Are you loving the Ride of Fate roller coaster yet? If you are an American, or one of its friends or (especially) one of its designated enemies, you better start paying more attention and find a way off this ride before it picks up too much speed.
Let’s review for a second. The United States, as a signatory to the UN charter, the Geneva Conventions, and the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, all of which it either wrote or had great input in developing, has used its great post-WW2 power and influence to urge/compel other countries to sign and uphold all of the above agreements. Under these sets of documents, waging war on a country that is not an “immediate and existential threat” is an act of egregious “aggression,” which is a defined war crime. Just ask US Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson, who was chief prosecutorial counsel at the Nuremberg Tribunal after WW2. He, as the principal writer of the charter governing the Nuremberg Tribunals, specified that unprovoked aggression against a country not at war and not threatening such is the most execrable war crime, for all other war crimes stem from it. In our most recent expedition into self-unaware double standards, the US has (yet again) managed to violate all of its commitments and self-righteous preening regarding standards of conduct in its use of Israel as a cat’s paw to “once and for all) level Iran.
Iran attacked no one, indeed, it was engaged in negotiations in which it signaled a clear intent to throttle back its nuclear enrichment program to the 3.67% uranium enrichment levels *every* country in the world is entitled to develop under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, to which (unlike Israel, by the way) it is a signatory.
It is not necessary to like or approve of Iran’s internal policies or theological preferences to find them innocent of precipitating recent events. I certainly have no use for their Islam-based policies, but, objectively speaking, they are not the aggressors here.
Neither does one need to fawn over or give mindless approval to every action of the UN; I certainly don’t. It regularly meddles in or wanders into areas of international relations for which it has no competence, but in certain areas, its charter, signed by nearly all nations, does provide it legitimacy, and, for the moment, its codifications regarding war, and ancillary codifications like the Geneva Conventions and the NPT under its effective custodianship, are all we have to keep minor skirmishes from becoming major, potentially world-ending wars. At least four times since the end of WW2, the UN apparatus has served, however clumsily, to avert wars that could have escalated to nuclear exchanges. Under the terms of the UN charter, President Trump, the State Department and the US armed forces have facilitated and escalated an act of clear, unauthorized, unjust aggression against Iran, at the eager behest of its equally guilty unsinkable aircraft carrier: Israel.
President Trump, has no basis of authority to do what he has done regarding Iran on the domestic front, as well. He is in massive, clear-cut violation of Constitutional procedure in his exercise of war powers. To be fair, every president in our lifetime has ignored the constitutional protocols; he’s hardly alone there. But knowingly aiding a country with both nukes and a touchy trigger finger to use them without going to Congress is flatly unconstitutional *and* grossly irresponsible, considering possible escalation scenarios that are obvious. It is Congress’ sole prerogative to declare war. This current situation is not Grenada 2 or something, this could potentially impact the whole world. The least that could be done is to make Congress debate the merits and make the decision to formally declare war, or not.
As a dodge to that, and a convenient way for Congress to avoid its responsibilities, there is the War Powers Act of 1973, which itself is flatly unconstitutional, but this has never been challenged or tested in a court case (mostly because neither Congress nor the courts want to handle that hot potato). Anyway, unconstitutional though it may be in itself, the Act purportedly grants a president authority to unilaterally act for up to 60 days under a clear and present danger to *the United States* without direct Congressional authorization, but he still *must* formally notify Congress about his intentions and their scope within 48 hours. This was not done.
Trump is acting in the precise way a tyrannical king might do, which was expressly understood to be objectionable and avoided by the Founding Fathers, hence their intent to hand declarations of war to Congress in the Constitution. He’s mercurial and erratic, changing his mind and his “strategies” on a dime over and over, while issuing childish, ALL CAPS threats and edicts on Truth Social to all potential parties and the whole world. His erratic behavior is undermining his legitimacy , and making other countries conclude that the US is unpredictable and incapable of forming lasting agreements (or, especially, potential treaties) under his administration.
The Russians don’t trust him, those countries currently forced to engage him in his unilaterally imposed tariff wars don’t trust him, BRICS doesn’t trust him, and you can be darned sure Iran doesn’t trust him, in both his threats or his attempts to mediate or negotiate anything. He has unilaterally destroyed, or at least severely damaged, the good offices and reputation for fairness that the United States formerly (sort of) enjoyed. On that basis, watch countries start backing out of the NPT and consider their own nuclear programs. Why not? If a country can be attacked for not having nukes, in an area of the world where another country that *does* have them threatens it constantly *with* them, well, they “might as well” develop them too, as at least some form of balance-of-power hedge. This is by no means an endorsement of that mindset on my part, but one has to see it as a now-likely “thought process “ throughout the Middle East.
Reckless, unilateral actions that are half-baked and have no long-term vision or strategy motivating them are becoming a trademark of an administration that is too egocentric to act rationally. The situation is even worse when incompetent people with no training or background in foreign policy are routinely put in cabinet-level positions to be yes-men for erratic “visionary leadership.” But such doings have been mandated by a political apparatus that puts people in prominent positions of authority as the result of semi-mindless political “beauty contests” instead of competence and training. The increasingly politically unsavvy electorate, with its minute attention span focusing on the NFL or The Voice, cannot fathom anything more nuanced than that, and must be mollified. Behold the vehicle of our own doom!
As someone who voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020 (holding my nose a bit the second time) and who stood with him as a matter of principle to protest election fraud by being present in DC during *both* 1-6-21 and 12-12-2020, I take no delight in writing any of the foregoing. Argue on the basis of the deficiencies in my points if you like, but blindly following a clear egomaniacal megalomaniac just because we “had to stop Harris” is weak sauce, and will no longer pass muster. This guy put us on a path that may, even now, escalate to get us all killed. Twice. In only 8 days!
As Trump himself often puts it: “Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
