The map on the Resolute’s Desk no longer resembles strategy; it looks like a drunk’s shopping list at a colonial fire sale, continents ringed in red like discount stickers on doomed stock. In a few weeks, Donald John Trump declares war like it’s Black Friday: grab one, bomb one, loot one, stay out of jail free.

A decaying, unravelling, ruined hulk of a man, Trump is the ship’s parrot of statesmanship, screeching obscenities, profanities and threats at neighbours he cannot find on a globe without staff and subtitles. All at sea on the poop deck, kidnapping a couple, menacing the rest, Trump is going down with all guns blazing, and the safety catch welded off. Megalomania vies with kleptomania in the small, dark, airless space where a conscience should live. To Trump, sovereign nations are marked‑down real estate or unguarded plunder: he will “take the oil” from Venezuela, a sour black tar too costly to refine, the Exxon men telling him to his face what the others only mutter into their expense accounts: chump. Trump.

There’s always more. There’s never enough. The pussy‑grabber promises to take Greenland “the hard way,” barks “watch your ass” at Colombia, and eyes the rusting Tijuana taxi that’s all that’s left of Mexico, a stripped‑out chassis he plans to drive through the front window of history. His hangman cobbers all love him. But is any of this making America great again, or just louder on the way down?

Factor in “Bibi” Netanyahu’s frantic demands for more bunker‑busters over Iran, and you have a war machine red‑lined into bearing seizure, the dashboard a Christmas tree of warning lights nobody in the clown car can read. Welcome to the egomaniac’s rattle‑trap, rat‑trap, that special hell with after‑burners, reserved for leaders who mistake a map for an empire and their dim‑witted delusions for destiny.

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Napoleon’s Ghost, Turned Up

History’s cruellest lesson is also its pettiest: do not fight on multiple fronts when your axle’s already cracked and your hoon driver’s drunk on his own reflection. Napoleon had his Russian snow. Hitler had his scorched‑earth east while the west still burned. Both discovered that even the mightiest military machine can’t march in every direction when the core has turned to rot and rhetoric.

Trump is flirting with simultaneous conflicts across South America, the Arctic, and the Middle East, a bargain‑basement Bonaparte in a red tie that’s several sizes too long for him, trying to reenact Waterloo on four continents at once. This is the Don‑roe Doctrine, a bastardised Monroe where might makes right, the world is America’s oyster, and nobody asks what happens when the oyster snaps shut on the greedy fingers of his sticky little hands. The Pentagon can’t “shock and awe” four theatres while the domestic floorboards are alive with white ants. The termites adore him. They call it jobs growth.

The logistics alone would break a fit, sober crew under top command. Instead, Trump recruits low‑calibre, high-rent loyalists when he needs Dwight D. Eisenhower and gets guys who can barely spell the name.

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Hollow Men, Sharpened

Empires in terminal decline don’t attract their best and brightest, but they do lure the loudest, least, savoury and most vainglorious. Trump’s roster reads like a LinkedIn page for failed game‑show hosts auditioning for a war they don’t know the rules of.

The TV Generals: Pete Hegseth, a Fox weekend personality, handed the deadliest military on Earth like a segment prop. The Department of War? Tulsi Gabbard, ex‑candidate turned intelligence czar, watching the servers while the world burns. JD Vance, the podcaster‑turned‑apprentice to chaos. Kristi Noem, Kash Patel, Matt Gaetz: a string of ring‑light revolutionaries. What you have is a clown car of industrial‑strength sycophants whose primary qualification is their willingness to bend the law to the leader’s whim until the law snaps. When there’s no law left to bend, they simply lie. Or prosecute you for noticing.

The High‑Velocity Zealots: Stephen Miller is not low‑calibre; he’s high‑velocity shrapnel. Relentless, disciplined, obsessive in his devotion to a vision of gilded American hegemony, he is what happens when the ghost of manifest destiny learns to draft executive orders. History’s graveyards overflow with the pitted bones of disciplined men who applied themselves brilliantly to a fantasy.

Napoleon had marshals. Trump has podcasters and men who think an edit button is tyranny.

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Persian Gulf: Fever‑Dream Escalation

The Persian Gulf is not quiet tonight; it is holding its breath like a patient on a ventilator while the surgeons argue over who gets naming rights on the hospital. This is not diplomacy; it is stage management, the careful construction of a story in which war appears as the only responsible adult in the room. As B‑52 bombers loiter with intent, overhead and naval mines slide onto Iranian decks like coins into a vending machine, the question is no longer whether conflict is being prepared, but how many times the button gets pressed and who stands in front of the slot when the fireball comes out.

Benjamin Netanyahu is not merely urging strikes on Tehran from “strategic necessity.” He is drowning in the same breaking wave as Trump: Epstein papers, corruption trials, coalition rot, an electorate that has grown tired of professional liars insisting they are the only grown‑ups left. For both men, war is not policy; it is a life raft patched with the skin from other people’s bodies. They have chosen the Persian Gulf as the best place to test whether the world will let them set it all on fire to stay out of prison orange.

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Manufactured Pretext and Rat‑Trap Ending

Nothing signals a looming strike quite like a sudden, synchronised outbreak of humanitarian conscience in middle powers that slept soundly through Gaza, Yemen, and Afghanistan. Penny Wong’s joint condemnation of Iranian brutality is a masterclass in selective morality, a dress‑rehearsal invocation of “responsibility to protect” that furnishes the moral scaffolding for someone else’s cruise‑missile sermon. The language of rights becomes the camouflage net over the launchpad.

This is the “rules‑based international order” as performed by arsonists lecturing the building about fire codes. “Responsibility to protect” becomes a rhetorical spear, not a shield, thrust into whichever capital is currently misaligned with Western energy flows and arms schedules. Critical legal scholars have been shouting this for decades; only now, as the Gulf holds its breath and the oil futures blink red, does the managed consensus fully show its teeth.

The rat‑trap doesn’t care about intentions. It does not distinguish between Napoleon’s grandeur and Trump’s narcissism, between strategic genius and sheer, gibbering panic. It sits, spring‑loaded, under the floorboards of empires, waiting for the combined weight of folly, fear, and fantasy to trigger it.

The breaking wave isn’t just leaked documents or collapsing coalitions. It is the structural failure of an empire that can no longer afford its own hallucinations, led by men who mistake the shopping list for strategy, the map for the territory, and their own survival for destiny. The families in Jakarta and Nairobi, the commuters in Western Sydney, the conscripts in Iran, the voters in Pennsylvania who thought they were choosing cheaper groceries—they are already in the trap, already feeling the metal against their ankles.

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We are standing on a fault line. Imperial overreach, desperate leaders, and manufactured consent have brought us here. Trump and Netanyahu are two drowning men fighting for the same tattered vest. B-52s are circling Qatar. Iran’s mines seed the Gulf. Penny Wong isn’t stopping the fire; she’s polishing the fuse.

Napoleon had the snow. Hitler had the ash. Trump has the ring-light; a vainglorious lout, hell-bent on global conquest in order to keep out of a prison cell.

The Persian Gulf isn’t holding its breath anymore. It’s choking on oil and waiting for the spark.

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