The neo conservatives and the Project for a New American Century – PNAC. They believed that U.S. imperialism would control the world for the next 100 years. Today, Trump is acting out their ideas without even realizing it.

On February 28, Trump and Netanyahu went to war against Iran. In doing so, and without even realizing it, Trump is reenacting the failed view of the Neoconservatives. Their first failure was their inability to stop North Korea from going nuclear, but they barrelled on anyway. That is the background to the fact that it is failing again. Here is a summary of the story of its present failure:

President Bush – Trump makes that simpleton appear to be a wise statesman in comparison

Bush considers nuclear attack; real issue who dominates
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, there arose a train of thought that since the U.S. was now without any challenger, it could invade anywhere. It didn’t even need allies. That was the train of thought of the neo-conservatives, who instituted the Project for a New American Century, PNAC. The entire 21st century would be dominated by the United States without a challenge! Those who dared to defy the U.S. would face the wrath of US military might, to which nobody could stand up. Or so they thought. Their representative was President George Bush. 

Bush considers nuclear attack
According to Seymour Hersh in 2006, the Bush administration was drawing up plans for a military attack on Iran.ⁱ According to Hersh, Bush was even considering using a nuclear bomb against Iran, but “senior Pentagon officials” strongly opposed it. The nuclear issue was directly related to the broader issue of Iran’s role in the region. Hersh reported that “one high ranking diplomat told me… ‘The real issue is who is going to control the Middle East and its oil in the next ten years.’” (emphasis added) That was the issue for both the U.S. and Israel and for Iran, whose regime had regional ambitions, as befits any self-respecting capitalist power. It continues to be the underlying issue to this day, and the fact that Bush was considering a nuclear attack should not be ignored today.

Hersh’s report was followed by a 2008 article in the Guardian newspaper. They reported that the Bush administration was again drawing up plans to attack Iran. They wrote “Such an attack would almost certainly have produced a conflagration in the Middle East that could have seen Iran retaliating by blocking oil supplies [through the Straits of Hormuz] and unleashing militias and sympathisers in Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon.”

President Obama. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for not being a neo-conservative

From neo-conservatives to Obama
The neo-conservatives’ invasion of Iraq proved to be a disaster. And now they were planning to go even further by attacking Iran! More strategic heads gained influence. They put Obama in the White House. The major capitalist powers breathed a sigh of relief and Obama was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize less than a year after he took office. His award was more for what he hadn’t done (go to war with Iran) than what he had done.

What the neo-cons sought to accomplish through war, Obama sought to do through “diplomacy”. He entered into negotiations with Iran over a nuclear deal, which became known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA. Netanyahu strongly opposed it because he recognized that the real issue was Iran becoming a regional rival to Israel and the JCPOA did little to prevent  that. He even took the unusual step of coming to the United States and addressing a joint session of the US congress over it in March of 2015. His direct interference in US politics was done at the initiative of the Republicans. Obama responded by saying that Netanyahu’s speech offered “nothing new”. He was right. In effect, what Netanyahu offered was a return to the neo-conservative strategy.

John McCain and Bibi Netanyahu: Two peas in a pod

John McCain the neo-con adds to Netanyahu’s voice
In September of 2015, Republican Senator John McCain gave a speech in the senate opposing the JCPOA. He took up where Netanyahu left off. He said “But the ultimate test of any diplomacy is not merely whether it avoids the use of force, but whether it secures our national security interests. Put simply, I believe the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action fails this test, and it fails by the very criteria that the Administration itself once laid out for a good deal.” McCain continued to say that verification would not be possible, and that anyway the JCPOA would expire in eight years.

He continued: “In this way, the Administration’s Iran deal not only paves the Islamic Republic’s path to a nuclear capability. It also furthers that regime’s emergence as a dominant military power in the Middle East. This has direct and dangerous implications for the United States, especially our armed forces. After all, the ultimate guarantee that Iran will not get a nuclear weapon is not a 109-page document. It is the capability of the U.S. military to do what is necessary to prevent it, if all else fails.” In other words, the JCPOA was a decisive step against military action against Iran.

McCain continued: “Iran is not just an arms control challenge. It is a geopolitical challenge. For years, many of us have urged the Administration to adopt a regional strategy to counter Iran’s malign activities in the Middle East. Unfortunately, if such a strategy exists, there is no evidence of it. Instead, we have watched with alarm as Iran’s military and intelligence operatives have stepped up their destabilizing activities in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Bahrain, Gaza, and elsewhere….” This amounted to a declaration that whether Iran “went nuclear” or not was not the key issue. The key issue was whether the Iran regime would challenge the US and Israeli domination of the region.

To all of which, Obama could have responded as he did to Netanyahu’s speech a few months earlier: “The alternative that the prime minister offers is ‘no deal’, in which case Iran will immediately begin once again pursuing its nuclear programme, accelerate its nuclear programme without us having any insight into what they are doing and without constraint.”

Today, McCain is lionized by the Democrats as a wise and thoughtful statesman while Netanyahu is reviled. The fact is that McCain was in the Netanyahu camp at that time and he died still in that camp.

Another Neo-Con is more open: invasion is needed
In that same year, Josh Muravchik, who is a fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies and was praised by the Wall St. Journal editors as “maybe the most cogent and careful of the neoconservaitve writers on foreign policy”, said what McCain and Netanyahu wouldn’t say out loud. He wrote a column in the Washington Post entitled War with Iran is Probably our Best Option. Muravchik wrote: “What if force is the only way to block Iran from gaining nuclear weapons? That, in fact, is probably the reality…. Iran aims to carry its Islamic revolution across the Middle East and beyond. A nuclear arsenal, even if it is only brandished, would vastly enhance Iran’s power to achieve that goal…. Such visionary regimes do not trade power for a mess of foreign goods. Materialism is not their priority: They often sacrifice prosperity to adhere to ideology…. Does this mean that our only option is war? Yes, although an air campaign targeting Iran’s nuclear infrastructure would entail less need for boots on the ground [emphasis added] than the war Obama is waging against the Islamic State….

“Wouldn’t an attack cause ordinary Iranians to rally behind the regime? Perhaps…. 

“Wouldn’t destroying much of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure merely delay its progress? Perhaps, but we can strike as often as necessary…. And finally, wouldn’t Iran retaliate by using its own forces or proxies to attack Americans – as it has done in Lebanon, Iraq and Saudi Arabia – with new ferocity? Probably.” This was where rejection of the JCPOA was headed, and the majority of the U.S. capitalist class knew it was a disaster. But in reality, all the JCPOA did was kick the can down the road.

The neo-cons lived on!
In 2017, Trump cancelled the JCPOA. He did so more as a natural extension of the Islamophobic campaign on which he got elected the year earlier, but in any case it signaled a return of the neo-con philosophy, even though the simpleton Trump didn’t know it.

From Venezuela to Iran
After many twists and turns, this brings us to January 3, 2026. On that day, the Trump administration went to war against Venezuela and kidnapped its president. The operation was such a smashing success that it set Trump up for Netanyahu’s visit to the White House’s Situation Room a month later – February 11. At that time he convinced Trump that a joint war against Iran would easily secure its goal of ending Iran’s nuclear ambitions at the very least and, more likely, bring down the regime altogether.

Trump’s ideosyncrasies
In bourgeois democracies the importance of personal idiosyncrasies of the individual head of state are a distant second to what matters most by far. That is the alignment of political forces, what pressures exist upon the head of state both within and surrounding his or her administration. However, Trump is moving closer to Bonapartism every day, and a Bonapartist dictator exercises complete control over his power base, which is the Republican Party in this case. Such dictators also tend to surround themselves with  toadies, aka sycophants. In that situation, there are few checks on the head of state, so the personal qualities of the head of state take on unusual importance. In Trump’s case, those qualities include extreme narcissism, megalomania, and inability to think in the longer term or to hold contradictory thoughts at the same time. This set Trump up as a sucker for Netanyahu. Trump must have envisioned Republicans running for office in November with their savior, Trump, as the conquering hero. If the economy wasn’t going that great, a successful military adventure would do the trick, especially if it was larger and more important than kidnapping what he saw as a tin-pot dictator in his back yard.

JD Vance, who is capable of thinking, was skeptical but his role as just one more sycophant won out.

Trump and Netanyahu go to war
So it was that on February 28 Trump and Netanyahu went to war against Iran. Things didn’t go as planned from the start. Those who survived the initial terrorist attacks, which killed off most of the Iran government leaders, did not bow down in obedience to Trump/Netanyahu. On the contrary, the regime’s power base shifted from the clerics to the even more hard line and more strategic Revolutionary Guard (the IRGC). The Kurds and other opponents didn’t rise up and overthrow the regime. The bombing did not wipe out all of Iran’s military capacity. And, most of all, horror of horrors: Iran shut down the Straits of Hormuz – exactly as previous US strategists had warned.

Trump’s plan to boost his ratings and maintain control over congress was backfiring. So, quick as a flash, he reversed course and did what he said Iran would do: He cried “uncle”, and reached a deal with Iran that was to their liking. It left the Iran regime in a position that was even stronger than it had been under the JCPOA. Just as Trump hoped, the price of gas did start to drop, but then he hit another problem: He appeared weak, and if there is anything more dangerous to Trump than high gas prices it is appearing weak, especially to his own supporters.

Wall St. Journal editors
The neo-conservative Wall St. Journal’s editorial board had been nervous about Trump’s staying power right from the start. As early as March 2, they praised the war but added “our main concern is that Mr. Trump may stop [the war] too soon.” They didn’t want to undermine this puppet for the neo-cons who had done so much to boost profits, though. So they ended on a positive note: “Mr. Trump didn’t begin a war on Saturday. He is fighting back against an Iranian regime that has been waging war against the U.S., Israel and the West for decades. The threat is the regime itself, and let’s hope it falls.” But they knew their man. He didn’t get the nickname “TACO” for nothing after all. By April 17, the WSJ posted an editorial entitled Hold off on the Iran Victory Parade which concluded “Mr. Trump has the right instincts about Iran, (in other words, he doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing but his instincts are good) and we will be the first to give him credit if the Iranian concessions turn out to be real. But his frequent assertions that a deal is imminent also tell the regime he is desperate to end the war. This makes the regime less likely to make the concessions Mr. Trump needs to claim a legitimate and lasting victory.”

Then on May 20, they wrote another editorial entitled Trump Reaches Iran Crossroads in which they warned him about the only thing that matters to him. They wrote, “Signing a mooted “letter of intent” to continue negotiating for another 30 days—a cease-fire extension for Iran, in essence—would merely raise the costs while letting Iran string Mr. Trump along even closer to the election.” They sang more praise, but they got their point across, knowing that what really matters to Trump is the November elections. They concluded: “As Mr. Trump famously said in criticizing his predecessors, the U.S. shouldn’t start a war if it isn’t prepared to do what it takes to win.”

And so Trump goes, back and forth – one day “crying uncle” to Iran. Then he realizes he appears weak and this will hurt his chances of maintaining control over congress, so he resumes bombing and making blood curdling threats, whose only effect is to raise the price of gas once again. That the people of Iran are suffering matters no more to him than does the suffering of the people of Cuba.

Saudi Arabia
Meanwhile, Trump took a side trip to cut a deal with the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia to allow them to go nuclear. He probably got a nice fat real estate deal out of it, but in any case this was a step too far and within a day or two he had to reverse course. Having done so, China or Russia or even maybe Pakistan will now step in and assist the Saudi’s drive to go nuclear. This will be followed by other states in the region going nuclear. Among other side effects, it will strengthen the grip of those dictatorships over their own people. This, in turn, will strengthen the most racist tendencies of Israel. This is the wonderful benefit of the rise of imperialist rivals to the United States.

U.S. elections
As for the elections, Trump is now realizing that he probably won’t be able to maintain control over congress under any normal election procedure since he can’t resolve the Iran crisis in such a way as to make himself look good. So he is ramping up his plans to steal the elections. Should he succeed, or if he maintains control over congress due to the weakness of the Democrats and the cowardice of the union leadership, this will have serious implications for the people of both the United States and Iran.

Both sides right and wrong
Already under Bush there were discussions of a nuclear attack on Iran. The neo-cons have

Recently, former Navy Seal and CIA contractor and podcaster who is popular with the right wing, Shawn Ryan, was interviewed by Tucker Carlson. Ryan reported major discontent among NCO’s. How this could play out is unknown, but it could swell the ranks of the far right Nazi-sympathizer anti-Semites, Tucker Carlson included.

several alternatives. One is to put boots on the ground. An all out invasion is ruled out since it would require over one million troops, which would mean the return of conscription. The other is the original Bush plan – use nuclear bombs on Iran. A combined approach is also possible. That would be using Delta force to plant a suitcase size nuclear bomb in Pickaxe Mountain. That assumes that it’s true that that is where Iran’s nuclear facilities are housed. It also is highly questionable whether such a step would even succeed. Iran is not Venezuela, after all. One possible outcome would be that the entire force is killed, leaving Iran in possession of that suitcase size “tactical” nuclear weapon.

Other neo-cons have other brilliant suggestions. Recently, General Wesley Clark, advocated on CNN that the U.S. bomb Iran supply trains coming from Pakistan and China, In other words, widen the war.

Both sides are right and both sides are wrong. Diplomacy – meaning some version of the JCPOA – only delays the day of reckoning. The only alternative is war, which has proven to be a disaster.

So, in sum we have:

• The return of the failed neo-conservative policy of military war after diplomacy failed.
• The unstoppable rise of Iran as a regional rival to Israel.
• The rise of imperialist rivals to the US, which in no way diminishes capitalist exploitation and repression.
• Increased tendency towards war.
• Further spread of nuclear weapons.
• An increased tendency towards dictatorship – “Bonapartism” – in the United States.
• Likely increase in influence of the far right.
• And still the thundering silence of the union leadership.

Decades ago Leon Trotsky wrote that it takes a great shock for the working class to rise up and throw off its failed leadership. That great shock seems to be coming.

Note: This article will be part of my memoirs, which I hope will be published later this year.