EDITORIAL: MAD KING TRUMP REFUSES TO QUIT, NETANYAHU COMPOUNDS THE FOLLY AND MODI SILENTLY SWALLOWS INSULTS
Vinod Mubayi
Analysts of the US-Israeli unprovoked and blatantly illegal attack on Iran on Feb 28, while US-Iranian negotiations brokered by Oman were ongoing, have concluded that the assault has failed to achieve any of its objectives. Iran, despite suffering significant losses, is now acknowledged to be in a stronger position compared to the assailants as its closure of the Strait of Hormuz threatens to tank the world economy. The refusal of the narcissist Trump to admit defeat is compounded by the efforts of the genocidal villain Netanyahu to prolong the conflict while nations from Asia to Africa and even Europe suffer the consequences.
It has become painfully obvious now that Trump was bamboozled by Netanyahu and the Israeli Mossad into attacking Iran, something that previous US presidents from George Bush to Obama to Biden had refused to do despite Israeli pleas and entreaties. Trump’s election campaign boasts to his followers that he would keep the country out of wars and his anxiety to win the Nobel Peace Prize sound particularly ironic considering his invasion of Venezuela, and threats to “take over” Greenland, Panama, and maybe Cuba, along with his musings on making Canada the 51st state and sending the US military into Mexico to erase the drug cartels.
At the outset, it needs to be acknowledged that the US attack on Iran on February 28, like the earlier one in June 2025, was highly deplorable as it was carried out while the US and Iran were officially negotiating. A set of outrightly false reasons were trotted out by members of the Trump team following the initial bombings and missile strikes; Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed that the US learnt that Israel was going to attack so the US joined them to preempt an Iranian response. This was shown to be a fabrication when it was revealed that Trump had been persuaded to join the assault a few days earlier by Netanyahu and the Mossad chief David Barnea who convinced Trump that Iran’s regime would crumble in a few days after its top leadership was decapitated; they fantasized that the “Iranian people” would rise up to install a US friendly government.
The US-Israel attack appears to have had four objectives: destruction of Iran’s uranium enrichment capability and the possible capture and removal of the amount of uranium that had been 60% enriched; destruction of Iran’s existing long-range missiles and drones and its industrial capacity to produce them; elimination of Iran’s ability to support Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, and the Houthis in Yemen; and, most important of all, regime change, i.e., removal of the current Shiite religious regime and its replacement by something acceptable to the US, or, failing that, making Iran a failed state on the lines of Libya or Syria. The last objective seems to have been, and likely still is, the goal of the Israelis who wish to eliminate any possible opponent of their plan to emerge as a hegemonic Eretz Israel in the entire West Asia region.
Several weeks after the assault, as Trump proclaimed a ceasefire, the perpetrators of the criminal and deceitful attack on Iran seem to have failed on all four objectives. No doubt, the top leadership of the Iranian regime, including the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, was executed on the first day of the attack itself. Attacks on subsequent days killed more of the civilian and military leadership but the core of the regime remained and stabilized. It was not only able to repel the attacks but mount highly successful counterattacks on US bases in the Gulf Arab states, including Saudi Arabia, and on infrastructure and buildings in Israel.
In their initial retaliatory strikes as the war began, Iranian forces appear to have caused far more extensive damage to U.S. military assets than Trump administration officials have admitted. In these strikes, reports indicated that Iran hit over 100 targets across 11 U.S. bases in the Middle East, including the Gulf Arab states and Saudi Arabia, striking warehouses, command headquarters, aircraft hangars, satellite communications infrastructure, runways, high-end radar systems and dozens of aircraft. These strikes caused damage that will cost billions of dollars to repair and many of the U.S.’s 13 bases in the region have been rendered “all but uninhabitable” due to strikes.
Above and beyond the counterattacks, Iran has been able to essentially shut down the Strait of Hormuz through which a fifth to a quarter of the global oil and gas supply passes, in addition to significant fractions of the world’s supply of fertilizer and helium, the latter being a crucial ingredient in the manufacture of microchips. Stopping the traffic of tankers in the Persian Gulf carrying oil and gas, or other vessels transporting fertilizers and helium, has severe negative impacts on the world economy. Already, the world price of crude oil as well as oil products such as diesel and gasoline has shot up by more than 60% and threatens to go significantly higher the longer the shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz continues. Although the US is now the world’s largest oil and gas producer and does not face any domestic shortage from the shutdown of the strait, oil is a globally traded commodity and its price reflects a global supply-demand balance. Thus, the rise in the price of gasoline at the pump in the US along with increasing inflation poses a domestic challenge to the Trump administration and the Republican Party in the forthcoming elections to the US Congress in November 2026.
Beyond domestic US politics, the larger and more serious long-term impact is to the US role as a global hegemon, attacking countries on the whims of Donald Trump, ousting their government or forcing them to accept US dictates. Despite all of Trump’s incoherent and unfocused bluster, where one day he threatened to commit the mother of all war crimes by “destroying Iranian civilization” and the next day proclaimed an indefinite ceasefire, Iran’s ability to withstand a month of US-Israeli bombing, counterattack effectively with its concealed missiles and drones against Israeli targets and US military assets in the Gulf, and, above all, credibly threaten to crash the global economy by blocking the Strait of Hormuz has led many observers to conclude that it is the US that has effectively “lost” this war in terms of its inability to achieve any of the four objectives it began the conflict with. Prof John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and one of the leading realist political science theorists has expressed Trump’s frustration and dilemma succinctly:
“he cannot win a military victory if he goes up the escalation ladder as the Iranians hold most of the cards. Second, escalation would prolong the war and further reduce the oil and gas flowing out of the Persian Gulf (and probably the Red Sea), which is likely to take the world economy off the precipice. Given this ominous prospect, Trump has a powerful incentive to cut a deal with Iran as soon as possible. But the chief problem he faces is that Israel does not want a deal. It wants the US to continue the war and try to beat Iran into submission. Given the stranglehold the Israel lobby has on Trump, he does not have much maneuver room. All of this is to say, even if he cuts some sort of deal with Iran, Israel and its minions in the US will work overtime to undermine it. Trump is boxed in and he knows it, which I think explains much of his erratic and outrageous behavior in recent weeks. In short, Israel and its lobby bamboozled Trump into starting a losing war against Iran and now they won’t let him end it.”
While Mearsheimer’s views on the culpability of Netanyahu’s Israel and the pro-Israel AIPAC-funded lobby on US politics and the Trump Administration are on target, one has to also recall that there is a considerable neocon lobby in the US too that promoted regime change in Iraq in the George W Bush administration in 2003 and some of whose figures are undoubtedly behind a similar effort now in Iran. Their belief in the invincibility of the American Empire and the ability of American imperialism and military power to bend countries such as Iran to its will recalls what was said about the Bourbon monarchy in pre-revolutionary France: “they learnt nothing and they forgot nothing.”
Trump’s unhinged rhetoric has caused a panel of five leading American psychiatrists to write a letter to the leaders of the US Senate and House of Representatives urging them to exercise their “constitutional responsibilities” to evaluate the “President’s fitness for office” under the 25th Amendment (https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/is-trump-psychologically-unfit):
“President Trump exhibits what forensic mental health experts have, across dozens of independent assessments, identified as the “Dark Triad” of personality traits: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy… The President’s recent public communications have been, by any normal standard of political discourse, alarming. His posts demanding that Iran “open the fuckin’ strait, you crazy bastards” and his threat to bomb Iran “back to the stone ages,” adding that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” are…the expressions of a man in profound psychological distress who is reaching for the most extreme retaliatory threats available to him.”
Meanwhile, Modi’s India continues to place itself squarely in the Netanyahu-Trump camp. India has not only remained silent on the genocide in Gaza, it abstained on UN resolutions on a Gaza ceasefire or enquiries into atrocities by the Israeli military and the Indian film censor board blocked the release of an Oscar nominated film “The Voice of Hind Rajab” that chronicles the plight of a 5-year Palestinian girl trapped and killed inside a car by the Israeli military in Gaza. Modi’s visit to Israel on the eve of the US-Israeli assault on Iran, his embrace of Netanyahu, heaping praise on a man indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court, his cringe-worthy address to the Israeli Knesset and his elevation of Indo-Israel ties to a special strategic partnership has trapped India in a diplomatic space that is becoming both isolated and toxic. As Debashish Roy Chowdhary remarks in an incisive and insightful article (A White Supremacist’s Passage to Modi’s India, April 14, 2026) “With Hindutva becoming the dominant political ideology in India, the Indian state’s support for Zionism and Israel has simultaneously risen and mainstreamed.”
India, currently the chair of BRICS, has become an outlier in this group as it also is becoming in much of the Global South. According to a report in the Hindu newspaper, in the recent meeting of the BRICS group deputy foreign ministers and special envoys in Delhi, officials from the Ministry of External Affairs attempted to soften “language that criticized Israel for its bombardment of Gaza and Lebanon, as well as dropping a reference to “East Jerusalem” to be established as the capital of the Palestinian state as a part of the two-state solution. Ministry officials even sought to replace references of “Israel” while criticizing its operations in the West Bank and Lebanon. These attempts were opposed by the other members of BRICS so no resolution was ultimately adopted.
Under US pressure of sanctions, India is faced with the dilemma of abandoning its decades long investment of $620 million in the Chabahar port in Iran that was meant to enable its connectivity plans with Iran, Central Asia and Afghanistan. The US earlier issued diktats on India’s purchases of oil from Russia and Iran; as one analyst put it; “the U.S.’s seemingly insatiable demands may also extend to India’s engagement with other countries and end its ability to pursue an independent foreign policy.”
Moreover, when the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian territories Francesca Albanese from Italy presented her report “Torture and Genocide” to the 61st session of the UN Human Rights Council on March 23, she remarked that by associating closely with Israel, India is “violating its obligations” under international law and went on to state “there are actors in your state [India], like in my state [Italy], particularly connected to the surveillance and security apparatus, who are profiting from it.” According to Albanese, “The support that the Modi government, like the [Giorgia] Meloni government in Italy, is providing to Israel is beyond the pale.”
Meanwhile, Trump continues to hurl insults at India in his characteristically random and incoherent fashion whenever he feels like, now calling India a “hellhole” country. Modi keeps mum and swallows the insult while the Indian External Affairs Ministry after a delay issues a tepid and meaningless response, illustrating the depths to which the country that was the founder of the Non-Aligned Movement has sunk under BJP rule.
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