He started a war nobody asked for, and now he’s angry that nobody wants to finish it for him.
Let that sink in. Roll it around. Hold it up to the light.
A man who spent years telling NATO it was worthless, who stood before cameras and informed the alliance that American troops had carried them, that coalition soldiers who bled and died in Afghanistan had “stayed a little back, a little off the front lines”…that man launched a war on February 28th without a single phone call to a single ally. No consultation. No coalition. No plan beyond the strike itself.
He didn’t want help. He said so. Out loud. On the record. Repeatedly.
Now the Strait of Hormuz is closed. Oil is up fifty percent. Marines are on ships headed toward a war that has no exit. And he is on Truth Social, in all capitals, calling the people he insulted and excluded “COWARDS.”
The word coward. From him.
This is the geometry of tyranny: claim all the credit, dodge all the cost, blame everyone who refuses to be drafted into the consequences.
The Germans answered him plainly, with the flat affect of people who have seen this before. Washington had explicitly stated at the start of the war, their chancellor’s spokesperson noted, that European assistance was “neither necessary nor desired.”
Australia said no. Japan said no. Poland said no. Sweden said no. Spain said no. France spoke of international law and de-escalation. The UK offered mine-hunting drones and the use of a base. And even that came with a firm warning that Britain would not be drawn into the wider war.
These are not cowards. These are governments that watched a man spend years burning down the alliances their soldiers died to build, and they made a calculation: we will not bleed for his vanity.
They are right to refuse.
Meanwhile, Amnesty International is reporting that a U.S. strike killed at least 170 people at a girls’ school in Minab. One hundred and seventy. Most of them children. The man who ordered the war that produced that strike is at this moment somewhere between the White House lawn and Palm Beach, telling reporters the conflict will “wind down” one hour after ruling out a ceasefire. He assures us all that the strait will “open itself at a certain point.”
He does not know what that means. He does not care what that means. He is performing leadership for an audience he believes will never hold him to account.
And he is probably right about that, which is the thing that should keep you awake at night.
This is not a war fought for American security. There was no attack on American soil. There was no imminent threat that demanded strikes within the week. This is a war of choice, launched by a man who does not experience consequences. Not personal ones, not political ones, and certainly not the kind that arrive in the form of bodies carried out of rubble in Minab.
He declared the fight “militarily won.” In the same breath he is sending more Marines. He says the enemy is defeated. The strait remains closed. He claims victory. Oil is at prices that are crushing working people from Tokyo to Toledo, and the shockwaves haven’t fully arrived yet.
Do not let the noise distract you from the arithmetic: people are dying, more people will die, and the man responsible for setting this in motion cannot name which countries have agreed to help him, will not explain his plan, and spent the week reassuring the press that he “may or may not” have a strategy for the next phase.
This is what unchecked power looks like when it runs out of road. It doesn’t confess. It doesn’t reckon. It posts in all capitals and calls the world cowards and flies to Florida.
The founders understood this pathology. They built structures specifically designed to contain men like this, men who mistake office for inheritance, who treat alliance as servitude, who send the young to die in wars the old invented over breakfast.
Those structures have bent. Some have broken. The question now is not whether this man is dangerous. That question has been answered, in capitals and in rubble and in the price of a tank of gas.
The question is whether we have the courage he is accusing his allies of lacking. Not the courage to march into the Hormuz Strait. The courage to name what this is. To refuse the normalization. To say, in the plainest possible terms, that a democracy does not belong to one man’s temper, one man’s post, one man’s weekend plans.
He will remember who didn’t help him, he says.
Let him make his list. We’ll make ours: the mothers in Minab. The children never coming home. The dead of a war that didn’t have to happen.
We will remember.