Trump is clutching at straws and the world knows it

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The Trump administration is hallucinating again. The United States’ “economic D-Day” against Iran will exhaust political consent in Washington for this ill-conceived war long before it forces Iran’s Revolutionary Guard to capitulate.

It draws out the spectacle of Donald Trump’s aimless flailing in a region that neither he nor his close advisers begin to understand, further convulsing the global energy, food and commodity markets and further eviscerating US strategic credibility.

The plan to mount the “single greatest financial offensive ever marshalled against an adversary” requires also mobilising China, Russia, India, Turkey, a resentful Europe and the world’s major financial centres in a joint campaign to throttle Iran, a country that has already learned to live with 2200 separate US sanctions.

The US Treasury could plausibly have pulled off such a feat 10 to 15 years ago, when it was able to crush nations by the “boa constrictor” method, using all the tools of the world’s dollarised financial system. But that supremacy relied on a tight-knit phalanx of democratic allies – or what we used to call the West. Such a world no longer exists, and China cannot be pushed around any longer.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has threatened the economic obliteration of any country that declines to enlist as foot soldiers in America’s quarrel.

“If you insist on doing business with them – either transferring money, buying their oil, doing seaborne ship transport – the US government will put its full might and force toward enforcing against you,” he said.

The White House says this is the Iran endgame. We’ve heard that before

Such hubris is courting fate for a nation that depends on constant inflows of capital from these same countries to fund its twin deficits and that already has to pay punitive interest rates to sell its bonds.

The US Treasury made a Faustian pact by issuing so much short-term debt. The trap is closing. Bessent must roll over or fund almost $US6 trillion........

© WA Today