Matt Aldarab

The US midterms elections turned out to be an utter disaster for Donald Trump and Republicans. This disaster had many factors, but by far and away the biggest factor started on February 28th when Donald Trump launched his foolish war against Iran for Israel. After campaigning on a platform of being a ‘peace President’, Donald Trump betrayed the hopes of the American people and became the second coming of George W. Bush. After railing against the madness and delusions of neocon foreign policy, he appointed the same pro-Israel neocons to the highest positions in his administration, who convinced him that a war on Iran would somehow be a good idea. The campaign donations and power of the Israel lobby over American foreign policy convinced him to throw his domestic agenda of an era of American revival out of the window, and pursue a foreign war so obviously disastrous, that not even his war criminal predecessors could be convinced by Israel to launch it. The hubris and disaster began on day one. By assassinating Ali Khamenei and Iran’s leadership, which had continuously exercised restraint and avoided a major war, they allowed a more hardline and determined Iranian leadership to take power and impose tremendous costs on the US, and entire global economy. The fantasy of a regime change uprising evaporated into thin air as the Iranian population rallied around the flag, and the only regime change turned out to be replacing Ayatollah Khamenei with Ayatollah Khamenei. A war that was supposed to last ‘a few weeks’ has instead gone on for 250 days. Genocidal threats of wiping out an entire civilisation achieved nothing in negotiations, the Strait of Hormuz still has not returned to pre-war conditions, and global energy prices remain sharply elevated. Despite War Secretary Pete Hegseth’s odious worship of American warplanes bringing ‘death and destruction, all day long’, none of the US’ war objectives were achieved. As each day passes, the US economy and global economy are pushed closer to a major crisis. Already struggling working class Americans are facing financial misery as the rising cost of living from Trump’s war suffocates them. And yet stunningly, Donald Trump has not realised his catastrophic mistake, and is considering resuming the war on Iran despite global oil reserves already exhausted, leaving the US and global economy without any buffer for the consequences of a resumed war. The alarming short-sightedness of the American President, the global disaster he has caused, and the bewildering display of hypnotised loyalty to genocidal war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu, who achieved his dream of getting the US to fight Israel’s war against Iran for him, has infuriated millions of struggling Americans, and the midterm results reflect it. America First was exposed as codeword for Israel First, and the American people paid the price for it. Trump sold the vision of reviving the American Dream for Netanyahu’s dream of Israeli hegemony, and a Greater Israel. Washington’s empire is now in a paralysed state of dysfunction: stuck in a quagmire abroad, its economy creaking under the weight of the quagmire, and political deadlock locked in with a Democrat ‘blue wave.’ Of course, nothing will fundamentally change in the US, since the Democrats and Republicans simply represent different parts of the capitalist class that rapaciously concentrate more wealth into its hands, while the rest increasingly own nothing. Whatever is left of the US’ soft power evaporates into thin air, its hard power is increasingly questioned as supposedly the world’s most powerful military could not defeat a regional power it has kept in economic misery for over 4 decades with sanctions, and most of the world views the US as a dangerous rogue state that brings nothing but war and destruction, disrupting the rest of the world’s concentration on economic development. A humiliating state of affairs for the empire in decline.