous efforts. The understandable worry is that a regime such as this one would use war to justify repression at home. But is that even possible when they don’t make the faintest attempt to gin up a froth of warlike sentiment in the public? Trump cannot even be bothered to sing paens to the fallen dead. His rhetoric is always deflationary and bathetic. So far, his attitude has been “shit happens.”

Public support aside, it’s unclear if the war is even materially sustainable. The Wall Street Journal reports that the U.S. is racing to “destroy Iran’s missile and drone force before it runs out of interceptors to fend off Tehran’s retaliation.” The Washington Post reports, “Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, expressed his concerns at a White House meeting last week with Trump and his top aides, these people said, cautioning that any major operation against Iran will face challenges because the U.S. munitions stockpile has been significantly depleted by Washington’s ongoing defense of Israel and support for Ukraine. Caine’s remarks at the White House meeting have not been previously reported.” Another Post report in the wake of the killing of 3 American servicemen by Iranian missiles:

Inside the Pentagon, and among some members of the Trump administration, there was deepening concern Sunday that the Iran conflict could spiral out of control, said people familiar with the situation.

“The mood here is intense and paranoid,” one person said.

There is anxiety among senior leaders that the fighting will extend for weeks, further stressing limited U.S. air defense stockpiles, people familiar with the situation said.

“There is concern about this lasting more than a few days,” said another person. “I don’t think people have fully absorbed yet, like, what that has done with stockpiles,” they added, noting that it often takes two or three air defense interceptors to ensure that an incoming missile is stopped.

Back-of-the-napkin math suggests that the interceptors will be depleted in a matter of days, and the US and Israel would need to sustain a tempo of about 1000 strikes a day to degrade Iran’s ballistic missiles to the point where they would not simply overwhelm defenses.

On a personal note, I manage to stay angry at much this gang does to wreck our country and the world, but I confess to feeling almost a sense of numb resignation. It’s all so senseless and ill-conceived. We have teetered so long at the edge of an abyss that looking into it is longer so vertiginous. Or maybe it is just hard to tell up from down anymore.