Brilliant Strategy

Break Everything, Call It Leadership

It’s like watching a dark comedy in observing a country with every advantage on earth repeatedly trip over its own ego. You’d think after decades of outrageously expensive , destabilizing wars, someone in power might hesitate before lighting another match in the Middle East. But nooooo….hesitation requires reflection, and reflection isn’t exactly the defining trait of the current political moment. Is it?

Nobel Peace Prize winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz, who actually understands how economies work instead of just tweeting about them, calls this latest war a calamity.

That feels almost polite. What we’re looking at is a chain reaction of destruction that goes well beyond the battlefield. Civilian lives lost, infrastructure reduced to rubble, and the kind of long term instability that doesn’t politely resolve itself once the headlines move on.

Wars just don’t end cleanly. They linger. They metastasize. And this one, like so many before it, was launched with all the forethought of a bar fight.

What’s especially galling is how casually the decision seems to have been made. The U.S. has a system that’s supposed to slow things down when the stakes are this high. Checks and balances. King Charles brought applause for onlookers when he spoke about it at the White House yesterday. Congressional oversight. The faint hope that someone might ask, “Are we absolutely sure this is necessary?”

Instead, that process was brushed aside like an inconvenience. The result is predictable. Thousands dead, most of them civilians, and credible accusations of war crimes are left hanging in the air like smoke that won’t clear.

Meanwhile, the economic consequences are rippling outward, hitting people who had nothing to do with any of this. Supply chains are breaking down. Energy infrastructure is seriously damaged. Prices are rising higher and higher.

The world was already dealing with an affordability crisis, and this has poured gasoline on it. Central banks are now stuck in a familiar bind, either raise interest rates and choke off growth, or hold steady and watch inflation chew through what’s left of people’s purchasing power. Either way, ordinary people lose…and they can blame poor decision making by Trump.

Let’s not pretend this pain is being shared equally. Large oil companies are doing just fine, in fact better than fine. When global oil prices spike, they collect the rewards while everyone else absorbs the cost.

The idea that American consumers somehow benefit from increased domestic production is a nice talking point, but reality doesn’t cooperate. Gas prices are set globally, and they’ve gone up. So families pay more to get to work, to buy groceries, to live their lives, while corporate profits quietly swell in the background.

At the same time, the government has made sure it has fewer tools to respond to the damage. Tax cuts skewed toward the wealthy have drained resources that might have been used to stabilize things when they inevitably went sideways. It’s a remarkable strategy if the goal is to maximize vulnerability. Create a crisis, then weaken your ability to deal with it. It’s efficient, in a grim sort of way.

After World War II, there was a serious effort to build something more stable, more cooperative, less prone to exactly this kind of chaos. It wasn’t perfect, but it was progress. Now that foundation is being chipped away, piece by piece, by decisions that prioritize impulse over judgment. Democracy itself feels …thinner, less capable of correcting course before the damage grows worse .

The real danger isn’t just the destruction unfolding overseas or the economic strain creeping into everyday life. It’s the growing sense that this is normal, that this is just how things are now. Once that idea settles in, accountability fades. Expectations shrink. And the bar for leadership drops so low it practically disappears.

That’s when the real damage sets in, the kind that doesn’t show up in a single news cycle but defines an entire era long after the architects of it are gone. This damage…the Trump destruction of the United States, probably won’t be fixed in our lifetime.