Is Donald Trump Facing a Military Mutiny Over His Losing War With Iran?

By
The Unz Review

April 7, 2026

Over the last couple of weeks there have growing media reports that we were preparing to launch a ground invasion of Iranian territory even as more and more American troops were brought into the region. But at this very moment, the Trump Administration suddenly fired Randy George, America’s top Army general, along with a couple of others also of very high rank. It seems implausible that these important developments were totally unconnected.

Conducting such a military purge in the early stages of a major war seemed unprecedented in our national history, so this was merely the latest example of how the government of Donald Trump has done things that no previous American president had ever considered doing. Perpetual War for Perp... Buy New $28.94 (as of 10:57 UTC - Details)

On the Internet, Trump partisans quickly declared that those generals had been removed for ideological reasons unconnected with any disputes over the management of our Iran War. The Army commanders fired had allegedly been hangovers from the Biden Administration, overly “woke” in their views, and indeed media leaks supported this, indicating that disputes over the diversity policies in promotions had been a crucial factor. But numerous leading Congressional Republicans soon publicly praised George and expressed shock and dismay over his ouster, suggesting that if he had been too liberal, most right-wing Republicans loyal to Trump had apparently been unaware of that fact.

Furthermore, very soon after his second inauguration, Trump had replaced the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff along with other members of that body, and the top leaders of the NSA had been fired a few weeks later. Trump had apparently made these personnel changes on ideological grounds, so if George had fallen into that same category, he surely would have also been swept out at that time.

Meanwhile, unconfirmed claims suggesting that very different factors were involved have attracted millions of views on Twitter:

Indeed, when questioned by members of Congress, Pete Hegseth seemed completely unable to provide an explanation of why he had fired all those top-ranking generals. This suggested that a major factor had been their huge concerns about the course of our war with Iran.

Our current war is certainly the most serious conflict America has fought in decades. Iran is a nation of over 90 million, possessing a huge arsenal of ballistic missiles and powerful drones, so in many respects our foe seems larger, better armed, and more effective than any we have faced since the Korean War three generations ago. Only a sliver of the current American population personally remembers that conflict or the major military defeats that we had suffered at the time.

And as I emphasized late last year, the Trump subordinate who purged those top generals hardly has the sort of personal background that would inspire great confidence among any of our military commanders. The Debt Machine: How ... Keenan, Mark Gerard Buy New $12.99 (as of 11:16 UTC - Details)

Similarly, some of the top officials that he has appointed to implement his national security policies appear to be completely unprecedented in their outrageous personal history and lack of qualifications, notably including his Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth whose department Trump suddenly renamed the Department of War in a surprisingly candid executive order.

Although a military veteran of the Iraq War, Hegseth had never commanded anything larger than a rifle platoon, but he had apparently caught Trump’s eye as a gung-ho commentator on FoxNews. However, when Trump nominated him, it quickly came out that he had a long and severe drinking problem while the non-profit veterans organizations he led had financially collapsed.

Worse still, while drunk at a Republican conference he had been very plausibly accused of raping one of the women there, who had both told her colleagues about the brutal attack and also reported it to the police at the time, with Hegseth desperately begging her not to press charges and later paying $50,000 for her silence. This nearly led to the defeat of his nomination in the Republican-controlled Senate, but massive pressure from Trump had allowed him to squeak through on a tie-vote broken by Vice President JD Vance, only the second time this had happened in American history.

Once in office, Hegseth violated all security protocols by sharing details about missile strikes with his friends and relatives, an incident that was widely but mistakenly expected to result in his immediate termination.

I’m not sure of the last time any major power has put its military under the control of a totally unqualified, incompetent, and heavily tattooed drunken rapist, and I suspect that even the overwhelming majority of Third World countries would balk at such a doubtful personnel decision.

In the most recent example of Hegseth’s remarkable venality and incompetence, a few days ago the Financial Times reported that because of his advance knowledge of our attack on Iran, he sought to place a multimillion-dollar bet on a basket of defense stocks, but that the ones he selected actually lost rather than gained value.

Given Hegseth’s manifest incompetence, I couldn’t help considering how different matters might have gone if Trump had instead appointed Col. Douglas Macgregor to that same important position.

After serving as a celebrated military commander during our Gulf War against Iraq, Macgregor had authored several highly regarded books on military history and strategy, and as a strong right-winger and defense expert he had become a regular guest on Tucker Carlson’s top-rated FoxNews show. During Trump’s first term, Macgregor had been quite close to the president, who had nominated him as our ambassador to Germany, and after the U.S. Senate blocked that appointment, named him as a senior advisor to the secretary of defense and placed him on the board of the U.S. Military Academy.

But more recently, Macgregor’s historical knowledge and military expertise had led him to become a very sharp critic of our Iran War, so if he had held Hegseth’s position and had Trump’s ear, our current disaster might have been averted. However, as someone pointed out to me, the powerful pro-Israel donors and lobbyists who fervently sought this war would have obviously recognized that political threat and would have vetoed any Macgregor appointment for exactly that reason. NatureWise Vitamin D3 ... Buy New $14.99 ($0.04 / Count) (as of 11:50 UTC - Details)

Meanwhile, Hegseth seems so totally unqualified for his position and so much given to outrageous remarks and behavior that there are widespread suspicions that he has been kept in his job merely so that he can deflect attention away from Steve Feinberg, the controversial Jewish billionaire who serves as his deputy and may actually be running the department. Feinberg had co-founded Cerberus Capital Management, a buyout firm heavily involved in military contracting, and during his long business career he had been notoriously secretive, even going so far as boasting to his shareholders that he would “kill” any employee who got his picture in the newspapers. So an idiot such as Hegseth might serve as a very useful lightning rod.

Our official 2026 Pentagon budget was a trillion dollars and Hegseth recently demanded an additional $200 billion in supplemental funding to cover the unexpected costs of our Iran War. But even before attacking Iran, Trump had raised his proposed 2027 military spending to an astonishing $1.5 trillion dollars, a figure roughly as large as that of the rest of the world combined. These gargantuan sums will surely be extremely lucrative for Feinberg’s former colleagues and those in a similar line of business.

With someone as stupid and ignorant as Hegseth apparently serving as Trump’s chief American military advisor, our decision to attack Iran becomes far less inexplicable.

Iran was Israel’s most formidable regional rival and for decades Israeli leaders and their zealous American partisans had heavily pressed every American president to attack and destroy that country. But for decades our Pentagon and CIA officials had successfully dissuaded those American presidents from taking any such reckless action.

Iran had always threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz if attacked and that crucial waterway carried the oil shipments and other vital resources of the Persian Gulf to the rest of the globe. These represented a substantial fraction of the world’s total exports of those important commodities, so any such blockade would devastate the global economy. Our intelligence experts were convinced that the Iranians would carry out that threat and our military experts believed that it would be very difficult for our forces to prevent them from doing that. So although administrations regularly denounced the Iranians and imposed various sanctions against their economy, any major military action was off the table.

The closest we ever came may have been in the aftermath of the 9/11 Attacks of 2001, which had allowed the fiercely pro-Israel Neocons to gain a dominant position of influence in the George W. Bush Administration. Even as they were preparing to launch their ill-fated invasion of Iraq, another major regional rival of Israel, they also hoped to follow that up with a similar invasion of neighboring Iran.

However, the Pentagon held a massive simulation exercise around that time that helped to torpedo those plans. The Millennium Challenge 2002 wargames suggested that if the Iranians closed that waterway, any American naval effort to reopen it would be utterly disastrous. Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Paul K. Van Riper played the part of our Iranian adversaries and in that role he immediately sank an American aircraft carrier along with all its accompanying warships. In real life, America would have lost 20,000 dead after just a single day of combat, certainly representing the greatest military catastrophe in our entire national history. With that powerful lesson in mind, neither Bush nor any subsequent American president prior to Trump had ever seriously considered an attack on Iran. Sports Researchu00ae O... Buy New $25.57 (as of 01:51 UTC - Details)

That was almost a quarter-century ago, long before the Iranians had acquired the highly accurate ballistic missiles or powerful drones that are currently their most formidable weapons. So with the Iranian control of the waterway vastly stronger today, any American naval forces attempting to challenge that blockade would probably suffer the total destruction suggested by that Pentagon exercise.

Unfortunately, President Donald Trump completely disregarded such concerns and instead launched his massive surprise attack against Iran. But when the angry Iranians refused to surrender and instead followed through with their threat to cut off a substantial fraction of the world’s oil, energy, and fertilizer supplies, he was completely flummoxed and apparently lacked any Plan B.

The sharp rise in world oil prices quickly provoked such desperation in the Trump Administration that they responded by removing all existing sanctions on Russian oil sales. Even more remarkably, Trump also lifted all existing sanctions on Iranian oil sales, thereby hugely boosting the governmental revenues of the country we were attempting to defeat and destroy, something perhaps unique in recorded military history.

America has the world’s most powerful navy and prior to attacking Iran, Trump had already deployed two of its carrier strike groups to the region. So faced with the dire economic consequences of the Iranian blockade, our president repeatedly declared that he would send American warships to reopen that final waterway to cargo traffic.

But such a proposal was so suicidal that even erstwhile Trump supporters publicly rebelled. Popular history podcaster Darryl Cooper had a strong military background and he said he hoped that senior American military commanders would refuse to carry out such a presidential order rather than condemn so many thousands of their American servicemen to a watery grave. Whether or not such a hidden mutiny of our top naval commanders actually happened, Trump soon backtracked on his proposal, instead absurdly demanding that our NATO allies send their own ships to be sunk, or even more absurdly saying that Iran’s Chinese ally should do so. Meanwhile, America carefully kept all the warships of its carrier strike groups around 1,000 kilometers away from Iran lest they be hit by Iranian missiles. Sports Researchu00ae V... Buy New $21.55 (as of 09:36 UTC - Details)

From the very beginning of the war, Trump had repeatedly declared that it would soon end in a total American victory that would force the Iranians to reopen the waterway, and for weeks most Wall Street traders had regularly fallen for those ridiculous claims, bringing down rising oil prices whenever Trump promised a quick end to the war. But over the last few days, the oil markets finally concluded that Trump’s words meant absolutely nothing, and prices spiked to nearly double what they had been earlier this year and remained there regardless of anything our president said.

However, much higher prices are probably still to come. According to a Saudi report cited a couple of weeks ago in the Wall Street Journal, if the Iranians maintained their blockade, oil prices would triple to $180 per barrel by the end of this month, thereby plunging the world into a severe global recession or something even worse.

Around one-third of all fertilizer exports also came from the Persian Gulf, and with the planting season soon to begin in the northern hemisphere, analysts feared that the result would be a global famine.

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Ron Unz, publisher of The American Conservative, served as chairman of English for the Children, the nationwide campaign to dismantle bilingual education. He is also the founder of RonUnz.org
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