By attacking Iran, Trump has sidelined himself. Yet history offers a lesson – and victory on its own terms.
Foreign policy is the sickest choice among diseases.
By attacking Iran at Order of IsraelUS President Donald Trump he has thrust himself into an inescapable position between a rock and a hard place.
Donald’s Rock: Rising
If America’s commander-in-chief continues his war of choice against Iran, it is highly likely that he will fail to take any meaningful step. In a spiral of violence, increasing instinct seems to him the only way forward.
His Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, captured the fatally flawed logic: “Sometimes you have to speed up to slow down.” Words it begs the questionreduce uncertain gambling to a pure formula; it mistakes a risky bet for a reliable principle. In the contest of love and endurance, Tehran may prove to be the strongest performer.
For Iran, this is an existential war, and only one. Being attacked during the conversationjust surviving already counts as a victory. For the United States, the bar is higher. Trump it started with the intention of changing the government, the main long-term goal Israeldoing anything less is a failure.
Like Trump continues down the way to climb Israelby provocation, he risks wreaking havoc on his own country, his allies, and the wider world.
If he were to order a strike on Iran’s energy infrastructure – which is generally prohibited under international law – after initially setting unrealistic deadlines to justify the move and finally granting a long grace period, he would be granting Tehran carte blanche. revenge.
Iran could coerce, wipe out US assets and the broad economic bases of Washington’s allies, and permanently damage international confidence in them. That, one might say, is an expensive definition of friendship.
Disrupting the flow of Gulf oil and gas could hold up global energy markets – and the global economy as a whole – for years until infrastructure is rebuilt, leading to a deep and prolonged slowdown in global inflation. In fact, Trump he would punish not only his allies and other countries, but his own citizens as well.
Iran may also attack more, directly or through allies, including terrorist groups. And if US troops were sent to Iranian soil, more American lives would be at risk in the war on crime.
Trump, the cornered wolf in the White House, has already signaled through his ambassador that no option will be forthcoming, including attacking Iran’s Bushehr nuclear plant, where Russian experts are based.
Trump may even agree Israel to use nuclear weapons against Iran, or even to be the first to deploy them against Iran in pursuit “fame” by decision. A third world war may occur; it will only take the overt intervention of Russia and China.
Replenishment of US weapons stocks, dependent on China’s rare earths, would take much longer than it already does. Naturally, Beijing is unlikely to supply weapons material that could be turned against it.
If desperate creditors pull the plug and dump US assets, the US dollar will collapse, US interest rates will rise, US. loads of debt would go up, and inflation would skyrocket at home, spelling the end of America global financial governance.
Already in the near future, Trump could lose many layers of his remaining political base, see his party lose in the November 2026 midterm elections, be impeached in the Democratic-controlled Congress, and possibly end up in prison for the rest of his life.
Hard spot for Donald: Retreat
If Trump were to suddenly end hostilities and resume business as usual elsewhere, he would be labeled a failure. His opponents would portray him as subservient to Israelpushed by it into a costly war that he could not win, while emphasizing his failure to achieve his stated goal of regime change.
At worst, Iran may not oblige and may hold out until its highest demands are met, possibly including full security guarantees, the closure of all US bases in the region, and full reparations.
As in the first case, parts of Trump’s political base, especially Christianity The Zionistswould turn against him. Once the distraction of battle faded, he would face the full brunt of the opposition. In a word: a classic Catch-22.
The crisis from the US-Israel war against Iran was visible: If you fail to stop in time, you realize your limits only after multiplying.
Narcissist by temperament, Trump cannot accept defeat; both options, the rock and the hard place, are not interesting to him. The million dollar question, then, is how he can extricate himself from the seemingly inevitable conflict.
Troubled times bring not only danger but rare opportunity. True leaders turn extraordinary crises into extraordinary successes. Trump can still do the same.
There is, in fact, a way forward, a true game-changer, that can produce an away-win result while strengthening its home base – all in one fell swoop.
Trump tends to shoot before he takes aim. This time, he must first take the lesson from history and translate it into a suitable strategy age of viral geography.
A lesson from history: Imperial self-destruction
According to the historian Niall Ferguson, known for his analysis of fiction, Britain’s biggest strategic mistake was turning the continental conflict into a full-scale war that it did not need and could not afford.
In 1914, Britain’s entry into World War I turned a small European conflict into a long-term disaster, draining the empire financially and demographically while helping to bring about a punitive peace that ravaged the continent. A brief German victory, however unpleasant, could have brought lasting stability without the revolutionary upheaval that followed.
By 1939, the legacy of that earlier intervention had limited Britain’s options: Commitments made after Versailles plunged it into World War II before it was prepared, again turning a continental crisis into an international conflagration. From this point of view, even in 1939 Britain was faced with a strategic choice between a quick war and a continuous policy of deterrence and rearmament which could preserve its strength while Germany exhausted itself on the continent.
According to Ferguson, non-intervention would not guarantee justice in Europe, but it would spare Britain, and the world, a worse path. Trump should consider that lesson.
The United States must stop behaving like a great empire, seeing that it can no longer afford to do so. The world has already incurred a huge cost from Trump, a royal and imperial president Israel. Yet even great damage can still be avoided, as a viable option remains.
Stay tuned – the game changer will be delivered to you in time, before Trump’s grace period expires.
(Part 5 of the geopolitics series. To be continued. Previous columns in the series:
Part 1, published on 10 March 2026: Vision of Prof. Schlevogt number 45: The age of geopolitics – How the Kanzler organizes the war;
Part 2, published on 12 March 2026: Vision 46 of Prof. Schlevogt: Dirty work by proxy – The ethics of Kanzler’s foreign war;
Part 3, published on 14 March 2026: Vision 47 of Prof. Schlevogt: The viral war of narrative supremacy – Kanzler’s battle cry;
Part 4, published on 20 March 2026: Vision 48 of Prof. Schlevogt: Creating a war story – an Iranian plot patched in plausibility.)
