The Last American Vagabond - Trump Presses Self Destruct Button With Iran For Israel’s Sake

Episode Date: September 3, 2026

In the latest episode of Foreign Policy w/ Robert Inlakesh, we look at the Trump administration’s desperate attempt to punish Iran by dragging the global economy down, leading to an inevitable continuation of the regional war that Washington launched on Tel Aviv’s behalf.In order to understand the current predicament, it is key to understand why the US President is lashing out & threatening a move that will have global economic consequences. This is all born out of a failure to act in the best interests of the United States.Bitcoin Donations Are Appreciated:www.thelastamericanvagabond.com/bitcoin-donation(3FSozj9gQ1UniHvEiRmkPnXzHSVMc68U9f)The Last American Vagabond Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to The Last American Vagabond Substack at tlavagabond.substack.com/subscribe

To have dignity, to have respect, to have our human rights. The occupation is not just the soldiers, it's not just the settlements, it's everything. What will separate the condition of humanity from the barbarism of the past, which we like to think we have since changed and progressed from. That might have been the work of American imperialism and international Zionism. We've come here to investigate what this means for the people living here. It's a violation of international world. It's a war crime.

These are the real journalists, achieving liberation to unite the people in a way that we've never seen before. Welcome back to another episode of Foreign Policy with me, Robert and Lekesh for the last American vagabond. The US Trump administration has just launched Operation Economic Outcast, or at least is threatening Iran with the worst sanctions regime ever imposed on any country around the world. And not just the worst for Iran and Iranians, but the worst for the United States and the entire global economy as well. Because as Scott Besant, the secretary of the Treasury in the United

States, has admitted this is going to tank the global economy as soon as this is implemented. And so we've already seen that China wants to respond to this. And this is the key thing to understand right now when we're looking at the status of this war. The Trump administration has reached a dead end. And so now what is being proposed is not just to sanction Iran, because Iran has been under sanction since the year 1979 when the Islamic Revolution happened. And of course those sanctions have grown over time to the point where the United States basically sanctions everything you can sanction to do with Iran. Now they want to do something going a step further than this. And it's not even actually just to do with

Iran, it's trying to punish all of Iran's allies and trade partners. For example, they would like for the Iraqis, which are the neighbors to Iran, to close the border and shut down trade. This is catastrophic for so many reasons, which perhaps are a topic for another edition of this show. But then we have the likes of China, which is where it really matters. See, China has already pledge to fight back. And in fact, it wants to impose its own equation on the United States if they are going to go through with these sanctions. This means that all those Gulf Arab kingdoms, which are allied with the United States, but have historically always done trade or had some sort of relations with the Iranians can no longer do that. The Russians can't do it.

Pakistan can't have any relations with Iran. This is a full deterioration of all economic ties. And we're talking about a recipe for global economic disaster. Now, the reason they're doing this is pretty simple, but we sort of have to go back a few months and get to the time period where the 41-day war came to a sort of close or a ceasefire, what was supposed to be a two-week ceasefire, to end the war. So the Trump administration at that point, along with their Israeli allies, if you can even call them that at this point, some would argue owners, they had gone to a point in the war with Iran where they realized that militarily they weren't able to degrade Iran, they couldn't actually destroy their missile

cities, they weren't able to defeat Iran militarily, and their air campaign alone was not going to do the job of triggering regime change. They simply didn't have a movement inside of Iran that was powerful enough to do it. In fact, most Iranians rallied around the flag, so it had the opposite effect. Then they had their proxy forces like Kurdish militia groups, Iranian Kurdish opposition forces, that they wanted to invade Iranian territory, and Iran has been continuing to take care of that problem, even during the periods where there was no direct fire between Iran and the United States.

But all of these different strategies fell through. The attempt to create a color revolution inside of Iran at the start of the year failed. It was cracked down upon and it was very quickly put down. The United States admitted to funneling weapons into those rioters, into the hands of the rioters, to try and overfrow the government, but not just overfrow it. They wanted to create a failed state. That failed. The military campaign, the air campaign, failed.

So the only next step that they could take if they wanted to actually inflict a blow that could possibly in the long term lead to a collapse of the Iranian government and system, or at least make Iran a failed state, was to go after specifically and target all of Iran's civilian infrastructure. And of course, this impacts the civilian population in Iran because you're taking out their water. supplies. So you're hitting reservoirs. You're going after desalination facilities. You're going after the power plants. You want to take out the power grid. You want to take out all of the businesses, right? You want to go after radars. Everything that makes a country work, you want to take it out. Now, that of course takes a lot of bombs and Iran has a lot of ballistic missiles and has what it looks like, and even according to the Israeli estimates, has been able to replenish its stockpile during this so-called ceasefire period. So it has a hell of a lot of missiles. And so

when we came towards the conclusion of the initial 40-day clash, which was this all-out air campaign, Trump explicitly threatened to go after bridges, the power plants, and water desalination facilities and to annihilate an entire civilization. He said that an entire civilization is going to die tonight and then suddenly there is a ceasefire. And he's made these sort of threats a number of times since the initial temporary two-week ceasefire was signed. That's because if Trump went ahead with it, this is going to mean massive repercussions to the United States, its regional hegemony, all of its allies in the Arab world would be destroyed. Some of them annihilated, wiped off the map. They wouldn't be able to exist anymore because if they don't have their desalination facilities,

if they don't have their oil and gas facilities and they don't have a power grid, then those countries simply cannot continue. So goodbye, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain, for example. This is a terrible thing for the United States. But for Israel, that's great. They're just eliminating competitors and taking these economic competitors off of the chess board. But of course the United States didn't really want to just do that. Israel can pressure them, but it takes a lot of convincing. The problem is Trump went into this ceasefire period. He agreed to a bunch of the terms put on the table by the Iranians and then he reneged on them straight away. And the reason why he did that is because the Israel lobby pushed back and they said,

We don't accept this. You can't enter into any kind of agreement with the Iranians, which is going to make them stronger in the region and is going to grant them all of the concessions, including ownership over the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran has successfully closed since the early March. So right after the February 28 initial attack in early March, since then, the Strait of Hormuz has been pretty much closed other than a few ships getting out here and there. That's taken off in combination now with another card that Iran has played in Yemen with imposing a blockade in the Red Sea, has taken out 25% of global oil supplies. Of course, other things are affected here.

There's the likes of fertilizer which has been affected. This means that certain crops couldn't be grown and there wasn't a season in many parts of Asia because they simply couldn't get their hands on cheap enough fertilizer and other materials, which they're dependent upon this trade of Hormuz being open in order to get, which means that inflation is going to hit in more ways than perhaps people expect. So immediately, what does the Trump administration do, knowing that it can't come to any sort of an agreement with the Iranians, and it would be a surrender agreement if they were to?

Well, he imposes a counter-blockade on top of Iran's blockade, thanks to Alan Dershowitz, apparently. He's the one who came up with this. But that being said, that didn't work, of course. Iran continued to hit ships in the Strait of Hormuz, even though there were these on-and-off negotiations. Strait of Hormuz was not going to open. If we then fast forward to the memorandum of understanding that was signed, and there was a 60-day period, which of course, has now passed, that memorandum of understanding was a US surrender agreement. In essence, they lost. Now, on the Iranian side, they believed they could have extracted a lot more and that that agreement

wasn't even the maximum. And so there was a lot of opposition internally, yet the Iranian leadership structure allowed the elected government in Iran to pursue this memorandum of understanding. But then the United States, of course, having accepted this, had all of this pushback from the Israel lobby and the donor class. And so, and in the case of Trump, the donor class is just a whole bunch of Zionist billionaires and their interests are Israel. We all know that. And so then what he starts trying to do is he starts reviving a strategy, which was implemented during the initial blockade period where he's trying to carve out an additional route through the Strait of Hormuz. And now Iran has not agreed to that. Iran says it's going to have joint ownership over the

Strait of Hormuz along with Oman and that they are going to charge a fee for ships coming through. That's the Iranian position. Pretty explicit. Although in the MOU, the language was somewhat ambiguous. The United States does this. Iran sees it as an aggression. To cut a long story short here, then there was a clash, an armed clash between the two sides. Now, the United States was prepared for this. The United States was trying to attack targets in the south of Iran, hoping that it could start degrading its military capabilities. That really didn't go too well for the United States. In fact, Iran really preempted a lot of those attacks. In some cases, took out attack teams. It went after military bases. We then saw that Iran had live intelligence like we didn't see it, those sort of intelligence capabilities during the initial 41-day war period.

And so Iran came out on top. And one of the reasons for that is because during this period, Iran had dug out all of its missile bases across the country. So Iran has all of these missile bases and cities underground. And what the Israelis were helping doing during the initial war period where there was a large-scale bombardment of the country was the Israeli. was the Israelis were continuously striking the entrances and exits to these missile bases and suppressing the rate of Iranian fire.

That's why the Israelis were a key component of this all-out air campaign. And so during the sort of low-intensity campaign that the United States decided to carry out against Iran as a new strategy against them, Iran was able to fire at will whenever it wanted, and not really worry about having fire suppressing their rate of fire, of their ballistic missiles and drones, and successfully countered what the United States was trying to do there. And so they took out more radars, they went after a number of different sites, and punished the United States,

and the US didn't really hit anything of major significance. We heard all of these threats. Trump again during this period, his threat to take out Iranian infrastructure, said he'd hit a bridge or power plant or water desalination facility for every single tanker that Iran took out in the Strait of Hormuz. Of course, none of this worked. And then we went back to a period of sort of relative calm, and then Trump is coming out with, well, we're going to sanction them even more. They want to come to the table. Look, they're negotiating with us. Really, Iran was negotiating with

man, not with the United States, has nothing to do with opening the straight of formulas. It's an agreement that was being put together for a post-war situation. But Trump then desperate, and with the price of oil again shooting up, because all his antics, all of his claims, they are taken and adapted into the algorithm and to the AI systems that are being used to trade for the likes of Brent crude futures, These are projections of the price of oil, and so that impacts the price of oil for us. And he was able to keep them down for a bit. When they started shooting up, now suddenly it's a new operation, an economic operation, he's calling it,

and that is economic outcast, the operation's name. Now, we're currently at a stage of this war where Iran, in reaction to all of these different tactics, the United States has chose to implement against the Iranians has triggered different fronts. It openly challenged Saudi Arabia's blockade on Yemen. Yemen then decided it was the best time Saudi being under real pressure and not being able to export oil through the Strait of Hormuz and only being able to export around 6 million barrels a day through the Red Sea. It was going to impose a counter blockade on Saudi Arabia.

and it was going to pick up the heat against Saudi proxies inside of the country, tried to liberate its territory, and hit Saudi oil infrastructure, which is bad news for the global economy, bad news for Saudi Arabia, bad news for the United States. So Iran now has the Yemen card that is being played. Iran, of course, has its allies in Iraq, which can threaten to also strike targets throughout the region. We saw them do it during the 40-day war.

And the situation in southern Lebanon is starting to heat up again. And that is another front that they could potentially trigger. Now, the Trump administration went back and said, hey, we're going to push Ahmed Ashara, the president of Syria, or Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, as he used to be called, to fight against Lebanon. And he's going to invade Lebanon.

And so Turkey, which is, of course, another factor in Syria and another power involved that has a lot of influence there, doesn't want that to happen, because the Turkish government knows that that's a catastrophe for itself. So it's trying to stop that situation from boiling over. And now the United States is just desperately trying to force disarmament of Hezbollah, disarmament of the popular mobilization units in Iraq, so the allied militias that are on the side of Iran in this conflict,

and to disarm Hamas and then put pressure on Gaza by bombing more civilians. Very predictable. But in all of this, with all of these different strategies and all of these different cries for help, really, the Trump administration cannot make the decision to go to all-out war, which is the next natural step, like I discussed earlier in this video, the only way to get at Iran and really weaken them is to go after their infrastructure. And again, Trump doesn't want to do that because there's repercussions to doing it. And now, some people may say, well, why would the Israelis want to do that?

Well, for the Israelis, they, in their strategic calculations, they know that they will get hit back for sure. But if it means that Iran is going to be degraded in the long term, then they will take those hits to an extent. And when the price gets too high to pay, then they'll call up the United States to sort of end it. But of course, Trump, on the one hand, again, he doesn't want these repercussions, but then he can't make a deal because Israel doesn't want him to make a deal. And he's been able to ride out this period over months now, playing with the markets, playing with the price of oil, and it's just market manipulation. But we're getting to the point now where the strategic petroleum reserves of the United States

are at an old-time low. They're as low as they were back in 1982. Now, the strategic reserves, the United States started them in the 70s, didn't really pick up until the late 70s. And to cut a long story short, once again, there's about 40 days left that they have of their strategic petroleum reserves, which means it does not matter after that. What he says. The prices of all.

price of oil is going to shoot up. The oil is physically not there. So all the manipulation in the world cannot change the fact that the product does not exist. So the prices are going to go up, inflation is going to go up, interest rates are going to go up. And Trump is now, it's looking like it's not a stalemate. It's looking like it's closing in on a checkmate. So he either has to make a deal very, very quickly and push back against the Israel lobby and all of his donors and those who potentially, depending upon what you believe, may have serious blackmail that they're using against him, blackmail material that they're using against him. And if he doesn't push back against the Israel lobby in a significant way here and close a deal, which means forcing the Israelis

to withdraw from Lebanese territory, forcing the Israelis to back off of Gaza and end this genocide once and for all, and to allow for Iran to have control over the Strait of Hormuz to give all these concessions economically to Iran. If he doesn't do it, then, well, what does he do? Keep watching as the global economy collapses and keep trying to manipulate things here and there as things get worse and worse and we head towards a global recession. He either does that, just sits back and does nothing. or he goes to all-out war, and he makes that decision to take the next step. And so the question then becomes, looking past just the initial phase of this all-out war,

let's assume that Israel survives this, and let's assume that all of those Persian, Gulf, Arab countries are severely battered, the very least. And let's assume that they do inflict serious damage to Iranian civilian infrastructure. What's the promise that the Iranian government is not still going to be there? In fact, right after the Islamic Revolution in 1979, suddenly Saddam Hussein, which, of course, he was encouraged by the United States and backed by the United States to do it, went and launched a war which lasted a decade with Iran. And so the Iranians understand what it's like to live under a war economy. They understand what it's like to live under economic sanctions. But that government, this strategy of destroying its civilian infrastructure, is not a strategy that will immediately take out the Iranian government.

What will happen at the best case scenario in the thinking of the United States and the Israelis, or at least the Israelis, so the United States is not really going to gain anything from this, is that, you know, maybe five, ten, fifteen, twenty years down the line, the Iranian government will collapse and that it will be so badly battered from this experience that it won't want to push against the Israelis for some time. And so that will take a little bit of heat off of the Israelis, I guess. That's what they hope during that time.

And then they can try and stir uproids. uprisings inside of Iran and tear apart the country from within with the Mossad. That still means at the end of that exchange, you have to do some sort of deal with them. And that's an exchange that they would have won most likely or fought you to a stalemate, and then you will have to start giving some concessions. But this time, your allies in the Arab world would have been battered so badly that how do you even solve that situation? And really, are you going to use nuclear weapons?

Because no matter what, which way you try and slice this, we're heading for serious economic repercussions, the likes of which we've not witnessed, at least in any of our own. our lifetimes. And so that's where things are heading. If there's not an agreement, which is going to be filled with concessions, and it just has to be that way, then we're looking at a situation which will dramatically reshape not only the region, but perhaps the whole world. And again, the time is ticking. It seriously is.

and it doesn't even look like we're going to get to those midterms before this is all going to erupt. So sometimes there are some bleak assessments that we have to sort of just swallow. This is one of them. Best case scenario is that the Iranians pull off a quick military victory, which defeats the Israelis, they wave the white flag, and then somehow there is an agreement which is struck with the Israelis begrudgingly allowing it to happen. That's probably the best case scenario here. Otherwise, this is going to be very ugly.

So until the next episode, I'm Robert Inlakesh. You've been watching the foreign policy show for The Last American Vagabond. And remember, question everything.