CNN reported this week that the CIA is arming Iranian Kurdish forces to destabilize Iran further. The White House called it “completely false,” while it confirmed Trump had spoken to Kurdish leaders, an intentional contradiction. A former military intelligence specialist told AFP the strategy is for Kurds to trigger a “cascading effect” of ethnic violence that overwhelms the Iranian state, destabilizes it and increases mass suffering.

At the same time, the administration is backing Reza Pahlavi as the son of the Shah toppled in 1979, to be the presumptive puppet who needs American aid to violently suppress the ethnic groups. No armed forces, no domestic base, no democratic mandate. Just a willingness to sign whatever contracts keep him in “power” over the mess Trump creates.

Five Iranian Kurdish groups just announced a coalition for self-determination. Pahlavi immediately attacked the concept, calling a sense of territorial integrity “the ultimate red line.”

Get it?

Trump is arming the people that his chosen dictator calls an existential threat. That contradiction is not incoherence. That is a repeat of history, slaves with any power forced to fight for the master’s pleasure, and to degrade themselves.

My own graduate degree research on disinformation and the origins of special operations, at the London School of Economics, documented this pattern in the British occupation of Ethiopia. An intervention to “establish stability” was followed by revolution, territorial war, and decades of anti-Western blowback. The Horn of Africa is still a disaster living with the consequences. Iran is being set up for the same.

The Method Has a Name

Mahmood Mamdani at Columbia published Define and Rule in 2012 documenting how British colonial administrators invented a system after the Indian Rebellion of 1857: define populations by ethnic categories, codify those categories into law, govern through the resulting divisions.

In Sudan, after crushing the Mahdiyya — a revolutionary movement that had united populations across tribal lines — the British parceled Darfur into tribal homelands called “dars.” Rights to land and governance became exclusive to those classified as native to a particular dar. What had been a multi-ethnic society with fluid identities became a set of legally enforced ethnic containers.

The Mahdiyya was a translocal anti-colonial resistance which “shook the foundations of the Empire to the core.” After it was brutally defeated, Darfurian society was effectively tribalized.

The mechanism is not to divide and rule, because define and rule is sufficient. You do not need to exploit existing divisions. You create the administrative categories that make ethnicity the only politically meaningful identity. Once that is done, ethnic conflict becomes structurally inevitable and an unavoidable tool of control.

Trump’s Iran strategy follows this logic to weaken Iran and dramatically reduce stability, force lower quality of life.

Arm the Kurds as Kurds. Activate Baluchi militants as Baluchis. Court Pahlavi as the Persian restorationist. Everyone is pushed into groups defined into roles that make national cooperation impossible and intense self-destructive conflict inevitable.

Follow the Oil

Philippe Le Billon at UBC has spent two decades mapping how resource geography shapes armed conflict. His framework: point-source resources like oil, concentrated in specific locations, produce a specific kind of violence. Control of the production site becomes the strategic objective. The populations living near those sites become either assets to recruit or obstacles to remove.

Iran’s resource geography is a textbook case.

Khuzestan province generates roughly 90 percent of Iran’s oil revenue. Its population is predominantly Arab. The International Crisis Group documented in 2023 that Khuzestan’s Arab minority views the central government’s chronic underinvestment not as mismanagement but as systematic discrimination. The New Lines Institute confirmed in February 2026 that local Arabs are denied employment in the oil and petrochemical industries, with jobs reserved for ethnic Persians who receive economic incentives to resettle on confiscated Arab farmlands. As a Khuzestani activist, quoted in the ICG report, puts it:

We live on one of the wealthiest lands on earth.

The Baluchis sit in the southeast along the strategic corridor to the Indian Ocean. The Kurds are in the northwest on pipeline routes and border crossings to Iraq. The Azeris are in the north near Azerbaijan.

Fragment Iran along these ethnic lines and you have erased humanity, replacing it with desperation. You have created a cage match of competing entities, each sitting on resources they lack the sovereign capacity to negotiate collectively.

Chaos is the Extraction Discount Trick

Michael Ross at UCLA looked into data from 170 countries in The Oil Curse and found petroleum-rich countries are 50 percent more likely to be ruled by autocrats and twice as likely to descend into civil war. Just look at Texas. Oil concentrates power, eliminates the need to tax citizens, removes the incentive for accountability. Oil states become rentier states — authoritarian by structural necessity.

But the Iran strategy is something worse than the oil curse operating organically.

This is the oil curse being engineered from the outside to ruin a country. Pick the autocrat first — Pahlavi. Engineer the ethnic fragmentation that will make his authoritarian consolidation appear necessary. The resource trap is the objective, for manipulation.

Paul Collier at Oxford coined the “conflict trap” phrase: civil war, low income, and dependence on primary commodity exports form a self-reinforcing cycle. Once you break a resource-rich country, it tends to stay broken. Resources continue to flow out at discounted rates because armed factions need weapons more than they need fair market value.

That is the business model, which obviously fits the Trump brand of hyper aggressive smash and grab.

Congo has more cobalt than anywhere on earth. It has been in continuous conflict since the 1990s. Jason Stearns, who led the UN investigation into the violence, documented in Dancing in the Glory of Monsters how the political system consistently produced leaders without vision, sustained by mineral extraction that financed all sides simultaneously. 5.4 million dead. The minerals kept flowing.

Sudan fractured and the oil fields became the contested border. Libya fragmented and the oil concessions got carved up among militias. Venezuela — same administration, same playbook, same prize — destabilize, sanction, back an exile figurehead, write the intervention around energy concessions.

Yugoslavia Isn’t Forgotten

Susan Woodward — senior advisor to the top UN official in the former Yugoslavia, special representative of the Secretary-General — wrote in Balkan Tragedy:

To explain the Yugoslav crisis as a result of ethnic hatred is to turn the story upside down and begin at its end.

The real cause was disintegration of governmental authority. Outside powers recognized breakaway republics, armed specific factions, imposed economic conditions that accelerated collapse, then characterized the resulting violence as “ancient ethnic hatreds.”

The hatreds were the output, not the input. They were produced by political and economic disintegration, not the cause of it. And Western intervention, Woodward documented, exacerbated the conflict.

Iran maps onto this with uncomfortable precision. Multi-ethnic state with geographically concentrated populations. Economic pressure from sanctions. External powers arming specific ethnic factions while claiming to support territorial integrity. Diaspora figurehead with foreign backing but no domestic base.

Pahlavi is Tudjman. The Kurdish coalition is the Croatian Defense Council. The “cascading effect” the administration’s own analysts describe is what Woodward spent 556 pages documenting: the mechanism by which a multi-ethnic state dissolves into ethnic war when outside powers pick favorites.

In Yugoslavia, that cascading effect produced Srebrenica.

Name It

Francesco Caselli and Wilbur John Coleman formalized the economics in their NBER paper “On the Theory of Ethnic Conflict“: the probability of ethnic conflict rises with the proportion of expropriable assets in a country’s wealth. Oil is inherently expropriable. Ethnic boundaries serve as enforcement mechanisms — they reduce the cost of determining who is in the winning coalition and who is not.

Ethnicity makes resource expropriation cheaper. That is why resource conflicts so consistently follow ethnic lines.

Berman, Couttenier, and Girard confirmed in The Economic Journal (2023) that mineral extraction increases the salience of ethnic identity over national identity. Mining does not create unity. It creates ethnic grievance, by making ethnicity the category that determines who benefits and who does not.

The Trump administration is selecting a dictator, injecting an unelected exile, to ensure extraction continues on favorable terms. To prevent him from facing actual power, they are engineering ethnic conflict across a country of 90 million sitting on the world’s fourth-largest oil reserves. Ethnic minorities concentrated directly on top of those resources are being primed to kill each other.

The scholarly literature has a name for Trump deliberately triggering ethnic violence to prevent a population from achieving political representation.

The scholarly literature has a name for Trump intentionally engineering state collapse to break apart Iran for access to resources at below-market rates.

Will anyone use the right words before another “cascading effect” of genocide reaches its known conclusion?

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth held a Pentagon briefing this morning and complained that media only covers the drones that get through. Six Americans are dead in Kuwait after an Iranian drone penetrated U.S. defenses without triggering a single alert, struck a makeshift operations center at Shuaiba port, and completed its kill chain undetected.

The deaths are the vulnerability assessment. And let me say, as an old and grizzled vulnerability expert, this is very, very bad news for American defense.

A drone threaded every layer of U.S. defense, found a soft target, and proved the capability gap. That’s not a tragic accident. That’s a successful credibility penetration test, paid for in American lives.

And the results are now public.

What the Troops Say

Three U.S. military officials with direct knowledge told CBS News the operations center was a triple-wide trailer — a shipping container turned into office space at a civilian port, more than ten miles from the main Army base at Camp Arifjan. There was no American counter-rocket, artillery, or mortar system at Shuaiba. No drone defeat capability at all. Requests for additional resources were made.

Support never came.

Two of the sources said they didn’t recall hearing warning sirens before the strike. The sirens had worked all week — but in prior incidents, drones were already inside the base before they sounded.

The dead were from the 103rd Sustainment Command out of Des Moines, Iowa. A reserve logistics unit. Captain Cody Khork, 35. Sergeant First Class Noah Tietjens, 42. Sergeant First Class Nicole Amor, 39. Sergeant Declan Coady, 20 — recommended for promotion, the youngest in his class. They were pushed to a civilian port without organic force protection. Someone signed off on operating from Shuaiba without C-RAM coverage during an active air campaign against an adversary with demonstrated drone capability.

That’s not a defense gap. That’s a command failure.

The OPSEC Disaster

Now listen to what the Secretary of Defense said from the Pentagon podium. Monday: the drone was “a squirter” that “makes its way through” defenses he called “fortified.”

Wednesday: “This does not mean we can stop everything.” The troops say there was nothing to stop anything with. The husband of one of the slain soldiers says the building had no defenses.

Hegseth is publicly contradicting the people who were there while simultaneously confirming the capability gap to every adversary watching. He’s not managing information. He’s broadcasting failure from the podium and calling it strength then complaining that the press reported what he just said.

This is what telegraphing military weakness looks like.

Not the media reporting on the deaths. The Secretary of Defense publicly confirming what American air defense can’t do, where it isn’t deployed, and what gets through, while his own troops are telling reporters the resources they requested never arrived.

That’s a huge gap. Resource constraints are the clearest tell in military history. Quartermaster integrity and strength mean everything in war and Hegseth is openly exposing that he can’t handle the truth.

The Numbers Watching

Approximately 375,000 U.S. military and civilian personnel are assigned to Indo-Pacific Command. About 53,000 in Japan, 24,000 in South Korea, 7,000 on Guam. The Congressional Research Service has noted that much of the INDOPACOM area of responsibility falls within range of PRC conventional ballistic and cruise missiles, and that U.S. bases, personnel, and weapons systems may be at risk.

China’s Rocket Force fields over 1,300 medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles covering the First and Second Island Chains. The DF-26 — the “Guam killer” — can reach every major U.S. installation in the Western Pacific.

A Stimson Center study found that Chinese missile attacks could close runways at forward air bases in Japan and Guam for the first critical days or weeks of a conflict, and that no combination of countermeasures is likely to solve the problem.

Iran just demonstrated that a single drone can thread U.S. air defense architecture undetected. China didn’t need to probe those systems.

They got decisive gap analysis for free.

The drone that did it wasn’t advanced — it was Iranian, likely a Shahed-136. If that technology completes the kill chain, China’s far more sophisticated platforms now have a confirmed baseline. They know the floor of what gets through.

The Drawdown

About 40% of U.S. Navy ships capable of immediate operations are now in the Middle East. The Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group was pulled from the South China Sea.

The only U.S. carrier in Asia — the George Washington — is in maintenance at Yokosuka. Japan faces delays in Tomahawk deliveries. Former Defense Secretary Kendall warned that drawing down precision weapons stockpiles “would increase risk in other theaters.”

The U.S. is burning through THAAD rounds and PAC-3 Patriots in the Middle East, which are the interceptors designed to protect the 375,000 troops from competition with China.

China has built over 3,000 hardened aircraft shelters in the past decade. The U.S. has built… wait for it… twenty two.

Chinese analysts are already saying it publicly. As one scholar wrote this week, America’s deep involvement in military conflict in the Middle East:

…inevitably diverts its strategic resources and attention, objectively constraining its capacity to sustain pressure on China in the Indo-Pacific.

Beijing didn’t need to say it. The math says it for them.

The Signal

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Dan Caine opened his remarks by naming the fallen. He didn’t have two of the names yet because next-of-kin notification was still underway — while Hegseth was complaining about press coverage. Caine acknowledged that troops “remain in harm’s way” and that “the risk is still high.” He’s reading the battlefield. Hegseth is performing for an audience.

Six dead Americans gave a blueprint for exactly how targets now will be painted.

Hegseth’s own words confirmed the capability gap from the Pentagon podium. His pivot to grievance over accountability told every adversary that when U.S. defenses fail, leadership fails too by reaching for a talking point instead of a fix.

And the war consuming the interceptors meant for the Pacific tells China exactly how long this big window stays open.

Epilogue: For Those Who Don’t Recognize the Pattern

Putin did this. He telegraphed Russian military incompetence in Ukraine for years before the 2022 invasion, chest-thumping about modernized forces while his logistics couldn’t sustain operations seventy miles from the border, his commanders lied up the chain, and his air defense gaps were exposed one system at a time. He performed strength from behind a long table as his army bled out in the mud by the tens of thousands. Every intelligence service on earth read the meat grinder signals. It didn’t matter. Putin couldn’t stop performing.

The Greeks had a word for this.

They had two war gods to differentiate them. There was an Ares, who was rushed, aggressive, and a liar, despised even by the other gods, who fought with brute force and bluster. And then Athena, who was measured, strategic, and honest about the battlefield.

Homer has Ares wounded and screaming in the Iliad. Athena barely breaks a sweat. Ares always loses. He just never admits it.

“Death and destruction from the sky all day.” “No stupid rules of engagement.” “We’re playing for keeps.” “Four days in, we have only just begun to fight.”

That’s obviously weakness, an Ares. With 375,000 Americans in the Western Pacific directly exposed to China doing the simple math.

Donald Trump has never hidden his admiration for white supremacist apartheid doctrine. The doctrine has a consistent two-step execution: assassinate the successor first, destroy the resulting state second.

Let’s step back in time for a minute. Patrice Lumumba was killed in January 1961 to prevent a functional post-colonial Congo. When UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld flew to negotiate a ceasefire that would have ended the Katanga secession, his plane was shot down in Northern Rhodesia eight months later by the South African apartheid mercenaries, Belgian colonial officers, and CIA operating as one network. Eduardo Mondlane was killed by a parcel bomb in 1969 because his moderate leadership of FRELIMO made Mozambican independence negotiable, and the Portuguese colonial right and its Western allies feared negotiation more than armed resistance. When Mozambique achieved independence anyway in 1975, South Africa deployed RENAMO to destroy the resulting state. The same sequence played out in Angola with UNITA.

The recurring goal in each case was a failed state by design, because a failed state confirmed the ideology that was manufacturing it.

White House advisers now include Elon Musk, who grew up in apartheid South Africa and tweets nostalgia for Rhodesia as “a century of civilization,” and Peter Thiel, who spent years under apartheid and has praised that system. Trump’s immigration enforcement architecture was built by Kris Kobach, whose transition vetting documents flagged “white supremacy” as a political vulnerability after he accepted funding from white supremacist groups and employed white nationalists on his campaign. The ambassador to South Africa is a man who spent the 1980s trying to protect apartheid by blocking US contact with the African National Congress.

In February 2025, Trump signed an executive order prioritizing Afrikaner refugees while freezing aid to the Black-majority South African government — citing a “white genocide” conspiracy theory that South African courts, South African political parties, and the South African Human Rights Commission have all dismissed as fiction.

On January 7, 2021 — the day after the Capitol attack — Trump awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Gary Player, who wrote in 1966 that he was “of the South Africa of Verwoerd and apartheid,” describing the country as “the product of its instinct to maintain civilized values and standards among the alien barbarians.” Player’s Johannesburg estate had been acquired by TGS International, a company set up by former CIA agent Ted Shackley — the same covert apparatus that ran operations in Katanga while Lumumba was being delivered to his executioners.

This history is the how and why of an administration now bombing the Iranian succession process. The strategy it has for Tehran is the same derangement it admires so much from apartheid-era Pretoria.

Bombing Successors to Prolong Chaos

The sequence is precise enough to read as a doctrine. CIA intelligence on Khamenei’s location (an old man in ill health, sitting at home with his family) was shared with Israel, accelerating the timeline of a strike that killed the supreme leader along with his children, senior IRGC commanders and political officials gathered at his home. Within 72 hours, Israel struck the Iranian parliament building to prevent assembly. Then it struck Qom, the seat of the Assembly of Experts, the body constitutionally charged with selecting the next supreme leader.

Richard Helms, who helped engineer the 1953 CIA coup in Iran and later served as US ambassador to Tehran, testified before the Church Committee with the clearest possible warning against exactly this kind of operation (Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, Interim Report of the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, S. Rep. No. 94-465, 94th Cong., 1st Sess. Nov. 20, 1975 — Epilogue, testimony of Richard Helms.):

If you are going to try by this kind of means to remove a foreign leader, then who is going to take his place running that country, and are you essentially better off as a matter of practice when it is over than you were before?

The Trump administration has no answer to either question.

There is no evidence it has even considered them.

They started bombing to prevent the end of negotiations. They destroyed the succession to prevent the end of bombing.

Permanent Improvisation Policy

The Kahanist ministers now holding structural power in Netanyahu’s coalition — Ben-Gvir at Internal Security, Smotrich at Finance with authority over the West Bank — require permanent instability.

Stability forecloses annexation. A coherent Iranian state, even a post-theocratic one, could reconstitute as a regional counterweight. A permanently fractured Iran with the IRGC splintered, Kurdish and Baloch separatist movements armed by the CIA, and the clerical succession process physically destroyed serves the Israeli territorial program.

Netanyahu’s own record is mired in Kahanism. For years he kept Hamas financially viable, allowing Qatari funds to flow into Gaza, precisely because a divided Palestinian leadership made a two-state solution structurally impossible. The chaos was the alternative to a peace strategy. The same logic, applied at regional scale, produces the current operation in Iran.

Kahanism requires both — the land and the proof that no alternative was ever possible. A functional Iranian state falsifies the second requirement as surely as it threatens the first.

Trump Exceptionism

Carl Schmitt’s definition of sovereignty — the sovereign is whoever decides the state of exception — illuminates why forever war is a governing strategy.

Permanent war produces permanent emergency. Permanent emergency suspends legal constraint.

The courts that declined to rule on the war powers question, invoking the political question doctrine and standing limits, are the system functioning exactly as the executive branch spent decades engineering it to function.

Netanyahu faces criminal indictment. Wartime prime ministers stay in office. Trump, facing his own accumulating legal exposure, understands this logic intimately. He said so himself, telling ABC that he killed Khamenei as a grudge match.

I got him before he got me.

The president who claims the unilateral right to assassinate a foreign leader preemptively, citing fear for his own life, spent the same year stripping Secret Service protection from Kamala Harris and revoking security clearances for Biden, Blinken, Cheney, and the prosecutors who pursued him. He removed protection from Americans facing documented threat environments. The immunity from consequences is only for Trump.

A personal grudge framing is the only honest assessment. The legal architecture — Article II authority, the 2024 immunity ruling, the hollowed-out War Powers Resolution — was hastily constructed around it after the fact.

Why Chaos? Evidence to Justify More

The Afghanistan war lasted twenty years and transferred roughly two trillion dollars from public accounts to private contractors. The stated objectives — stable governance, functional institutions, a self-sustaining security force — were not achieved. The contracts were fulfilled. Revenue was recognized. By the measure that actually governed behavior, it succeeded.

Iran is far larger, far more complex, and more strategically located as it sits astride the Strait of Hormuz. The procurement pipeline implied by permanent conflict there makes Afghanistan look like a pilot program.

The absence of a plan is the plan. An open-ended operation answers to no endpoint, no congressional authorization, no definition of success that could expire.

The mechanism is based in cruel operational logic. The belief system, raw ideology, explains why that mechanism is indispensable.

You can’t go bankrupt if there’s never an accounting. You can’t go to jail if there’s never an enforcement.

Kahanism holds that Arabs have no legitimate national existence, that Palestinians are not a people, that Islamic civilization is structurally incompatible with self-governance. Inside that framework, a functional Iranian state, a coherent Palestinian authority, a stable Arab democracy anywhere in the region is a falsifying data point. Nazi racial doctrine followed the same logic — Jewish participation in European civic life falsified the premise of inherent incompatibility, so participation itself became the target.

The death and chaos are required as evidence.

Apartheid South Africa operated the same logic with the same precision. The white minority regime understood that a thriving Black-governed neighbor would undermine its foundational claim that Africans were incapable of self-rule. When Mozambique and Angola gained independence in 1975, South Africa responded with a formal doctrine of regional destabilization — arming RENAMO to terrorize Mozambican civilians, backing UNITA through decades of Angolan civil war that killed at least half a million people, and at one point using its proxy forces to deliberately exacerbate a drought into a famine that killed over 100,000. The goal was a failed state on the border, because a failed state confirmed the ideology that manufactured it. Self-sealing.

Robert Moses did the same to the inner cities. Urban renewal demolished the organizational infrastructure of functioning communities — the informal economies, the political networks, the institutions of local order — and installed nothing in their place. The crime wave that followed was predictable. Jane Jacobs diagnosed the mechanism in 1961. Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote the report that blamed the family structure. The consequences of deliberate policy became legible as evidence of inherent incapacity. The destruction that produced the dysfunction disappeared from the official account.

The through-line from apartheid South Africa to the current operation is the cordon sanitaire. Apartheid South Africa used that exact term to mean a buffer of deliberately failed states that an ethno-supremacist project requires on its borders. The logic today is identical: no neighbor can be permitted genuine sovereignty, because sovereignty eventually produces the mirror that reveals the actual threat.

The American Christian nationalist layer adds the civilizational frame. Trump calling Khamenei “one of the most evil people in history” is doing theological work, not strategic work. Chaos in Iran reads, inside that framework, as confirmation that Islamic governance is inherently ungovernable. The bombing produces the evidence that the crusader narrative already required.

What Helms Already Told Us

The Church Committee’s conclusions on assassination were bipartisan. They quoted Kennedy:

We can’t get into that kind of thing, or we would all be targets.

They documented eight attempts to kill Castro between 1960 and 1965. They produced Helms’s operational objection, grounded in the predictable consequences of decapitating a state without a successor structure.

Three consecutive presidents — Ford, Carter, Reagan — signed executive orders banning US involvement in assassination. Reagan’s order is technically still in effect. It is a dead letter, rendered null by practiced nullification: bin Laden, then Soleimani, then Khamenei, each step justified by the last, the ladder working exactly as ladders do.

The hardest argument against assassination is operational. The moral case makes itself.

The argument that reaches even people who have dispensed with moral reasoning runs through 1975 Helms testimony: decapitate a state without a successor structure and the vacuum compounds the original problem, every time, with no historical exceptions.

Unless, of course, a power vacuum is a structural doctrine of manufactured state failure as an ideological proof. Then it works as intended.

Iran agreed to degrade its nuclear stockpiles on February 27. The United States and Israel bombed Iran on February 28.

That sequence matters more than anything else about this war.

What the Talks Were For

The standard explanation is that diplomacy failed. This is wrong. The diplomacy worked exactly as designed. It was never a path to agreement. It was the preparation, the pretext for attack.

Through the Oman-mediated channel and the Geneva rounds, the United States in bad faith extracted detailed knowledge of Iran’s negotiating position, its internal divisions, and how far it would bend. When Iran agreed to degrade its stockpiles, it confirmed two things: that the regime was willing to make real concessions, and that it had placed itself in its most exposed position.

The strikes came the next day because it had showed willingness to negotiate.

This pattern is not new to this administration. Venezuela’s government was in diplomatic back-channels before the January military operation. The Geneva nuclear talks were active when the bombs hit Iran. In each case, the process of negotiation is being used bad faith for intelligence collection to find a window of vulnerability for attack.

Trump’s own words confirm the framework. Speaking to The Atlantic while strikes continued, he said of Iran:

They should have done it sooner. They waited too long.

The act of negotiating, by showing up, making concessions, is reframed as the victim’s error. The target is blamed for being in the room, for being vulnerable.

A Czechoslovak Parallel

The tightest historical precedent I can think of is not at Pearl Harbor or the invasion of Iraq.

It is Czechoslovakia in 1938.

A very important detail is obscure. Czechoslovakia had built strong defenses, had great technology (Porsche and VW are stolen designs, shameless Nazi copies of Czech innovations), and posed a good chance of defeating Hitler. The Sudetenland fortifications were among the strongest in Europe, purpose-built to stop a German invasion. The Czech army was competent and well-equipped. France had a treaty obligation to fight. The Soviet Union had offered military support.

Hitler used bad faith negotiations to undermine it all.

Munich didn’t just stupidly hand over territory. It handed over the fortification line that made Czech defense possible. Once the Sudetenland was ceded, Czechoslovakia was militarily indefensible. The diplomatic process was the attack, it physically stripped the target of its defensive capability. The German Generals, who knew Hitler was unstable and could not lead, felt betrayed by the foreign nations refusing to stand up to Hitler.

Six months later Hitler took the rest without firing a shot.

Iran agreeing to degrade its nuclear stockpiles, removing its own deterrent, and then getting bombed the next day is the same mechanism, feeding the same mindset.

The concession didn’t buy safety. It removed the thing that made them safe.

The Czechs weren’t even at the table. Britain and France negotiated away Czech sovereignty without Czech participation. Czechoslovakia was the subject of diplomacy, not a party to it. When Czech representatives were finally told the terms, they were presented as a done deal. There was nothing left to discuss with the people who should have had the final say.

Stalin Balked

The aftermath of Munich is where the precedent turns from instructive to predictive.

Stalin watched the Western powers sacrifice an ally, break a treaty commitment, and negotiate away another country’s security to avoid confrontation. He drew the rational conclusion: the Western diplomatic framework could not be relied on. Within a year he signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with the very predator the diplomacy was supposed to contain. Not because he trusted Hitler. He didn’t. But Munich proved the alternative was worse.

That is exactly the recalculation happening now.

Every state watching the Iran strikes is drawing its own Molotov-Ribbentrop conclusion. If the American-led order will use diplomacy to disarm you and then strike, you make your own arrangements — with China, with Russia, with anyone offering a security framework that doesn’t require you to show up at Geneva and hope for the best.

North Korea will never voluntarily give up its nuclear weapons. It just received the clearest possible demonstration of what happens to countries that negotiate away their deterrent. China will recalculate every scenario involving Taiwan or trade. Any middle power weighing a deal with Washington — on any subject — must now treat the act of sitting down as a risk factor, not a safety measure.

The Oman foreign minister, who brokered the talks and personally vouched for the process, told the United States afterward: “This is not your war.” His credibility was the room the diplomacy happened in. That room was used as a staging area. He will not broker talks again. No one will.

“The Fools”

There is one important difference between Munich and Tehran.

Chamberlain genuinely believed the process would work. He was a fool, or at best a passive strategist unable to overcome an English fondness for Hitler, not a predator. Daladier, the French premier, reportedly knew it was a betrayal. He expected to be loudly booed and ridiculed when he returned to Paris. The crowds cheered instead. He muttered to an aide:

The fools — if only they knew.

The Iran operation doesn’t even have a Chamberlain. There is no one in the room who believes the diplomacy is real. Steve Witkoff, the real estate envoy and Trump sycophant, couldn’t even commit to his own vocabulary on Fox News:

I don’t want to use the word ‘capitulated,’ but why haven’t they capitulated?

Pete Hegseth was placed at the Pentagon not because he understands warfare, he most certainly does NOT, but because he understands rape culture and the performance of domination.

The Reza Pahlavi meeting at Trump’s direction made the regime change objective barely subtext. This is what the Soviet Union did to Hungary in 1956. They invited General Maléter and the Hungarian military negotiators to discuss troop withdrawal. Because they participated they were arrested at the table. Invaded the next morning.

The negotiation was literally the seizure mechanism.

It also brings to mind Austria-Hungary’s 1914 ultimatum to Serbia, which was designed to be unacceptable. It performed the structure of diplomacy by making demands with a deadline, the appearance of giving the other side a chance to comply, while being engineered to produce rejection. Serbia actually accepted nearly every demand, which panicked Vienna because they wanted war, not compliance.

Iran’s stockpile agreement had the same problem: concession wasn’t supposed to work, Trump wanted war.

Another Trump War Without a Plan

The strikes stupidly killed Supreme Leader Khamenei on the first day, as well as destroying a school and killing hundreds of school girls. More than 1,250 targets were hit. Trump calls the campaign “ahead of schedule”, boasting the whole operation will last at most four to five weeks.

But air campaigns end when you run out of targets. What’s the target? The question is what follows, and the answer appears to be: nothing.

There is no ground force plan. No occupation plan. No governing authority plan to install. The exile groups Trump has courted — the Pahlavi monarchists, the MEK — have no meaningful support inside Iran. America has even less. The Kurdish factions claiming forces along the border represent a fraction of the country. The IRGC is damaged but not destroyed, and its fragments will operate independently for years.

Meanwhile, the war has already spread out of control beyond Iran’s borders, exactly as predicted. Hezbollah entered on March 2. The Houthis are escalating in the Red Sea. Iranian missiles and drones struck Israel, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Jordan. An Amazon data center in the UAE was hit. A Saudi oil refinery shut down. A school in Minab where 148 people died. Oil and gas shipments are parked and insurance terms are cancelled.

The most structural comparison of the miscalculation is to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, because it’s a war the initiator cannot exit without admitting catastrophic error. It continues while stopping is more politically dangerous than fighting. But Putin, for all his faults, at least was ex-KGB enough to have a theory of occupation. The United States has destruction from the air with no mechanism to shape what comes after. That’s worse than even Nixon in Vietnam.

It has created a power vacuum it cannot fill and cannot physically reach.

Napoleon walked into the same trap in Spain in 1808. He invited the Spanish royals to “negotiate” at Bayonne, forced both claimants to abdicate, and installed his brother on the throne. He got symbolic regime change. Then years of guerrilla warfare bled their Grande Armée thin and caused his empire’s decline. He destroyed the authority structure and stood empty handed, nothing to govern with.

What Dies With This

Germany’s Bismarck understood something his successors forgot. He used deception tactically (e.g. the Ems Telegram was a manufactured provocation) but he preserved the diplomatic framework because he knew Prussia would need it again. He fought limited wars with defined objectives and then stopped.

Germany’s Wilhelm II’s generation inherited the tools of manipulation without the strategic restraint. The result was a system where every negotiation was assumed to be a pretext. That made the collapse into WWI by 1914 inevitable. Not because anyone wanted a world war, but because no one believed the conversations were real anymore. Mobilization schedules overrode diplomats. The July Crisis happened because the table itself becomes a threat.

The United States this has done to global diplomacy again what Wilhelm’s Germany did to the Concert of Europe. We are supposed to know better, to learn.

The very framework that made negotiation possible, the basic assumption that coming to the table offers a degree of protection, has been totally destroyed by Trump. He has zero respect and zero credibility. His force became an embarrassment on the first night, shooting down three F-15E for the first time in history. Not eroded gradually. Destroyed in twenty-four hours, between a stockpile agreement and a self-bombing campaign.

After 1938 Munich, it took barely a year for the entire European security order to collapse into bilateral survival pacts and then World War II. The nations that had relied on collective diplomacy scrambled to cut whatever deals they could with whoever seemed most dangerous.

The system didn’t reform. It shattered. And I’m already seeing American special operations communication post-Venezuela about how to break ties and compete against former allies.

American diplomacy is dead. If history holds, many now will die with it.