““Societies are not made of sticks and stones, but of men whose individual characters by turning the scale one way or another determine the direction of the whole”

Plato (The Republic)

Gotabaya Rajapaksa inherited a lower-middle income country and bankrupted it in two years and five months.

Donald Trump is likely to upend the world in a much shorter time. If he doesn’t immediately – and unconditionally – end the unprovoked and illegal war he began against Iran.

When Gotabaya Rajapaksa won the Lankan presidency with the enthusiastic backing of 6.9 million voters (almost all of them Sinhalese, and the absolute majority of them Sinhala-Buddhist), Dr Steve Turley, a pro-Trump conservative radio talk show host, hailed Sri Lanka’s turn to ‘nationalist right’. “An increasing number of populations are turning away from globalism and re-embracing nation, culture, custom and tradition as the basis for a vibrant political and cultural renewal. Just so another nation embraced the nationalist right. Sri Lanka recently held its presidential election and as a result we can add another nation to the growing number of nationalist populist governments throughout the world” (Sri Lanka Turns to the Nationalist Right!!! – YouTube).

The Rajapaksas could have given Donald Trump lessons on ethno-religious- populism, on the art of weaponising race and religion for political purposes. That mastery, however, was of no use when their errors and misdeeds sent the economy into a tailspin. Gotabaya Rajapaksa was chased out, literally, and the Rajapaksas reduced to three percent electorally.

Now Donald Trump, with his Iran folly, is about to unleash unprecedented economic chaos on America and the world.

Gotabaya Rajapaksa believed that Lankan agriculture (after more than half a century of inundation in chemical fertiliser) could be turned organic in one season. Donald Trump seemed to have convinced that a short sharp war would bring Iran to its knees. According to a recent New York Times report, “On Feb 18, as President Trump weighted whether to launch military attacks on Iran, Chris Wright, the energy secretary, told an interviewer he was not concerned that the looming war might disrupt oil supplies in the Middle East and wreak havoc in energy markets. Some of Mr Trump other advisers shared similar views in private dismissing warnings that…Iran might wage economic warfare by closing shipping lanes carrying roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil supply.” With such blitheness did America begin its newest war.

Today, the world’s oil supply is facing an unprecedented crisis. Iran has closed down the Strait of Hormuz and the 20 million barrels of oil that go through it on a normal day is not moving. Donald Trump first promised to use the US navy to escort ships through the channel, then told the shipping industry to show ‘some guts’. No one is likely to heed his call, not after three vessels in the vicinity were hit by Iranian projectiles (In the meantime, Iran is exporting more oil through the Strait than before, according to the Wall Street Journal.). So oil prices are soaring, driving up energy bills in the US – and across the world – less than eight months before mid-term polls with all Congress seats and 33 of the Senate’s 100 seats up for grabs.

Not just oil. Over one-third of world’s fertilizer trade too move through the Strait of Hormuz. Already fertiliser prices are rising globally and experts are warning about falling harvests and increased food prices across the world.

Then there’s Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG). Qatar, second largest exporter of LNG gas (handling about 20% of world’s output), has stopped production due to Iranian attacks, leading to soaring prices. An attack by Israel-US on an Iranian bank has resulted in an Iranian threat to retaliate against US and Israeli banking interests. The consequences so far include Citi Group and Standard Chartered evacuating their Dubai offices and HSBC closing its Qatar branch.

If the disruption of energy markets, financial markets, trade routes, and supply chains continues, the world is likely to slip into stagflation – low growth and high inflation with predictable results, from increased poverty and unemployment to socio-political upheavals.

In America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay argue that with his war on Iraq, George W Bush set off a revolution not in “America’s goals abroad, but rather in how to achieve them.” Under Donald Trump, American foreign policy is undergoing an even more momentous transformation. America has gone into Iran without a clear notion of what it wants and how it plans to achieve whatever it wants. With Donald Trump, it is not America Unbound. It is America Unhinged.

Quagmire

“We won,” claimed Donald Trump at a recent rally in Kentucky. Perhaps he has – in some alternate reality.

In this reality, Iran has achieved an unexpected degree of success in using one-way attack drones to destroy several US radars across the Middle East, “degrading the ability of the US and its allies to track incoming missiles,” according to the Wall Street Journal. The Military Watch Magazine reports that American air defence systems worth $2.7billion were destroyed by Iran in the first week of the war. These include one AN/FPS-132 radar (a long-range ballistic missile early-warning system) and two AN/TPY-2 X-band mobile radars (from THAAD anti-ballistic missile systems located in US bases in Jordan and the UAE). As a result, the US is planning redeploy parts of or even the entirety of THAAD anti-missile system from South Korea to the Middle East.

The financial cost of the war to the US was $11.3billion for the first six days, according to the Pentagon.

The Trump administration has finally admitted that around 150 American soldiers have been injured in the war already. This is without any boots on the ground. Israel-American plan to use Iranian Kurds as substitutes doesn’t seem to be working. “This is not our war,” responded deputy prime minister of Iraqi Kurdistan Qubad Talabani when asked why Kurds didn’t want to get involved in the Iran war. His message to Iranian Kurdish groups was, he said, “Be cautious, be smart, be strategic. Understand the landscape. Understand what’s on the other side of this border. Don’t rush into anything that could cause you significant damage or cause Kurdish areas in Iran significant damage” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqeT68ukZYI&t=192s).

With the air war not going according to plan and Kurds unwilling to act as cat’s paws, Donald Trump is in a bind. Close to 60% of Americans oppose the war while an overwhelming 80% oppose any commitment of ground troops. According to a recent Drop Site/Zeteo/Data for Progress survey, 52% of likely American voters believe that in starting the war, President Trump was ‘at least partly motivated…to distract from the Jeffrey Epstein’ (40% say he wasn’t so motivated). 46% of the respondents said that Trump is more responsive to Israel than to American people while 47% said he was more responsive to American people.

The controversial Epstein file containing allegations about Donald Trump abusing a minor came out, but barely made a stir since all the oxygen is being sucked in by the war on Iran. Without the war, it would have been the NEWS, for several cycles. If distracting public and media attention from the Epstein files was a Trump-objective in starting the war, it is working, so far. As for Israel, there’s little doubt that Binyamin Netanyahu was the prime mover in the war against Iran, just as he was in the 2003 war against Iraq. In his address to the nation, Mr. Netanyahu said that attacking Iran with American assistance “allows us to do what I had yearned for 40 years: smite the terror regime hip and thigh. This is what I promised and this is what we shall do.”

In November 2003, at an event to mark the 20^th anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy, George W Bush assured his credulous nation that “A new regime in Iraq would serve as a dramatic and inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region.” Knowingly or unknowingly, he was echoing Bibi Netanyahu’s blithe and misleading words to the US Congress during a hearing on Iraq, “A war on Iraq is a good choice, the right choice… A nuclear-armed Saddam would place the security of our entire world at risk… If you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have positive reverberations in the region” (https://www.vox.com/2015/2/26/8114221/netanyahu-iraq-2002).

Donald Trump is after a third term. A repeat of Iraq in Iran is not in his interests. According the Wall Street Journal, White House officials fear that Israel will continue to attack Iran even if the US tries to end the war. Bibi Netanyahu needs and wants a long war to stay on as PM and to evade a possible long prison sentence for corruption. The extremist parties who back him think that the road to Greater Israel lies through a Middle East engulfed in chaos and anarchy. Longer the war, the greater the chaos. As the deputy PM of Iraqi Kurdistan said, chaos in Iran is not good for Iraq, Kurdistan, the Gulf, or the global markets. The possible exception, he pointed out, is Israel. “They could live with chaos in Iran. They’ve been living with chaos in Syria. As long as threats to Israel are taken care of, distracted, weakened and disorganised…”

According to a report by France 24, Israel drones are spraying herbicides on crops and even fruit trees in the buffer zone between Israel and Syria, destroying them (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lyp9Xfess3Q). This is despite the pro-Israeli nature of Syria’s new regime. Clearly anarchy and chaos in the region is what Israel is after. A long war in Iran or – ideally – the fragmentation of Iran resulting in a series of civil wars would suit Israel’s purpose perfectly.

Blasts from the Past

Soon after the war began, a non-commissioned officer in a combat unit in the US army, a Christian by faith, wrote to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation on behalf of 15 comrades (at least 11 Christians, 1 Muslim, and 1 Jew). He said that his commander urged them to tell the troops that the war with Iran “is part of God’s Plan” and that Donald Trump was “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to earth.” This complaint was repeated by at least 200 other officers across 50 installations encompassing every branch of the military. 30 Congressional Democrats are now asking the Defence Department to open an investigation into “invoking religious prophecy and apocalyptic theology to justify the United States’ actions in Iran” (https://www.militaryreligiousfreedom.org/2026/03/ms-nows-ali-velshi-covers-mrff-in-superb-segment-on-the-dangerous-infusion-of-religion-into-the-iran-war-by-commanders-pushing-end-times-prophecy/).).

This tendency within a section of the US army to justify the war on Iran using the Bible dovetails perfectly with Bibi Netanyahu’s own propaganda gimmick. In explaining the time of the attack on Iran, he invoked the Jewish holiday of Purim. “2500 years ago in ancient Persia, a tyrant rose against us with the very same goal, to utterly destroy our people.” The story of Purim is contained in the Book of Esther in the Old Testament (Torah in Judaism). Historians doubt the veracity of the tale. Be that as it may, the tale in the Book of Esther is not about Jews rising against Persian oppression; it is about Jews defeating a conspiracy against them by winning over the Persian king.

Haman, a minister of the Persian king Ahasuerus, angered by Jewish leader Mordecai to bow to him convinces the king to kill all Jews within the Persian empire. The king’s chief queen Esther is Jewish (she had married him at Mordecai’s suggestion hiding her Jewish lineage). She manages to convince the king not only to spare her people but also to allow them the right to worship. The historical truth is that Jews lived unharmed in the Persian Empire and often served as auxiliaries in the Persian army for centuries in the war against Christian Rome.

The first time Jewish people regained the right to occupy Jerusalem since the destruction of the Second Temple and their banishment by Roman emperor Titus in 70CE was after Persian emperor Khosrow conquered the Holy City around 610CE with the aid of Jewish auxiliaries. That ‘return’ did not go well either for Jerusalem or its Christian population. According to Pulitzer-winning historian David Levering Lewis, “The horrific sequel is so overlain by partisan hyperbole that little more can now be said other than that the holiest city in Christendom was left a charnel house of smouldering ruins after several days of rape, pillage, and massacre…” (God’s Crucible).

Trying to frame modern wars in the shape of ancient conflicts is a dangerous game. Some of George W Bush’s advisers depicted the war against Iraq as a new Crusade. As history shows, Crusades did the Crusaders no good. “If Richard Cœur – de – Lion and Philip Augustus had introduced Free Trade instead of getting mixed up in the Crusades we would have been spared 500 years of misery and stupidity” Fredrick Engles pointed out (letter to F Mehring – 14.7.1893). But misery is what happens when ignoramuses wear the crown. The misery we went through in 2022, the rest of the world is about to experience, soon.

by Tisaranee Gunasekara