The Iran Fiasco’s Silver Lining: Trump, Bibi, and the Neocons Got Their Clocks Cleaned

by David Stockman | Jun 22, 2026 | 

If you don’t think the Donald inhabits an alternative universe – just set your mandibles loose to chomp on his most recent missive. According to history’s most gifted practitioner of the Art of the Deal, only one thing really counts with respect to his Paperless Invite for Iran to join yet another round of negotiations: Namely, making good on their pledge to “never, ever” get a nuke, which they never, ever, ever actually had or had even pursued:

Trump: “This agreement is about one thing — that Iran will never have a nuclear weapon. Never ever ever. The rest of it is irrelevant, frankly.”

And just in case anyone missed the point, he further insisted that the real bad stuff that supposedly provoked the US/Israel attack in the first place – the 420 kilograms of 60% HEUs – and which the Donald had been on the verge sending in ground troops and Caterpillar earth-movers to retrieve, doesn’t matter so much any more, either!

Trump is backing away from getting Iran’s enriched material: “You could make the case, why even bother? It’s not very valuable stuff.”

That’s right. It is plain as day that the Donald is laying the ground work for a final “deal” with Iran that contains nothing more than a notional “No Nukes” pledge, gussied up by some variation of JCPOA Light.

That is, an agreement about:

• the length in months and years of a moratorium on Iran’s fuel grade (3.67%) enrichment operations in support of its civilian nuclear power plant.
• the scale of these civilian enrichment operations in terms of facilities and numbers and types of permitted centrifuges once they restart.
• the intrusiveness of a renewed IAEA inspection regime.
• the “snap-back” mechanisms designed to keep the mullahs on the straight and narrow of the overall Peace Plan.

Needless to say, the Obama folks will be proven to have done a far better job the first time around during their arduous negotiations of 2013-2015 than whatever cockamamie version emerges from a final deal that the Donald must and will sign in the shadows of the upcoming November Congressional elections.

Still, peace is better than war against a faraway nation that has 1% of America’s GDP and which never wanted “nukes” of the explosive type in the first place; and one that has now also discovered that 1,600 kilometers of rocket- and drone-studded shoreline along the Strait of Hormuz to be far more powerful than an implosion device chock-a-block with U-238, anyway.

But when it comes to Iran’s missiles, proxies, evil regime, enriched stockpiles and economic and military strength in the middle east – all the things that the War was allegedly fought over—not so much.

Of course, you might well ask why the Donald spent upwards of $100 billion to date on this misbegotten project. And that’s at least what it is when you count munitions expended (~$41 billion), damaged bases and military assets (~$12 billion), aid to Israel and sundry O&M costs ($7 billion) and needlessly increased domestic fuel costs (~$40 billion).

Indeed, none of that was necessary – to say nothing of pushing the global economy to the edge of collapse – in order to get a NO NUKES PLEDGE from the mullahs. After all, the chief mullah himself – the assassinated Ayatollah Khamenei Sr— had given that pledge long ago (2004) in the form of something far more powerful and binding than a diplomatic post-card addressed to Washington.

We are referring, of course, to the former Ayatollah’s religiously binding Fatwa proscribing Iran from possessing or even working upon nuclear weapons.

And, don’t smirk. The alleged medievalist regime in Tehran did take the instructions of its Supreme Leader deadly serious. For crying out loud, even the war-loving US intelligence agencies have testified to that truth over and again.

So at the end of the day, the Donald’s still secret “peace plan” appears to be all to the good. This last and most pathetic Regime Change War may finally destroy the UniParty consensus which has generated endless Forever Wars since the end of the Cold War in 1991; and set off a civil war in the Republican party that may finally rid the remnant that emerges from the baleful grasp of the Bibi/neocon Fifth Column.

Stated differently, what the neocons will denounce as the Donald’s “surrender” will underscore better than anything else that the war was a gigantic mistake; and that the bellicose loud-mouth who launched it without even consulting the Congress – let alone getting a constitutionally prescribed declaration of war – got his clock cleaned in the process.

Indeed, that Trump actually “lost” the war was starkly confirmed this morning by the careful work of the folks who make a living tracking tankers on the blue water and the movement of 106 mb/d of liquids through the labyrinthine global petroleum supply chains.

To wit, in January Iran was earning about $90 million per day from its oil exports. That figure reflected a $63 per barrel Brent price minus a $10 per barrel discount for Iranian crude, multipled by sales of about 1.7 million barrels per day.

As it happened, the Donald’s mighty Naval blockade wasn’t all its cracked-up to be by his ex-news-reader Secy of Defense. That’s because there was about 130 million barrels of Iranian petroleum on the blue water in transit to market or in floating storage when Hegseth allegedly brought down the hammer of the US Navy blockade on April 13th.

But that was more than enough to support sales during the month of May of about 850,000 barrels per day from this floating stockpile outside the blockade perimeter—augmented by another 250,000barrels per day of workarounds over land routes.

Moreover, while the resulting sales of 1.1 mb/d during May represented a sharp 35% reduction from the January daily rate, that was only half the equation. During May the Brent marker price averaged $107 per barrel or nearly double the January price. Moreover, due to the extreme global scarcity induced by the Donald’s Demolition Derby in the Gulf, the discount fell to just $1 per barrel on Iranian crude.

Hence the math. At $106 per barrel and 1.1 mb/d, Iran earned an estimated $116 million PER DAY in May or nearly 30% more than the January level!

And that was even as Mr. Body-builder at the DOD was regaling the Donald with the wonders of the Naval blockade.

Moreover, for want of doubt the estimated Iranian haul of oil loot during May was $3.6 billion on the month and $43 billion at an annual rate – a figure which happens to exceed 15% of Iran’s pre-war GDP.

So, no, the mullahs didn’t cry UNCLE!

THE DONALD DID. And there is no doubt as to why.

The coming storm of renewed inflation is already baked into the cake and will surge again toward 5-6% or higher in the run-up to the November elections for reasons we amplify below. Still, the Donald is belatedly doing god’s work – that is, making peace – because he apparently finally realized that if the Dems run the tables in November, he’ll be getting a last ride to Mar-a-Logo on the Dick Nixon Memorial Helicopter before next Easter.

In fact, the chart below tells you all you need to know. Most voters do not parse the prices on their grocery bills as between the part that existed on January 19, 2025 and what they paid last week for coffee, hamburger or eggs – and the same with respect to fuel, utilities, rent, health insurance and other daily necessities.

Prices for all of these have been surging since the Donald’s inflationary train-wreck during the pandemic. That was when the lockdowns and supply chain disruptions shrank available supply. At the same time, $4 trillion worth of stimmies and free stuff signed by the Donald – along with an eruption of Trump-supported money-printing at the Fed – turbo charged demand, thereby causing inflation rates to erupt toward 9% and 40-year highs.

That’s the affordability issue, represented in a nutshell by the chart below. The Donald was elected in 2024 because voters desperately hoped that he would not only slow the rate of increase, but would actually roll back the whopping cost-of-living gains that they had already suffered during the previous four years. After all, 108% more for coffee, 64% more for hamburger meat and 52% more to fill the gas tank does make an impression on almost everyone.

Alas, when Bibi convinced the stupid mark in the Oval Office – which he had been hunting for over decades – that the mullahs would roll-over on their backs after the first wave of bombs and missiles, it was all over except the shouting. Any chance to even slow-down this tidal wave of every day cost increases was ended, and the way was paved for a new inflationary surge that is already barreling down the supply chain pike.

Indeed, the Donald is so fundamentally innumerate and impulsive that even now he doesn’t understand that his surrender to the mullahs is already too late. There is so much inflation in the pipeline that even a return to the pre-war status quo ante is not going to slow-down the reported inflation indices in the months just ahead.

For instance, during May the producer price index rose at an incredible 41% annualized rate (blue line) and had been surging higher since the beginning of the year. As a result, the slower moving Y/Y index (dotted red line) is just catching up, rising by a double digit 13.1 % versus prior year during May.

Needless to say, these wholesale level cost increases are now busy filtering their way through the nooks and crannies of America $30 trillion economy in the form of rising energy, materials and labor cost inputs, thereby working their way into end products and the CPI indices to be reported from July through October.

In fact, we have the same story with the consumer price index – just with a few months of lag time. As shown below, the inflationary momentum already in the headline rate will be lifted further on a Y/Y basis right through election time, even if oil prices “drop like a stone” as the Donald apparently expects.

Thus, the Y/Y headline CPI was rising at just 2.37% a year ago, but this May had already rebounded to 4.2% on a Y/Y basis. Of course, it’s the inexorable math of index construction that is already built in. The monthly annualized rate had posted at 5.5% in May and had averaged +6.7% during the four months since February when the war shocks began to hit the US economy.

As we move forward in the months ahead, the low 2.35% average annualized gain of last June to August will drop out, and the higher rates already built into the PPI pipeline will replace them. In turn, that means the headline CPI increase on a Y/Y basis has nowhere to go except up from 4.2% during the balance of summer and early fall.

Meanwhile, rising inflation will not be the only cloud on the horizon as the November bi-elections approach. It should be evident by now that the massive stock market bubble is fixing to have one of its epic decennial crashes.

As of this morning, Space X is now trading at a market cap of $3.0 trillion. That happens to represent 160 times its LTM sales of $18.7 billion, and an infinite ratio to its -$14 billion of free cash flow.

But Space X, of course, is only the canary in the red hot infernal-like coal mine down on Wall Street. As shown below, when you take an average of all the different ways to value stocks – including forward and trailing PEs, EBITDA/Enterprise ratios and aggregate market cap to GDP—we are now at, yes, the 100th percentile of historic performance going back to the 1890s.

To use the Donald’s favorite phrase, the stock market bubble is at nose-bleed level that you have never, ever seen before!

Needless to say, every time the stock market has worked itself into a speculative bubble even approaching this absurd magnitude, it has crashed. And crashed hard.

So come next December, the Donald will be in the countdown to GOODBYE (and good riddance). Inflation will have flared, the stock market will have crashed, the Peace Deal well have given way to renewed Israeli-instigated warfare in the Persian Gulf, and the GOP will have suffered a 1974 scale landslide defeat in November.

You don’t have to be a student of American history to understand what would happen next.

Needless to say, none of this will be good for the unhinged megalomaniacal blowhard now ensconced in the Oval Office. But, ironically, it may well be good for America.

Surely Washington’s ignominious defeat in Iran will put the disciples of Empire on the run. And, hopefully, it may purge the GOP of both the MAGA Hat maniacs and the neocon Bibi First warmongers, too.

Trump’s War a Failure, Trump’s Peace a Failure Too

Monday 22 June 2026

INTERNATIONAOL VIEWPOINT/IMPRECOR

President Donald Trump signed what he called “the Iran peace deal” during a dinner at the Versailles Palace on June 17 to the applause of the G-7 heads of state. But there is no peace. And no one else is applauding.

In his typically grandiloquent and bombastic style, Trump said that he had reshaped the Middle East and “saved Israel from nuclear annihilation.” He declared, “Ships of the world, start your engines. Let the oil flow.” But, as I am writing on June 21, few ships have moved through the Strait of Hormuz and little oil has flowed.

Trump, even as he promoted his peace plan, intermittently threatened to begin bombing Iran again.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, unhappy with Trump’s deal, has continued attacks on Lebanon, with more deaths and destruction. Furious, Trump told Netanyahu, “What the fuck are you doing? You’re fucking crazy. You’d be in prison if it weren’t for me.”

The Iranian government, believing a ceasefire in Lebanon was part of the deal, now refused to move forward after Israeli attack. Netanyahu argues there is no deal until Hezbollah is disarmed. Israeli fascist National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir made the horrifying declaration that Israel should “burn all of Lebanon.” By and large, Israelis oppose Trump’s deal and now 60% of them oppose Netanyahu, largely because the peace deal doesn’t eliminate Hezbollah.

In the United States recent polls show that 60% of the American people are unhappy with Trump’s peace deal. Republican and Democratic politicians don’t like it either. Republican leaders believe that the deal gives too much to Iran: ending all sanctions and agreeing to pay $300 billion to Iran, while postponing the negotiation of an agreement to end Iran’s nuclear program. Republican Senators Bill Cassidy, Ted Cruz, Roger Wicker, Tom Cotton and Lindsey Graham have all criticized the deal in those terms. Cassidy called the deal the "worst foreign policy blunder in decades."

Cotton, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said, “certain aspects of this deal are a step in the wrong direction.” Cotton criticized lifting U.S. sanctions on Iran’s oil exports, which he estimated would allow the country to bring in between $4.5 and $6 billion a month. “That’s a lot of money,’ he said. “And we know that this terrorist revolutionary regime is not going to spend that money on day care or on hospitals. They’re going to use it to rebuild their drone stockpiles, their missiles, to fund Hamas and fund Hezbollah.”

American politicians and the American public don’t understand that Hezbollah was created as a Shiite militia in reaction to a previous Israeli invasion in 1982, that led to an 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon. Hezbollah became a political party and established large scale social services in southern Lebanon. Lebanese of all faiths and politics, except the Christo-fascists, have come to accept it an integral part of Lebanese society, even if many would like to see Hezbollah disarm. Short of Ben Gvir’s genocidal call, “burn all of Lebanon,” Hezbollah is not going away.

Trump’s deal, if it ever actually goes into effect and if there is also a nuclear deal, will probably be less effective in restraining Iran’s nuclear program that President Barack Obama’s 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, torn up by Trump in 2018.

At the moment supposedly there is no war, actually there is no peace, and almost nobody is happy with the deal, except maybe Iran’s leaders. In the United States, people want the war over, but there is no anti-war movement to end it either. The American left has been focused on the primary elections and the national elections coming in November that will determine who controls congress. And, if we’re in the streets, that could change U.S. foreign policy.

21 June 2026

International Viewpoint 

Why is the US in Iran?

Gerald Sussman

 June 23, 2026

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“God created war so that Americans would learn geography.”

– Attributed to various sources.

“One of the delightful things about Americans is that they have absolutely no historical memory.”

– Zhou En-lai (cited by William Blum)

There is no irreducible answer to this query. There are multiple factors driving US-Israeli aggression in that country, and the rest of the Middle East. Most visibly, US officials and their propaganda organs in the media and in government align with Israel’s cold-blooded, supremacist hostility toward Iran and other Muslim countries.

American ruling circles, with few exceptions, appear incapable of understanding that the humiliation Iran in 1979 (the “hostage crisis”) inflicted on the US was of America’s own making. The state/media establishment has produced no useful propaganda to offset this recurring reality.

There is a second order of explanation that looks to the dark influence of Israel on US Middle East policy. Israeli propaganda depicts the Zionist state as a victim of Tehran by virtue of the material support it gives to Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis in their backing of the Palestinian cause and blocking Israeli territorial expansion. The US mainstream power structures have wholly bought into this narrative, portraying the allies of Palestinian freedom, including Iran, as “terrorist” state organizations.

If nothing else, the Israeli propaganda machinery has until recently been masterful at manipulating public opinion through a well-coordinated state project known as Hasbara. But Hasbara is not only about planting stories in the press and TV news of key allied states, such as the US, UK, and France.

It also provides free trips to Israel for foreign politicians, finances their election campaigns, especially in the US and UK, arranges overseas tours for Israeli celebrities, recruits speakers at university events, and constantly renews and instrumentalizes public memory of the Holocaust, such as by actively collaborating with the American film and TV industries to produce sympathetic films on the theme of Jewish suffering and the Zionist project.

Israel also maintains an organization, Camera, which surveils Israel’s image in the US and other countries, ready to pounce on factual public representations of the condition of the Palestinian people. Until the recent slaughter in Gaza, Israeli propaganda was quite successful at flipping the meaning of victimhood, in effect turning the Holocaust upside down.

The racist apartheid Jewish state now seeks a final solution for non-Jews living in their midst and lebensraum for their land-hungry settlers in the occupied territories of Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon. For more than 75 years, the Zionists have been either exterminating Palestinians or expelling them from their villages. This reality has been redacted from the information channels in North America and Europe. It is only social media that have revised the popular perception of Israel.

The well-known “realist” political theorist, John Mearsheimer is puzzled by the lack of pragmatism in US foreign policy in the Middle East, which he can only explain by the power of the Israel lobby. Here he refers mainly to Jewish billionaires who fund organizations such as AIPAC, which openly took credit for helping elect 322 American politicians in the 2024 election cycle.

These organizations either contribute to pro-Israel PACs or directly fund the campaign expenses of politicians in their camp. One of the major donors is Miriam Adelson, who gave Donald Trump $106 million for his 2024 campaign and offered $250 million, according to Trump, if he (illegally) runs for a third term. The Israel lobby has been extremely well represented in both the Trump and Biden governments.

Although Mearsheimer and his Harvard colleague Stephen Walt were certainly courageous in exposing the power of the lobby and corrupting influence in American politics, their analysis falls short in the way they assume that states operate on a rational calculus of national self-interest, without reference to the composition of the state itself. Among the realists, however, Mearsheimer in particular does see the US as having acted very aggressively over the centuries in its foreign policy objectives.

He fails, however, to consider that the violence perpetrated by the US always redounded to the benefit of organized, wealthy business interests, especially the arms industries, banking, and in the Middle East, the oil interests, and was not, contrary to his view, acting out of irrational motives. Moreover, if Israel never existed, the US would still be blasting its way “from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli” – and Tehran.

That said, the Jerusalem Post reported that Netanyahu and the head of Israeli foreign intelligence (Mossad), David Barnea, convinced the mentally challenged US president that Iran faced an imminent collapse and needed only a quick decapitation of the Supreme Leader and other key officials to end the regime. Trump dismissed the national intelligence estimate of 18 agencies under director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard that informed him that Iran had no plans to develop a nuclear weapon. Doing foreign policy on his instincts, Trump was outwitted by a nation that enjoyed a unique geopolitical configuration, mountain ranges, the Strait of Hormuz, and advanced military hardware, which neither the Americans nor the Israelis had tactically or intelligently considered.

Nor had US foreign policy professionals but for a very few given serious thought to the strength of Iranian nationalism, its technological sophistication, and sense of self-determination. The 1979 Iranian revolution made little impression on Foggy Bottom, which continued in the next few years to pursue regime change in vulnerable states throughout the world: Nicaragua, Grenada, Afghanistan, Panama, Poland, and the Philippines, among others, an old habit that was rejuvenated by the fall of the Soviet Union and the Wolfowitz Doctrine’s call for unipolar American hegemony.

In the case of Iran, any serious student of foreign policy, including those who cover it in the mainstream media, should understand that the US overthrew a vibrant democracy in that country in 1953 and replaced it with a 26-year dictatorship under Shah Pahlavi. That action, undertaken as a joint US-UK initiative, was designed to overturn the secular liberal nationalist Mossadegh government’s nationalization of the oil industry and to eliminate the growing influence of the communist Tudeh Party in Iranian politics.

Following the 1979 revolution, the Carter administration illegally placed sanctions on Iran, a policy that has been maintained by every Democrat and Republican administration. During his presidency, Joe Biden (2021-2025) made no effort to restore the JCPOA agreement on nuclear non-proliferation that President Obama, with the help of the Russians, had signed with the Rouhani government in 2016, but which Trump unilaterally canceled two years later.

The International Atomic Energy Agency stipulated at the time that Iran was in full compliance with the JCPOA accords, but expressed no concern that Trump had used false claims of violations to justify his attack on that country. Nor did the IAEA publicly defend the principle that each country has the sovereign right to develop a nuclear program.

In the economic sphere, the US-Israel military-industrial complex is interwoven with a shared supply chain and technical collaboration. Apart from genocidal and racial motivations for their joint aggression in the Middle East, the attacks on Arab and Persian peoples in the region provide the imperialist and sub-imperialist states with data on the usefulness and flaws of their weapons systems, information with which they can further militarize their foreign engagements.

The threat of Iran is its opposition to US-Israeli hegemony. As Nancy Fraser sardonically notes, “Epic Fury,” a theater of massive violence launched upon civilians in Iran modeled on the reign of terror deployed in Gaza, sounds like a title drawn from Marvel Comics.

For the CEOs of Boeing, RTX (formerly Raytheon), Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and General Dynamics, the killing of tens of thousands of civilians registers as $275 billion in windfall profits from 2025 to early 2026 and counting. Israeli defense industries get a share of the ten-year $38 billion aid package due to expire in 2028. As profit-hungry as they are, the M-I-C can’t seem to produce bombs fast enough to fully annihilate the Middle East.

Conclusion: Trump the trombenik

A trombenik is a Yiddish expression, which means, among other things, stupid blowhard, a fake, and a loser. That’s who’s bringing down the richest and most expansive imperium in human history.

As commentator Patrick Henningsen has pointed out, not only has Trump reduced foreign policy to the craven language of deal-making, he’s also influenced the mainstream media to cover international news within that paradigm. The norms of diplomacy, including the establishment of treaties, have vanished from international relations. Deals are not permanent fixtures lodged in the protocols of binding international law, they are ephemeral and easily undone by later governments.

It is not just Israel that is influencing Trump’s annihilationist rhetoric toward Iran but also those among his foreign policy advisers who are part of the Zionist lobby. Drawn from the real estate market and without any diplomatic or foreign policy training, but with the support of the Israel, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, along with Witkoff’s adviser, Israel lobbyist Nick Stewart, were chosen to “negotiate” with Iran. Stewart had earlier made clear that he was firmly opposed to negotiating with any Iranian officials. Since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, never has the status of state diplomacy been so violated.

Up until now, Trump has acted like putty in the hands of Netanyahu, leading many to speculate that Mossad has the goods on him. Each day, one wonders which Trump will show up. With Israel’s attachment to genocide and the total destruction of Iran, a policy backed by 93% of Israelis and materially backed by the US, America’s support for the neo-fascist state has accelerated America’s own decline on the world stage and its standing as a global hegemon. In the end, the US, having failed to achieve quick regime change in Iran, has lost all sense of purpose, and has brought to light the “banality of evil” of the US-Israel neo-fascist alliance.

Gerald Sussman is professor emeritus of urban studies and international studies at Portland State University. He is the author or editor of seven books, including the most recent (2025), British and American Electoral Politics in the Age of Neoliberalism: Parallel Trajectories (Routledge). This article is an abbreviated version of a forthcoming article in the journal New Political Science. Professor Sussman can be reached at: sussmag@pdx.edu