Trump’s Iran Con Put Us in the Covid Before Times Again

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Trump started an unwinnable war. We know what comes next. We just haven’t felt it yet—the same way we hadn’t truly felt COVID in early March 2020. L O L G O P Mar 8   READ IN APP   There is a specific interval between when a catastrophe begins and when it becomes personal, and we are very bad at it. Everyone is. It seems the human brain is better at processing small worries than big ones. But no one is worse at it than Donald Trump. In February 2020, the people whose job it was to read the incoming data from Wuhan knew, and some of them said so in public, and most of us went on living that sparkling Covid-free existence we’ll never be able to explain to anyone else or ourselves. That interval has a name now. We called it the Before Times, meaning the period just before everything changed, when we still thought it wouldn’t. We are in it again. There are far worse situations to be in. Ask the people of Iran, due to an aimless, purposely brutal war being waged in our name with our dollars. At least six American service members have been killed so far. But we must recognize what’s happening now. Because we’ll be living with the consequences for years, if not longer. The story they’re not telling you The official story: Iran was building a nuclear weapon. It’ll be ready any day. We must go to war to stop it because if we don’t, it’ll use it against Israel, even though Israel has had nuclear bombs that could destroy Iran for decades. That’s been the story from Bibi Netanyahu and Lindsey Graham for decades now. Iran’s always on the verge of something that Obama prevented from happening, and Trump then unprevented. And Iran or their leadership must be destroyed immediately to prevent what he unprevented. But here’s where it all falls apart. In the last few weeks, we’ve been offered a kaleidoscope of justifications in rapid succession and with equal confidence — none of which justify this completely illegal war that the GOP-controlled Congress has refused to check: the nuclear program, the missile and drone program, the need to preempt Israeli blowback on American forces, forty-seven years of grievances, roadside bombs from 2003. Alibi-shopping in real time is its own kind of confession. The actual story begins even earlier than that. Netanyahu visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago on December 29 and raised the possibility of a new round of strikes on Iran — what one U.S. official described as “round two.” No specific timetable or threshold was agreed upon. The decision to go to war was being sketched on a coffee table in a social club, over the holidays, before anyone knew the Omani foreign minister would be on television. The actual story begins the day before the bombs fell, when Oman’s foreign minister Badr Albusaidi appeared on CBS’s Face the Nation with news that should have been front-page everywhere. Iranian negotiators, he said, had agreed to zero stockpiling of enriched uranium and offered full IAEA verification — a concession, he was careful to note, that went further than anything achieved under Obama, further than anything achieved before. A deal, he said, was within reach. He had flown to Washington to say this in person because he didn’t trust Trump’s envoys to relay it accurately. Twelve hours later, the U.S. and Israel attacked. Economist Michael Hudson, who wrote about this in CounterPunch the day after the strike, draws the only conclusion the timeline supports: the attack was launched because the negotiations were succeeding. A verified, peaceful Iran still selling oil to whoever it chose—above all, to China—was more threatening to the actual strategic objective than a nuclear Iran would have been. My theory is Bibi and Lindsey weren’t going to miss their chance to do what they’ve always been looking for an excuse to do. Kushner and Witkoff traveled to Geneva on Thursday—the day before the bombs fell—knowing a deal was, in their own assessment, difficult if not impossible. They went anyway to keep up the ruse. Keeping Iranian negotiators believing diplomacy was alive kept Khamenei out of his bunker on Saturday. Regardless, the attack on negotiators mid-breakthrough — the second time America has done this to Iran — was not a miscalculation. It’s another confession. Whatever role the nuclear question plays in the politics, the theology, and the personal obsessions of the men who drove us to war, it did not determine the timing. The timing was determined by the impending peaceful resolution that had to be stopped. Hudson titled his piece “The US/Israeli Attack Was to Prevent Peace Not Advance It.” If that sounds like an interpretation doused in Trump Derangement Syndrome (I wish), it is worth noting what Marco Rubio said on the record two days later. Explaining the timing to congressional leaders, America’s secretary of state, national security advisor, national archivist, and college football expert said, “We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action. We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t pre-emptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.” Read that slowly. The United States went to war not because Iran threatened us, but because Israel was going to act and Iran would retaliate against American targets in the region. We joined a war to limit our exposure to the consequences of our ally’s war. The Omani foreign minister, the enrichment concessions, the unprecedented verification offer — none of it was ever part of the calculation, because the decision had already been made. The intelligence community’s own declassified assessment said Iran could develop a viable ICBM by 2035—if it decided to pursue one. Trump told the State of the Union that it would “soon reach the United States.” The people whose job it is to know said: a decade away, maybe, if they choose to. The real threat Trump was addressing? His chance to kill Iran’s leader, operating under the fantasy that Iran would behave as pliantly as Venezuela seemed to be doing with a decapitated government, at least so far. Trump confirmed this himself. He told TIME on March 4: “We went way early. We were going to do it in another week.” The operation had been scheduled for a week later. They accelerated when they located Khamenei. And this is why we aren’t even being offered a settled reason. Every reason eventually unravels into a derranged, unchecked fiend being provoked by even more bloodthirsty fiends made exactly the kind of mistake you’d expect him to, without any sense of how he gets himself or the world out of this mess that’s already looking like a World War. What this means for you, specifically We can’t imagine the horrors the Iranian people, especially the children, are suffering now due to the dueling evil of our two countries’ leaders. But to plot the end of this catastrophe, we must calculate the domestic consequences of this attack. That’s the only way to figure out how we can compel Trump to ignore Lindsey and Bibi and declare victory fast, before the Now Times shatter into a time when we’ll long for the merely domestic horrors of Trump’s first year of his second regime. The Strait of Hormuz is a narrow passage at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, about 21 miles wide at its narrowest point. Roughly 20% of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas moves through it. Iran responded to the strikes by attacking oil tankers in the Strait. A map of tanker traffic from before the strike looks like a circulatory system doing its job. Four days later, the dots were gone. Joe Brusuelas, chief economist at RSM, noted this week that jet fuel is already up 115% from a year ago and accounts for 30% of carrier operating costs. That number is the mechanism by which a war in the Persian Gulf becomes a surcharge on your Amazon delivery, a fare hike on your next flight, and a price increase on anything that moved on a truck to get to you, which is nearly everything. A former Bush administration energy adviser called it “a huge sudden tax increase.” The difference from a tax is that Congress didn’t vote on it, it falls heaviest on people who can least absorb it, and the people who imposed it will not be held accountable for it. Trump’s own answer to the surcharge question, in a Reuters interview on March 5, was: “If they rise, they rise.” He also said he wasn’t looking to tap the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The history of those releases—usually deployed in election years, knocking a few cents off the price for a few weeks—shouldn’t cheer anyone up. There is no strategic fertilizer reserve. The grocery store is where energy shocks arrive second, with a lag of weeks to months. Fertilizer is made from natural gas. Trucks run on diesel. The price of oil is embedded in the supply chain of virtually everything you buy, and it moves through to the shelf quietly, without a news story announcing it. Just what our affordability crisis needed. Another affordability crisis on top of it. The farm economy is where this gets genuinely alarming, and where almost no one is paying attention. Iran is the third-largest urea exporter on the planet. The Strait of Hormuz handles roughly 25% of all globally traded nitrogen fertilizer. The attack came in late February, weeks before spring planting — the narrow window when fertilizer has to be on vessels, at ports, or already in the ground. Urea prices jumped $70 to $80 a ton within days of the strike. Qatar Energy, which operates the world’s largest single-site urea plant, halted production when its natural gas feedstock was cut off. Three Indian urea plants reduced output. The shipping math is unforgiving in much the way the initial spread of Covid was. Thirty days to load and sail from the Persian Gulf. Three to four more weeks to move product into the American interior. A vessel that departed today would reach the Corn Belt in early May, which is, for many crops, already too late. Farmers who can’t source nitrogen will either switch to soybeans or cut application rates and accept lower yields. Josh Linville, StoneX’s vice president of fertilizer—the person whose job it is to know this market better than anyone—said: “Literally, this could not happen at a worse time of the year.” Either path ends at the same place: less corn, higher food prices, a farm economy that was already running on nothing, absorbing another Trump-inflicted blow. And then there’s the Federal Reserve, which is now facing what Brusuelas calls a genuine stress test—a large, persistent energy shock layered on top of the hiring slowdown from Trump’s trade and immigration policies. The specific combination that the Fed has no good tools to address. Cut rates to fight the slowdown, and you pour fuel on inflation. Raise rates to fight inflation, and you accelerate the slowdown. The Fed will eventually have to admit that it has no good options, especially if Trump was telling the truth, as he so rarely does, when he said he has no timetable for ending the war, and it will take “whatever it takes.” That means it could even last until we have a new Fed Chair willing to show us a whole new kaleidoscope of lies. The Before Times problem Here is what we did in February 2020. We scrolled the articles. We forwarded them to people who maybe scroll them, too. We made jokes about buying hand sanitizer and then actually bought as much as we could find, knocking over any senior citizen in our way to get it. Unwittingly, we went to the last indoor dinner party we’d attend for years. That catastrophe was not hypothetical—it was already savaging parts of China and Italy and winding through our cities—but it had not yet taken anything from us personally, and so we kept doing what people do when they still can. The bombs have already fallen. The tankers have already stopped. The fertilizer is not loading. The oil price shock is priced in, and the food shock is six weeks behind it. The specific comfort of the Before Times—that the catastrophe is real but not yet yours—is the only comfort available right now. And unfortunately, it has an expiration date. The difference from COVID is that this was a choice. The war was planned, argued for, and launched over the objections of diplomats who had just achieved a genuine breakthrough, precisely because of that breakthrough. The people who made the choice understood the economic consequences. For some of them—the oil companies, the speculators who were long on crude before the first missile landed, the ideologues who have waited forty years for this—the consequences are mostly positive. Who cares who dies? Hudson noted this with the kind of flatness that cuts: it would be interesting to know how many of Trump’s insiders placed bets on oil prices before the strike. Which brings us back to the man who is worse at the Before Times than anyone. In January and February 2020, Trump spent critical weeks publicly praising Xi Jinping—thanking him for his transparency and calling China’s response “great”—while the response window closed and the virus spread over a defenseless America. Trump was managing his relationship with an authoritarian leader he admired, and Americans paid for it in lives. Now he has managed a different relationship with a different authoritarian leader he admires, and Americans are going to pay for that, too. The mechanism is identical: Trump is a man who can be worked by foreign leaders who understand that flattery is the lever. Xi managed him into inaction. Netanyahu and Graham managed him into action. The results, in both cases, are ours to cope with from now on. Before the strike, the CIA concluded that killing Khamenei could produce equally hard-line successors. He attacked anyway. He has since told Axios he wants to personally “be involved in the appointment” of Iran’s next leader. The man who couldn’t stop a virus, who can’t end a war, has decided he’ll pick a country’s government. Trump can always be lured into horrors by sly purveyors of death if he can be promised some reward, some taste of domination. The flattery lever runs in both directions: he is just as available to his own vanity as he is to anyone else’s flattery. And he has never been so high on flattery as he is right now. And look who pays the cost. The people who did this are counting on the story staying confused enough and the accountability diffuse enough that, by the time it becomes personal, it will no longer be legible as a choice someone made. That is what “nobody could have predicted” is for. That is what “complex geopolitical situation” is for. That is what the gap between the Before Times and the After is for. It’s already happening. The Oman foreign minister, the Geneva feint, the December meeting at Mar-a-Lago, the DIA assessment—gone. The Before Times are being rewritten in real time. Don’t let them have it. We know this is the result of men who’ve been after a war with Iran since even before 9/11 getting exactly what they want without any sense of how that ever ends. And we must never forgive them for that. Call your reps and tell them no one will forget if they do anything to keep this unwinnable war going.