President Trump surprised many, perhaps most people, by ordering the attack on Iran on 28 February 2026. Just during the last days preceding the war did it become clear that the attack was imminent, in spite of the fact that the U.S. and Iranian sides were actively engaged in negotiations to settle the conflict peacefully. Before that period, it seemed that Trump was trying to avoid the war, and it was only logical that he should.
Attacking Iran was well understood to be so risky that every administration, from George W. Bush onwards resisted the pressure to do it. Even Donald Trump knew not to, in the summer of 2019 when the British Ambassador in Washington, Sir Kim Darroch, mounted a pressure campaign for him to launch the attack. Simply, there was too much downside risk to it (as we are now experiencing) while the success was always going to be a long shot.
Furthermore, if anything went wrong, the adventure would carry a devastating political price. For Trump, keenly concerned with the mid-term elections this November, going to war against Iran would be too costly, likely jeopardizing his presidency and his political legacy: Trump explicitly promised his voters, no more wars! The next obvious question is, what was it all for? The answer is unclear.
Reason and logic were against the move and it appears that even many people close to Trump were very surprised by his decision. Here’s what Tucker Carlson said in one of his recent podcasts:
“Trump agreed with me for ten years, and I’ve been talking to him about this topic for ten years. You know, there’s been real press[ure] on Trump to commit the United States to some sort of war with Iran, and so I’ve been there, talked to him about it and I spoke to him not long before this war started. I never detected any enthusiasm from him for this at all.
I don’t think he wanted to do it, I think he fully understood the potential consequences. … the facts are that he was under enormous pressure from the Prime Minister of Israel to do this and from advocates for Israel in the United States and they pushed him into it. Now, how did they get the power to do that? I don’t know the answer to that”
Tucker did mention that Trump is a dice-roller who has a reckless streak, and that he operates under the assumption that everything would be alright, “because it always is,” but war is a different kind of a dice roll altogether, since there’s close to 100% probability that there will be casualties.
Significantly, Tucker says that he’s been talking to Trump about this for years, and that Trump agreed with him and fully understood the war’s potential consequences. The “real pressure” on Trump appears to have come from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which is how many analysts today explain Trump’s decision.
But how can it be that the Prime Minister of a foreign nation can exert critical influence on the President of the United States over decisions as consequential as committing the the nation to a war that had every chance to turn out disastrously wrong and that the President’s voters were decisively opposed to? That nation, supposedly is a democracy. and is still considered the world’s leading superpower. Her President is the world’s most powerful man - everybody knows that!
On the other hand, Israel is a small nation whose economy largely depends on the U.S. Its security entirely depends on the U.S. And yet, this episode has made the superpower and its most powerful President appear subservient. Sure, there’s no shortage of explanations for this: the Jewish Zionist donors, the Christian evangelical voters, the Epstein files, the possible compromat Netanyahu wields against Trump, etc.
But all these elements existed also in the summer of 2019 when Trump knew to resist the pressure to attack Iran. Then too, he would have been keenly concerned about the donors, Zionists, Evangelicals and any compromat Netanyahu, the CIA, MI6, or the Mossad might have had over him. Then too, he was keenly concerned about his upcoming Presidential elections.
I believe that the mystery defies any easy explanations, but I do find it significant that the pressure on Trump came both from the British ambassador and from Israel. Recall, Israel was the creation of the British Empire, whose purpose was to be the Empire’s bridgehead in the Eastern Mediterranean so that it may facilitate its hegemony in the key resource rich region.
The ultimate beneficiaries have been, and still are, the banking interests whose main incentive in wielding political control is in turning the region’s resource wealth into their own collateral. Recall, the ostensible legal basis for the formation of Israel was the Balfour declaration, issued from the British Foreign Office to Lord Walter Rothschild, scion of one of the world’s most powerful banking dynasties.
If the same vested interests are still in charge, this might explain how a small foreign country could wield such decisive influence over the world’s foremost superpower. It may also explain how that influence could come from the officials of two different nations: the Prime Minister of Israel and the Ambassador of Great Britain. Sir Kim Darroch was employed by the British Foreign Office, the same agency that issued the Balfour declaration.
That, in turn, suggests that both the government of Israel and the government of Great Britain are subordinated to the same vested interests and that these interests have decisive leverage over the government of the United States and the most powerful man in the world. The effects of that order just played out in front of our own eyes: the decision to commit a nation to war against its own interests and against the democratic will of its people represents compelling evidence that the real, decisive power in Western societies like Israel, UK, U.S. and others, doesn’t reside with their legitimate governments but with the financier oligarchy.
This oligarchy is evidently powerful enough to create whole new countries, and to compel supposedly democratic governments to war regardless of what their leaders and constituents think or desire. If they can compel us to war, what can they not do? What are democracies for? Why do we vote and why should we harbor any hopes of resolving any of the problems of our societies through the “legitimate” institutions of the system if literally the most critical choices can be overridden by the bankers?
It won’t do to explain any of this as Trump’s impulsiveness, competence, shallowness or inability to think strategically. The American people have voted for antiwar candidates before - virtually in every election (with the possible exception of George 43rd’s second term). They got forever wars all the same.
If one nation has initiated over 80% of all international military conflicts since 1946, the problem is not Trump; the problem is systemic and we won’t be able to vote our way out, certainly not through the “legitimate institutions of the system.” If World War III is on the agenda, we won’t be able to vote against that either. We might be able to do so, however, by voting with our wallets: taking our money out of the oligarchy’s financial institutions and (again) conducting as much business as possible in grey and black markets.
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By Independent News Roundup