After watching the latest rounds of right-wing podcasters intoning that somehow Trump is demon-possessed or out of his mind or fill-in-the-blank crazy conspiracy theory, or “It’s all about the Jews!”, it’d probably be good to broach what is apparently a unique thought to the daily bloviators. When it comes to the “Don-roe Doctrine,” perhaps President Trump actually sees the broader geopolitical realities America has lived under for generations and is trying to do something to ensure that America remains safe and our economy remains robust.
Here’s the frame everyone seems to be missing: Whatever you think about the Iran situation on its own merits, it has to be viewed through a much broader geopolitical prism. U.S. pressure on Iran – and for that matter Venezuela – directly degrades China’s ability to fuel its economy and military buildup on the cheap. China has been hoovering up sanctioned Iranian oil at steep discounts, with Chinese purchases now accounting for roughly 90% of Iran’s oil exports and generating an estimated $50-70 billion in petroleum revenues annually for Tehran. That’s $70 billion for the Iranian mullahs to spend on funding Hezbollah and just about every other significant terrorist organization in the Middle East and beyond. That’s funding that has gone directly to killing American citizens, civilian and military. That’s funding that has fueled Iran’s military and nuclear ambitions. And that in turn is oil that fuels China’s economy.
The same playbook runs through Venezuela, where China takes around 80% of oil exports – worth roughly $12-14 billion a year – using shadow fleets, third-country rebranding, and payments routed through small banks to dodge U.S. secondary sanctions. Across Iran, Russia, and Venezuela combined, the House Select Committee on China found that Beijing assembled a strategic petroleum reserve of roughly 1.2 billion barrels by early 2026, acquired at well below market cost – from the very barrels Western sanctions were designed to strand. Squeeze Iran and Venezuela, and you are squeezing China’s discount energy lifeline.
And while we’re at it, let’s talk about Europe. We should dispense with the Europeans whining about U.S. actions against Iran, because it is hollow and laughable. At the peak of the pre-sanctions era, EU countries were doing $27–30 billion a year in trade with Iran. Germany – which has the nerve to lecture Washington about economic coercion – was Iran’s single largest European trading partner, at one point exporting more than $1.5 billion worth of goods to Tehran annually, dominated by machinery and industrial equipment: exactly the dual-use category that can feed a nuclear and missile program.
France had Total, Peugeot, and Renault all rushing back into Iran’s arms the moment they had an opening. The EU’s own trade with Iran only cratered when U.S. secondary sanctions forced it to, not because of any principled European stand. The people now clutching their pearls about American “unilateralism” were doing billions in business with the mullahs right up until Washington made it financially painful to stop.
And while Europe lectures us about Iran, take a look at what they’ve been doing with China. Total EU-China goods trade hit more than $700 billion in 2024. Europe ran a trade deficit with Beijing of over $300 billion that same year – meaning they imported more than $500 billion worth of Chinese goods while only exporting more than $213 billion back. China is now the EU’s single largest source of imports, accounting for more than one in five euros of everything Europe buys from the outside world. The Peterson Institute put it bluntly: While the United States has been actively decoupling from China since 2018, Europe has been moving in the exact opposite direction, deepening its manufactured goods dependency on Beijing every single year. Germany – again, always Germany – has its entire export economy structurally intertwined with China, with exports clocking in at roughly $100 billion annually.
So when European leaders thunder about American recklessness in confronting China’s trading partners, understand what’s really going on: They are protecting a relationship they are hopelessly addicted to and financially terrified of losing. They are not America’s conscience. They are China’s most important customer, and they know it.
The Davos world order based in Brussels has been very happy to have the American taxpayer foot the bill for a global financial and economic system that has funneled economic power to China and to American and European elites. The global world order that made sense in the decades following WWII and the Cold War, decidedly is no longer in America’s interest in 2026, almost 40 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The world has been conducting economic warfare against the citizens of the United States for 30 years, while our elites got rich, bought off, and let it happen.
Then along comes Donald J. Trump, who says, “I don’t think so.” First of all, there should be no mysteries here at all on any level of the current situation. You want to talk about consistent, talk about Trump and trade. Trump and tariffs. But also, Trump and Iran. Go back and look at his comments on Iran and Kharg Island and oil from the 1980s.
So you know what Trump decided? Here’s a moment to hit a three-fer under the cover of no nukes for Iran, where he can unwind 30 years of a global financial and trade system that has disproportionally favored China and restructure a lot of things in our favor, including putting America at the nexus point of global energy production. To be clear, no nukes for Iran in and of itself is a completely sane policy. It’s actually in our national interests not to let a fanatical religious regime that chants “death to America” have nukes attached to missiles that have a 4,000 km range.
It should not be surprising that corporate propagandists and mouthpieces of the Davos establishment are furious about Trump upsetting the status quo like this. You could be excused if it looks like they’re actually cheering on the crazy Islamo-fascists against their own country.
Add to that aspects of the “new right” being so scarred by the neo-con stupidity of the last 25 years that they have neo-con derangement syndrome. You can maybe forgive them for mistakenly thinking any military action is the slippery slope to a 20-year quagmire like Iraq and Afghanistan, or just idiotic neo-con regime change efforts with no hard realist American goals like Libya and Syria. That is understandable on some levels. And let’s face it: There’s a knee-jerk reaction by many on the right: If Mark Levin and Lindsey Graham are for it….they must be against it.
In all this, however, I think it would be good for everyone on the right to take a deep breath, step back, and reframe their view of the situation in Iran. Think about it this way: Trump is conducting economic warfare principally against our enemies and our miserable, deadbeat allies to the benefit of the USA while severely complicating Iran’s goal of a nuclear weapon. He is doing it all in a focused plan, managing the economic disruption, while limiting American casualties, with a defined end date. All of the above to me is not only a good thing, it’s also hard to argue that Trump’s not putting America first in all of it.
