Oil

Why attack Iran?

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Our Authoritarianism and Our Corruption

By Timothy Snyder 2/28/26

Tom Nichols
Timothy Snyder

How do understand the war with Iran? We must get away from the propaganda and ask why this might be happening, in light of the facts that we do know.

These facts suggest two interpretive frameworks: a foreign war as a mechanism to destroy democracy at home; and a foreign war as an element of personal corruption by the president of the United States.

From the United States, the most plausible angle of view is domestic politics, not foreign policy. Wars are a tool of undermining and undoing democracies. Given that we have multiple examples of this from both modern and ancient democracy, and given the behavior of Trump and his allies in general, this must be an interpretive method for these attacks.

The relationship between foreign war and domestic authoritarianism can take two basic forms: 1) we must all rally because there is a war and everyone who oppose the war is a traitor; 2) we must hold elections under specific conditions favorable to the party in power. This is utterly predictable and should be easy to halt and indeed to reverse.

The American propaganda about our foreign policy motivations is impossible to believe as such. But it does lead us, indirectly, to the second possible interpretive framework: personal corruption.

a black and white photo of a ceiling

The claim that Iran was about to build a nuclear weapon has not been established. It is all the odder as a justification for war given that this administration has already claimed many times to have destroyed the Iranian nuclear weapons program.

The second American propaganda point is that the regime must be changed. This too is very strange, since opposition to regime change wars was supposed to be a core tenet of MAGA.

But who might be directly interested in Iranian regime change? Who has given it more thought than Washington? Insofar as there was any sort of foreign policy involved here, I suspect that it was that of countries that the Trump administration considers to be its allies in the region.

The basic structural feature of regional politics is a rivalry between Iran on the one side and Gulf Arab states plus Israel on the other. Given that this structural feature is a far more durable element of politics than the wavering and contradictory statements of the Trump administration, it is a good place to start. And where does it lead?

It leads to personal politics or rather personal gain. Given the stupefyingly overt corruption of the Trump administration, one must ask whether the United States armed forces are now being used on a per-hire basis.

Gulf Arab states who oppose Iranian power have generated extremely generous packages of compensation for companies associated with Trump personally and with members of his family. The United Arab Emirates invested in a family firm. The Saudis have provided numerous de facto gifts. And sometimes the gifts have been simply gifts. The Qataris gave Trump a jet. The list is very long.

And now — we are using military force to take the side of precisely the countries who have enriched Trump and his family. This backdrop must at the very least be stated in the reporting of the war. Along with the subversion of democracy, personal corruption provides a second interpretive framework.

None of this is a defense of the murderous regime in Teheran. The Iranian government has been engaged in the mass murder of peaceful protestors. The scale of that slaughter has not really sunk in. One can certainly imagine ways of addressing Iranian authoritarianism and corruption. We could combine a patient campaign of pressure and sanctions with support for the opposition and proposals to help address growing ecological problems such as the horrifying lack of water that stands behind much of political opposition in the country. Unfortunately, nothing like this is on offer, or could be on offer, from the Trump administration. All that it has to offer is its own authoritarianism and corruption.

A war is a time when we will be told not to ask questions. But a war is actually when questions must be asked. And they must be asked in light of what we already know. The presumption created by the surrounding evidence is that this war could very well be about (1) subverting US democracy, (2) enriching the president, or both. These are presumptions, not proof — but they provide the solid lines of inquiry as we learn more about the war.

War does not create a clean slate where suddenly we have to believe the absurd just because a leader says it. On the contrary, war provides the opportunity to see the core of the absurdity and the destruction that is being offered to us.

Trump should be impeached and convicted, and ICE disbanded

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By Timothy Snyder 1/25/26

Tom Nichols
Timothy Snyder

It is not just the moral horror. It is the political logic.

People are dying in American concentration camps, unseen. And people are being executed on American streets, seen by all of us.
This is enough. The radical is the pragmatic.

The president should be impeached and convicted, as should everyone responsible for these outrages. ICE should be disbanded. So should the Department of Homeland Security. The other agencies within it should be redistributed across other departments. And the people who have killed should be investigated and brought before judges and juries.

But we have to see the logic of the killings as well as the killings themselves. The horror is a truth in itself. But it is also a sign of a political logic, one known from the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, Soviet as well as Nazi, and from attempts to replace the rule of law with personal tyranny.
It is the logic of lies and of lawlessness.

In a constitutional regime, such as ours, the law applies everywhere and at all times. In a republic, such as ours, it applies to everyone. For that logic of law to be undone, the aspiring tyrant looks for openings, for cracks to pry open.

One of these is the border. The country stops at the border. And so the law stops at the border. And so for the tyrant an obvious move is to extend the border so that is everywhere, to turn the whole country as a border area, where no rules apply.

Stalin did this with border zones and deportations in the 1930s that preceded the Great Terror. Hitler did it with immigration raids in 1938 that targeted undocumented Jews and forced them across the border.

And just what is Trump doing now? By his own admission, as well as by the admission of cabinet members, he is using ICE, nominally a border authority, to enforce his own whims on an American state of his choosing. It is not legal to attack a city because its policies work. It is not legal to threaten a state to gain information about its voters.

The border becomes the pretext to undo the law everywhere, at all times, and against anyone. It is the crack that can be opened. The wedge is the lie.

The lies begin as clichés, memes that are pounded into our heads by the government and by those in the media who repeat them, mindlessly or with malice.

One of these cliches is “law enforcement,” which is uttered over and over like a incantation. “Law enforcement” is not a noun. It is not a thing in the world. It is an action.

And action is something that we have a right to see and judge for ourselves. People enforcing the law do not wear masks. And people wearing masks who trespass, assault, batter, and kill are not enforcing the law.

They are violating it.

It is indeed the job of some local, state, and federal authorities to enforce the law. It is a disservice to them when federal employees carry out public executions. It is a greater disservice to them when such actions are defined as “law enforcement.”

The lies continue as provocative inversions, as what in On Tyranny I called “dangerous words”: these are, precisely, “terrorist” and “extremist.” These two words are known to us from history as those used by tyrants. And these are the words used by the Trump people to defame those killed by their polices.

This is their “messaging,” their banality of evil, as Hannah Arendt called it.

Or the evil of banality, as Václav Havel said. Words turned into reality with the complicity of those who hear them.

Those who actively lie are directly complicit in the deaths that just happen and in any deaths to come. But those in media who choose to treat propaganda as the story, to begin from lies rather than from events, are also complicit. The border is the crack, the lie is the wedge, and the wedge is made up of people — of us.

Words matter, uttered first or repeated. They create an atmosphere, they normalize — or they do not. We can choose to see, to call things by their proper names, to call out people who lie. We have to.

The moral horror of those killings is enough. But there is a political logic as well. And the two are connected. Those who resist the lawlessness and the lies are doing right. And they are giving a second chance to the endangered American republic.

Venezuela: The Precedents

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And America: The Future

By Timothy Snyder 1/4/26

Tom Nichols
Timothy Snyder

Now that the United States has extracted Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela, it might help to consider four precedents. No event of the moment is exactly like any episode in the past. But in recalling history, we can see elements of the present that will otherwise be shrouded by propaganda or emotion.

1. American intervention in Latin America. Throughout the cold war, and indeed long before, the United States has intervened in Central and South America, asserting an implicit right to choose leaders. Sometimes these interventions were designed to reverse the outcome of elections, replacing the elected leader or government with people favored in Washington.

During the cold war, such operations were covered by a pro-democracy propaganda cloak, the logic being that whatever the United States did must have been to stop communism, and communism was anti-democratic.

This time around, there is no pretense that the goal is democracy. Nicolás Maduro and his allies stole the 2024 Venezuelan election, but that very real crime is not what the Trump people are punishing: the Trumpists prefer the essentially fictional concept of “narco-terrorism.” Venezuela has a legitimately elected president: Edmundo González. There is no sign that he figures in Trump’s plans Trump dismisses the courageous activist María Machado, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, as “a nice woman” who lacks popular support. (This is after she dedicated the Prize to him — it is important to remember the golden rule of dealing with Trump: he will always disappoint you.)

In light of the open US extraction of Maduro in January 2026, it is also worth revisiting the American-backed extraction of María Machado herself in December 2025, just four weeks ago. At the time this appeared to be a move designed to help her appear in Norway for the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony. At the moment, it looks much more like an American attempt to remove a rival for power and clear the way for an American imperialism directed not so much against Maduro as against Venezuelans as a people.

Yet the imperialism does not seem to be very well considered. In the past, American governments chose leaders in Latin America who would support the interests of American companies. On the surface, the same thing appears to be happening here. Trump is offering Venezuela’s oil to American companies, and the money to be made as an explanation for the whole operation. But there is little profit in Venezuelan oil in the short run; huge investments would be necessary in the long run. This would in turn require political stability. It does seem, at first glance, that the oil companies believe in this.

There is much to be said for democracy. One of the powerful arguments in its favor is continuity: that it offers a chance to move on from a calamity. The obvious thing to do now in Venezuela would be to hold elections.

2. The Second Iraq War. The 2003 invasion of Iraq was a turning point for American power and principle. It killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. It was based upon lies, which undermined American credibility and weakened American influence. It absorbed huge amounts of American money and attention, creating a window of opportunity for China ro climb to global prominence.

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Trump: US will be ‘strongly involved’ in Venezuela oil industry

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Donald Trump says Nicolás Maduro and wife will be taken to New York after being captured during US attack on Venezuela

Donald Trump has said the US “captured” Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, Cilia Flores, and flew them out of the South American country during a pre-dawn assault on Caracas and the surrounding region.

“It was a brilliant operation, actually,” the US president told the New York Times after witnesses in Venezuela reported a series of explosions. “A lot of good planning and [a] lot of great, great troops and great people.”

US Court prevents seized oil rigs case from moving forward against Venezuelan government - Splash247

The US attorney general, Pam Bondi, said the couple would face criminal charges and trial in the US based on a 2020 New York indictment. In a social media post, she said they would “soon face the full wrath of American justice on American soil in American courts”. [ . . . ]

Continue at source: US will be ‘strongly involved’ in Venezuela oil industry, Trump says after Caracas attacked and Maduro captured – live