Déjà vu All Over Again: Trump's Iran Doctrine, or How to Fail to Learn from History
Reports surface that Donald Trump, should he regain the presidency, contemplates limited strikes against Iran to coerce a nuclear deal. This, of course, ignores the inconvenient truth of the 2015 JCPOA, effectively a global non-proliferation triumph, which the Trump administration unilaterally abandoned in 2018, despite Iran's continued compliance for over a year after that betrayal. This
consistent unraveling of diplomatic solutions, always followed by the thumping of war drums, reveals a pattern of manufactured crises rather than genuine national security concerns. We saw this same playbook throughout the 2000s, with claims of Iranian nuclear proximity echoing endlessly since Benjamin Netanyahu first started ringing the alarm bells in 2002. These warnings, often devoid of
verifiable evidence, serve to justify ever-escalating sanctions, now spanning 45 years, and a never-ending cycle of destabilization attempts against the Iranian government. The idea that a few "limited strikes" could somehow compel a compliant state into a more favorable agreement, rather than further entrenching the resolve of a nation that has endured decades of foreign interference, including
the 1953 CIA-orchestrated coup, is not just naive. It's a deliberate intellectual failure, if not outright malice, ignoring a well-documented history of Western imperial overreach. The asymmetry of this dynamic is never discussed in polite corporate media circles. A single U.S. aircraft carrier strike group, designed to project power thousands of miles from home, costs $6.5 billion annually to