Trump’s Ponzi War Machine: The US Empire Eats Itself
From Caracas to Tehran, the self‑devouring logic of perpetual conflict; and why the blowback will be biblical
In my previous piece, I depicted a US on the precipice of a war with Iran, a war corporate media will not cover. Time to pull back on the camera and see the Trump Regime as a nation at war with itself while it makes the fatal error of fighting, not just a war on two fronts, but on reality, itself.
It can only end badly.
Picture an elderly grifter at a roulette table, betting the house on red after red. Each clattering spin is meant to recover the losses of the last. But it’s not that simple. The croupier is his own Pentagon. Or Department of War. The chips are borrowed from China. The wheel is rigged by a man who changes the rules mid‑spin.
That’s Donald Trump’s foreign policy. It’s a lunatic Ponzi scheme of perpetual war, where every failure funds the next fiasco, and the only thing compounding faster than the body count is the interest bill.
From the shambles of Venezuela to the barbed‑wire barbarity of ICE, MAGA’s own goon-militia, a terror-squad with quotas and bonuses; from the clown‑car, Pentagon, newly clean-shaven, to the minefield of Iran, Washington is not expanding its power. It’s cannibalising it. Drunk on it, at the same time.
The empire has become a pyramid scheme running on debt, bluff, gratuitous violence and cruelty. Running on empty, morally, spiritually and in every other way known to humanity.
The Venezuelan Black Hole
Trump’s first great gamble was Caracas; a smash‑and‑grab raid penned by AI, full of hallucinatory confidence, in a semantic stutter. It’s pure, colonial nostalgia: topple Maduro, privatise oil, and use the profit to bankroll the next adventure. Butch Cassidy’s business model. But Venezuela’s petroleum dream was already nightmare. After two decades of sanctions and sabotage, PDVSA’s rigs are rusting back into overgrown jungle.
The Columbia Energy Policy Center says $200 billion and a decade are needed just to restart production.
The Carnegie Endowment wryly calls the catastrophe “a failed experiment in fiscal receivership”, an attempt to turn gunboat diplomacy into professional debt-collection. Even Brazil’s Lula kept clear, sensing that any ally caught in America’s orbit ends up as collateral. Or in Butch’s Bolivian ending. The message echoed through the hemisphere: a nation that can’t fix its own bridges shouldn’t be running oil countries.
Every dollar burned in Venezuela wasn’t wasted, however. It was pre‑spent on the next catastrophe.
ICE: The War at Home
While one arm of the state hunted empire abroad, another waged “counter‑insurgency” at home. ICE became Trump’s domestic legion; an $8‑billion‑a‑year militia built to terrorise families, pad private‑prison profits, and radicalise the very communities Washington claims to “liberate” overseas. The American Immigration Council found the sums obscene. $8 billion is enough to feed every child in America, or buy three aircraft carriers.
But it wasn’t just a moral abomination; it was strategic suicide. National Guard troops meant to prepare for foreign war were redeployed to American cities. In 2025, over ten thousand soldiers were policing protests rather than training for combat, according to the National Guard Bureau.
Every rifle guarding the Rio Grande was one fewer ready for Tehran.
And the blowback? Generational. Latino and Muslim communities, brutalised by ICE, now view US power as ideological terrorism. Abroad, images of ICE raids have replaced “freedom” as America’s global brand.
Soft power has curdled into farce.
The Pentagon’s Clown Show
If Venezuela was the money pit and ICE the moral abyss, the Pentagon under Trump became its circus tent. At its helm: Pete Hegseth, a Fox News pundit elevated from breakfast TV to the world’s largest payroll.
The Center for American Progress calls him “unfit”, but that understates the calamity.
Under Hegseth, defence policy collapsed into culture war. Diversity programs were axed while drone wars multiplied; recruitment targets cratered, barracks moulded, and senior officers resigned rather than obey tweets masquerading as orders. The Foreign Affairs journal noted generals asking privately whether unconstitutional orders should still be obeyed. It’s the question that haunts every dying empire.
As historian Michael Howard once wrote of Britain’s Suez folly, imperial decline begins when the best officers look at their leaders and see farce. The US has hit that point.
Iran: The Nightmare Scenario
Yet Trump keeps spinning the wheel. The next bet is Iran. He’s egged on by Mossad, Israel’s intelligence establishment, which for decades has sought to lure Washington into doing its fighting. In late 2025, genuine protests against economic hardship in Tehran and Isfahan were hijacked almost overnight by armed gangs. Evidence gathered by The Grayzone and Middle East Eye shows how Mossad operatives, posing online as Iranian dissidents, urged followers to “take the streets … we are with you in the field”.
Max Blumenthal documented militia groups torching mosques, police stations, and buses, a synthetic insurgency fabricated for the nightly news. Or not. Within two days, the violence collapsed after Tehran cuts foreign internet connections. Even so, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent boasted at Davos that sanctions had “worked” because “people took to the streets.”
Helena Cobban observes, “that admission turns US economic policy into “terrorism on an industrial scale.”
Israel supplied the match, Washington the accelerant, and the corporate media the oxygen. The goal: regime collapse without the cost of invasion. The result: further entrenchment of Iranian unity and global disgust.
Even Israel’s generals, facing the blowback of Gaza’s genocide and regional isolation, now whisper hesitance. After decades of bombing from afar, the once‑vaunted Israeli Defence Forces have revealed their limits. They are technicians of brutality, not warriors of courage. Outside the protective shadow of Washington, Tel Aviv’s swagger looks less like strength than dependency.
The Financial Death Spiral
All this imperial overreach runs on borrowed money. The 2026 defence budget hit $850 billion; the National Priorities Project calculates total militarism near $1 trillion annually. The Peter G. Peterson Foundation warns that interest payments on the $34 trillion national debt will soon exceed the defence budget itself. The empire is literally paying for yesterday’s wars with tomorrow’s taxes.
The opportunity cost is biblical. One year of the “war on everything” could fund universal health care or decarbonise the national grid. Instead, the White House showers money on private contractors and border police. Trump boasts of growth. In truth, he is feeding a debt furnace that now consumes civic life.
It’s the logic of the Ponzi scheme made national: borrowing against a future that no longer believes in you.
You see it in his grifter’ signature. A row of jagged black spikes. Each stroke is a frantic ‘bet on red,’ a zig-zag that refuses to move forward, instead obsessively retracing the same angry ground. It is the signature of a man who doesn’t lift the pen because he’s afraid the moment he stops, the illusion—the bluff—will vanish.
Global Blowback
And the world has noticed. A Pew survey last year found global favourability toward the US and Israel collapsing; 60‑plus percent negative and rising. Western Europe experiments with “strategic autonomy”, the Gulf flirts with China’s Belt and Road, and Latin America shuts its doors to US meddling.
Once‑suppressed Arab regimes now label Israel the region’s main destabiliser.
Cox isn’t exaggerating when he calls them pariah states: allies out of fear, friends out of habit, reputations in free fall. Together, Washington and Tel Aviv have turned the “rules‑based order” into an auction of exceptions. The world, exhausted by double standards, is quietly defecting.
History’s Echo
Empires often die not from invasion but from contradiction. Rome debased its coinage; Britain bankrupted itself at Suez; America is mortgaging itself into irrelevance. Forget the tarrif wars. Each believed the next campaign would pay for the last. Each discovered too late that overreach is not a policy but an addiction.
Trump’s erratic command style, the TACO cycle of boasting, retreat, reversal, has merely accelerated what was already pre‑programmed. The US now fights on six fronts: fiscal, military, informational, psychological, climatic, and moral. Every victory on one creates defeat on another.
The Blowback Doctrine
So what happens when the Ponzi scheme collapses? Oil spikes to $10 a gallon as tankers burn in the Gulf. ICE’s policing of migrants provokes sanctuary rebellions in America’s cities. The Pentagon fractures between loyalists and constitutionalists. The dollar’s supremacy wanes as China and Russia abandon the petrodollar. And across the global south, nations once cowed by sanctions learn to trade beyond Washington’s reach.
The US isn’t just losing wars. It’s losing the ability to define what victory even means.
Coda: Update
According to latest reports from Al Jazeera, The Guardian, and independent regional outlets, we are currently in a critical 48-hour “mediation window“.
The Military “Stage”: The Armada Arrives
The “Butch Cassidy” energy has shifted from Caracas to the Strait of Hormuz.
The USS Abraham Lincoln: The carrier strike group arrived in the region this week. Trump has explicitly compared this build-up to the Venezuela raid, stating it is “bigger than Venezuela” and that “the next attack will be far worse” than the June 2025 strikes on nuclear sites.
The “Two-Week Window”: Trump has set a loose “observation period,” claiming he will watch the Iranians’ response to his ultimatum for two weeks before deciding on direct military action. It has to be noted that Trump is notorious for his outright lies, his record number of lies and his addiction to disinformation.
Iranian Counter-Posturing: Iran’s Navy, alongside Russia and China, announced joint naval exercises in the Sea of Oman “in the coming days.” The IRGC has reportedly deployed hundreds of “fast, missile-launching vessels” in close proximity to the USS Abraham Lincoln.
The Diplomatic “Stage”: The Ankara Emergency
While the ships move, the “stutter” in the conflict is happening in Turkey.
Hakan Fidan’s Warning: Speaking to Al Jazeera, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan stated bluntly: “It is wrong to attack Iran. It is wrong to start the war again.”
The Ankara Talks: Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi is in Ankara today (Friday, Jan 30) for emergency talks. Turkey is attempting to broker a video conference between Trump and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian to avert a strike.
The US Demands: The Trump administration is demanding four non-negotiable points: handover of all highly enriched uranium, a total end to domestic enrichment, limits on missile programs, and a cessation of support for regional proxies.
“Terrorism on an Industrial Scale”
Outlets such as The Intercept and Common Dreams (along with observers like Helena Cobban) are focusing on the humanitarian “discombobulation”:
Internal Unrest: Independent reports confirm that over 3,000 people (with some estimates reaching 12,000) have been killed in recent internal Iranian protests. Trump is using this “deadly crackdown” as a moral justification for the “Armada,” while critics argue that US sanctions have created the economic desperation that fuelled the violence in the first place.
The “Refugee” Concern: Much like Lula’s stance on Venezuela, regional powers (including the UAE and Saudi Arabia) have informed Washington they will not allow their airspace to be used for strikes, fearing a total regional meltdown.
Update 11:00 PM 30 January 2026
The Ankara Emergency (Today’s Talks)
The most critical movement today is happening in Turkey. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi is currently in Ankara for emergency meetings with Hakan Fidan.
The “Mirror” Strategy: In a fascinating move, Araghchi has begun using Trump-style rhetoric (even using all-caps in social media posts) to signal that Iran is open to a “GREAT DEAL”; provided it includes the lifting of the “industrial-scale terrorism” (sanctions).
The Erdogan Mediation: President Erdogan spoke with Iran’s President Pezeshkian today, reportedly proposing a three-way summit between Turkey, the US, and Iran.
The Naval “Picket Line”
Despite the talk of diplomacy, the “Discombobulator” logic remains active on the water:
The Armada: A US destroyer has docked at Israel’s Eilat port to coordinate “offensive and defensive readiness.”
The IRGC Counter: Iran has deployed hundreds of “fast-attack” missile boats in “close proximity” to the US carrier group. They have also announced joint live-fire drills with Russia and China in the Sea of Oman to start “within days.”
The Airspace Blockade: In a massive blow to the “smash-and-grab” plan, Saudi Arabia and the UAE have officially reiterated that they will not allow their airspace to be used for any strikes, fearing the “biblical blowback” we described earlier.
Urban Wronski Writes 