WHEN Donald Trump first ran for United States president, one of his policies was to avoid the moralistic Forever Wars that had been the mistake of previous American Administrations. I had believed that Trump was an isolationist at that time. It turned out I was wrong.
Trump may not have liked the empire building done by George Bush and to a certain extent, Barack Obama, but that did not mean he was averse to aggressively pursuing US foreign policy interests. His recent attack on Venezuela is proof of that. Now, it seems he is aiming for a larger and riskier prize: Iran.
Many of his supporters don’t want this, judging any attempt to remove the Mullahs from power as too risky, and I agree. But to understand why Trump is even considering an attack on Iran, we must understand that he is doing so for reasons entirely different from the ones that motivated his predecessors.
Unlike the neoconservatives, who occupied and tried to turn Middle Eastern countries into Northern European welfare states (and failed miserably), I think the Trump administration’s goals with Iran is to destroy another node in China’s logistics and economic system.
According to artificial intelligence, China imports of Iranian crude amounted to “1.91 million barrels per day (bpd) in March 2025—up from 1.71 million bpd in August 2024 and a 19.5% increase from February 2025.’”
We can expect the value to be higher in 2026.
The Neocons wanted to attack Iran to pacify and reconstruct the Middle East. Trump wants to pacify Iran because of Great Power competition.
The Neocons operated during the Unipolar moment, driven by idealistic vanity. Trump’s administration is operating according to grim necessity, because Iran does not exist in a vacuum. It is part of China’s network.
In any case, if Trump does act to decapitate Iran, the result will still be kinetic. The best-case scenario for the US is that an American friendly regime will replace the Mullahs. The worst case is chaos in that region./PN
