In Versailles last week, Trump pulled off the “reverse Trotsky”: he signed the defeat without stopping the war.

Famously, Leon Trotsky, dealing with a collapsed front against Germany in the First World War, which the Soviet Russia’s government inherited from the Russian Empire in the October Revolution of 1917, proposed a policy of “no war, no peace,” hoping to continue the armistice without signing a peace agreement, in order to avoid wasting human and material resources on a lost war, without burdening the new Soviet government with obligations that come with the recognition of defeat in the war.

Trotsky failed to pull off this trick, and the First World War on the Eastern Front ended with the signing of the Brest-Litovsk Peace, in which the new Soviet government had to bear the full brunt of the defeat of the Tsarist government.

Trump is trying to pull off a version of this, using the admission of defeat in order to kick down the road dealing with a deeper and more dire political reality of not even that particular defeat of the U.S., but the fact that Trump has no steering control over the US imperial machine, dead-set on perpetual warfare—which increasingly means more unwinnable conflicts and incapacitating defeats.

The fallacy of the “Iran deal”

The discourse around the “Iranian deal” in itself points at a more fundamental issue that anything that has been discussed within it: the search for a solution in the “Iranian deal” implies that there’s something wrong with Iran that needs to be dealt with problem lies in Iran. This is a fundamental misattribution of the problem: the source of the U.S. problem with Iran is not in Iran, but in the fact that the United States needs problems, the United States is constantly looking for problems, because the United States was formed by conflicts and wars and can only exist in conflict and war. The United States is trying to solve its problem with Iran, when the problem has always that’s the United States must have a problem with Iran—and why.

A year ago, in the article “Trump’s war against Iran will continue” immediately after the so-called “12-day war”, I presented a description of the “Washington political Blob” as a collective unconscious, formed by the sum of individual conscious “special interests”, a collection of the lobby, each of which is reasonable and rational in the pursuit of its narrowly defined material interest (whether it is the interest of weapons manufacturers, Greater Oil, Israel, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, etc.) and functional enough to force the machine of the U.S. empire to act—but not developed enough to correct the course of this machine as a whole.

Analysis: Why Trump’s War On Iran Will Continue [KKF longread]

Krystal Kyle & Friends and Egor Kotkin

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July 7, 2025

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Because—and that’s crucial—the aggregation of each of the “special interest” groups’ interests (like fulfilling of their immediate agenda) is not the same as the collective interest of the “special interest” groups (like preservation and continuation of the system and conditions that makes their interests feasible and achievable) as a total, not to mention the collective interest of the U.S. population, let alone all humanity. For that the Blob must’ve developed collective consciousness—a certain organ, an institution, that would balance out acting out the immediate, short-term interests of particular political influence groups with the acting in the interest of preservation of the very environment that facilitates their existence (planetary human civilization).

Historically, it was assumed that this was what the Presidents, or the US government in general, do. Here, the entire difference between conservatives and liberals being that:

1. liberals believe that it takes the entire Congress and the Presidency,
2. while conservatives believe that the Presidency itself is enough (“imperial presidency” aka “unitary executive theory”)
3. with the somewhat outdated conservative school of thought that emphasizes the role of “world’s greatest deliberative body,” the US Senate—a middle road for “respectable conservatives,” for whom taking in the political input from the House, representing the unwashed masses, is unacceptable, yet signing on to the “imperial presidency” is too uncouth.

Reality, however, has demonstrated conclusively, that all the supposed strength of the US system of checks and balances was a fiction: in the XX century, the checks on US policy were actually external, influenced by the necessity to put on a better face before the world in the competition against the USSR, the “Eastern Block” internationally and progressive political initiatives, forces and movements domestically. Take, for example, the success of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, endlessly abused by conservatives as proof that the US got better somehow, and got rid of racism on its own, for good. The same conservatives, who have been working tirelessly—and recently succeeded—to roll back every single achievement of this era. As a success story of the US system, the notion that the constitutional design of checks and balances allows it to progress over time, makes no sense. But the progress makes total sense in the context of pressure from an external influence: like the necessity to win over the newly minted independent African countries against the Soviets in the same decade as the Civil Rights movement was going on.

Not to take away anything from the movement—the cause or the people—itself, but by 2026 we can state clearly that the United States of America did not lose its capacity to execute racial violence in its domestic affairs compared to the XIX century. And racial (as well as gender) justice consciousness has only grown since the 1960s. Which makes inevitable the conclusion that the correction of the ark of the US history towards justice was not a doing of the wisely envisioned US constitutional order, but rather a response to international political pressure. That pressure, embodied in and represented by the USSR, was the force that actually gave a human shape to what—as soon as that pressure has went away, and the US system was left to its own devices—revealed itself to be a bunch of special interests in a trench coat.

This is why since the last decade of the USSR’s existence, with its now almost mythical feats like the US President (Reagan, of all people) ordering Israel to stand down in Lebanon, we have been observing a gradual waning of that power of the US President (alone, together with the Senate or the entire US Congress even) to rein in any of the special interests which were allowed to exert influence and collectively hold the brunt of the institutional power over the United States of America: from Clinton to Bush, Obama to Trump, Trump to Biden and to Trump again. Its not that the US is losing its ability to “lead the [free] world” for some mysterious reason—it never developed it in the first place, and as soon as the USSR imploded, the inadequacy of the US political system to responsibilities of the global hegemony started to reveal itself.

The US hegemony, “Pax Americana” was a fallacy all along: the capitalist system is only good to fight to live another day, to see another profit—but it has no vision of the future. Good to chase a car, existentially threatened by catching it.

This is why the entire might of the US imperial machine is working full-steam on destroying its very foundation: the power of the petrodollar is being undermined via sanctions, the power of the US military is being exhausted via endless warfare… They were created and shaped as war tools, to fight for world domination. But winning the fight means ending the fight, means peace (aforementioned “Pax”), means dismantling the wartime structure, institutions, profits—but by whom? Who could stop the war machine in the system, that was forged by war, when it won?

The imperial ship of the United States, having left the channel of history, where its course was steered by confrontation after confrontation in the international arena from 1776 to 1991, finding itself alone in the open water of the ocean of history—the last empire, the world hegemon—turned out to be completely unsteerable. Not because it lost control, mind you, but because it never developed through that 215 years long historic process, that shaped the US empire, a steering mechanism for the Blob for the time when there is no more enemy to fight. For when the centuries long struggle for world domination ended, and was supposed to be followed by peace. And peace is something that the United States was never prepared for, because peacetime requires a fundamentally opposite modus operandi, compared to war time:

1. war provides an external structure of a threat, which both shapes a goal to struggle for, and gives an incentive to endure the struggle.
2. a peacetime, however, requires replacing the external structure of a threat, with an internal structure, developing a goal tied out to an incentive to work towards it.

And in between them emerges the most important question of transition from one mode to another. And the United States, as an ultimate imperial war machine, having achieved world hegemony by 1991, had neither: it did not have a vision for the future without enemies to fight, nor the transition mechanism to change itself into peacekeeper mode.

And so, the imperial ship of the United States continued to row blindly, in a desperate search for a new enemy, a new war:

• There was no need for NATO anymore—but there was no transition mechanism to dismantle and/or replace it, so instead NATO expanded, until it found something resembling a cause to retroactively justify keeping and expanding it after the German reunification in 1989 and the Soviet Union’s dissolution in 1991.
• There was no global military threat to stand down for—until it was found in the “war on terror” in 2001.

Notably, in both cases the justification for continuation of the war for world dominance was provided to the US empire by expressively pro-US (Yeltsin regime in Russia), or US-groomed (Afghan mujahideen) forces. The US imperial machine, unable to stop, continued to run and create the problems it was supposed to resolve along the way.

The fallacy of “divide and conquer”

Russia, Palestine, Iran, like Iraq, Korea, India before them, and, potentially, Taiwan—are all cracks along the entire length of the “Roman Wall” of Western hegemony, built in the 20th century.

The imperial principle of “divide and rule” has a price: it works as long as there are sufficient resources to manage all the artificial divisions on which hegemony is built. But time passes, the divided enemies adapt—and the empire doesn’t perish from the defeat inflicted upon it, but rather strains under the effort required to maintain all these artificial crises.

The British big game of the XIX century, continued with the US-led “Cold War” in the XX century, were disruptive successes, master classes in screwing up “the other guy,” but in their historical success they were revealed as a historical dead end, they perfected a killing machine, that, when it run out of targets, turned inward, like an out of whack immune system which kills the host with auto-immune disease. Two hundred years of successful dividing and conquering the world with no goal beyond profiteering along the way—only to find itself in the mess of their own creation, divided, as victors yet feeling defeated, invading, but fearing invasions, and completely stumped: “How could this happen? Surely, migrants, women and gays must be to blame.”

They fucked around, and now they’re finding out.