One of the subthemes in Woody Allen’s Bananas (1971) was the possibility, even likelihood, that in toppling one abhorrent regime, one might spawn something even more abhorrent. In taking out the 86-year-old Supreme Leader, Iran, which despite Israeli and American propaganda, had become a relatively sclerotic regime, weakened by sanctions, geopolitical isolation, internal divisions, and decline of unifying ideological fervor.
An Iranian academic, some of whose students rose to senior government positions in Tehran, once told me that at the revolution’s beginning, the regime consisted of “80 percent indoctrinated believers—largely ignorant of global realities—and 20 percent charlatans and chameleons.” By Khamenei’s final years, he said, the ratio had inverted: 20 percent believers, 80 percent opportunists who flocked around officials for wealth and privilege.
Khamenei was 86 years old. He was enfeebled and about to die anyhow. One cannot emphasize this trite fact enough. What Trump’s America and Netanhuyu’s Israel has accomplished for this Islamic clergyman is his greatest wet dream. Having already lived a full life and then dying a martyr (with promises of 72 virgins), his death now constitutes a rallying cry in the immediate and ensures him a legacy long lasting.
WHAT MAROONS! WHAT BUFFOONS!
Falling into a Pit of Their Own Making
During the 1920s, the Weimar Republic attempted to repress the NSDAP (a.k.a. Nazis) through hate speech laws, often deployed to close an indeterminate number of Nazi newspapers. Goebbels was jailed for three weeks for insulting a Jewish police official in Berlin.
The problem with such machinations is that they are endemically contrary of the spirit of free civic polities and hence prove none too effective, especially in light of sentiments favoring right-wing factions by those in the police and military.
But having established the precedent, if and when those who have been repressed acquire power, especially if they are authoritarian in nature, those powers of repression will be deployed most ruthlessly. Democratic factions, who complained about such repression when conducted against themselves, were rightfully scorned in 1933.
In like manner, in establishing the precedent and new standard of assassinating heads of state and other high officials of adversarial powers, Trump and Netanhayu become themselves legitimate targets, even within their own country, Netanhayu especially since he has been found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court.
Validating and Perpetuating the Narrative of Jewish Control Over America
There already exists increasing recognition that the Israeli government and Jews in America have outsized influence on American policy (“the AIPIC lobby”). Whenever that perception has occurred or has been perceived to have occurred throughout history (i.e. Weimar Republic, Seneca the Younger), a Maîtres Chez Nous (re: “Masters of Our Own House”) counterreaction ensues, much to the denigration or worse for the Diaspora.
Jews constitute 2.4% of the American population. Yet they constitute 36 of 535 members of Congress (7%) and 10 of 100 Senators (10%). Jews dominate Hollywood, journalism, and social media corporations. Jews have often betrayed the arrogance of their outsized influence.
But there has been a bottom-up groundswell of resentment towards the outsized influence of these Jewish “aliens,” first from the Left and now from the Right, as America becomes involved reckless ventures which might regional benefit the nation of Israel but has dubious benefit for Americans, and may, indeed, prove detrimental to America.
A consistent pattern throughout Diaspora history is that Jews ingratiate themselves to the elites of the host country in which they dwell, hoping that these elites will protect them from the masses. However, whenever the groundswell of antipathy from the commons threatens the survival of these elites, Jews are hung out to dry (Hanna Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism).
This latest venture into Iran has no honest and coherent rationale, no coherent criteria for success, and no exit strategy. Indeed, the arrogance of Donald Trump deems offering any explication to his own people unnecessary for this very unpopular war from the get go.
There exists a consistent pattern in America wherein support for military adventures, which are not the result of threats to the homeland, declines with the passage of time. It explains the stereotypical quickie “get in, get out” nature of most American military adventures. The world knowing this, and a culture given to martyrdom, it behooves the Iranians to rag this current war for some time. As the Taliban demonstrated, patience triumphs over “shock and awe.”
Should this latest military adventure rag on, and American body bags pile up, American treasure be squandered, and the genuine concerns of Americans continue to be neglected, the ensuing resentment and antipathy just might be redirected towards Netanyahu’s Israel and the Fifth Column of Jews dwelling among True American Patriots, especially since there is not even an attempt this time to distinguish between American from Israeli interests. I can imagine a future moment when Americans ask, “who did this to us?”
Pushing Iran Ever Closer to the Russian Orbit
An alliance of very weak sorts already exists between the Iran and Russia. Putin’s Russia did not exactly risk its neck out for Iran in the June 2025 war. And an Iranian theocracy is not likely desirous to come under the “Christian Orthodox” orbit.
However, what would happen if the Iranian military (IRGC) became dominant (or more dominant), while continuing to be supportive of Shiite Islam, which is obviously necessary in that cultural setting. Being constantly denigrated by economic actions, and facing constant, sometimes even unprovoked, foreign incursions like the current one, will not necessity and Realpolitik override existing clergy objections to closer ties with Russia after Putin?
It must be recalled that in 1953, the CIA executed a coup against a legitimate democratic government in Iran in favor of the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in order to protect mostly British oil interests from nationalization efforts. This foreign adventure gave impetus to the Iranian Revolution of 1978.
Americans might have twittered memories. The rest of the world does not. The notion that any regime change in Iran would result in the recovery of love for the Americans (or for western-style democratic capitalism) is febrile self-delusion or blatant lie to fool a people who can nowadays be fooled all of the time.
One of the self-delusions, abetted by American cultural ignorance, is that there is widespread antipathy against the existing theocratic regime. No one can say that with any certainty. And the appearance of much protest and opposition, the type of protest and opposition which actually might sacrifice lives, liberties, and livelihoods in support of an overthrow, suffers from the mistake of only considering urban populations. In Iran, as elsewhere, the political base of theocratic and conservative regimes lie in the rural towns, villages, and farmlands. The wet dreams of Trump’s America and Netanyahu’s Israel just might find that replacing a feeble supreme leader ruling over a sclerotic regime with a competent and aggressive military junta, more pliable to a thicker alliance with the Russians, and a population even more and justly antipathetic towards the Americans, a far worse outcome than presently exists. Even some Israelis demonstrate concern for this possibility.
International Contempt and Hatred towards America and Israel
In 1979, when I backpacked around the Mediterranean, I kept finding myself having, or thinking that I had to, defend America against the aspersions of largely north-western Europeans. This was after the folly of the Viet Nam War, which was entered into through duplicitous pretenses and upon false rationales. (At least, there were rationales.)
There are no pretenses and no genuine rationales this time. It is raw 19th century imperialism in order to make a proud heritage and people bow to a lawless Narcissist-in-Chief in an already unpopular war in America, entered into by defying the Original Meaning of the American Constitution and blatantly ignoring International Law (ius gentium).
How long can one anticipate the overhang of contempt and detestation towards America and Americans ensuing this unprovoked military vanity? Any lifelong student of world history can anticipate the accelerating decline of American power and influence, even within the decade. For history emphatically demonstrates that on the coattails of the loss of moral authority and the legitimacy to govern, a decline and/or loss of power ensues.
Underneath the ersatz golden glitter of Trump’s America is a crud of moral, social, and economic rot, of an economy buttressed by annual deficits which rival those of the Great Depression, and shakily supported by the wealth effect from inordinately and irrationally expensive equity markets; of extreme economic disparities which overflow into civic and political inequality and two-tier justice which precursors civic tumult, even civic conflagration, as has happened often before.
Even before Trump, the weaponization of Reserved Currency status in 2022 has quickened the demise of that status which had given America exorbitant privilege. If the Chinese and Europeans joined hands, they could plausibly replace the U.S. dollar as Reserved Currency.
And Trump has done everything in his power to provoke the Europeans and their politicos out of their complacent subservience to their once American patrons. As much as I like Mark Carney’s revival of ‘non-aligned nations’ notion in his Davos speech, cynical realism suspects that Trump’s animosities will only project another (latent) superpower into an already unstable geopolitical situation, a superpower which will be at times hostile to America, one which will be eventually surpass America in the West, especially after the latter loses Reserved Currency status and it must address the many facets of its decadence.