The Trump administration’s attack on Iran was hardly a surprise. Since January, the military buildup around Iran has telegraphed that an attack was imminent. Yet despite being long foreseen, the attack was no less shocking. The assassination of Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei signaled this would not be a repeat of the Twelve-Day War last summer but a far more bitter and destructive conflict. At the same time, the administration has proudly declared its contempt for traditional rules of engagement, suggesting a disregard for “collateral damage” that eclipses even the sordid record of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
At the same time, there are signs that the administration was woefully underprepared for their war. Their announced war aims have been shifting and inconsistent. There was no plan for evacuating American citizens from the region, despite the predictability of Iran’s response. Finally, it is not even clear that the American military has sufficient armaments for the length of engagement that is now being predicted.
All of this raises the question of who exactly is planning Donald Trump’s war. Investigating this question reveals more than just the incompetence for which both Trump administrations are justly famous. It also reveals what a profound break Trump’s war party forms with the American foreign policy establishment and its backers among the corporate leadership.
Much of what makes this break possible is itself in need of explanation. In my recent book, Rogue Elephant, I argued that what is most novel about Trump and today’s Republican Party stems from the GOP becoming unmoored from the control of America’s capitalist class as a whole — importantly, not from the control of individual capitalists or narrow sectoral interests but from the kind of class-wide oversight that the foreign policy planning network was designed to provide. While warmaking and imperialist horror are far from aberrations in American foreign policy, it is this…
Auteur: Paul Heideman
