US-Iran: The Madman's War

Who’s Crazy Now?

Nowadays, words like madness and insanity are not much used in psychiatry, but they have retained an afterlife in Western geopolitical parlance to describe ‘mad dictators’ or ‘fanatical’ regimes supposedly impervious to reason and the requirements of the ‘rules-based order.’ These tropes have helped establish Iran’s reputation as the ‘most dangerous state in the world’. For years, conservative commentators have insisted that Iran is not a state that operates according to a rational calculation of its geopolitical interests.

Whereas other states seek certain goals that can be understood even if they are not acceptable, the Islamic Republic, we have been repeatedly told, is in thrall to apocalyptic expectations supposedly derived from ‘Twelver’ Shiism or ‘Mahdism’. Its quest for a nuclear weapon was motivated not only by its insane hatred of Israel, but by a desire to destroy the world and itself in a final showdown with the great and lesser Satan, in order to achieve collective martyrdom.

Such a country could not be dealt with through negotiation - even when Iran did negotiate. Diplomacy was out of the question, even when diplomacy produced positive results. Pity the deluded politicians who believed that you could talk to leaders intent on mass suicide.

As a recent article for the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs on ‘Iran’s kamikaze doctrine’ argued: ‘What we face is not a rational regime seeking security guarantees but rather a regime that sees annihilation as a legitimate instrument of statecraft’ - a regime that had ‘provisioned for maximum harm to be exacted within Iran’s borders’ in the event of war:

This is not military defense in the conventional sense – it is calculated annihilation. Critical infrastructure, including oil refineries, dams, energy hubs, and even civilian urban centers, have reportedly been seeded with strategic weaponry and chemical agents. These are not “booby-traps” in the literal sense, but they serve a dual-use function: to be activated by IRGC operatives in acts of sabotage, or to become targets for foreign powers in a way that can be weaponized in the court of public opinion.

So even when oil refineries etc are targeted by Israeli or US bombs, you can never be sure that the regime might be blowing up its own installations. And why is this?

The aim is threefold: ensure maximum civilian casualties, provoke environmental collapse, and – most cynically – blame Jerusalem. The regime, even in its death throes, seeks to control the narrative.

The late Lindsey Graham, who reportedly helped persuade Trump to take military action against Iran, also attempted to control the narrative in February, when he compared Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to Hitler:

Hitler wrote a book [saying that] he wanted to kill all the Jews. Nobody believed him. I believe the Ayatollah and his regime - not the Iranian people - are religious fanatics, religious Nazis. Hitler wanted a master race; they want a master religion.

And in March, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told a press conference shortly after Israeli strikes killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in the middle of US-Iran negotiations:

Listen, let me explain to you guys in simple English: Iran is run by lunatics! Religious fanatic lunatics! They have an ambition to have nuclear weapons. They intend to develop those nuclear weapons behind a program of missiles and drones and terrorism that the world will not be able to touch them for fear of those things. And this is the weakest they’ve ever been, now is the time to go after them.

Simple English for simplistic thoughts. Because the world now knows that Iran was not as weak or as mad as Rubio thought, but takes decisions based on a clear-eyed assessment of its national and geopolitical interests, using the military instruments at its disposal.

These instruments are obviously more limited than those of its enemies, but Iran has used them effectively in order to extend the ‘battlefield’ beyond its borders and fight the war it wants to fight, while making its enemies bear costs of the war that they had not anticipated. Its tactics have been carefully calibrated, well-prepared and directed towards an overriding strategic objective: to deter its enemies from attacking Iran again, and obtain long-term guarantees of security.

Whatever you think of the regime, these are rational geopolitical objectives that have nothing to do with the Mahdi or the twelfth Imam. In pointing this out, I am not expressing support or approval for the regime or its actions - some of which clearly constitute war crimes and breaches of international law. Nor am I ignoring the violence and repression with which Iran has routinely responded to domestic political dissent. But whatever the likes of Marco Rubio say, its actions during this war are not proof of madness or irrationality.

American Psychosis

The same cannot be said of its opponents. Before the war began, some commentators had begun to wonder whether Trump was reprising what international relations calls ‘madman theory’ in its foreign policy. This theory originated during Richard Nixon’s 1969 attempts to bring the North Vietnamese to the negotiating table, and was defined in a 2023 article (paywalled) by Daniel Ellsberg and Thomas C. Schelling as the belief that ‘projecting a readiness to take extreme action can shape an opponent’s calculations by heightening fears of escalation.’

Has the US been practicing this theory, by deliberately cultivating an aura of do-anything unpredictability intended to throw his enemies - and his allies - off guard? There has certainly been no shortage of ‘extreme action’ in Trump’s second administration, but would be giving such behaviour way too much credit to see it as the product of a considered strategy.

There is also another possibility: that Trump has no strategy, very little grasp of geopolitical or any other kind of reality, and really does not know what he is doing one hour to the next. Or to put it less politely, he may actually be as mad as a box of frogs, rather than a cunning leader pretending to be a madman, and Operation Epic Fury may be the deadliest confirmation of this condition

Ever since it became clear that the US was not achieving its objectives, Trump had staggered through the war like a drunken, blundering oaf, enraged by the resilience of an opponent that did not give him the results he wanted. He has bragged about killing and mass destruction, and threatened to commit war crimes, using the kind of language that one might expect from a drug-addled gangster, rather than a politician.

Even after the ceasefire, he continued to undermine his own negotiators, with a stream of moronic blustering posts and conflicting messages. Only last week, during a meeting at the Oval Office, the Wall Street Journal (paywalled) reports that Trump ‘ launched into a tirade against Iranian leaders, calling them scumbags and lunatics, and unleashing a series of expletives.’

For two weeks now, the US has carried out daily strikes against Iranian targets, including bridges and a desalination plant. Iran has promised an ‘eye for an eye’ and targeted US bases in Kuwait, Jordan, Bahrain and Erbil. Its ally in Yemen, the Ansar Allah or Houthi movement has now imposed a naval blockade on Saudi Arabia, which threatens to disrupt world trade and energy supplies still further.

Last week, the US was reported to be sending dozens of refuelling planes to Israel in preparation for another large attack, now that attack has been shelved, because American missile stocks are seriously depleted. Yet still Trump threatens to blow up bridges and power plants, while contemplating things that even the Wall Street Journal calls ‘previously unthinkable’. He has hinted that Syria may enter Lebanon to fight Hezbollah and signed an agreement permitting Saudi Arabia to enrich uranium - a development that is likely to lead to a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, and which also raises the question of why Iran is not allowed to do the same thing.

None of this suggests soundness of judgement or even the most basic understanding of his adversary. According to anonymous officials from American intelligence agencies, Iran is ‘unlikely to feel significant impact or soften its negotiating position as a result of new rounds of US military strikes like those now underway’ and ‘Tehran and Washington are, for now, stuck in an indefinite limbo between peace and war.’

This cascade of calamities all stems from the violent and incompetent administration in Washington, which has yet to produce any coherent justification for its actions. Trump has continued to claim that there would be ‘no Israel’ today if he had not ‘terminated the nuclear deal’ reached under Barack Obama, and that other countries in the Middle East ‘would have been terminated, extinguished’ if he had not attacked Iran.

There is no evidence to support these ridiculous assertions. They are the lies and fantasies of a leader who cannot get out of the war he foolishly started and who posts messages like this:

Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah

These are not clever strategic gambits, but the wild splenetic outbursts of an incompetent, deranged sociopath, who should never have been entrusted with serious matters of war and peace. His lunacy has its admirers and enablers, from the vapid automaton Karoline Leavitt to the savage Secretary of War ‘testosterone Pete’ Hegseth, who told Congress last week that the war had cost $37 billion, though the US Defense Department has already costed the war at between $80 billion and $100 billion.

Even as Hegseth promises to attack Iran ‘without mercy’, his administration has been lying about American casualties, in order to deflect negative publicity away from his failings and those of his boss.

These grovelling courtiers are not Cordelia or King Lear’s fool, and they are further proof that the deranged emperor in his war room does not operate in a vacuum, but in a milieu that accrues to him like mould. The excellent Drop Site News recently reported a conversation with an anonymous Iranian official regarding the post-ceasefire negotiations between Iran and JD Vance’s team in Islamabad. According to Drop Site:

Iranians warned Vance that the continued presence of President Donald Trump’s Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner would undermine the chance of turning the June 17 framework into an enduring deal.

The official also claimed that:

Iran conveyed to Vance that the pair were more interested in exploiting insider knowledge of the negotiations to profit in financial markets than they were in reaching a deal. Iranian negotiators also expressed concern about repeated leaks from Kushner to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

During the diplomatic talks in Oman in February, the unnamed official claimed that ‘this person [Witkoff] had zero connection to diplomacy or actually advancing the talks,’ and that he had had misrepresented Iran’s positions on a range of issues, ‘including what terms it was willing to offer the U.S. on the fate of its highly enriched uranium’.

These assessments, according to Iran, were passed on to Trump, who appears to have acted on them. So two property speculators-cum-cryptocurrency grifters who knew nothing about nuclear power or nuclear weapons were feeding back to their mad boss, who knows even less than they do, whilst also having a word with Netanyahu and Mossad.

The best that can be said about these diplomatic channels is that they are unlikely to produce coherent policy decisions, but they did help Israel to get the war that it has wanted for decades. And there are conservatives who still support the war despite its outcome. On 18 June Niall Ferguson - a long-time advocate of military action against Iran - wrote a joint letter with former Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant claiming that ‘Israel has done most of the job. Only Trump can finish it.’

Ferguson is not the kind of man to have any qualms about co-writing a letter with an Israeli general wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes in Gaza. ‘Finishing it’ meant attacking Iran’s enrichment facility at Fordow with B-52s. Quoting from Primo Levi, the letter condemned the ‘Iran-sponsored atrocity’ of 7 October 2023, that was ‘consciously intended as a trailer for a second Shoah. This lie segued into the same hysterical claim that has been repeated for the last two decades:

A nuclear-armed Iran would pose more than a threat to the Israeli people and their state. Its missiles could reach Gulf capitals and Europe. Those missiles could allow Iran to sponsor terror and wage conventional war with impunity. The result would be a nuclear arms race in the Gulf.

On 23 June, the US did bomb Fordow with B-52s and bunker-busting bombs, but it turns out the ‘job’ was not ‘finished’, and cannot be finished, without inflicting Gaza-level annihilation on a society of 93 million people. Trump has of course indicated a willingness to do this, but Iran’s responses suggest that such threats have merely encouraged the regime to be wary of negotiations with a capricious leader who cannot be trusted to keep his word from one day to the next.

This is a very different outcome to the one described by the unctuous NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte claimed, in a private message to Trump in June:

Mr. President, dear Donald. Congratulations and thank you for your decisive action in Iran, that was truly extraordinary, and something no one else dared to do. It makes us all safer.

‘Dear Donald’ immediately made this message public, because that is the kind of man he is, but there is Rutte, privately applauding an illegal war of aggression that has not made anyone safer, because that is the kind of man he is, and that is the world we have - a world in which the world’s only superpower can bomb any country whenever it feels like it and for whatever reason, regardless of whether its president is a Rhodes scholar, a former Chicago community activist or a criminal maniac.

Last week, having barely arrived in Downing Street, Andy Burnham approved the decision taken by Keir Starmer, to allow the United States continued access to British military bases following the latest resumption of military operations. This permission was granted on the condition that any such strikes were defensive actions carried out in accordance with Britain’s legal operations under international law.

These obligations cannot, and never could be met, in an illegal war in which there is no means of distinguishing between defensive, retaliatory or aggressive strikes. But no matter what messages of hope or change British politicians bring to the table, some things never change. When the madman wants to use our bases for his bombers, he gets them.

Perhaps Burnham hopes, like his predecessor, that America will one day come to its senses after its fit of MAGAness, humbled and chastened like King Lear. But it is more likely that he simply doesn’t dare stand up to a flailing superpower and its mad leader.

And until more people do, the madman’s war will continue to drag one country after another into a cycle of violence and devastation that always has the capacity to become something even worse.