A War Without a Political Author

The raised finger is meant to signal command. But this war no longer looks like command. It looks like a president trying to preserve the gesture of control after the structure of control has already begun to slip.

That is now the real image of Donald Trump in this conflict. Not the architect of a coherent campaign, but the public face of an escalation whose consequences are already spreading beyond the political capacity of its authors. Once the Strait of Hormuz became the decisive pressure point, Trump did not appear as the leader of a disciplined strategic design. He appeared as a president pressuring other states to help carry the burden of a crisis he could no longer politically contain.

That alone would be revealing. But the deeper scandal is that this pressure comes after a long phase of deliberate estrangement. This is not a president calling on trusted allies within an intact political architecture. It is a president trying to coerce participation from governments his own camp has spent months humiliating, lecturing, and destabilizing. What appears now is not coalition leadership but geopolitical extortion after political estrangement. Trump is trying to cash in a loyalty he has already degraded.

At the same time, the parallel U.S.-China talks darken the picture further. They suggest that Washington may already........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)