How to Explain the Inexplicable War in Iran?

On April 10, moments before a ceasefire was announced, Donald Trump was making unhinged threats of civilizational genocide against Iran if that country's regime didn't immediately open the Strait of Hormuz. Two days later, Trump announced that because negotiations had failed, the United States would now blockade the strait. That kind of vertigo-inducing confusion has been emblematic of this war.

Six weeks after the United States and Israel launched a massive bombing campaign against Iran, the entire episode is looking like the latest in a mounting series of blunders surrounding the Trump administration. The United States and Israel dropped tens of thousands of bombs on Iran, battering the country's exposed military facilities and infrastructure and killing thousands of people, including tranches of political leadership.

Yet the political regime in Tehran emerged stronger than it was before the war, when it was fighting off another round of massive protests. Iran's drone technology and asymmetrical missile strategy have proven well-conceived and effective, while its operational domination of the Strait of Hormuz, a globally important shipping choke point, has reinforced Iran's centrality in the world system.

The United States, on the other hand, appears all but incapable of forward thinking. Apparently caught off guard by predictable consequences, the Trump administration has repeatedly fumbled talking points, changed objectives and timelines, and reshuffled top military commanders. Meanwhile, the United States severely depleted its missile and interceptor stocks and exposed its military playbook to potential great-power adversaries such as China.

Two years ago, Trump was campaigning on lowering prices at home and ending foreign wars; now his coalition is doing contortions to explain to its base why oil prices are up, more troops are overseas with hundreds killed or wounded, and billions of taxpayer dollars are being incinerated in a war of choice.

Speculation abounds. Did the shockingly smooth decapitation of Venezuela's government convince Trump that the United States could do the same to Iran? Maybe it was Israel that conned, cajoled, or coerced the Trump administration into turning Israel's strongest foe into a failed state. Perhaps the Saudis were in Trump's other ear for the same reason. It could have been Trump's hawkish advisors who, whether for power, machismo, or religious fanaticism, pushed the United States to war by filtering selective information to a mentally fading president.

Even to otherwise sober foreign policy experts, the Iran war seems irrational to the point of unexplainable madness, imposed on the world through some combination of American belligerence, hubris, and a "special relationship" with Israel. However, as tempting as it might be to ridicule the Trump regime's stupidity — and there is no shortage of material for that — it is worth stepping back and asking: Who benefits from the madness?

It has become standard to view warfare through a lens of nationalist realpolitik in which each country's political leadership is assumed to act on behalf of the country as a whole. When we speak of what "America" does and what "Iran" does — for example, America gave Iran an ultimatum, and Iran rejected it — that language can misleadingly flatten the interests of the ruling class, government, and general population into a single, anthropomorphized character of each country.

When we focus on how the superrich are benefiting from this episode, the seemingly illogical chaos of the Trump regime's bungling war effort starts to make more sense. Here are four factors to consider in thinking about what the Iran war is achieving, not for America and its allies but for members of the Trump regime and theirs.

Deadly Force Projection

With the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores from Venezuela, the Trump administration proved it could execute a precision attack on a sovereign country and face no consequences for it. The intervention was stunningly audacious and certainly illegal, but from a vulgar nationalist perspective, also rational, especially considering the strategic partnerships Venezuela's government had forged with US rivals in China and Russia.

By unleashing war on Iran, Trump now proves he is undeterred by predictable and considerable repercussions to his home country. It was widely known that the Iranian military was willing and able to close the Strait of Hormuz, and this knowledge was sufficient to deter generations of US presidents from military action. By going ahead anyway, Trump let everyone know that he will deploy the lethal force of a trillion-dollar-a-year military even in ways that are self-destructive to the United States.

Between Venezuela and Iran, Trump has demonstrated that the US military can attack anyone anywhere and is willing to destroy entire countries regardless of the national consequences. For a clientelist regime run by a bully obsessed with deal-making, the ability to personally dispatch unrestrained and unpredictable violence appears as a powerful bargaining chip.

War Profiteering

US political leadership is now stacked with billionaires, and billionaires are making a lot of money off the war with Iran. Trump himself has personally profited from the presidency more than all previous presidents combined, growing his wealth by billions of dollars while in office. It stands to reason, then, that many of his decisions are made with this goal in mind.

Wars are enormously profitable for weapons manufacturers, defense contractors, and a transnational tech industry that is increasingly intertwined with the war industry. War profiteering is nothing new, but this one has brought out some cartoonishly unsubtle money grabs. For example, while Gulf states were absorbing barrages of Iranian missile fire as a result of a war the US president launched, a company backed by Trump's sons was selling desperately needed drone interceptors to those same countries.

The most obvious downside of attacking Iran might have appeared to be economic, as oil prices have soared and global markets have been destabilized. However, Iran's closure of the Strait of Hormuz has increased revenues for some US oil producers, even as the broader economic fallout has been severe. After all, the United States remains a global supplier that does not rely directly on the strait.

Following his announcement that the United States would blockade the strait after demanding that Iran open it, Trump boasted that "there are many boats headed toward our country to fill up with oil." One might be tempted to say this benefits America, but of course the profits don't go to America, and certainly not to the average American wincing at the gas pump; they go to oil companies that pay little if anything in taxes on those profits.

Meanwhile, volatile markets can also be major moneymakers. The world's richest 500 people made a quarter trillion dollars in a single day when Trump threatened Iran with genocide and then abruptly about-faced and agreed to a ceasefire. Meanwhile, "predictive market" gambling now moves hundreds of millions of dollars a day in unregulated bets on world events of all kinds, with the most money to be made on highly unlikely events — for example, a seemingly irrational war full of inscrutable moves, unhinged threats, abrupt ceasefires, and subsequent reversals.

Distraction and Dissonance

There is an old saying that truth is the first casualty of war. Trump has been making war on truth since he launched his political career spreading conspiracy theories about Barack Obama's birthplace. Architects of his first presidency such as Steve Bannon and Roger Stone made no secret of their strategic use of oversaturated news cycles and rapid-fire misinformation to foment a potent combination of widespread distrust in the media and a societal obsession with it.

War ratchets up urgency and stimulates the kind of panicky guesswork that is particularly corrosive to a sense of shared reality. The apparent senselessness of this war sent analysts and onlookers scrambling to find sagacity in the madness. Adding to the confusion was the rampant spread of artificial intelligence — generated images and videos during the war, itself a profitable enterprise. In turn, the heightened media environment made war strategy itself a matter of opinion — or perhaps misinformation itself.

Shortly before the United States started dropping bombs on Tehran, one news story was threatening to align the country in a shared reality: the release of the long-awaited Epstein files, which revealed astounding levels of criminal depravity among networks of elites connected through financier and sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Among the people accused of heinous crimes in the files, of course, is Trump. But more broadly, the Epstein files represent an indictment of an entire class of unaccountable elites. The fact that the files' release has produced endless revelations about some of society's most vile crimes yet yielded no arrests has only added fuel to the fire.

Then along came something more immediately pressing to worry about, like spiking gas prices and the possibility of nuclear war. Internet searches for the Epstein files dropped precipitously after the United States attacked Iran, and dead-end congressional discussions about the 25th Amendment took the place of Epstein-related inquiries and hearings.

Democracy Demolition

An unpopular war of choice requires insulation from accountability, above all that which democracy can impose. Doubling down on an oligarchic agenda, such as the recent suggestion that health care be cut to fund an unfathomable $1.5 trillion military budget, only further incentivizes the kneecapping of voter power.

War itself can manufacture this insulation in a number of ways. Techniques of state coercion and control multiply during wartime. US companies developed surveillance technology in collaboration with the US-sponsored Israeli occupation that were then brought home for use against antiwar protesters. The United States finances Israeli war crimes in Gaza and the West Bank, and tactics developed there show up on American streets. With more direct US warmaking and the ongoing militarization of homeland security, the distance between foreign war and domestic policing shrinks by the day.

War also appeals to national interest and heightens the prospect of domestic attacks, providing ready justifications for increased law enforcement and immigration crackdowns on dissent, even to the point of postponing or canceling elections.

Most of all, with each new breach of established norms, aspiring authoritarians shield themselves against accountability for previous transgressions that now appear moderate in comparison. At the same time, they accrue both the confidence and the tools to push further next time. The Trump administration has now launched a war of choice without congressional approval while spending tens of billions of unbudgeted dollars. Trump not only had US forces commit war crimes but openly endorsed them, even hinting at nuclear weapons use. So far, neither he nor his associates have suffered any consequences for any of this. With the Iran war, they take a great leap toward total impunity.

In previous eras, there was a general consensus among the American ruling class that the stability of the US government and economy was a necessary precondition for their own wealth and power. The US empire expanded its reach through its military so that American capital interests could grow their operations. At the same time, with the Soviet Union's system as a viable alternative, US elites were more vulnerable to domestic pressure to expand domestic rights and raise the standard of living at home. The good of the US ruling class was to some degree tied to the condition of the United States as a whole.

Times have changed. As mutating versions of capitalism have conquered the world, markets have financialized, and technological development has accelerated, billionaires' self-interest has become untethered from the US or any other polity. In fact, many of the world's richest seem to have convinced themselves that the apocalypse is coming one way or another and have resolved to profit from it to the end, using their obscene wealth to insulate themselves from the collapse.

To accurately analyze Trump's war moves, then, it is important to recognize the radically selfish motivations at the heart of his political project. Its insiders don't all have the same personal interests — some pursue profit, some power, some ideology — but their various interests align in a "might makes right" philosophy that has nothing to do with the good of the country's people. For all their "America first" rhetoric and "Make America Great Again" merchandise, at the core of the Trump administration is the will to personal power and profit in a dying world.