The Last American Vagabond - Why Trump Keeps Backing Down From Attacking Iran’s Infrastructure

Episode Date: August 7, 2026

In the latest episode of Foreign Policy with Robert Inlakesh, we look at the details hidden behind US President Donald Trump’s repeated retreats after threatening to wipe out Iran’s infrastructure. The predicament of the US in West Asia has dramatically changed, its options are slim, munitions drained, and, amidst all of this, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth appears to not even know basic facts about the war he is supposedly helping to direct.The Last American Vagabond Substack is a reader-supported publication. To ensure the platform continues, consider becoming a 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 law. 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 edition of foreign policy with me, Robert and Lakesh, for the last American vagabond. And today we're going to be talking about Donald Trump and his threats that he seems to have made at least six or seven times now to destroy Iran's civilian infrastructure. and why he keeps backing down from this. Well, the short answer is, it's very simple. He has two options here. And these two options that he is presented with are either escalate and attack Iran's civilian infrastructure and open up a wider war across the region or simply do a deal with Iran and finish this war. Now, Trump has signed on to a memorandum of understanding, which he,

quickly acted to break. And there were a number of these ceasefires which appeared. They even got the Lebanese government to sign onto an agreement that recognized Israel in order to forward this process, or at least that's what we were told. But now we're back in this cycle where Iran has explicitly said that there is no ceasefire. Trump is claiming there is negotiations yet again. there's still missiles flying. Now Yemen has broken into the conflict properly, imposed a blockade on Saudi Arabia. So the Strait of Hormuz is of course closed. There's Iran's blockade. Then there is the US blockade on top of the blockade. An expert move that apparently Alan Dershowitz came up with. So aside from that, there's now Bevan Mendeb that is closed, which of course is the waterway that Yemen has the power to control and it is blockading it for Saudi shipping.

Now this is very important because this means there is a stranglehold on the global economy. About 25% of global oil just isn't happening at the moment. There's that lack of the supply there. And we're seeing that there is obviously market manipulation that keeps going on in order to bring down the price of what is called Brent crude fuel. This is the projected price of oil. But that's not the real price of oil, as many will have come to understand right now. And so the clock is now ticking for the Trump administration. Either they can go ahead and they can actually commit themselves to an agreement, and it's

going to take some convincing of the Iranians to actually get to the agreement, because the memorandum of understanding that the United States decided to just break and start bombing Iran after they went into the Strait of Hormuz and tried to carve out an alternative route, which was something that the Iranians made very clear they were not allowing to happen and weren't going to allow to happen. So the Iranians, of course, active. They struck a number of vessels. But this is the United States, still with its military there, still not having lifted the sanctions, not abided to its side of the agreement. And it appears as if the United States believes that this conflict is like other conflicts, that you don't have to actually abide by your agreements,

that your words written down on paper don't mean anything at all. Well, with Iran, it sort of does because Iran can fight back. And that's the key difference here between this conflict and other conflicts. So a lot of people might ask, why doesn't the United States just go ahead and bomb Iran and try and take them out? Well, we saw during the 40-day war that the United States tried that. And they got nothing from it. In fact, the Strait of Hormuz is still closed.

There is another Khamanai, the son of Ayatollah, Sayyad Ali Khamanai, who was killed by the Americans. His son took his place, and the system is still exactly the same in Iran. They didn't change anything at all. If anything, they made Iran stronger and their position in the region stronger. So now the only way to actually weaken Iran is to go after that civilian infrastructure, which is what Trump keeps on threatening. So, why doesn't he just do it?

Well, at this point, around 80% were to believe the reports which are coming out now of the US's interceptor missiles have been depleted already. This means there's a dangerously low number that are still in existence of US interceptors. And these interceptor missiles, because we're not talking about Iranian military production here, We're not talking about the way that the Iranians do things and that's very quickly they can mass produce munitions. The US doesn't do that. The US likes to spend billions, hundreds of billions, trillions on projects, which take decades. And, you know, just producing some munitions. It's not quite as quick as many people would think, even though, of course, the Patriot missile system, you know, it's still in existence. This is the backbone of the US air defense. And then you have the THAAD systems, which are. the best systems in the world, or at least that's what they're marketed as, at catching

and taking down ballistic missiles. And of course that is crucial to defending the Israelis. Of course, we have to talk about Israel here because Israel is the reason why this war is even happening. And of course, taking on Iranian civilian infrastructure is not really going to do anything for the United States. In fact, there are many things that Iran can do to retaliate. But just looking at these interceptor missiles, dangerously low. Also, the majority of the US's long-range precision missiles have also already been used. Those munitions have been used to target, in a lot of cases, these same exact sites time and time again, like missile bases, because the United States wasn't able to penetrate Iran's

missile cities. It wasn't able to penetrate its nuclear facilities, in many cases, when they went out. after them. And what they did instead is they decided to bomb the entrances and exits. That's what they've done at least for the missile cities. So they would bond them time and time again to try and suppress the rates of Iranian fire because if those missile cities are of course closed the exits and entrances, then the Iranians have to dig them out in order to pull the missiles out and to fire them. But the real question is here, you've wasted all of these long-range precision missiles, which you would need for other conflicts if you're dealing with

the likes of China. Well, China has a rather sophisticated air defense system. You're going to need those munitions. You want standoff munitions. You don't want to be flying your fighter jets over Chinese airspace. Just the sake of argument here, because the United States likes to larp on about fighting all of these wars and being the number one military superpower. So if it is going to go ahead with any aggression against China. China was to, you know, take Taiwan, something like that, the US would be in a pretty bad position. In fact, to defend itself, the United States is wasting all of its munitions, and again, not gaining anything. So, why not just go after that civilian infrastructure? Well, that is very simple. The answer to that question is perfectly clear.

If you go after Iran's civilian infrastructure, like power plants, then Iran is going to go after all of the power plants in the Persian Gulf. And that means all of those Gulf allies, which Trump has pledged that are, you know, or said that they've pledged, trillions to invest in the U.S., they're no longer going to be inhabitable. If you want to take out Iranian desalination facilities, well, the majority of Iranians don't get their water supply from water desalination plants. When we're talking about power plants, Iran has about five. of them across the country. They're going to have to go after substations. They're going to have to hit these power plants, a lot of them, time and time again, because a lot of them are built with

war in mind. You were talking about in the Persian Gulf, you know, it's a handful in comparison that Iran has to take out with its ballistic missiles. And now remember again that a lot of those interceptors, the Patriot missile system and the THAAD missile system, is not going to be as effective. and what Iran has been doing over the past weeks until the United States halted its missile strikes against the Iranians, they were focusing very heavily on taking out radars in the region. And the reason that is important is because if you can't see those missiles coming, well, it makes them a lot harder for you to be able to shoot down. But also, you have limited interceptors.

So now Iran is more easily able to target all of those facilities in the region, and it will come with a vengeance if its own civilian infrastructure is targeted. So all those Gulf allies are going to be severely punished. And then the Israelis are also open to massive ballistic missile attacks as well. And we are not even opening the conversation about the allies of Iran and what they could possibly do. because the United States has a number of rather desperate strategies that it can try and open. For example, they have started actually using the Saudis to do a joint bombing campaign against Iraq. Well, there are hundreds of thousands of Iraqi fighters who are aligned with Iran as part of what is known as the Islamic resistance in Iraq. And they have not yet shown their full power.

These fighters can attack Saudi Arabia if they wanted to, they could attack Kuwait if they wanted to, they could of course cross the border into Syria because another one of the schemes of the United States, and Trump has said this very openly and very proudly, that the former leader of Syria's wing of Al-Qaeda, who now occupies the position of president of Syria in Damascus, Ahmed Ashaharah or Abu Mahmah al-Julani, as he used to be known, Trump wants him to go and invade Lebanon. which is going to mean a bloodbath. But if he does that, the Iraqis have pledged to come over into Syrian territory. So now we have the Iraqi front opened.

We have those fighters perhaps flooding into Syria. We have Syria's militia groups and what constitutes now the Syrian army, which are a collection of majority of these fighters, formerly Al-Qaeda-aligned militants, who will cross into Lebanon and attack what they consider to be non-Muslims from the Shia population there. They will go after Christians and Alawi and other different groups in the region. It will be quite bloody, but then they will get fought back by the group there called Hezbollah,

which is resisting Israel. Of course, again, the strategy that Trump wants to enact against Lebanon, which would plunge that country into chaos, will plunge Syria into chaos, we'll plunge Iraq into chaos, all of this is for Israel, because the ground force, really, of Iran in this conflict against the Israelis is Hezbollah that can actually fight them on the ground. But it gets even worse than that, because Yemen is right there. If the Yemeni armed forces actually are to commit to an all-out offensive and Saudi is getting hit very hard, there is a good chance that Yemen will come under the full control of the Ansara law government based in Senat, the capital city of Yemen.

Yemen could also fire ballistic missiles, most likely it will, against the Israelis. But then there is a wild card in all of this, which nobody is talking about, and most people have written off. And it's important because recently there was a step taken, which will perhaps escalate this front even further. and that is the Gaza Strip, where of course there has been a genocide that has been committed since October 7, 2023. Now, the Palestinian armed factions there, Israel has long been talking about they need to disarm, and Hamas needs to give control up of the Gaza Strip. Well, Hamas committed some time ago now to give up control of the Gaza Strip to a technocratic

administration in Gaza, to rule Gaza. It agreed to that. Israel didn't react. Israel didn't want to go to the phase two of the ceasefire, and instead they upped the killing of civilians inside of the territory. They started seizing even more land in the Gaza Strip after Hamas said it would have relinquished power of this civil administration of Gaza. Now something interesting has happened recently. Hamas and all of the Palestinian resistance factions in Gaza all agreed to a disarmament plan with the Board of Peace controlled by Donald Trump. The Board of Peace which was supposed to be set up for Gaza, but its own official charter doesn't mention Gaza or Palestine once. I wonder why, because of course it's a scheme which is seeking to replace the United Nations.

The UN system collapsed what we had in the post-World War II order and bring in this new world order of absolute chaos, right? And all to please the Israelis. But the Palestinian factions agreed, okay, we'll disarm. But there's going to be a process. Israel has to withdraw from the Gaza Strip entirely. Israel has to disarm the five different ISIS-linked militias, which it has created to fight against Hamas and the other Palestinian groups, something they won't tell you about that Israel literally created five ISIS-linked militias to fight against Hamas. But they were telling you the whole time

that Hamas is ISIS, and they're literally there creating these ISIS-linked militant groups to fight them. But that aside, they agreed. But Israel then came back and said, no, absolutely, not, were not agreeing to the deal that was struck with the Palestinian groups to disarm. Now, the reason why they didn't agree to it is because in that agreement that was signed by these Palestinian factions with the so-called Board of Peace, inside of that agreement was that this would be a phased approach, and that the weapons would be eventually, it would be stored, originally and decommissioned, and then they would be handed over to a future Palestinian state. That's the only people that would get hold of those weapons.

Instead, the Israelis want Hamas and all of the Palestinian factions to completely disarm before Israel even withdraws, and whilst Israel is pledging publicly that it will never withdraw from the Gaza Strip, and it will continue to conquer more land in the territory, and it will not abandon its so-called defense strategy, right? Israel doesn't want to do reconstruction in the Gaza Strip. Israel wants to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip. So if you take all of the weapons of all of the groups all at once, well, now no one is there to resist against a complete ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip.

But putting them in this position now, this so-called ceasefire, which was supposed to go into phase two of this agreement in Gaza, you know, we're now over 1,200 people killed in Gaza later, with no retaliation from the Palestinian groups against the Israelis, and the Israelis going deeper into the Gaza Strip and continuing to destroy civilian infrastructure and the remaining agricultural land that still exists in Gaza on a daily basis, and months and months go by,

the only ones giving concessions of the Palestinians, and the Israelis are not, and the Israelis keep bombarding, civilian sites and killing innocent people, including since the ceasefire, almost 500 children in Gaza have been killed by Israel. So what do you think is going to happen with that? Well, because Israel has refused to actually agree to Hamas removing itself from ruling Gaza and disarming, because it's refused that, then that front becomes a lot more likely to open up. And that front, by the way, if it does open up in the midst of a regional war, will perhaps be one of the most

bloody offensives that we will possibly see, because it will be a last ditched attempt in order to put down the Israelis, to force them back, and to defeat them. And that's something to consider because they have literally no options at that point other than to do this. So if we're being serious here, if we're looking at what the Trump administration is doing, well, there's no wonder it's hesitating to go and attack Iranian civilian infrastructure or it has hesitated to do it time and time again because as soon as that regional war opens, you're opening Pandora's box. When you start going after Iranian civilian infrastructure, well, the gloves completely come off. It's hard to strike a deal with them after that.

And so there will be immense pain, immense suffering, entire nations, the way that they've look are going to change. And then we have to add in the other element here. The Trump administration knows this. People like Pete Hegsef don't know this because Pete Hegsef just the other day was talking about how Yemen is not involved in this regional war and literally complimenting Trump for bombing them into submission back in 2025. ...bridge to bomb the Houthis and say, we will maintain freedom of navigation. I wonder why they're not involved in this conflict, the Houthis, even though they're a proxy Iran, because they've felt the weight of American power for 45 days and you had the courage to do that.

But apparently you are the Secretary of War and you don't know that Yemen is involved in this regional war and that they've imposed a counter blockade on Saudi Arabia. You know, at this point, it's very clear who is in control and it's not Pete Hegsef and it's not Donald Trump. They don't know anything about what's going on. There are just puppets that are there. So Trump, if he wants to go. ahead, he mentioned recently that they were about to go ahead with the largest bombing

campaign since World War II, and what does that mean? Well, we can interpret a number of different ways, but really if you're talking in that way, you're getting at that perhaps you were considering using nuclear weapons, which then brings us to another point that is beyond even the conversation of the regional war, because if the United States decides to try and use a nuclear weapon against Iran, the situation dramatically changes. And it could draw in other actors and this could be a much broader war in situation, let alone the immense civilian suffering and mass death that this will cause. But this is a ridiculous decision to make, an absolutely ridiculous decision that will only spell more chaos.

not end this war. See, the United States in the past was comfortable with its wars, like in Afghanistan. It spent trillions, it wasted a lot of money and a lot of resources, but ultimately, what was the Taliban going to do about their presence there? If they decided to stay, they could have stayed even longer, and there was really not much in the way of repercussions. This time, the Strait of Hormuz is still closed. And those strategic petroleum reserves of the United States are already at such lows that they're at the levels they were in the early 1980s. And it's going to get worse. And that means that when it comes to your oil prices, well, don't be too surprised if they suddenly shoot up overnight.

At one point and things get very difficult and inflation gets much, much worse. Again, remember, this is all for Israel. And here we are. Trump can't get out of this because the Israel lobby is going to strangle hold over him. He can't force the Israelis to do an agreement in Gaza, to respect an agreement in Gaza to end the Gaza genocide, which will completely avert any further warfare there if he was to do it. The Palestinian of actions all are ready to agree to even hand over their weapons,

to stop the fighting altogether. In Lebanon, the easy answer was to force Israel to withdraw from Lebanese territory, but of course, Trump couldn't do that. Because his boss is Benjamin Netanyahu. There's no other way to put it at this point. He couldn't force them to do anything in Gaza, and the Board of Peace, the Second Israel said, we're not agreeing to this, went back and just changed its whole entire language. Everything it was saying about the disarmament. of Hamas and the other factions instantly and reassured Israel, basically apologized to their

masters that, well, we didn't actually mean what we said and what we put on paper and what we publicly announced and what even the US president announced. We didn't actually mean that. So Trump can't do anything in the way of Gaza restraining Israel there. He can't do anything in the way of restraining the Israelis in South Lebanon. And instead, he's pushing for all these conspiracies and even when it comes to using Kurdish militia groups in northern Iraq, well, Iran has been doing these cross-border operations with its special forces units and smashing these Iranian Kurdish opposition groups with ballistic missiles and drones, taking out many of their ammo depots and their headquarters, assassinating key figures

within these organizations. And so Iran has been active. on top of that too. And the question is, where do you go? Do you do what Israel wants you to do? Or do you do what's in the best interests of the United States? And we know at the end of the day that it's, Trump is caught in between a rock and a hard place because he doesn't control his government. He does what he's told. And so even if he announces five, five, six more agreements, the Strait of Hormuz is not going to fully open and things are not going to return to normal until he grows a backbone and decides that he won't end up just violating the agreement. And Iran is waiting there with its finger on the trigger and is capable

of responding. And it's not Iran that is running low on its munitions. It's the United States. So Trump is in a very difficult position. Objectively so. I wouldn't envy that position and you had to ask yourself, why is he so weak in front of the Israel lobby? Why can't he make decisions in favor of the U.S. public? Well, I think we can all come to those answers ourselves. But at the end of the day, it's important to understand what his position is in all of this. This is not a president. This is a puppet. This is a weakling. This is a weakling. This is a somebody that puts Israel first and now perhaps countless American more American service members

have to be killed in this war for Israel and God knows the extent of the suffering that has to happen because the United States has been acting on behalf of the Israelis. This is bad on every single level. This is a strategic defeat that is just pending at the moment. We're just waiting for the outcome. Is it going to be more catastrophic or is the United States going to see the reality, wake up and smell the hot coffee, and realize that it has to come to a deal? And really, from what we've seen in the track record, it's hard to say that the United States can even come to any sort of deal at this point. But until that time, until the escalation or de-escalation, it's what everybody, hopes for at least that there can be suddenly something that happens which forces the US

administration to realize the position it's in, to force the Israelis to withdraw from Gaza, to withdraw from Lebanon, and to close this conflict. Everyone hopes that that is the case, but the reality here is that the United States doesn't have a very good track record with ending conflicts in the region when Israel wants it to do something. And in fact, Donald Trump has the worst record in the region. So we can expect to see that the pressure is going to mount. And we're now in uncharted waters. And that is quite concerning.

But everyone should know what position Donald Trump has got the United States into. The global economic implications are going to be enormous. implications on U.S. security are going to be enormous. There will be more U.S. casualties if this escalates. The U.S.'s allies are all going to be put through the meat grinder. More innocent people are going to be killed. Entire countries may look different at the end of this. And again, nobody is gaining here except for the Israelis. So until next next, time this has been another edition of foreign policy here for the last American vagabond.