ArcaMax

PARIS — There’s no sensible reason for the U.S. to bomb Iran. At least not exclusively in American interests. So who’s really calling the shots?

If you thought this was about Iranian freedom and democracy, President Donald Trump would like to disabuse you of that notion himself. “No,” was his answer when asked by CNN whether Iran had to be a democracy when the dust settled. “I’m saying there has to be a leader that’s going to be fair and just. … Treat the United States and Israel well, and treat the other countries in the Middle East — they’re all our partners.”

As long as Tehran caters to the whims of Israeli and American ambitions, then all is forgiven. To underscore the point, Trump evoked Delcy Rodríguez, the Venezuelan leader handpicked by Team Trump for her apparent willingness to kowtow to Washington, while still keeping just enough ties to the U.S.-kidnapped Nicolas Maduro to avoid total chaos.

Venezuela, it seems, was the preseason game — a sandbox to test plays and proofs of concept for the big match. But who’s really calling the plays?

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had long pushed for U.S.-backed regime change in Venezuela, citing Hezbollah in Caracas as a “threat” to the U.S. Total nonsense. The narrative conveniently obscures the fact that Venezuela was paying Iran for energy imports, thereby preventing an Iranian collapse that could have been exploited to Israel’s benefit in its quest for regional supremacy.

This also explains why Trump was seizing Iranian oil tankers off Venezuela even before kidnapping Maduro.

Then, after ousting Maduro, Trump sold 2 million barrels of Iranian-Venezuelan fuel, pocketed the profits in a Qatari account, and treated his own handpicked Venezuelan leader like a kid running a newspaper route who must ask for a fiver every time she wants to buy gum. But the focus on Venezuela obscures the impact on Tehran.

It’s also not hard to imagine the same regime change blueprint for Tehran. Admittedly, it’s a bust so far, having replaced Ayatollah Khamenei with Ayatollah Khamenei. Trump doesn’t much seem to care who runs the place — as long as they indulge his whims, which increasingly look indistinguishable from Israel’s.

Initially, Trump’s talking points mirrored Netanyahu’s old “two weeks until Iraq has nukes” routine — the same drumbeat used to justify bombing less than a year ago, recycled from the Iraq war.

But soon, the operation adopted a far more conspicuous religious zeal. Killing Ayatollah Khamenei, leader of Shiites worldwide, during Ramadan would do that. If that didn’t already raise eyebrows, Trump held a highly publicized religious gathering at the White House amid the bombings. Around the same time, The Intercept reported that the Military Religious Freedom Foundation was being inundated with hundreds of complaints from troops whose commanders had invoked “extremist rhetoric of Christian Zionist messianism when justifying the unprovoked war on Iran.”

War Secretary Pete Hegseth, author of the subtly-titled American Crusade, has previously referred to Israeli biblical prophecy and said that “Zionism and Americanism are the front lines of Western civilization and freedom in our world today.”

Has the Trump administration become so entangled with Israeli-American political mega-donors and seduced by the potential for personal profit of an expanded Israel that it now refuses to even rule out American boots on the ground in Iran? It’s not as if Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, hasn’t already been mining Israel, Gaza and the Middle East for opportunities.

Trump’s emerging foreign policy doctrine is simple: do the right thing for America, but only after first exploring every possible personal gain.

The picture coming into focus is one of the taxpayer-funded U.S. military being used as a proxy for a foreign state — one that seems impervious to the usual rules about foreign interference in domestic political life and institutions.

Meanwhile, U.S. allies appear more interested in going along to get along than calling out the charade. Surely it’s just a coincidence that the same world leader who previously called out Israel as a “genocidal state” and slapped it with an embargo is a rare voice of dissent, while the rest are allowing themselves to be dragged into sending military hardware under the pretext of protecting Gulf allies. The spark was an “Iranian missile” conveniently launched at British bases in Cyprus — but not by Iran. By whom? The Brits won’t say.

Surely not by anyone looking to nudge them into this war on Israel and Washington’s side.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio outright admitted that they weren’t leading the charge, but rather riding shotgun for Israel. “We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action. We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t pre-emptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties,” Rubio said.

If this is how American power is being deployed — shaped by foreign interests, personal profit and religious zeal related to a particular country that isn’t America — then there’s a real question here about whether the United States itself is still calling the shots, or if its president is effectively under occupation.