Trump's Iran War as America's "Suez Moment"?

Seventy years ago both Britain and France were still regarded as great military powers. Having emerged in the winner’s circle of World War II, they had been given permanent seats and veto power on the Security Council of the fledgling United Nations, taking their places alongside America, the USSR, and China.

Just a decade earlier, their empires had encompassed most of the Middle East, and as a consequence they still regarded themselves as the natural overlords of that region. Hence they were outraged by the actions taken by some of the leaders of the newly independent Arab states, notably President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, who nationalized the Suez Canal in July 1956.

Europeans had controlled that vital waterway almost from the time of its original construction, and it was regarded by Britain as a crucial strategic asset. Encountering American ... Unz, Ron Check Amazon for Pricing.

So having formed a secret alliance with the young State of Israel, Britain and France suddenly struck later that year, using the excuse of a pre-arranged Israeli attack on Egypt to launch their own invasion and occupation of that country. Their military forces easily defeated their weak Egyptian opponents and seized control of the canal and its vicinity. They intended to topple Nasser’s government and thereby reassert their traditional dominance over the entire region and all its new Arab states.

But although the alliance of Britain, France, and Israel easily achieved a total operational military victory, battlefield successes sometimes do not determine the outcome of wars. The United States under President Dwight Eisenhower was opposed to this unprovoked military aggression against the most important Arab country and the seizure of its greatest national asset. So he deployed America’s overwhelming financial power against those invading European countries, and their economies quickly faced total collapse.

For more than a century, the British Pound Sterling had ranked as the world’s most important currency but that was no longer the case. Although Prime Minister Anthony Eden might have foolishly believed that it still retained some of that standing in the postwar era, he quickly discovered he was mistaken. His government’s finances were wrecked and his country’s economy risked the same fate, so without a single American shot being fired, he was forced to politically surrender together with his French and Israeli allies. All their military units withdrew in total national humiliation.

Britain’s 1956 financial defeat has traditionally been called its “Suez Moment” revealing to the entire world that Britain no longer existed as a great and independent power. Britain would never again attempt any such bold international action, so the sun had finally set on the last faded residue of the once mighty British Empire.

I think there is a very real possibility that President Donald Trump’s sudden attack against Iran might result in a similar development for our own country.

Without even firing a single shot, China could easily inflict a severe financial and economic defeat upon America. The resulting collapse would probably force our effective political surrender on several different fronts, resulting in a national humiliation every bit as great as that suffered by Britain and its allies seven decades ago.

During the last few weeks President Trump had positioned an enormous American military force near Iran, a force that by some accounts contained as much as half of our available air and naval power.

Jews, Nazis, and Israe... Unz, Ron Check Amazon for Pricing. This deployment greatly exceeded anything we had sent to the region since our 2003 invasion of Iraq. It seemed far too large to merely be aimed at pressuring that country into major concessions. So most observers agreed that a huge American attack on Iran was very likely.

Despite all these indications, I hoped that this war might be averted as our negotiations with Iran in Oman moved forward. Trump repeatedly declared that our central demand was that the Iranians promise that they would not develop a nuclear weapon, and the Iranians did exactly that, offering to allow international inspections to guarantee that result, just as they had done numerous times in the past. Indeed, for twenty years all our many different intelligence agencies had agreed that Iran had abandoned all its nuclear weapons development work in 2003.

Iran was a large country comparable in size to all of Western Europe and had a population of over 90 million so an American war would be an enormous undertaking.

During his long and illustrious career, Colin Powell had served as our top uniformed military officer, then secretary of defense, then secretary of state, and held those positions during both of our wars against Iraq in 1990 and 2003. His longtime chief of staff was Col. Larry Wilkerson, and in an interview a few days ago, the latter described the extremely difficult military challenges we would likely face in any war with Iran. He considered those challenges greater than those in any previous war since the Korean conflict that we have fought to a draw three generations ago.

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Throughout the last decade Tucker Carlson has ranked as America’s leading conservative media figure, and a couple of days later, he hosted his fellow FoxNews alumnus Clayton Morris of the popular Redacted podcast. Both agreed that an American war against Iran would be disastrous and absolutely contrary to American national interests, also noting that only about 20% of Americans were in support. Carlson had recently met with Trump and he emphasized that no decision for war had yet been made, so I hoped against hope that Trump might pull our country back from the abyss.

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Unfortunately, that hope proved forlorn, and early Saturday morning I learned that the combined forces of America and Israel had suddenly attacked Iran, with large explosions racking the capital city of Tehran and many other Iranian urban centers.

An outraged Carlson immediately condemned our attack on Iran as “absolutely disgusting and evil.” Other very prominent figures in the MAGA movement such as former GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Alex Jones denounced Trump’s Iran War in equally scathing terms. Greene declared “We voted for America First and ZERO wars,” denouncing our administration as a “bunch of sick fucking liars.”

Journalist Glenn Greenwald noted the gigantic hypocrisy that Trump had successfully returned to the White House in 2024 by running as the candidate of peace, but had now begun the biggest war we had fought at least in the half-century since our debacle in Vietnam.

One of the most shamelessly fraudulent presidential campaigns in American history: https://t.co/yksugk3s6d

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) February 28, 2026

Although all our major media outlets had uniformly been fiercely hostile to Iran, during the last few days before the American attack, a flurry of news stories had suddenly appeared emphasizing the severe difficulties that we might face in any such war, and these seemed based upon leaks by top Pentagon sources.

The Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been the leading force pressing Trump for an immediate attack, but the Financial Times quoted an Israeli report that America would probably exhaust its available munitions after just a few days of combat, with many American military experts having said the same thing.

“Israeli intelligence has concluded that even with the imminent arrival of the USS Gerald R Ford later this week, the US has military capacity to sustain just a four to five day intense aerial assault on Iran, or a week of lower-intensity strikes.”https://t.co/b0zymvzwPV

— max seddon (@maxseddon) February 24, 2026

If these facts were correct, a war against Iran seemed the height of folly. How could we win a war if we would mostly be out of missiles and bombs in less than a single week? The entire project made absolutely no sense, but irrational projects have unfortunately become the hallmark of the Trump Administration.

Confronting Russia and... Unz, Ron Check Amazon for Pricing. Once again, we used the ruse of ongoing peace negotiations in hopes of luring our adversaries into a false sense of security. Our initial strikes against top Iranian leaders were quite successful, and by the end of the first day Iranian sources confirmed that we had successfully assassinated Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s 86-year-old Supreme Leader, as well as the country’s defense minister and numerous other top military commanders.

So after having recently kidnapped one leader of a sovereign country, President Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela, we had now assassinated a second one, with both these actions being almost completely without precedent in modern world history. Since its founding, the Israeli government had always relied upon assassinations as its primary tool of political statecraft, so this sort of American behavior seemed to further reflect what Greenwald has often decried as the near-total “Israelization” of our own country.

• Zionist Israel as the Assassination Nation
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • June 23, 2025 • 11,800 Words

Despite those leadership losses, the Iranians almost immediately responded with a barrage of medium and long range ballistic missiles, exactly as they had previously threatened to do, striking our own major military bases in the region as well as sites in Israel. Strict censorship and the fog of war makes it difficult to accurately assess the total amount of damage visited upon either side in the conflict.

Chas Freeman ranks as one of our most distinguished diplomats, and he also served as an assistant secretary of defense. In an interview after the attack, he warned that our government had reduced the entire world to a complete state of lawlessness, with fateful consequences for all nations, certainly including our own.

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He also pointed out that President Trump had launched this enormous war despite overwhelming public opposition and without even bothering to consult or inform top Congressional leaders. When taken together with the huge changes in import tax policy Trump had regularly imposed by emergency executive order and his administration’s frequent defiance of federal court mandates, Freeman suggested with great sadness that we seemed to be witnessing the disappearance of our American republic and its centuries-old constitutional system of government.

A few hours before Freeman’s interview, Prof. Jeffrey Sachs had made some equally disheartening points on that same channel:

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Sachs noted that even after the early Roman Empire established by Augustus had concentrated all actual power into the hands of the reigning emperor, it still maintained many public trappings of the defunct Roman Republic, and he felt that our own country seemed to be following that same sort of despotic political trajectory. An article that I’d published in December had made those same points.

• Donald Trump as Our President Caligula
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • December 15, 2025 • 8,300 Words

Since the early 1990s Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders had continually stated that Iran was secretly working on a nuclear weapon, always claiming that the project was on the very verge of completion. Although all the many American intelligence agencies had repeatedly debunked that claim for twenty years and declared that Iran had ended that effort in 2003, the threat of Iranian nuclear weapons was the main argument that Trump and his mainstream media echo-chamber provided as justification for the war. Iran had willingly opened its civilian nuclear enrichment program to foreign inspection in the past and offered to do the same in the future, but all to no avail.

In discussing that history, Freeman argued that those Israeli claims were obvious examples of psychological projection. More than a half century ago, Israel had secretly developed its own nuclear weapons arsenal against strong American opposition, doing so by stealing our own nuclear fuel supplies and technology, so the Israeli leaders naturally assumed that Iran must be behaving in similar fashion.

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