America Has One Birthday, the USA Was Born on Another

The USA was born out of a reactionary effort against the ideas that birthed America by the oligarchs of the day who preferred making money to defending human rights. 

By Kary Love

April 7, 2026

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Image by Childe Hassam/Wikimediacommons, in public domain

America was formally born on July 4, 1776, with the Declaration of Independence, but the USA was not born until September 17, 1787 when the Constitution was adopted. America was born of revolution and a claim that god created human rights and government’s job was to preserve those rights, and any government that violated the peoples’ god-derived rights was not long for this world.

The USA was born out of a reactionary effort against the ideas that birthed America by the oligarchs of the day who preferred making money to defending human rights. That division has bedeviled the nation/country since as it oscillated along a spectrum between the two.

America v USA is a divide that has warped the nation’s psyche to the point that today, as has happened from time to time in the past, national schizophrenia is manifest.

America was not monolithic, nor in total agreement, when born. Estimates vary but only about 5% of the people supported the American Revolution and many were “Tories” who remained loyal to King George III and proud to be members of the “greatest purveyor of violence on the planet” at the time: the English Empire. The largest percentage of people were satisfied with just being left alone to try to get on with their lives.

But when the revolution was surprisingly, impossibly, incredibly won by the Rebels, the human world turned over. The idea that people had “inalienable rights” that even Kings must honor or be thrown into the dust bin of history was staggering. That even the government, the army, and all given government power, had to obey the law and respect the rights of the people who could withdraw their “consent” if government failed to do so, was a departure from most of human history that saw Kings, Emperors and other tyrants do as they wished and the people, called subjects, or peasants or serfs, merely suffer in silence.

Although it is claimed this idea resonated with humans around the world and led to a rise of democracy worldwide, back home in America it was not universally appreciated. In fact, as the ordinary Americans, farmers, shop owners and others exercised the rights won in the Revolution and specified in the Declaration of Independence, those with money found they could not make as much money as they wanted because those rights got in the way.

Farmers facing foreclosure would march en masse on courthouses to stop foreclosures and other resistance based on communities impeded the goals of those who pursued wealth and power. In order to reallocate the effects of the Revolution, the oligarchs of the day realized the law of revolution needed adjustment.

Although America had won the Revolution under the Articles of Confederation, arguably the second Constitution if the Declaration of Independence was the first, a more pro-business law was needed if money for the wealthy was to grow. And so, Congress authorized a meeting in Philadelphia to propose amendments to the Articles of Confederation to address some of the imbalance unruly Americans invoking their revolutionary rights were using to impair profiteering.

When convened in Philadelphia, the convention attracted mostly the wealthy as “representatives.” It was convened in secret.

Doing business in secret was an indicator that bad business was afoot, so many of the Revolutionaries were alarmed when they learned of it. Patrick Henry was asked to be a representative but refused, suspecting it would retreat from the rights won in the Revolution. Henry, rather than be a member, warned the people “I smell a rat,” when talking about what would happen in Philadelphia. 

In “Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution,” Woody Holton provides the startling history that the primary purpose of the Constitution was, simply put, to make America more attractive to investment and making money, not human rights. And the linchpin to that endeavor was taking power away from the states and ultimately away from the people. This is what birthed the Constitution, a reactionary backing away from the American Revolution. The Constitution, which birthed the USA, was a rebellion against the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence.

Unfortunately, Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence was ambassador to France in Paris and was not present at the Constitutional Convention. Tom Paine, another strong proponent of the “Rights of Man” and the revolutionary ideas, was also not present.

John Adams, admirer of the English unwritten Constitution, and author of a study of the best constitutions of history was a delegate to the Convention. The Constitution that emerged was largely the unwritten Constitution of England George III had asserted gave him the powers that caused the people to rebel.

Arguably the Constitution of 1787 gave victory back to the Tories and monarchists and was a reactionary derogation of the Declaration of Independence and the idea of universal human rights.

One of the gravest compromises, more odious than even England, was the recognition of human slavery in the Constitution, while in England slavery was on the way out and the English slave trade was ended in 1807.

The conflict between the principles of America—pro human rights derived from god and predominantly over government—and the principles of the Constitution birthing the USA—is stark. The Constitution is largely the written version of the unwritten English Constitution that failed the American people as the King became a tyrant and was overthrown in the Revolution. By 1787 the divergence of voices in America was no more monolithic than ever, many were the competing views and voices raised in support and in opposition. Despite the belief today that the Constitution was received by the people with open arms, back then, it barely passed in state conventions called to consider it.

In fact the division between Revolutionary Americans and the Tories remained, and led to fights over passage between the “Federalists” and the “Antifederalists,” with the former favoring and the latter opposing a vote for the Constitution. Patrick Henry, one of the antifederalist leaders, declared that if the Constitution passed without a Bill of Rights making “inalienable human rights” part of the supreme law, he volunteered to lead a new revolution against it. Patrick Henry, proponents of the Constitution believed, could pull off such a rebellion. Moderate supporters of the Constitution, such as James Madison, realizing Patrick Henry could rally sufficient support to defeat it, promised a Bill of Rights would be the first order of business in the new Congress if the Constitution passed. The Bill of Rights was adopted in 1791, partially restoring, in law, the principles of the Revolutionary Declaration of Independence.

However, power corrupts. When John Adams succeeded George Washington, in the election of 1800, the schizophrenic divide remained and was more pronounced as Thomas Jefferson was elected as Vice President although Jefferson opposed many of Adam’s views. Jefferson was pro France while Adams leaned towards the English, and when the threat of war with France appeared, President Adams secured passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts in Congress, where his Federalist Party was in power.

Adams was heavily mocked during his time as vice president and president for his preference for titles, formality, and what many contemporaries viewed as pompous, quasi-monarchical matters. His obsession with dignity and class made him a frequent target of political enemies, who used it to paint him as out of touch with the anti-aristocratic, republican values of the newly formed United States. 

As vice president, Adams advocated for grand titles for the president, such as His Highness, the President of the United States of America, and Protector of the Rights of the Same, which were rejected by the Senate in favor of the simple President of the United States.

The most famous insult, coined by opponents to mock Adams with his pompous desire for high-sounding titles and his physical appearance, was His Rotundity. Even the revolutionary lawyer John Adams became enamored by the pomp and circumstance of power. It can happen to anyone.

When the Alien and Sedition acts emerged, Jefferson warned America of the hard lesson of history: when government sought power it usually started with suspicious peoples but soon expanded if not thwarted, to anyone. Vice President Jefferson warned that the “friendless alien [the migrant] has been selected as the safest subject of a first experiment [in the expanded power to deny due process and other legal protections], but the citizen will soon follow.” Once the precedent was set and the power enshrined by practice and use, and the “aliens” all dealt with, the power would not evaporate but find new targets to retain funding and operational continuance. Government agencies seek to continue and expand their life and power like any other human created entity. 

The same schizoid values division continues to this day. Human rights America was born July 4, 1776. Money and power USA was born September 17, 1787. A balance was sought in the Bill of Rights adopted December 15, 1791. But the division remains to be manipulated and used by factions favoring one value side or the other, dividing the people into camps to be exploited for political power gain and loss.

As human rights recedes, power and money advance. As the rule of law promoting human rights for all is reversed, even the citizens’ rights erode, and power with its grim and grotesque embrace of blood and guts advances. The elevation of dominance and violence, the marks of power, to central roles in a civilization, run the risk of conflagration and a fire consuming far beyond any plan or strategy. Civilization itself can be consumed.

America has one birthday. The USA another. Their values are antithetical and inherently at odds. A house divided against itself erected on a flawed, cracked foundation continues to battle with itself and “friendless aliens” at home and enemy aliens abroad. It flails without direction, deploying power and harm, in search of no goal or direction. Unless the advance of power “uber alles” is rejected by the people, the rights of the citizens will soon become targeted and the dream of universal human rights set back, if not swept into the dust bin of history.

Which birthday we choose to celebrate will define the next stage: America or USA. They are not the same. But perhaps we can build a bridge joining the two, using both to advance the future of the nation, and our fellow citizens of earth, in a rising tide lifting all boats.

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Kary Love, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a Michigan attorney who has defended nuclear resisters and many others in court for decades.

What Clean Energy Transition?

By Steve Hendricks

April 7, 2026

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Image by Adrem68/Wikimediacommons, licensed via CC BY 4.0

A pox of optimism has infected climate reporting in late years, and one of the Iran War’s unremarked casualties is that it has only furthered the scourge. Perhaps you know the sort of reports I’m referring to, the sanguine dispatches telling us that our long-overdue divorce from fossil fuels may be behind schedule, but the “dire predictions about renewable energy were all wrong,” for we have embarked at last upon a “clean energy boom” that, rather unexpectedly, is “arriving faster than you think,” indeed is now “unstoppable.” Decarbonization, we are assured, lies no longer around the next bend. “The renewables future has arrived.”

The most influential traffickers in this line are The New Yorker’s Bill McKibben and the New York Times’ David Wallace-Wells. “The clean energy transition,” McKibben wrote last fall, “is not destined to be the slow, dragged-out affair that most analysts would have predicted even five years ago.” Instead, we’ve entered “a kind of mind-blowing virtuous cycle” in which solar and wind power are getting so much cheaper and more efficient that governments and corporations can’t resist tapping into them. Wallace-Wells, taking the war-fueled surge in oil prices as his cue, declares that “green energy has been a dizzying, ecstatic success” and that we are now smack “in the middle” of the switch to renewables. Such optimistic chords reverberate all down the chain of liberal and left media. “Everywhere, the world is turning to renewables,” a lead story in CounterPunch averred last month. With the disruptions of the Iran War, “Perhaps we are finally seeing the end of oil.”

There’s just one problem with all these gladsome reports: The evidence to support them is witheringly thin. We are nowhere near the middle of a green transition, global emissions have yet to decline by a single gram of carbon, and the end of oil, far from nigh, remains well out of sight.

One chart tells the story. Below, courtesy of Our World in Data, is the bleak totting-up of all the energy that humankind has used over the last two and a quarter centuries.

What is striking about this chart is not merely that carbon-free renewables make up so small a share of today’s energy mix—about one-seventh—but that the growth in renewables has done nothing to halt the overall rise of fossil fuels. At best, renewables have only slightly slowed that rise. The only carbon-based fuel we’re burning less of these days, and very marginally less at that, is traditional biomass, mostly wood. Our burning of coal may—emphasize, may—be approaching a leveling off, but our extraordinary use of that fuel almost certainly won’t dip substantially for years, and even then forecasters expect not a plunge but a very long, slow decline across many decades. Meanwhile oil and gas are going great guns and by any dispassionate forecast will keep blazing, year on year, for decades.

In short, while renewables are indeed growing, their growth has not yet spurred an energy transition. They’ve simply added to our ever-burgeoning energy expansion.

Lest you think I’ve cherry picked my chart, you can find much the same narrative from other credible sources freely available online. Below, for example, is a comparable chart from the International Energy Agency, which shows (in different units, across a shorter span of time, and treating supply rather than consumption) that we are producing roughly one and half times the carbon-based fuel that we were producing just thirty years ago, with no sign of a letup. Squint and you just might see the minutely increasing slice of renewables sandwiched among all that carbon.

The terrifyingly inconvenient truth that leaps off graphs like these is that we are still unmistakably barreling, if you’ll forgive the pun, toward a grim new climate, possibly even our worst-case scenario: a rise in global temperatures of 4°C to 5°C (7.2°F to 9.0°F) by early next century.

But how can this be? Isn’t it true, to take just one thread of the energy tapestry, that the burning of coal has fallen in the last two decades by roughly half in the US and to virtually nothing in the UK?

Yes, that’s true. But it’s also not true. What is true is that the coal burned within the territorial confines of the US and UK has fallen by those amounts. But no country’s economy is confined to its own borders, certainly no country as rich as the US or UK. So it is also true that the US and UK are burning just as much coal as ever, only they’re burning it in the vast extraterritorial labor camp known as the Global South. Keats’s “dark Satanic Mills” are still burning coal, still churning out the goods that keep western lifestyles afloat, only at different latitudes.

China burns the most staggering heaps of coal, and although the growth curve is flattening, we can’t be sure when it will decrease. India and Indonesia also burn coal willy-nilly and are forecast to burn ever and ever more for decades. A recent report concluded that India could more than double—double—the coal it burns by mid-century. This is a high-end estimate, but even the lesser projections make forbidding reading. If you can believe the forecasters, whenever coal finally does peak in China, India, and Indonesia, it will make up a sizeable share of their fuel supplies until late in the century.

The story for other fuels is just as bleak. Oil and natural gas look likely to peak in China and India in the 2030s but are still expected to be used in dreadful quantities for decades, just as they will be in the US and many other rich countries. Nearly everywhere, oil and gas are likely to be in the mix for most of the century.

And that may not be the worst of it. Bad as the forecasts are, few of them fully account for—because few forecasters have any idea how to account for—the obscene surge in AI data centers with their ravenous appetite for power. AI might not merely rearrange the climate chessboard; it could overturn it altogether.

*          *          *

You may ask why, despite the growth in renewables, we keep burning more carbon than ever. The answer is simple: We—and here We means both the great mass of people and the tiny sliver of elites who run the world—have used every advance in renewables to consume more rather than less. Rooftop solar panels are all well and good, but the SUV (or two) in the garage of the 3,000-square-foot house, the vacations in Bali and Dalmatia, and the thrice daily meat and milk make a mockery of the panels. The equivalent profligacy by corporations is of course exponentially worse than any individual decadence.

So why, then, do so many of my fellow commentators and reporters, many of them good of heart and noble of intent, tell us we’re deep into the salvation of an energy transition?

Before I answer, let me note that some reporters do nod in this direction. “New power changes the existing system only on the margins,” Wallace-Wells allowed recently. “[N]ew green energy has mostly supplemented rather than displaced fossil fuels.”

But the trouble is that such sentences are so very few and far between, and so lightly played, they don’t begin to balance the heady tumble of paragraphs about the gathering tsunami of renewables. The inescapable implication is that whatever nits one may pick just now, they will momentarily be swept away by the indomitable green wave.

So why do journalists paint so optimistic a picture? I see four reasons. The first is that with stakes so horrific—we are talking, after all, about whether organized human existence can even survive, let alone thrive, in a +4°C world—few people care to face the facts. A whole academic literature has blossomed around the idea that rather than depress people into inertia with doomsaying, activists and journalists should attend to the upside of the green transition. It’s a strategy McKibben has evidently taken to heart, and Wallace-Wells has freely acknowledged that after writing grimly about the intransigence of politicians, a handful of climate ministers took him to task and suggested he write instead about “something that looks much more like progress.” And so he has. Whether this is a good strategy for activism, I can’t say. But it is not good journalism.

The second reason for the undue optimism is that everyone who gains by capitalism and its endless consumption has a potent incentive to swallow good news about it. In the West, that’s nearly everyone. Few Americans, reporters included, are eager to give up their SUVs or cheeseburgers, and few news outlets care to forgo the ad revenue from hawkers of those so-called goods. Not that reporters outright lie to us. Instead they merely tout the boom in renewable electricity, which is indeed cause for (restrained) celebration. What they don’t say, or say only fleetingly, is that electricity remains a modest piece of the current energy puzzle and that the great majority of our factories, cars, trucks, planes, ships, and furnaces run on coal, oil, or gas—and will for some time.

The third reason for the cheerleading is that many observers who have paid long and painful attention to the climate catastrophe have grown demoralized by the failure of politics. Our decades of marches and speeches and reports have moved not a single powerful government to take the bold action needed to avert disaster. Now, of a sudden, plummeting solar and wind prices have made the most astonishing end run around government. What activism so long failed to achieve, the law of supply and demand—the magic of the marketplace, in the old libertarian phrase—has done overnight. The rout of politics by economics has proven as inspiriting as it is unexpected. How often, after all, have impersonal economic forces helped people and planet? But there’s peril in this celebratory thinking, for it implies—sometimes this is flatly stated—that the problem is solving itself and climate activism is less necessary than ever before. Yet as the charts above attest, nothing could be further from the truth.

The fourth and more occult reason for the journalistic immoderation is that almost nobody understands the history of energy transitions. Better said, nobody understands that we’ve never had one. Not once when humans have found a new fuel has the happy discovery prompted us to abandon the previous fuel. Instead, we’ve just kept burning it. You’d hardly know this from conventional histories of energy, which almost always tell a story that goes like this: Once upon a time humans burned biomass, mostly wood, for their heating and cooking. But then we discovered coal and gradually abandoned wood. Later we found oil, and we began the long but certain transition away from coal. Shortly afterward we discovered natural gas, which helped accelerate the transition from coal. Thus energy historians write of a Wood Age, a Coal Age, an Oil Age, and an Oil and Gas Age. This thinking has seeped into the minds of environmental reporters and, to a degree, the public. It makes an energy transition seem a straightforward process, like swapping a wood stove for a coal furnace.

But take a look again at that first chart, and what do you see? Coal didn’t replace wood. Not at all. We just kept burning wood alongside coal. And when oil came along, oil didn’t replace coal. We kept burning that too. Nor did natural gas ease out coal. And renewables aren’t replacing any of it, not globally anyway. We’re just using more of almost everything we can get our hands on.

The story of why we have done so is soberingly told by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz in his superb More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy (2025). It’s a bit of a twisting tale, but a big part of it is that once a fuel becomes widely used in a complex economy, it gets so embedded in everything that it’s hard to eliminate when a new fuel comes along. Another part of the tale is that new fuels create new industries that are necessarily fueled in part (often a large part) by the old fuels.

Take the appearance of coal toward the end of the so-called Wood Age. When coal first boomed in the mid-1800s, many households nonetheless continued to burn wood because it was either cheaper than coal or readier to hand. Wood was also essential for mining coal and for building the industries that coal begat. Whole forests were logged for the millions of framing timbers that kept mine shafts and tunnels from caving in and, a little later, for the billions of sleepers underlying railroad tracks. (Railroads were both created by coal and essential for its widespread diffusion.) When the wooden members of the mines and rails reached the end of their lives, they were pulled, burned for fuel, and replaced by a new batch of timber—the whole cycle starting again.

Today’s story is different only in its particulars, not its outcome. Whole forests are now razed to make the shipping pallets and cardboard boxes that are vital to global capitalism, and when they reach the end of their lives, they’re often burned for fuel. We’ve also never abandoned wood for home heating and cooking. The wood stoves of today are more efficient than those of yore and make up a much smaller share of heating and cooking, but because our one billion people in 1800 have become eight billion today, far more of us—on the order of two billion or so—use wood for heating or cooking.

A like story can be told for oil and gas. Oil and gas may have supplanted coal for transport and heating a century ago, but coal is still baked into those industries. To make our innumerable cars, trucks, trains, ships, furnaces, and boilers requires massive amounts of steel, both for the machines themselves and for the infrastructure they demand: mining equipment to extract raw materials, factories to put the pieces together, railways and bridges to move everything, and on and on. Making high-quality steel requires massive amounts of coal—no electric-powered process is half so good—so as our oil- and gas-burning machines have run riot, coal has too.

In short, an energy transition—any energy transition, not just the renewables transition—is not at all as straightforward as swapping a wood stove for a coal furnace. In fact it’s so untidy and convoluted, we’ve yet to pull one off.

But for all that, it’s true that much of what now runs on wood, coal, oil, or gas could, with sufficient political will, run on sun, wind, or water. But by no means all of it, no time soon anyway. You can power a house with solar panels and batteries, but the steel in those devices will have to be forged for the foreseeable future in a coal-fired steelworks. And while a half-ton battery can power your one-ton car, the physics don’t scale up to getting a fifty-ton passenger jet off the ground or moving a ship with a hundred thousand tons of cargo across an ocean. Someday hydrogen generated by renewable electricity or another innovation may power planes, ships, and steelworks, but such technologies are in their tender youth. We are decades from the grail of net zero.

I take no joy in reciting these unkind facts, but front them we must. To perpetuate the delusion that we’re deep into a transition to clean energy, that a politics-free rush to bargain-priced renewables will save the day—is saving the day even now—is to tranquilize ourselves when we desperately need to wake up, raise hell, and put an almighty fear in the moguls orchestrating our destruction. Only then will we stand a chance of upending fossil fuels, reining in our own ecocidal excess, and mitigating the climate holocaust already enveloping us.Email

Steve Hendricks

Steve Hendricks is the author of three well-reviewed books of literary nonfiction, one of which, The Unquiet Grave: The FBI and the Struggle for the Soul of Indian Country, was named a best book of the year by several publications. His most recent book is The Oldest Cure in the World: Adventures in the Art and Science of Fasting. His website is www.SteveHendricks.org

One Blow After Another

Michael T. Klare

 April 7, 2026

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Image by Ivan Pergasi.

On March 13th, buried in the New York Times’s coverage of the U.S.-Israel-Iran conflict was a headline that would have been easy to miss amid the din of war coverage: “As El Niño Simmers, Scientists Warn of Weather Extremes Starting in Late Summer.” Many readers may not even have noticed it, but that article noted that scientists at the Climate Prediction Center, a part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, had raised their estimate for an El Niño event this summer from 60% to about 80%.

Admittedly, in this strange world of ours, that hardly seemed like an earth-shattering revelation. But if you had read the piece more closely, your alarm bells should instantly have gone off. Forecasters now predict that the coming El Niño — a warming of the Pacific Ocean that deeply affects global weather patterns — is likely to be as severe as the one in 2023-2024, which triggered severe flooding and prolonged heatwaves around the world. As the article noted, however, average world temperatures are now actually higher than they were at the height of that previous El Niño, thanks to global warming, and so it’s likely that we will face even more intense heatwaves and flooding this time around.

Consider that news alarming enough. Unfortunately, the bad news didn’t end there. The Times article went on to report that, since early last year, the Trump administration has laid off thousands of Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) workers, greatly diminishing the agency’s ability to respond to such impending weather disasters. And then there’s the dismal fact that Trump has overseen the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development, which once sent humanitarian aid to disaster-struck countries.

And, sadly enough, it only gets worse from there. After all, we know that the Trump administration is doing everything it can to boost the production of fossil fuels — the consumption of which is the main driver of global warming — even as it also works to impede global action to slow the warming process. On January 7th, for example, the president announced that the United States would withdraw from the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, the bedrock treaty upon which most international efforts to rein in that onrushing nightmare are based.

Likewise, on February 12th, the administration repealed the scientific determination (called the “endangerment finding”) that gives the government the legal authority to combat climate change. And that’s not all: on March 15th, the Times also reported that the administration was preparing to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the nation’s premier institution for studying global weather patterns — including the severe climate disturbances we can expect from the coming El Niño and higher world temperatures. In other words, the rest of us will not only be deprived of emergency assistance during future climate disasters, but also lack timely information about oncoming hazardous weather patterns.

As I consumed all of that — in the midst, of course, of President Trump’s ill-conceived war on Iran — it struck me that we need to brace ourselves for ever more calamitous outcomes from Donald Trump’s extreme leadership incompetence. In fact, his incompetence is likely to produce one mega-disaster after another, culminating perhaps in global political-economic collapse.

Trump’s Profound Incompetence

Donald Trump’s leadership incompetence has already been demonstrated in one bad move after another. His capricious imposition of ever-fluctuating tariffs on U.S. imports, for example, has caused prolonged misery for farmers and many small and medium businesses that depend on predictable trade patterns. Likewise, his heavy-handed deployment of armed ICE and other federal agents to Minneapolis achieved little in the way of apprehending dangerous immigrants but caused widespread disorder and violence, while killing two nonviolent protestors. But the most severe example of his governing incompetence to date has been his handling of Operation Epic Fury, the war with Iran.

While devising an elaborate plan to destroy Iran’s conventional military capabilities and shatter the regime, the Trump team appears to have made no preparations to eliminate the Iranians’ extensive drone capabilities or their ability to disrupt oil production and transit in the Persian Gulf area, with far-reaching global consequences. As of this reporting, the critical Strait of Hormuz through which one-fifth of the world’s oil supply passes every day (along with a substantial share of its liquified natural gas [LNG] and chemical fertilizers) remains largely closed to commercial traffic. This has produced energy shortages in many countries that are heavily reliant on imported oil and/or LNG and, because oil is a globally-traded commodity, it has boosted gasoline prices in the United States, despite the fact that this country doesn’t import much Middle Eastern oil.

None of this should have been unexpected. The Iranians have, on numerous occasions, threatened to block the Strait of Hormuz in response to a U.S. attack on their country, while their efforts to build up a vast stockpile of drones and missiles (and to hide them in remote underground sites) were well publicized.

Any intelligent war planner — of which there are many in the U.S. military establishment — would have known of these realities and planned for them. Indeed, U.S. planning to secure the Strait goes back to 1980, when President Jimmy Carter’s White House issued what became known as the “Carter Doctrine” — an assertion that any move by a hostile force to impede the oil flow in the Persian Gulf “will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.” To enforce that edict, the Pentagon established the U.S. Central Command (Centcom) and established a network of military bases throughout the Gulf region. Since its inception, Centcom has repeatedly stressed its ability to keep the Strait open in the face of any Iranian drive to block it.

Trump obviously ignored all such intelligence — collected over many years by top American officials — and started his war without the slightest apparent plan for keeping the Strait safe for energy shipping. Not only were U.S. naval forces unprepared to escort oil tankers through it, but Trump failed to enlist U.S. allies in such efforts — a glaring fault that only became obvious after the war began when he suddenly called upon them to do so (and chided them when they proved reluctant).

And consider all of this sheer, unadulterated incompetence, on a massive scale.

The Blows to Come

We have yet to witness all the consequences of Trump’s incompetence in undertaking the war against Iran. The shutdown of fertilizer exports from the Gulf is already causing the price of that critical commodity to rise around the world. In doing so, it threatens agricultural production as farmers balk at the higher costs — a trend likely to result in higher food costs everywhere, including the United States. That will, of course, result in increased hunger for those least able to afford the higher prices of food and rising inflation. The rise in food and energy prices could also diminish consumer spending and investor confidence, possibly leading to a global economic slowdown (or worse).

And don’t imagine that those are the only major shocks to the global system we can expect in the months ahead — shocks the Trump team is unlikely to address with competent leadership. At the January convocation of business and political elites in Davos, Switzerland, the World Economic Forum released its “Global Risks Report 2026,” identifying what experts believe are the greatest future threats to global stability and prosperity. According to those experts, the top risks include extreme weather events, state-based armed conflict, and a global economic downturn — real-time threats that Trump has already encountered and failed to address successfully. As those perils gain momentum in the months ahead, Trump’s incompetence will result in ever greater hardship and suffering.

The Adverse Effects of AI

That Davos Risk Report also identified another category of threats for which the Trump administration is woefully unprepared: “adverse outcomes of AI technologies.”

Beginning with AI’s impending impact on employment, the report cites one study suggesting that “AI could eliminate up to 50% of entry-level, white-collar jobs within the next five years in the United States, potentially driving unemployment to 10–20%” — an enormous threat to social and political cohesion. At the same time, a massive buildup of computing data centers is putting extreme stress on local energy and water supplies across the U.S., introducing an added layer of popular unease and conflict.

Hovering in the background of all this is the threat of “rogue AI” — the possibility that computer scientists at OpenAI, Anthropic, or one of the other leading AI firms will create a “superintelligent” version of AI capable of outperforming humans in most cognitive tasks and selecting its own objectives, independent of human wishes or instructions. Think of “Skynet,” the superintelligent AI in the Terminator movie series that chooses to eliminate humans by inciting a global nuclear war. While the Davos Risk Report doesn’t address the risk of advanced AI development directly, there is growing talk in the scientific community of just such an outcome, as vividly suggested, for example, by the 2025 book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.

And I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that President Trump and his entourage are wholly unprepared to address the very idea of such a possibility. Rather than emphasize safety in the development of advanced AI models, Trump has called for their untrammeled evolution. In his major policy statement on AI, “Winning the Race: America’s AI Action Plan,” he made his top objective overridingly clear: “It is a national security imperative for the United States to achieve and maintain unquestioned and unchallenged global technological dominance.”

That means, as his plan explains, eliminating all barriers to the development of advanced AI models, including any legislative restrictions on their release and any local environmental impediments to the construction of mammoth AI-driven data centers nationwide. Nowhere does Trump’s plan acknowledge the potential for catastrophic job losses from widespread AI utilization or the risk of AI going rogue and threatening the survival of humanity. Rather than offering Americans the slightest protection from such potential calamities, he is ensuring that they will become more likely and that the rest of us will suffer the consequences.

Convergent Catastrophes

Until recently, the shocks to global stability and safety — war, economic disorder, climate disaster, and AI-driven calamities — seemed relatively distinct. The crisis in the Persian Gulf, however, has offered us a first glimpse, however limited, of how they might become a conjoined mega-catastrophe.

In the future, there is no reason to assume that such earth-shaking calamities will remain discrete events, allowing world leaders adequate time to respond to them individually. It is likely, in fact, that they will arise ever more frequently in unison. In a 2013 study conducted for the U.S. intelligence community, the National Research Council described just such “clusters of extreme events,” warning that they are a concern from a national security perspective “because U.S. government resources and those of other international actors deployed to deal with a security or humanitarian concern related to the first event in a cluster might be unavailable or less available to deal with a second or subsequent event.” The potential result of such a future reality could, of course, prove to be almost unimaginable social disorder, economic chaos, and even state collapse.

Overcoming one extreme event, let alone two or more, would always pose a remarkable challenge to even the most competent of governments. Sadly, we face an increasingly hazardous future with a demonstrably incompetent leadership team running what still passes for the most powerful country on Earth. For the United States to survive, no less prosper, Americans will need to unite around a demand for a humane and deeply competent national leadership team. If there’s anything we can agree on, it should be a need for leaders who can successfully steer us through severe national calamities — but don’t hold your breath for such an outcome in the next three years.

This piece first appeared on TomDispatch.

Michael T. Klare is the five-college professor emeritus of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and a senior visiting fellow at the Arms Control Association. He is the author of 15 books, the latest of which is All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change.