Donald Trump’s disastrous war in Iran underscores that the guiding principle of his foreign policy is superpower suicide. But this is a symptom of a deeper condition: the democratic distortions and drastic inequalities that have enabled world-historic levels of strategic buffoonery.
TORONTO—The United States is spending billions of dollars to lose a war in Iran that is enriching its oligarchs, impoverishing its citizens, sabotaging its alliances, and strengthening its enemies. The war is exposing a guiding principle of US President Donald Trump’s foreign policy: superpower suicide. Empires rise and fall, but to my knowledge no state has ever deliberately, and systematically, killed its own power—much less with such speed.
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