Iran’s mission to the United Nations issued a statement rejecting claims the country is seeking the assassination of Donald Trump three days after an attempt on the former US president’s life at a campaign event in rural Pennsylvania.
“These associations are unsubstantiated and malicious,” the mission said. “From the perspective of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Trump is a criminal who must be prosecuted and punished in a court of law for ordering the assassination of General Soleimani. Iran has chosen the legal path to bring him to justice.”
Coming during the final year of his tenure in the White House, Trump’s targeting of the Iranian military officer shocked observers and briefly prompted concerns the United States would find itself in an armed conflict with the formidable West Asian power. The real estate magnate is often characterized as a foreign policy “isolationist,” winning the presidency in part due to his criticism of the US-led war in Iraq. But the surprising incident demonstrated Trump’s characteristic impulsiveness as well as the influence of neoconservative hawks like former CIA director Mike Pompeo in his administration.
Four years later Trump is once again casting himself as an antiwar figure amid dissatisfaction with President Biden’s proxy war in Ukraine, but his record of aggression towards Afghanistan, Syria, and China tells another story. Commentator Ryan Cristian joined Sputnik’s The Final Countdown program Tuesday to discuss the implications of Trump’s candidacy and consider whether the mercurial figure is elites’ choice to reassert US power amid the emergence of a multipolar world.
“I think it's fair to say that Donald Trump is riding very high for a man who is just missing a small bit of a body part,” said host Ted Rall. “He just created an iconic photo of himself that's likely to go down in history books. He survived this assassination attempt… He just made a pretty bold choice in the form of JD Vance as his running mate.”
“Joe Biden seems to be playing a completely different game,” he mused. “Basically he's running out the clock.”
“Joe Biden has been destroying his entire administration and everything they've been planning, every amount of influence or support he had from either side, because of his support for Israel,” responded Cristian. “I mean, his own party in many cases calls him ‘Genocide Joe.’”
“JD Vance is an example of someone who appeases the Never Trumpers,” he claimed, referring to the former president’s venture capitalist running mate. “He's also aggressively pro-Israel, you know, and I think that's something we have to take into consideration. I know a lot of people don't want to hear that. They don't want to believe that that might be the case.”
Although he has carved out a similar identity to Trump as a skeptic of foreign US military intervention, Vance as a strident Christian Zionist, once claiming his religious faith compels him to back the Israeli government. “The idea that there is ever going to be an American foreign policy that doesn’t care a lot about that slice of the world is preposterous,” he once said in a speech at the Quincy Institute.
Vance has signaled strong support for controversial Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has presided over the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians after Hamas’ October 7 uprising last year.
Rall questioned why political elites seem unbothered by the prospect of keeping Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket, despite mounting evidence of his unpopularity both among the broader public and within his own party.
“When you have this apparent effort to keep Joe Biden in no matter what, is that going to reduce voter turnout and destroy down ballot races?” the host asked. “Senate? Congress? Governors? City council?
“Why are they doing this?” he wondered. “They're not just destroying their chances of keeping the White House, they're shifting control of the Senate, the House and state legislators and they don't seem to have any problem with that.”
“I think Trump is the aim, the direction for the empire,” Cristian suggested. “Whatever the driving force – not Democrat versus Republican – Trump is kind of a selected choice for what's happening next. That's why that would be where this goes. It's a large teeter-totter.”
“It is a corrupt system… I will be clear. I think they're individuals. I think Pelosi, for example, hates Donald Trump. I think that's very clear. But that doesn't mean that they're not going to be driven to take larger action through lobbying and through other interests when it comes down to real things like war, right?”
Just three months into Trump’s chaotic term in the White House, the former president enjoyed bipartisan praise in April 2017 when he lobbed a volley of missiles at targets in Syria. The former president’s insistence he would remain uninvolved in the country, where the CIA has carried out a covert dirty war for over a decade, had prompted concern over the abandonment of a crucial arena for the United States to project its imperial might.
But Trump’s show of force calmed those concerned over Trump’s stewardship of the American empire, prompting liberal pundit Brian Williams to wax poetic on the “beauty” of US munitions.
Figures within America’s foreign policy establishment have suggested time is running out for the United States to secure its place as the global hegemon, with some suggesting the country must go to war with China within just a few short years. The influential RAND Corporation once warned the bloody showdown must occur by 2025.
With Israel struggling, the Ukraine proxy war stalling and de-dollarization continuing apace, perhaps elements of the Western ruling class are ready to once again take a chance on Trump, fully abandoning the pretense of belief in any rules-based order and brandishing US power in its raw and brazen form.