2,573 years ago, Croesus, the rich and powerful king of Lydia, consulted the Oracle of Delphi about whether he should invade Persia, and the priestess replied: “If you cross the Halys River, you will destroy a great empire.” Croesus crossed the Halys, attacked Cyrus’s Persia, and destroyed his own empire.
As Trump himself acknowledged, it was Netanyahu who convinced him to attack Iran. But the oracle knows nothing of peace. As the New York Times noted the day after the fiasco of yet another reversal, Trump turned a deaf ear to the experts and, once again, trusted his instinct—that is, Netanyahu’s whisper.
Although the agreement between Washington and Tehran included a cessation of hostilities in Lebanon and the region, Netanyahu responded a few hours later with the heaviest barrage of bombs, destruction, and death ever seen over the Lebanese capital.
The strategy of instinct and unpredictability, typical of a businessman with a lot of money and few ideas, may have served him well at some point, but one day he had to face his windmills.
Just as recent U.S. administrations have accelerated the devaluation of the dollar through orgies of money printing, Trump is devaluing all the empire’s assets, from the material to the symbolic. Just as an addict needs an ever-increasing dose of drugs to achieve the same effect, Trump needs a growing level of megalomania, such as his announcement that before that night of April 7, “an entire civilization” was going to be destroyed. The hyperbole could not be taken seriously. The clown no longer amuses even the circus owners.
The power that rules Washington, as in any liberal democracy, has always taken advantage of the rotation of presidents. They all served it. The agreement one president signed with his hand was erased by the next with his elbow. It has been this way since the days of the dispossession of native nations at the hands of genocidal fanatics, the owners of the cannon. They all signed false “peace agreements” to buy time. The same thing happened in 2015, when Obama signed a nuclear deal in which Iran agreed to limit its nuclear program and allow international inspections in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions. Three years later, Trump declared it null and void.
The problem now is that Trump keeps slipping up and making the mistake that CIA manuals forbid: revealing truths about his own conspiracies. Trump has become a “self-incriminating” machine. Not only has he confessed that his goal in Venezuela and Iran was and is oil (to “get rich”), but also that it was Washington that orchestrated the anti-government protests in Iran late last year.
This is an old modus operandi, dating back to the creation of Panama in 1903, the coup in Iran in 1953 (against another democracy and to seize the oil), and a long list of others. All disobedient governments were demonized as “regimes” prior to a coup (such as in Nicaragua in 1909), while destabilizing terrorists, like the Contras 70 years later, were financed and glorified as “freedom fighters.”
Now, the squandered capital—both material and symbolic—will never be recovered. According to Gallup, between 2001 and 2025, Israelis consistently maintained a double-digit lead in American public opinion regarding the Middle East; the gap averaged 43 points between 2001 and 2018. The gap began to narrow four years before Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack and even more so with the student protests against the genocide in Gaza. This process deepened further with the open censorship and intimidation of critics of the genocide, which even the Zionist owners of social media could not contain.
October 7 did not reverse the trend; rather, the supposed backlash significantly accelerated it. Today, 41 percent of Americans support the Palestinian cause, while only 36 percent sympathize with Israel. If we consider young people alone, that difference is overwhelming, indicating that we are facing an earthquake that cannot be altered by the traditional mountains of money spent on propaganda—especially when the printing press begins to rust.
If we consider that Israel without Washington and without Brussels will never be the Israel that still decides who lives and who dies, no reasonable calculation can paint a promising future for it. Historians will mark this decade as The Great Break, regardless of the wars Washington-Tel Aviv may still win and the thousands of dead it may still bury under the rubble.
The American empire, in a decline accelerated by its own choice, dragged into the black hole of the Middle East, insists on committing suicide before confronting its main target: China. Meanwhile, China knows full well that it must not interrupt the adversary when he is making a mistake. Especially when he invests so much in making them.
Like a Superman addicted to kryptonite, Trump has squandered all the empire’s resources: the Pentagon’s arsenal, the Treasury’s coffers, and, most importantly, the value of the threat and the fear of his superpowers.
I believe it would be a miracle if Trump were to finish his term. He will suffer a crushing defeat in the November midterm elections, an impeachment in 2027, a “health issue,” or some new false flag operation that this time will not take him back to the White House, but to his Florida palace where the eternal ghost of his friend Epstein awaits him.
For the powers that be, it will be a way to pacify, for a time, a population increasingly aware of its reality.
Jorge Majfud
