Previous US administrations were facades of incompetence, fanaticism and stupidity over a bureaucratic war-machine; now it is just stupidity, incompetence and fanaticism all the way down.

Iran may have justified confidence in its deterrence against a US attack, but it cannot assume the present Trump administration is even as rational as the last one.

The roots of the present crisis lie squarely with Trump during his first term of office. In 2018, he unilaterally collapsed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) by withdrawing the US and illegally re-imposing secondary sanctions on the Islamic Republic. While he clearly did so with the encouragement of inveterate war hawks such as John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, he also had seasoned professionals such as Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, locking in some level of restraint.

These limits on his freedom of action irked Trump, such that by the time he resumed the presidency in 2025, his transition had systematically weeded out anyone from a position of authority that might challenge, counsel, or otherwise fail to sufficiently fawn over America’s own Caligula.

This relentless drive for absolute subordination of every member of his administration has given us a cabinet of personalities no less war-hungry than their typical neoconservative predecessors, but with none of their intelligence or basic competence.

The personification of this trend can only be the serial wife-beater and barely functional drunkard, Pete Hegseth. The former FOX News host and current Defense Secretary has outdone his colleagues in debasing the office he holds while simultaneously gutting it of any competent management. The highlight of his career so far has been recalling the US command from across the globe to berate them about their levels of physical fitness. That this radioactive cocktail of cravenness, inexperience, and intermittent lucidity has profound implications for the readiness and performance of the US military is beyond question.

Beyond the halls of the Pentagon, nowhere has this collapse in institutional capacity been starker than in the diplomatic field where Trump has radically dismantled Washington’s capacity to engage in functional interaction with the rest of the world. Dozens of ambassadorships remain vacant and almost all diplomatic initiatives of any significance, have been delegated to a clique of real-estate developers he’s styled as “Special Envoys.” All of these figures, Witkoff, Savaya, Barack are Trump’s erstwhile business-partners, and in the latter case, “associates” of the late Jeffrey Epstein. Jared Kushner simply holds the position by virtue of the president being his father-in-law. What they are not are trained diplomats, entirely unlike their Iranian, Chinese or Russian counterparts.

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In addition to their profound lack of diplomatic skill, these businessmen possess, as is often the case, no discernible knowledge of the world outside the real estate industry. They exhibit no understanding of the countries whose fates they hold in their hands nor even how to speak to them, we saw with Tom Barrack who admonished the Lebanese media to behave “civilized.”

The past weekend alone has served to emphasize the Trump administration’s catastrophic lack of ability and connection to reality. In an already infamous interview, the extremist minister and American ambassador to Tel-Aviv Mike Huckabee, candidly admitted to Tucker Carlson that he thought it would be “fine if they took all of it,” in reference to the land Christian Zionists assert God gave to Abraham’s descendants (Israelis in this narrative) extending from the River of Egypt to the Euphrates. This would include all or most of the territories of present-day Syria, Jordan, and Lebano,n in addition to vast swathes of Egypt and Iraq.

Witkoff’s admission this week that Trump is “curious (read bemused)” as to why Tehran still hasn’t capitulated in the face of the US armada is worryingly suggestive that he is having to learn basic geopolitical realities in the heat of the moment. In view of his declining health, he may be having to learn these lessons repeatedly.

All of the underlying facts that were obtained in previous episodes of US military posturing against Iran remain true. Tehran easily retains the capacity to decimate the energy infrastructure of the Gulf, shut down its maritime traffic, and saturate American and Israeli targets with unparalleled missile bombardments, triggering an apocalyptic collapse of the world economy that makes any level of military aggression wildly irrational.

What is different this time around is the scale and the depth of the American institutional collapse internationally and its accumulating domestic crises of legitimacy. Each continuous wave of scandal, rather than bringing down Trump as the apotheosis of the Epstein class, merely entrenches the atmosphere of innate criminality the world expects from the American government.

That Trump is no longer beholden to the wishes of the American public, who overwhelmingly oppose war against Iran, and has surrounded himself with sycophants who allow him to believe his own bluster, makes the present danger of a greater magnitude entirely.

It remains entirely plausible that someone will intervene to halt Trump’s mad march to war, but the degeneration taking root in Washington has reduced that chance to a coin toss.

Those are not the kinds of odds on which the peace of the world should depend.