The world, before February 28 – when the United States and Israel decided to attack Iran and cause the largest oil shock ever in the history of capitalism – was obsessed with the hallucinations of an artificial intelligence model. In the two weeks since, the discussion has increasingly centered on whether our near-term future depends on the hallucinations of one person who brought the world to its current predicament: US President Donald Trump. His pronouncements about the origins and future direction of the ongoing conflict have swung so wildly — sometimes simultaneously — that one person on X (formerly Twitter) joked that New York’s new left-leaning mayor may have taught polemics to Trump. The joke would be funny if the economic and human costs of war were not so high, especially for countries and peoples not involved in starting the current conflict.
Where does this leave the rest of the world and what some starry-eyed people still like to call the world order? Let’s start with the most obvious answer.
There is no universal system at the moment. Trump not only bypassed existing international and even US rules for waging war, but also ignored US intelligence regarding not only Iran but also US capabilities, such as ammunition stockpiles before entering the conflict. Trump’s recent admission suggests that his son-in-law’s input was most important in his decision to go to war. The only country that can possibly claim to have violated more international laws than Trump recently is Israel in the wake of Hamas’s clearly brutal attacks on innocent Israeli citizens. There is a growing consensus among foreign policy observers that US policy today is a dog with its Israeli tail wagging.
Trump is certainly not the only US president to flout international rules to wage war. But he may be the first to drag it into a war in which the United States does, in a way, exactly what George W. Bush, the last Republican president before Trump, warned about. After attacking Afghanistan in retaliation for the September 11 attacks, Bush said: “I’m not going to fire a $2 million missile at an empty $10 tent and kick a camel in the ass.” Today Trump launches billions of dollars worth of missiles to intercept Iranian drones worth a few thousand dollars. It’s no wonder the latter keeps coming and that the United States is increasingly running out of the former, even having to redeploy it from other important geopolitical theaters, as described in detail in this Bloomberg story.
Some might say that Trump should not have been involved in such a decision in the first place. He was, after all, a darling of the MAGA coalition, which vocally opposed any foreign military intervention by the United States. Well, it turns out that this novel may have been just a story and not fact. The Economist published a poll of 14,000 Republican voters in August 2025, which should have disabused us of the illusion that MAGA is an effective impediment to Trump’s failed military adventures. Only 10% of Republican voters were “isolationists” when it came to foreign policy. They were actually the smallest cohesive group among the top five which also included, in descending order of importance, the (very wealthy) culture warriors (30%), economic populists (26%), neoconservatives (20%) and moderates (14%).
There is certainly good reason to believe that Trump will not commit to US involvement regarding the deployment of the US military in Iran unlike his predecessors in Iraq and Afghanistan to avoid a political backlash. This may be good news for American soldiers and their families, but it is certainly bad news for the world, as Iran, the surrounding region, and the critical chokepoint in the Strait of Hormuz, could descend into even more chaos than they are now.
Why does Trump do what he does? Evidence suggests that the economic costs of the war are generating widespread anxiety among his allies about the outlook for the upcoming midterm elections in the United States, scheduled for later this year. The story wasn’t much different when he imposed tariffs either. Most people have seen them fuel inflation.
It is now clear that Trump’s policies have no larger or coherent goals, and he is essentially a man with a reverse Midas touch who destroys things he encounters. What really explains this position of a politician who has shown remarkable political abilities and flexibility in the past ten years?
This question is best answered in Karl Marx’s 1852 treatise Political Economy, which explained the 1851 coup in France in which then-president (and Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew) Louis Napoleon Bonaparte dissolved the National Assembly and reestablished the monarchy in France. “The class struggle in France has created conditions and relations which enable a hideous class to play the hero,” Marx wrote in his introduction to the second edition of the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. “Driven by the contradictory demands of his situation, and because at the same time, like a charlatan, under the necessity of keeping the public eye on himself, as Napoleon’s successor, by constantly raising surprises – that is, under the necessity of arranging a mini-coup every day – Bonaparte throws the entire bourgeois economy into confusion, violates everything that seemed inviolable to the Revolution of 1848, makes some ‘tolerate the revolution and make others desire it, and produces anarchy in the name of The system, at the same time strips the entire state machine of its aura, defiles it and makes it at once odious and ridiculous,” Marx writes about the behavior of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte. The similarity to Trump and what he does is quite striking.
Not surprisingly, Trump’s political rise in the United States comes at a time when the country is more polarized than ever and Trump’s support base is highly diverse in terms of class. The important point here is that the roots of Trump’s political irrationality cannot be found within his own mind, but rather in the political environment in which he dominated. The United States is a declining power, deeply polarized, and burdened by growing (and to some crippling) debt. An overwhelming majority of the mainstream leadership tried to bury the contradictions under the rug of politics.
Where does this leave the rest of the world? Capitalism in its current form has created a situation where the vast majority struggle to make ends meet while a small, privileged minority continues to amass wealth at an unprecedented level. Democracies, from the United States to Europe and to some extent India as well, are struggling to keep the peace through acts of financial juggling that are becoming increasingly more difficult. While there is an occasional spree to restore order by “middle powers” and so on, no one in the world is willing to break with the US-led economic order yet. No such adjustment will occur without major disruption to the world as we know it, especially for US-like powers like China that still invest heavily in exporting to the US.
Until a new competitor emerges to reshape the world, the world will remain in trouble as Trump will continue to destabilize it while looking to the United States for stability.
(Roshan Kishore, data and political economy editor at HT, writes a weekly column on the state of the country’s economy and its political implications, and vice versa)
