The question ahead of the latest summit with Netanyahu on Tuesday is what the U.S. president will lose — either a war, on the one hand, or on the other, the global economy and the American electorate.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Donald Trump talking in the Blue Room of the White House on July 7, 2025. (White House Photo /Daniel Torok)
By Patrick Lawrence
Special to Consortium News
I was talking to an investor friend the other day, asking whether I should get into one of these price-lock arrangements with the people who supply our heating oil. He usually has sound answers to these kinds of questions, but this time I could practically hear him shrug over the telephone as he said in anxious tones, “How’s Trump going to end this!? He has no way out. It’s rattling the markets now. What’s the way forward? Nobody can see an exit plan.”
Donald J. Trump can’t either, it seems.
Obliging the Zionists who own him, Trump wandered into a war there was never any chance of winning, and the military option seems to be collapsing as we speak. He has betrayed the Iranians so often they have shut down all diplomatic channels. The Trumpster doesn’t even know how to lose this reckless war: This is the net of it, so it seems to me.
I have seen Washington pols out on limbs before, usually having got there by way of their own foolish machinations and miscalculations. Rarely, if ever, have I seen a political figure crawl out on one and turn to saw it off as he or she sits there.
All last week Trump continued to threaten a major escalation of the war he let Bibi Netanyahu talk him into starting last February. “Next week it gets really bad for them,” Trump said in a Fox News interview broadcast in mid–July, “next week” being the week just passed. “We’re going to knock out all their power plants. We’re going to knock out all their bridges unless they get to the table and negotiate.”
Last Friday, with no one at the table, Trump told Barak Ravid, the White House’s Zionist mouthpiece at Axios, “I am considering a massive attack. Bigger than ever before. I am close to making a decision.”
A day later, following a conference with military advisers and members of his cabinet, Trump’s decision turned out to be no knocking out of anything. It is coming out now that the U.S. military is running low on weapons — air-defense systems, “stand-off” missiles, etc. — and running very low on petroleum reserves.
The New York Times, in the cotton-wool English it has perfected over the decades, reported as follows in its Saturday editions:
“President Trump has set aside, at least for now, plans to sharply escalate the American military assault against Iran, with particular concern that intensifying the war could dangerously drain the Pentagon’s already diminished stockpile of Patriot antimissile interceptors and other air-defense munitions in the Middle East.
The threat to interceptor stockpiles is one of many considerations that have made a return to major combat operations a hugely risky endeavor, administration officials say. Mr. Trump and his top aides are also uneasy about the prospect of a widening war in the Middle East, the alienation of key Gulf allies who are vulnerable to Iranian attack, a global economic crunch, and growing energy and refugee crises.”
This is not what I’m reading other than in the Times. I’m reading that senior Pentagon officials with heads on their shoulders, which excludes Pete “High–T” Hegseth, the defense secretary, are clamoring for the White House to bail out of the war with Iran because the U.S. military finds itself perilously out of its depth.
Barak Ravid — him again — reported in Axios last week that Brad Cooper, who heads the Central Command, has told the White House it is time to stop the bombing campaign “because it has reached the limit of its effectiveness.”
A Major Moment
This is a big moment. Reporting out of Washington has it that the Trumpster has abruptly discovered the limits of his power and this sits very badly with him.
This is true on both counts but not the half of it. It is the late-phase imperium that has slammed into the limits of its potency, and it would be hard to overstate the world-historical significance of this new reality.
In the way of limits, the United States has relied on drawdowns from its Strategic Petroleum Reserves to control oil prices and defer the crisis to come in available supplies, but this finger-in-the-dike strategy now reaches the point it is no longer tenable. Releases from the S.P.R. since the U.S.–Israeli aggression began on Feb. 28 come to 172 million barrels. This leaves the reserve at about 300 million barrels, against a legally mandated minimum of 250 million barrels.
You do the math, as they say: This is simply not a sustainable circumstance.
I am reminded of that old, bitter line in The Sun Also Rises. “How did you go bankrupt?” one of Hemingway’s characters asks another. “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” The Trump regime seems headed from the first way to the second.
Karl Miller, a conservative commentator on economics and geopolitics — the Washington Examiner, the Manhattan Institute — added a telling detail to this arithmetic in a report that comes to me via Larry Johnson’s Sonar 21 website.
Miller describes a Pentagon operation to purchase fuel and send abroad a good deal of what it purchases. This is covert and therefore unaccountable, as so much of what the U.S. military does, turns out to be. From May to July, Miller writes, the Pentagon sent overseas some 160 million barrels of product, distillate and jet fuel, to keep its operation in West Asia running.
U.S. aircraft on the flight deck of USS Abraham Lincoln on Feb. 28, 2026, in support of the U.S.-Israeli assault on Iran. (U.S. Department of Defense /Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain)
I cannot confirm Miller’s numbers. But unless I am missing something, by his research and calculations the U.S. war machine’s consumption in just these past three months is the equivalent of 90–odd percent of the S.P.R.’s drawdown since the war began.
I am not surprised to read that Trump, as of his retreat from his “massive attack” last Friday, is now talking about negotiating a new ceasefire agreement with those he recently referred to as “scum.”
An Axios report over the weekend (and what would the Trump regime do without Axios?) quoted Trump saying, “We’re talking to [the Iranians] right now. I think they’re getting more and more serious as the days go by. We’re locked and loaded and ready to go, but we’re talking to them.”
Locked and loaded, we’re talking to them: This makes two bits of nonsense in one sentence. As it now develops, the United States is neither locked and loaded because it does not have enough in the inventories to lock and load, nor, certainly, is it talking to the Iranians for the simple reason they have point-blank declined any further negotiations with the Trump regime.
From The Hormuz Letter’s post on “X” after Trump announced his retreat last Friday:
“The cancellation came despite Iran comprehensively rejecting any negotiations with the U.S. throughout this week and confirming it is not talking to the U.S. under any circumstances, and came directly after Trump claimed Iran is talking to the U.S. and that major progress is being made. The decision also followed an Omani delegation arriving in Tehran for talks on a new arrangement to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, with Trump claiming additional progress there, though Iran denies any talks are taking place.
Additionally, a source close to Iran’s [Mohammad Bagher] Ghalibaf assesses the operational silence of the past 15 hours as a prelude to an intensification of attacks and not a new attempt at negotiations, with the U.S. military still preparing plans for a return to major combat operations.”
This is the price the Trump regime pays for the president’s insistence that two greed-head New York landlords, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, the one a friend from property dealings the other his son-in-law, are qualified to conduct diplomatic negotiations with Iran, Russia and who knows who else. I always knew Trump’s vulgar contempt for expertise and his primitive understanding of statecraft would come at a cost.
Now he is paying it.
Treading Water With Zionists
Trump overseeing Operation Epic Fury at Mar-a-Lago, Palm Beach, Florida, on Feb. 28. (White House photo by Daniel Torok / Public Domain)
Trump cannot even conduct a war, to say nothing of winning it, and the adversary refuses to speak to him because his serial betrayals have devastated the trust that is essential to effective diplomatic contacts. Nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide, it seems.
Trump is stuck, even, with the Zionist regime. As Bibi Netanyahu’s latest summit with Trump drew near, the speculation was that the Israeli PM would persuade the ever-manipulable Trump to restart the military operation and the Israelis would rejoin it.
Trump preempted Bibi with his retreat last Friday, the timing of which was surely calculated to anticipate Netanyahu’s arrival Tuesday.
Trump should listen to Zo, as The New York Post delightfully calls the mayor of New York, and arrest Bibi when he steps onto the White House portico Tuesday. But for the moment, the regime seems to be treading water with the Zionists. This in itself looks to me a subtle turn in U.S.–Israeli relations, about which more in a moment.
What will the Trumpster do? This is the question on many minds just now. In brief, Trump is going to have to decide what it is he will lose and then figure out how to lose it — either a war, on the one hand, or on the other the global economy, the American electorate and the midterm elections.
My immediate answer: While Trump does not like to lose anything, he will lose a war that has so far remained regional but appears on the brink of enlarging.
As of this past weekend he seems to accept that he cannot win this one because he can no longer fight it, and the economic consequences of continuing it are about to become unmanageable. Trump’s larger war — in his mind, where everything that matters to him takes place — is for a “legacy” he seems to think merits him a place on Mount Rushmore. This is the war he will wage now.
Accepting defeat in the Iran war will be a messy schmear the American public cannot read for what it is, and it will never be called a defeat. In my view we are in for some variant of “peace with honor” — another name for the other side’s victory, as coined after Vietnam’s triumph in 1975. When and how this is presented remains to be seen, but I do not see any alternative open to Donald J, Trump.
There is a large implication here that must not be missed. If Trump chooses this way back from the limb he crawled out on, what is already apparent as a new divide between Washington and the Zionist rxegime will grow significantly wider.
I have previously argued in this space and in The Floutist that Trump would continue aggressing against Iran because he has been so thoroughly a captive of the Israelis. For Trump it was Israel über alles, as I put it earlier in the war.
But there now seems to be no more obliging the psychotic, war-obsessed Netanyahu and all the monied Zionists Trump has served until now. If he betrays them — and absent a a crystal ball or a Ouija board I expect him to do so out of sheer self-interest — we will at that moment be witnessing the making of history.
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon. Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been restored after years of being censored.
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The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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