CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The Gulf of Oman near the Strait of Hormuz. Photo by Matthew Stevenson.

I don’t think there is anything that gives Donald Trump quite so much pleasure as failure, perhaps one of the reasons why he is so enjoying blowing through $50 billion in taxpayer money on his way to numerous defeats in the Strait of Hormuz.

I realize Trump has taken out primetime copyrights on various brands of success—all those “arts” of the deal—but at the end of the day what Trump likes most is to measure himself by the size of his failures (no doubt the only time his remote father ever paid him much attention).

Maybe in the 1980-90s he got a rush from screwing over plumbers in Atlantic City or bilking Wall Street investors on their bonds, but now he needs a little more skin in the game. (“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again…”)

After a lifetime of bankruptcies, failed ventures, sexual transgressions, and Wall Street con jobs that bled dry various banks and investors, how nice for Trump that he can cap his career with (to paraphrase Saddam Hussein, who also foundered in the Persian Gulf) “the mother of all defeats.”

Imagine the good fortune of the Iranians emerging from their bomb shelters amidst the rubble only to find that Trump has declared a cease fire based on Tehran’s ten-point program, which reads as though the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had landed long boats in the Chesapeake and marched overland to Washington to burn the Capitol.

As a premise to the negotiations, the Iranians get to keep their enriched uranium, evade all sanctions, and charge $2 million for every ship transiting the Strait of Hormuz. Advising the Iranians might well be Napoleon himself, who was known to quip: “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”

The self-defeating Trump also agreed to 1) peace talks in Islamabad, Pakistan’s........

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