Marx said that all great world-historical facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.
In the opening editorial of NLR issue 158, Alexander Zevin reminds you that Trump's team sometimes seems to be deliberately inverting this maxim. His second term is not repeating his first; it is repeating the later phase of Napoleon III — a man who came to power on a gambler's luck and, once that luck ran out, placed a bad bet.
The trajectory of Napoleon III runs thus: in the first phase, the political adventure of a plebiscite, successful; in the second, the military adventure abroad, the Battle of Sedan, utter collapse. How far along is Trump's trajectory? Zevin's judgment is measured and cold: it is not yet Sedan, but eight weeks into the war, things are proceeding nothing like planned.
The Corpse of "America First" Is Still Lying There
The most glaring contrast lies between the first term and the second.
In the first term, Trump's banner was "America First" — a turn inward, away from permanent war and foreign occupation, even an estrangement from allies. He attacked the Iraq War as "the biggest lie in history" and accused NATO allies of "taking advantage of America." Anti-war populism was a core component of his appeal.
In the second term, he launched the war against Iran that every neoconservative had dreamed of.
How does a man who campaigned on "no more stupid wars" end up launching the biggest one of all? Zevin's question is pointed, his answer cool: it is difficult to explain this without the long-standing demands of various internal and external pressure groups. The corpse of "America First" is still lying there, but it has been carried off by the combined effort of the Israel lobby and the neoconservative remnant. Israel went from an "embarrassing appendage" of the first term to the initiator and co-belligerent of the war in the second — what Zevin calls the exposure of an "oligarchic feature" within the structure of the American state.
The Old Fantasy of Air Power
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth — that muscle-bound former Fox News host — is the "id-like embodiment" of this lust for war. In Zevin's words, he is in effect "an actor hired to play the Secretary of War." His rhetoric is an exhibition of performative violence: threatening to "bring death and destruction from the skies around the clock," mimicking the Iranian leaders who "look up and see nothing but our air power and Israel's, every minute, every second," piling up threats in parallel constructions — "find, fix, finish"; "dismantle, degrade, destroy, defeat." And then boasting to reporters: "This is not a fair fight, we strike them as they go down, and that is exactly as it should be."
Behind this rhetoric lies an old fantasy: that air power can win a war on its own.
This fantasy has a long genealogy. In World War II, Curtis LeMay's firebombing of Tokyo killed 100,000 people; in the Korean War, Operation Strangle, together with MacArthur's notion of dropping 30 to 60 atomic bombs on the neck of Manchuria; in the Vietnam War, the ceaseless expansion of the bombing for want of clear targets. Every time, strategists have pointed out that air power has never on its own achieved the strategic objectives assigned to it. Yet the idea has lived on, because its true function is not military but political: victory with zero American casualties. Kosovo, Libya, and now Iran.
In the first ten days of the Iran war, 20,000 non-military buildings were struck, of which 17,353 were residential. The AI-driven kill chain turned precision-guided munitions into weapons of mass destruction — only more efficient, and quieter.
The Decapitation Strike, and Its Consequences
On February 28, 2026, Israel launched a decapitation strike against the Tehran home of the 86-year-old Khamenei, in the center of the city. It failed.
The former deputy supreme commander of NATO offered an apt verdict: it "lacked as much subtlety as murdering the Pope on the steps of St. Peter's during Holy Week," and "its impact was likely to mobilize many Shia Muslims in much the same way."
Then came Iran's retaliation. Not a scattered reprisal, but a systematic chain of calibrated retaliation — you strike one of our targets, we strike an equivalent target of yours:
| What you struck | Iran's response |
|---|---|
| Israel's decapitation strike | Closure of the Strait of Hormuz, locking down one-fifth of global oil and gas supply |
| US destroys Iranian warships | Strike on Al Udeid base in Qatar (the largest in the region), 10,000 US troops evacuated |
| US bombs defenses on Kharg Island | Ballistic missile hits the International Hotel in Baghdad's Green Zone |
| Israel attacks the South Pars gas field | Attack on the Haifa refinery the following day |
| US drops bunker-busters on Natanz | Iranian missile strike on Dimona (Israel's nuclear facility) |
The first round, a stalemate. The ceasefire of April 8 was widely understood as a pause before the next round.
War in the Rhythm of the Market
The most original part of Zevin's essay is his analysis of the "war–market rhythm." He cites Baudrillard's 1991 The Gulf War Did Not Take Place — once derided as postmodern nonsense, in 2026 it reads almost like prophecy:
Just as wealth is no longer measured by the flamboyant display of wealth but by the clandestine circulation of speculative capital, so war is no longer measured by whether it is waged, but by its speculative unfolding in the abstract space of the electronic and the informational.
The war of the Trump era has a peculiar rhythm: before the opening bell or at the start of the week, the president predicts the war's imminent end or hints at progress in negotiations, in order to "reassure the markets"; after the close or during a lull, the exterminatory threats and ultimatums are issued, or an attack is launched outright. The war proceeds to the rhythm of the stock market.
Then there is the insider trading. On March 23, mere minutes before Trump posted on Truth Social about "productive" talks with Iran, someone placed oil-futures trades worth $580 million.
Today, market manipulation is itself the reason of state. The commander-in-chief's accomplices revel in their status as insider traders.
This is not metaphor. The decisions of war have been saturated by market logic — when to strike, when to pause, when to float a rumor — all follow the candlestick chart. And the daily war briefing the president receives is a two-minute video clip of "things exploding." The society of the spectacle has reached its terminal form: war crimes can no longer hold public attention for more than a few flickering moments. One hundred and fifty schoolgirls were killed by a missile strike on a school in Minab — the same school was struck twice — Trump said "I can live with that," and within days most of the media had learned to live with it too.
The Complicity of the Democrats
Zevin's most unsparing criticism is reserved not for Trump — what else would you expect of Trump? — but for the Democratic Party.
This is one of the least-supported wars in American history: in a mid-March poll, only 41 percent of adults supported it, less than 25 percent of independents, less than 10 percent of Democrats. Compare the 73 percent support rate in the six weeks before the 2003 Iraq War. And yet what did the Democratic machine do?
When the United States assembled the largest fleet in the Middle East since the Iraq War — eight days before the outbreak of hostilities — the Democrats did nothing. The vote on the War Powers Resolution was said to have been "deliberately delayed" by members of the Foreign Affairs Committee until after the war had broken out; the vote failed 212:219, with exactly four Democratic defections deciding the outcome. On the Senate side, Schumer's aides said privately that the preferred outcome of many pro-AIPAC Democratic senators was to "let Trump act unilaterally, weakening Iran while absorbing the domestic backlash before the midterms." Even Democrats who voted against the War Powers Resolution indicated they were "willing" to support a $50 billion supplemental funding bill. Schumer himself — one of the most hardened Iran hawks in either party — confined his public criticism to quibbles over "targets," while privately assuring Jewish groups that his job was "to fight for everything Israel needs."
Today, it is precisely this party machine that constitutes the greatest obstacle to a radical change of direction. It increasingly thwarts not only the desire of its own base for a less bloody foreign policy, but the desire of the majority of all voting-age adults.
This is a structural diagnosis. The disagreement between the two parties on foreign policy is tactical, not strategic: whether to fight, how to fight, what to do after. But the premise — that "the United States should possess the right to use force in the Middle East" — is shared by both. The political space for an anti-war movement is therefore systematically compressed — at the ballot box, there is no third option.
History Does Not Repeat, but It Rhymes
Zevin sets this war back into a longer historical sequence.
In 1991, George H. W. Bush's Gulf War. A "perfect war": first acquiesce in Saddam's annexation of Kuwait, then declare it an international atrocity; spend half a year assembling a global coalition; display refined diplomatic courtesies to Gorbachev and the Arab leaders; keep Israel out of it (lest it provoke Arab solidarity); stage a video-graphic spectacle of a new generation of smart munitions against a fleeing infantry.
But what was the outcome? The CIA-backed Shia uprising was brutally suppressed by Baghdad. Then came a decade of economic sanctions (and child malnutrition), the Clinton-Blair era of bombing, the accumulating neoconservative clamor to "finish the job" — leading ultimately to the second Gulf War of 2003, eight years of military occupation, ISIS, the caliphate of Mosul.
The "perfect war" of 1991 sowed twenty years of disaster. What will this one of 2026 sow?
Drawing on the concept of Giovanni Arrighi, Zevin situates this war as a "signal crisis" of American hegemony — the crisis provoked by a declining hegemon as it attempts to defend its position. A declining hegemon always has many options, but every option carries its adverse side, and every adverse side accelerates the decline. Trump's dilemma is structural: hold out to the end, and oil prices and inflation embed themselves in the world economy for years; negotiate a ceasefire, and it means retreat and the acknowledgment of some of Iran's demands. Whichever road is taken, the United States is heading more rapidly toward the very decline it sought to delay.
The principal lesson of these historical precedents — a "signal crisis" in Arrighi's vocabulary — is their unintended duration.
From 1991 to 2026, what has changed is not the pattern but the quality. George H. W. Bush had refined diplomatic etiquette and broad international support; Trump has real-estate developers, talk-show hosts, venture capitalists, and bitcoin miners conducting the war. DOGE cuts the budgets of the State Department and the Defense Department even as the war is waged. Senior officers are fired mid-war, including the Chief of Staff of the Army. Since the emergence of the fiscal-military state in the early modern period, wars have generally been won by soldiers, industrialists, and bureaucrats. Trump's team fits none of these.
Randolph Bourne wrote that "war is the health of the state." Zevin's conclusion is its mirror image: what this war exposes is not the health of the state but its oligarchic feature — that thing "hidden behind the smoke-screen of democratic principles." The decisions of war are outsourced to Tel Aviv. The firepower of the Israel lobby in Congress, the media, and higher education. The State Department fires Iran experts who criticize the White House line. Witkoff and Kushner do not understand nuclear science — but that is precisely the key to ensuring the Israeli line is carried through: you need not understand, you need only obey.
Trump may halt this phase, or he may escalate. But the American-Israeli war against Iran that he began in June 2025 is unlikely to end soon. The "perfect victory" of the last Gulf War took twenty years to bear all of its fruit, and most of it was bitter. This time, the harvest has only just begun to form on the branch.