The latest events in the Middle East and in the always mobile tides and currents of American politics indicate that President Trump, novel though his methods are, retains his status as the dominating force in American public life and international relations. The United States is conducting large quantities of oil through the Strait of Hormuz every day and exposing the Iranian claim to control of that strait as just more hot air from the surviving mullahs and the factions of thugs who prop up that ramshackle government. Trump has taken the latest attacks on Qatari and Saudi ships as his excuse to reimpose the blockade of oil exports from Iran with the resulting daily loss of revenue to Iran of over $500 million. He has also made it clear that any such attacks will lead to heavy retribution from the air by the irresistible American forces in theatre.
Iran cannot seriously dispute American control of the Persian Gulf and the Strait; it has no defences against American air counterattacks, and now that Trump has declared the ceasefire to be over and the Islamic Republic government to be “scum not worth dealing with”, Iran can be financially and militarily strangled at America’s pleasure. Either the Iranians will concede and demonstrably comply with an absolute elimination and prohibition of nuclear weapons, and will drop any pretence to control the Strait of Hormuz international waterway or impose tolls on it, and curtail its support of international terrorism including on the borders of Israel, or the United States will squeeze it into submission at no cost in American lives and without requiring the involvement of Israel.
Iran cannot explicitly go back to war and it cannot sustain any serious level of skirmishing with the Americans. As the weeks pass, it will be clear to the American voters that their commander-in-chief has literally taken the ayatollahs over a barrel and pummelled them severely at minimal cost in American casualties (13 dead, six of those in a non-combat accident which could have occurred anywhere). Iran will have to buckle to American demands, almost certainly before the American midterm elections in the first week of November. It will be another and greater almost bloodless victory for Trump, like the destruction of the underground Iranian nuclear laboratories and the involuntary move of the deposed president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife from their palace in Caracas to a criminal house of detention in New York.
Within the United States, the Democrats are finally cracking apart, as the stale and cruelly inadequate traditional leadership wallows helplessly, terrorised by the Marxist and Muslim Left: California governor Gavin Newsom has turned the golden state of California into the sick man of America, overtaxed, violent and shedding population in increasing numbers. The last presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, was best described by acerbic conservative commentator Ann Coulter as “a communist dingbat”. There are some tolerably capable Democrats here and there in Congress and the governor’s mansions but they have no support. All the energy in that party is now in the anti-American and anti-white Left such as New York mayor Zohran Mamdani and several of the recent winners of Democratic congressional primaries. The United States, to use an American football expression, is always governed from between the 30-yard lines and this riffraff of Marxist racists has led the parade of the Democrats into the cul-de-sac of open borders, higher taxes, climate change hysteria, flag-burning collective national self-hatred, anti-Semitism, defunded police, underage sex change operations and biological men in women’s sports. With the precision and discipline of a parade ground honour guard, they have marched the party of Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson into a dead end shared by not more than 20 per cent of American voters.
The debacle of the Nazi alleged rapist senatorial campaign in Maine, and Trump’s success in apparently counter-gerrymandering 10 to 14 additional congressional districts for the Republicans, as well as the disintegration of a sensible opposition makes the tradition of midterm setbacks for the governing party very uncertain this year, and Democratic control of the Senate very unlikely. If the Iranian regime has not come to its senses by the end of the first week in November they will be holding more mass public funerals with dragooned hosts of bereaved peasants wailing and gnashing their teeth. Trump is a president like no other and his public personality is sometimes very jarring, but he is master of the scene and it is a mistake to underestimate him.
