Watching Trump describe the war against Iran feels exactly like watching King You of Zhou light the beacon fires as a joke — a ruler squandering the last reserves of trust that kept his empire standing.
According to a 9 April report by the UK edition of the International Business Times, Trump has been conducting a blitz of one-on-one phone interviews with reporters — without consulting his White House team. The result: a stream of contradictory statements about the war with Iran. By mid-April, Trump had given nine different answers to nine different journalists on the same subject. On one occasion, he told Axios the war "could be over in two or three days," then turned around and told Britain's Daily Mail "this has always been a four-week operation." In total, Trump offered nine distinct timelines — ranging from "two to three days," to "four to five weeks," to "a six-week deadline."
This chaotic spectacle peaked last Friday, 17 April. Trump coordinated with Iran and successfully persuaded it to announce the lifting of its blockade on the Strait of Hormuz. Iran had been willing to cooperate partly because the U.S. had brokered a ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon. Trump was elated. He fired off a rapid succession of social media posts announcing the reopening of the Strait and declaring a breakthrough agreement with Iran.
But Iran's goodwill was not appreciated. Shortly after Tehran announced the Strait's reopening, the U.S. military declared it would continue blockading Iranian ports. Iran was furious. It publicly stated that America's continued blockade violated their agreement. A day later, Iran reimposed its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and opened fire on an Indian oil tanker attempting to pass through. The U.S. responded by firing on an Iranian merchant vessel in the Gulf of Oman.
From the reopening of the Strait to both nations opening fire on commercial ships, barely 48 hours passed. Oil prices briefly plunged more than 10% on Friday after Iran's announcement, only to rebound 7% on Monday once news broke that both sides had opened fire and the Strait had been sealed shut again.
In hindsight, there was a second motive behind Trump's Friday manoeuvre. A Europe-led "Strait of Hormuz Freedom of Navigation Initiative" was convening in Paris at the very same time. Spearheaded by the UK and France, the initiative had mobilised 50 countries and international organisations with the aim of forming a coalition to escort commercial vessels through the Strait after the war's end.
The European initiative was a clear bid to assert Europe's standing in the post-war international order. The conference conspicuously excluded belligerent nations — meaning the United States — and Trump was incensed. While the conference was underway, he engineered the announcement of the Strait's reopening, effectively torpedoing the meeting. Yet once the conference was scuttled, the U.S. military promptly announced it was resuming its blockade of Iranian ports. The reopening of the Strait turned out to be nothing more than a pipe dream — everyone had celebrated for nothing.
The New York Times published a commentary on 12 April under the headline "Trump's War Is Weakening America in Four Ways." The piece argued that Trump's reckless war has dealt severe blows to the United States. First, it has empowered Iran by allowing it to weaponise the Strait of Hormuz and expand its influence. Second, America's global military standing has been damaged — not only has it burned through vast missile stockpiles, but Iran's asymmetric warfare strategy has ground the U.S. down. Third, it has eroded trust with America's allies, with relationships rapidly deteriorating across Western Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Fourth, America's moral authority has been undermined.
America's appeal was never based solely on its economic prosperity. It rested equally on the values it upheld. Trump has spent his entire political career chipping away at those values, and the damage inflicted recently has reached an unprecedented scale. The brutal methods of armed conflict that American leaders are now embracing are precisely the methods the world collectively renounced after the Second World War. Their use is shaking the very foundations of American global leadership.
Lo Wing-hung
Bastille Commentary
** The blog article is the sole responsibility of the author and does not represent the position of our company. **
American politics right now is better than any TV drama.
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — the same woman who once called Hong Kong's protests "a beautiful sight to behold" — was recently asked what she thought of Trump's latest social media post comparing himself to Jesus. Her reply: "You’d have to ask a psychiatrist." The notion that Trump may be mentally unwell is no longer a punchline in American political circles. It is now being treated as a serious question.
The New York Times dedicated a full piece to examining Trump's mental state. On April 4, chief White House correspondent Peter Baker published a piece titled "Trump’s Erratic Behavior and Extreme Comments Revive Mental Health Debate". It noted that Trump's increasingly erratic behaviour — beginning when he decided to strike Iran — has intensified the debate over whether he is "playing crazy or actually crazy." Last week, Trump threatened to wipe Iran off the map, declaring that "tonight all of civilisation will be destroyed." On Sunday night, he launched a bewildering attack on the Pope, calling him weak on crime and disastrous on foreign policy. This series of incoherent, crude statements has led many observers to see him as a power-drunk, hysterical authoritarian.
The Times piece did not only quote Democrats. It also cited a range of voices from the right questioning Trump's mental state. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia Republican congresswoman who recently broke with Trump, has called for invoking the 25th Amendment to remove him from office on grounds of incapacity. Greene said Trump's threat to destroy Iranian civilisation was "not tough talk — it's a mental breakdown."
Far-right blogger Candace Owens called Trump "a genocidal lunatic." Infowars founder Alex Jones said Trump "does babble and sounds like the brain’s not doing too hot." Even those who once worked alongside him are now speaking out. Former White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham wrote online: "he’s clearly not well."
Trump fired back with a lengthy, furious post — which only served to illustrate his emotional instability. "They have one thing in common, Low IQs," he wrote. Of Owens, Jones, and commentator Tucker Carlson, he added: "They’re stupid people, they know it, their families know it, and everyone else knows it, too! They’re NUT JOBS, TROUBLEMAKERS, and will say anything necessary for some ‘free’ and cheap publicity."
The Times piece ultimately drew no firm conclusions. What it did note, however, is telling: unlike Trump's first term, his second has no equivalent of former Chief of Staff John Kelly — someone willing to quietly restrain him from going too far. Those around him now do not even attempt to hold him back behind the scenes.
Make no mistake: if so many figures in American politics are seriously debating whether Trump is mentally unfit, we should all be alarmed. This is the man with his finger on the nuclear button. The situation demands examination from two angles.
A War Spiralling Out of Control
After negotiations with Iran broke down, Trump announced he was deploying US forces to blockade the Strait of Hormuz. Using a blockade to counter a blockade is, frankly, a kind of madness. Yet within a day of the blockade taking effect, Trump told Fox News that the war was "basically over" and hinted at renewed peace talks with Iran in Pakistan within two days.
On the surface, the conditions for continuing the war do not favour the US. Soaring inflation could hand Republicans a crushing defeat in November's midterm elections, giving Trump every reason to wind things down quickly. Iran, too, appears willing to negotiate, having agreed to face-to-face talks. By conventional logic, there is perhaps a 70% chance this war ends soon. The remaining 30% represents the possibility that Trump acts against all logic and lets things spiral out of control.
The reality is, if so many Americans believe Trump is mentally unwell, who can say with confidence that an unstable person would not turn a manageable conflict into an unmanageable one? We must always leave room for the possibility of irrational decisions from those in power. If every leader always acted rationally, the First and Second World Wars would never have happened.
A System That Elects a Madman
The same Nancy Pelosi who now laughs at Trump as a madman was once a vocal advocate for Hong Kong to replicate the Western democratic model. She called the push for direct elections in Hong Kong "a beautiful sight." But the reality is that American democracy has produced — twice — the very person Pelosi now calls a madman, with his hand on the nuclear button. Once could be called an accident. Twice is unmistakably the choice of a majority of Americans.
This forces us to ask: what has gone so wrong with the Western democratic model? The question becomes even more pointed when we consider the pressure placed on Hong Kong to copy it wholesale. Director of the Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Office Xia Baolong put it well: Hong Kong must balance development with security. If Hong Kong had copied their system and ended up electing some pro-Western neurotic, it would likely have neither development nor security.
Lo Wing-hung
