Andy Storey writes: The US and Israeli war on Iran has proved a colossally expensive catastrophe in human, environmental and financial terms. It has ended (for now at least) in what is described by Ryan Cooper, a senior editor at The American Prospect, as ‘an immense strategic defeat – and one that knocks the legs out from under the entire American system of power projection and global predominance’.
This debacle was characterised, from the US perspective, by: unclear and shifting goals; failure to rally, or even prepare to rally, the support of allies; insufficient stockpiles of military assets and of the raw materials necessary to replace them; and, most crucially, underestimation of the strength of Iranian state resistance – especially its willingness and capacity to attack Gulf states (and US bases therein) and close the Strait of Hormuz, throwing the global economy into chaos and peril, not just through pushing up oil and gas prices but also through wider impacts on global supply chains. Experienced US military leaders’ words of caution on some or all of these matters were ignored or overridden.
Why then did America choose to wage this disastrous war? A clue lies in an article in the US establishment insider journal Foreign Affairs, written before the war began. Alexander Cooley and Daniel Nixon propose a simple and useful frame for viewing the actions of the Trump regime: ‘Trump has … wielded U.S. foreign policy principally to increase his own wealth, bolster his status, and personally benefit a small circle of his family members, friends, and loyalists. U.S. foreign policy is now largely subordinate to the private interests of the president and his retainers.’
Cooley and Nixon criticise other scholars for committing a ‘category error’ (assigning to something a quality it does not possess) and continuing to believe that Trump 2.0 is pursuing (even if poorly) anything resembling the US national interest or that his regime is adopting a classically realist approach to foreign affairs to which his blatant corruption is merely a sideshow. They label this administration a ‘kleptocracy’, that is one run for the personal benefit of the president and his family (both materially and in the sense of feeding his monstrous ego).
Left-wing writers commit a similar category error when they assume Trump is acting in the best interests of the US ruling class and its imperial ambitions. On the contrary, Paul Heideman, author of a recently published book on the relationship between American political parties and economic actors, identifies a US state becoming ‘unmoored from the control of America’s capitalist class as a whole’. While individual capitalists and particular commercial sectors seek to exert influence (and gain it in return for making kickbacks to Trump Inc), there is no longer, Heideman contends, ‘the kind of class-wide oversight that the foreign policy planning network was designed to provide’ – to both Republican and Democrat administrations.
This planning network operated through corporate-sponsored think tanks that produced advisory reports for US governments and supplied many of the personnel who staffed those governments’ foreign policy departments. The classic example is the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR, which publishes Foreign Affairs): for example, Condoleeza Rice, George W Bush’s national security adviser, was a CFR fellow, while Anthony Blinken, secretary of state under Biden, was a CFR member; there are myriad other examples. Crucially, the boards of such think tanks bring together representatives of different corporations from different economic sectors, thereby facilitating, in theory at least, the forging of a shared ruling class perspective that became operationalised through the deployment of think tank personnel within successive administrations.
Trump 2.0 has changed that radically: there has been a massive clear-out of senior staff at both the National Security Council and the State Department, with critical foreign policy roles now more likely to be occupied by people drawn from the worlds of TV and real estate. A military studies professor visiting Washington in March 2026 and nostalgic for the old order has written despairingly: ‘It is hard to convey the gloom that has overtaken Washington. All the structures that are vital to crisis management [for which read war planning] have either been attenuated or disbanded. There is hardly anyone left on the National Security Council staff. A friend described an empty State Department where you could hear your own footsteps.’
High-ranking military officers are also being purged, with nine four- and five-star military personnel fired during Trump 2.0 – compared to eleven over the entire previous 160 years. One result is that decisions now get made by, Heideman contends, a ‘staggeringly incompetent policy team’, with the particular ignorance and ineptitude of Trump golf buddy and ubiquitous special representative Steve Witkoff singled out by some.
But Trump does not care whether the US as a whole, or even its ruling class, suffers harm. He, to a greater extent than any US president in the modern era, clearly pursues policies (and Cooley and Nixon are right about this) that are of direct, personal benefit to himself – primarily materially, but also in the sense of feeding a narcissistic ego (Melvin Goodman, Johns Hopkins professor and former CIA analyst, refers to his ‘extreme obsession with power, wealth, and self-importance’).
This naked self-serving was evident during the war on Iran. There is strong circumstantial evidence that regime insiders were making stock and commodity market killings, as well as profiteering through event prediction platforms, by virtue of advance access to Trump’s market-shifting statements on the war – for example, a suspicious number of one-way bets on falling oil prices were made just before Trump claimed negotiations to end the war had been initiated, while large bets on a ceasefire were being made just before Trump announced it. The Financial Times reports that a financial broker for secretary of war Pete Hegseth sought to buy shares worth millions of dollars in armaments companies before the war began.
A New Yorker investigation estimates that this presidency has already been leveraged to ensure that Trump and family members have grossed over $4 billion. Of course the actions of previous US regimes were also partly driven by the corrupt motivations of key actors (Cooley and Nixon elide this history). To take just one example, vice-president (under George W Bush) Dick Cheney drove the 2003 invasion of Iraq and saw a firm in which he had substantial interests – Halliburton – profit enormously from no-bid, billion-dollar government contracts (rife with fraud and overcharging) for the supposed reconstruction of Iraq.
But Cheney’s greed and graft can be argued to have largely overlapped with the objectives of US imperialism in controlling Middle East oil and the region more generally. No such convergence of interests can be assumed in the case of Trump. What we have instead, in the words of former Dublin City University professor Farrel Corcoran, is ‘a massive agglomeration of rackets and scams led by a racketeer-in-chief’, who also wildly pursues ego-boosting adventures. Trump prizes loot, fawning tributes (witness the way in which cabinet members and visiting foreign leaders have to lavish praise upon him), and the settling of personal grudges. From the point of view of the empire, the approach is almost certainly perverse. As a mournful Guardian columnist puts it, ‘Making Trump feel great is the undoing of American greatness’ (though greatness is hardly the right word).
He has alienated Western allies, themselves hypocrites who drew the line at threats to Greenland but backed the genocide in Gaza. And for many ordinary people across the world the slaughter in Gaza has become the red line issue of our age, albeit a slaughter Trump inherited rather than initiated. Trump’s innovation has been to turn the criminal tragedy into, he hopes, a grisly real estate mega-development in a Gaza cleared of Palestinians, with the very real prospect of billions of ‘reconstruction’ dollars being siphoned off to himself and his cronies, exemplifying his seemingly bottomless appetite for graft and self-aggrandisement.
Previous presidents have been stupid and suffused with greed, have even suffered mental instability or cognitive decline (Reagan springs to mind), but, to take the most recent example, Biden’s senility probably mattered little because his regime was staffed with long-term and loyal servants of empire drawn from what Heideman calls ‘the corporate foreign policy planning network’. Trump, who is himself showing signs of derangement, is surrounded by a plethora of grifters, delusional ethno-nationalists and obvious idiots.
What Cooley and Nixon fear is that the best interests of the US empire are being undermined by the current kleptocracy, That the empire is being damaged by a profoundly corrupt and narcissistic regime is, to many of us, a rare positive thing in otherwise bleak times. The old, better-managed order mourned by the writers in Foreign Affairs was no less violent and exploitative (Heideman references the ‘bloodbaths in Vietnam and Iraq’) than Trump’s grotesque carnival of hustle and hubris. Thucydides’ famous dictum on the conduct of empire – ‘the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must’ – remains constant. The difference is that the mask of civilisation has been dropped.