February 4, 2026
David Hearst
He bullied Nato into "a framework" for a future deal over Greenland, which according to one report, later vigorously denied, had Denmark ceding sovereignty over the areas in which US bases would be built.
He has got Europe to pay for more of its own defence.
He seized President Nicolas Maduro, as a result of which, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that Venezuela will submit a monthly budget.
He arm-twisted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu into stopping the war in Gaza. If his "Board of Peace" has grabbed autonomy from both the Palestinian factions and the Palestinian Authority, Israel has also less control over Gaza.
This is what Trump thinks he has achieved. And now he has assembled an armada of ships and bombers poised to strike Iran for the second time in a year. Trump thinks he can do to the Islamic Republic what he did to Venezuela.
In this, Trump is fundamentally mistaken. But he believes it.
His envoy Steve Witkoff and his son-in-law Jared Kushner have told one regional power what Trump thinks he can do to Iran. A quick but limited air strike which decapitates the leadership, but leaves the regime in place.
This is to be followed by a deal in which Iran surrenders its uranium enrichment programme and agrees to trade its oil solely with the US, in return for which Trump will allow Boeing back into Iran.
There are other variants circulating, but its essential ingredients are speed, extreme violence, and the submission of surviving members of the leadership to US diktat.
US diktat
Trump is also convinced that now is the time to strike. He thinks the Islamic Republic has been fundamentally weakened by the air strikes he ordered last year.
Its main uranium enrichment plants remain buried under tons of rock and rubble and US intelligence claims the regime has done nothing to restore its stockpiles.
Iran was then rocked by the second major wave of national unrest in three years which was suppressed only at the cost of thousands of lives.
In evaluating Iran’s alleged weakness, Trump has two sources of information, both deeply flawed - his own intelligence assessments and Israel’s. Israeli intelligence is powered by different objectives.
Netanyahu wants regime change, not a token or limited round of air strikes. He has said for decades that Hamas and Hezbollah function as "aircraft carriers" for Iran - a claim which is contradicted by the enduring and cross-generational levels of support each movement enjoys in Palestine and South Lebanon.
Both Trump and Netanyahu are power drunk by the military actions they have taken so far. Each believes they are masters of the universe.
If their pilots operate off real-time information, almost to the minute, on where targets can be located and eliminated, they believe there are no constraints on what they can do.
Last year, the Israeli airforce showed how it is no longer constrained by the physical distance between its airfields and Iran.
In publicly claiming that its agents were on streets of Iran at the height of the recent economic protests, Mossad thought it was spooking the Islamic Republic.
Its braggadocio had the opposite effect. Mossad did not help the opposition. It tarnished it and after a pro-state mass demonstration, the protest folded.
Iran is not Venezuela
Before the next bout of folly starts, it is worth stating a very obvious fact: Iran is not Venezuela.
To take the most obvious differences - and this list is not exhaustive - Venezuela had no regional cards to play when Maduro was seized. Iran abounds in them.
The supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is not just Iran’s head of state, commander in chief of its armed forces and its supreme political and religious authority.
He is the spiritual leader of tens of millions of Shia Muslims around the world. The most significant Shia populations in the Middle East - outside Iran- are Iraq, Bahrain, Lebanon, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
Ayatollah Khamenei has direct control of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). And here is the second major difference from Venezuela.
Whereas a small Delta Force armed with a blowtorch was enough to seize Maduro, a very different prospect awaits any invader who tries to neutralise the IRGC, a force as large as the US Marine Corps.
The IRGC can count on 150,000 ground troops, 20,000 naval personnel, and a 15,000-strong air force, plus the large Basij militia. It alone has the capacity to block the Strait of Hormuz with naval mines, fast attack boats, and naval drones.
This strait is considered a maritime "choke point". Twenty million barrels of crude oil, condensates, and refined petroleum products pass each day through a stretch of water 33 km wide at its narrowest. Through it, too, goes 20 percent of the world’s trade in liquefied natural gas.
Furthermore, if Trump were to fulfil his dream of arm-twisting a battered Iran into selling him all its oil, he would first have to dismantle the IRGC as an economic powerhouse.
The IRGC’s ability to control the Iranian economy was heightened by the sanctions imposed by the US in 2010 under the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act (CISADA).
The IRGC acts effectively as Iran’s international banking system - including crypto currency mining and gold trading to circumvent international banking controls.
It controls around 50 percent of Iran’s oil exports. It manages a fleet of ghost tankers.
Trump’s plan to seize or redirect Iran’s oil flow would have geostrategic implications. It would directly impact China, which has bought in recent years around 90 percent of Iran’s crude oil and condensate.
Iranian crude accounted for around 14 percent of China’s total seaborne oil imports making Iran a more important supplier than Venezuela.
A third Gulf War
So what does Rubio think would happen the day after a US strike? Does he imagine that the IRGC, the owner of an elaborate global infrastructure to circumvent international sanctions, would submit Iran’s annual budget to the US Treasury for approval? If so, he is dreaming.
But perhaps the biggest difference with Venezuela is that, if struck a second time by US and Israeli missiles, Iran would think and react very differently than it has in the past.
It would regard such an attack as part and parcel of the strategy behind arming an insurrection, which the state has just survived.
It would interpret Trump’s action not as a wrap over the knuckles to induce the right negotiating response, but as an existential attack on the Islamic Republic itself.
This means its response would be unconstrained by attempts to grade or limit the war that would follow.
Iran would be less likely to accept a choreographed exchange of missile strikes as it did when it replied to the assassination of its chief military strategist and diplomat General Qasem Soleimani at Baghdad Airport in 2020.
Five days later, the IRGC launched more than a dozen ballistic missiles at Ain al-Asad Airbase in Al Anbar governorate, western Iraq and at another airbase in Erbil. But it warned the Iraqi government first.
This time round, Iran would use its arsenal of short and medium range missiles, estimated by the US Central Command's General Kenneth McKenzie to number over 3000 missiles. Iran would have no reason to hold anything back.
Its senior diplomats have already said its response would be asymmetric and it would regard Israel’s regional partners such as the United Arab Emirates and Azerbaijan, from whose territory drones operate, as particular targets.
The Saudis, with whom Iran maintains good relations after decades of hostilities, are concerned that an attack on Iran would quickly develop into a war that spreads like wildfire through and down the Gulf. And for good reason.
A war like this would be impossible to limit geographically. Iran has a reach which extends from the Caucasus to Yemen, from Lebanon to Afghanistan.
The axis of resistance may have been severely dented by the loss of Syria, but its core components remain in place in Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen.
In brief, I would not like to be the US Pentagon planner tasked with war-gaming a short and limited set of air strikes, as Trump has ordered.
A third Gulf War is in Trump’s and Netanyahu’s power to start, but it would not be in either man’s power to stop.
The prospect of a third Gulf War has been propelling regional attempts to construct a diplomatic off-ramp. But these are complicated.
Serious negotiation?
There is a view in some circles in Ankara that Iran would welcome a US strike to consolidate domestic support for the state.
Turkey’s Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan has been trying to build an international forum of regional foreign ministers to take part in negotiations. The idea behind this is to prevent negotiation becoming an arm wrestling match between Trump and Khamenei.
A meeting between Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, Witkoff and Kushner was scheduled to take place in Istanbul on Friday, before the Iranians said they wanted it switched to Oman.
The supreme leader, however, is thought to have rejected the idea of a regional forum, and wants one-to-one negotiations with the Americans in Oman and only about Iran’s nuclear enrichment programme.
Iranian acceptance of talks is also heavily caveated. An Iranian diplomatic source told Reuters that the planned meeting would show Iran whether the US intends to conduct serious negotiations.
As ever, the Iranians intend this meeting, if it ever takes place, to be just the start of a long process. Trump expects immediate results. He has no patience for negotiations. For him, every deal is take it or leave it.
Iran has already taken its ballistic missile fleet off the table. To surrender this, it would leave the country defenceless. Trump expects it to be on the table.
The Iranians will not negotiate seriously with a sword of Damocles hanging over their head. At some point in the negotiation, they are bound to demand the withdrawal of the US armada, as a proof of good faith, before any progress or offer can be made on their uranium enrichment programme.
All about the oil
Trump has a bad record with Iran. In his first term as president, he pulled out of the JCPOA nuclear accord which remained the best and only path to controlling and monitoring Iran’s uranium enrichment programme.
He launched a surprise attack last year in the midst of negotiations. Iran is right to demand from him - in particular - a gesture of good faith before talks continue.
Trump must surely refuse. For him, Iran has to be seen to be folding under duress, as he now imagines Nato to have done over Greenland.
With all these points in mind, I would conservatively put the prospects of talks averting war at about one in ten.
This collision course is nothing new for the Islamic Republic, which has a historical memory deeper than anything floating around in Trump’s Fox News-informed head.
From 1954 - the year after the overthrow of Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in a coup organised by the CIA and MI6 - to the 1979 revolution, control over Iranian oil was held by the "Seven Sisters", a consortium of the world’s leading oil companies: Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now BP), American oil companies (that together were to become Mobil, Chevron, Exxon and Texaco), Royal Dutch Shell, Compagnie Française des Pétroles (now Total), and a smaller group of American companies.
How similar this looks to Trump’s "Board of Peace".
Iran's Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi got only half of the profits from the 1954 agreement, but by 1973 even he was weary.
A new 20-year agreement was signed granting the National Iranian Oil Company operational control. The Shah was setting the stage for nationalisation, but it was too late, as a series of workers' strikes preceded the revolution.
Does anyone think Iran, a proud nation with a history going back 3000 years, will tamely revert to the days of foreign domination by Trump’s equivalent of the Seven Sisters?
Does anyone imagine that an Islamic Revolution that has survived eight years of war - which included gas attacks by Saddam Hussein, that survived sanctions and assassinations, will fold like a pack of cards when faced by Trump?
Does anyone seriously think that Iran would now follow Iraq’s lead? Since 22 May 2003 - the date of an executive order by President George W Bush - all revenues from Iraq’s oil sales have been funnelled directly into an account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Trump is just the latest configuration of a colonial bully that Iran is only too familiar with.
Trump should read history before making what could prove to be the costliest foreign policy mistake of his presidency.
David Hearst
The US president should read
history before making what could prove to be the costliest foreign policy
mistake of his presidency
US President Donald Trump’s
authority may be in shreds after the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)
shootings in Minnesota, and with inflation rising as a result of his tariffs,
but internationally Trump still thinks he is on a high.
He bullied Nato into "a framework" for a future deal over Greenland, which according to one report, later vigorously denied, had Denmark ceding sovereignty over the areas in which US bases would be built.
He has got Europe to pay for more of its own defence.
He seized President Nicolas Maduro, as a result of which, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that Venezuela will submit a monthly budget.
He arm-twisted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu into stopping the war in Gaza. If his "Board of Peace" has grabbed autonomy from both the Palestinian factions and the Palestinian Authority, Israel has also less control over Gaza.
This is what Trump thinks he has achieved. And now he has assembled an armada of ships and bombers poised to strike Iran for the second time in a year. Trump thinks he can do to the Islamic Republic what he did to Venezuela.
In this, Trump is fundamentally mistaken. But he believes it.
His envoy Steve Witkoff and his son-in-law Jared Kushner have told one regional power what Trump thinks he can do to Iran. A quick but limited air strike which decapitates the leadership, but leaves the regime in place.
This is to be followed by a deal in which Iran surrenders its uranium enrichment programme and agrees to trade its oil solely with the US, in return for which Trump will allow Boeing back into Iran.
There are other variants circulating, but its essential ingredients are speed, extreme violence, and the submission of surviving members of the leadership to US diktat.
US diktat
Trump is also convinced that now is the time to strike. He thinks the Islamic Republic has been fundamentally weakened by the air strikes he ordered last year.
Its main uranium enrichment plants remain buried under tons of rock and rubble and US intelligence claims the regime has done nothing to restore its stockpiles.
Iran was then rocked by the second major wave of national unrest in three years which was suppressed only at the cost of thousands of lives.
In evaluating Iran’s alleged weakness, Trump has two sources of information, both deeply flawed - his own intelligence assessments and Israel’s. Israeli intelligence is powered by different objectives.
Netanyahu wants regime change, not a token or limited round of air strikes. He has said for decades that Hamas and Hezbollah function as "aircraft carriers" for Iran - a claim which is contradicted by the enduring and cross-generational levels of support each movement enjoys in Palestine and South Lebanon.
Both Trump and Netanyahu are power drunk by the military actions they have taken so far. Each believes they are masters of the universe.
If their pilots operate off real-time information, almost to the minute, on where targets can be located and eliminated, they believe there are no constraints on what they can do.
Last year, the Israeli airforce showed how it is no longer constrained by the physical distance between its airfields and Iran.
In publicly claiming that its agents were on streets of Iran at the height of the recent economic protests, Mossad thought it was spooking the Islamic Republic.
Its braggadocio had the opposite effect. Mossad did not help the opposition. It tarnished it and after a pro-state mass demonstration, the protest folded.
Iran is not Venezuela
Before the next bout of folly starts, it is worth stating a very obvious fact: Iran is not Venezuela.
To take the most obvious differences - and this list is not exhaustive - Venezuela had no regional cards to play when Maduro was seized. Iran abounds in them.
The supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is not just Iran’s head of state, commander in chief of its armed forces and its supreme political and religious authority.
He is the spiritual leader of tens of millions of Shia Muslims around the world. The most significant Shia populations in the Middle East - outside Iran- are Iraq, Bahrain, Lebanon, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
Ayatollah Khamenei has direct control of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). And here is the second major difference from Venezuela.
Whereas a small Delta Force armed with a blowtorch was enough to seize Maduro, a very different prospect awaits any invader who tries to neutralise the IRGC, a force as large as the US Marine Corps.
The IRGC can count on 150,000 ground troops, 20,000 naval personnel, and a 15,000-strong air force, plus the large Basij militia. It alone has the capacity to block the Strait of Hormuz with naval mines, fast attack boats, and naval drones.
This strait is considered a maritime "choke point". Twenty million barrels of crude oil, condensates, and refined petroleum products pass each day through a stretch of water 33 km wide at its narrowest. Through it, too, goes 20 percent of the world’s trade in liquefied natural gas.
Furthermore, if Trump were to fulfil his dream of arm-twisting a battered Iran into selling him all its oil, he would first have to dismantle the IRGC as an economic powerhouse.
The IRGC’s ability to control the Iranian economy was heightened by the sanctions imposed by the US in 2010 under the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act (CISADA).
The IRGC acts effectively as Iran’s international banking system - including crypto currency mining and gold trading to circumvent international banking controls.
It controls around 50 percent of Iran’s oil exports. It manages a fleet of ghost tankers.
Trump’s plan to seize or redirect Iran’s oil flow would have geostrategic implications. It would directly impact China, which has bought in recent years around 90 percent of Iran’s crude oil and condensate.
Iranian crude accounted for around 14 percent of China’s total seaborne oil imports making Iran a more important supplier than Venezuela.
A third Gulf War
So what does Rubio think would happen the day after a US strike? Does he imagine that the IRGC, the owner of an elaborate global infrastructure to circumvent international sanctions, would submit Iran’s annual budget to the US Treasury for approval? If so, he is dreaming.
But perhaps the biggest difference with Venezuela is that, if struck a second time by US and Israeli missiles, Iran would think and react very differently than it has in the past.
It would regard such an attack as part and parcel of the strategy behind arming an insurrection, which the state has just survived.
It would interpret Trump’s action not as a wrap over the knuckles to induce the right negotiating response, but as an existential attack on the Islamic Republic itself.
This means its response would be unconstrained by attempts to grade or limit the war that would follow.
Iran would be less likely to accept a choreographed exchange of missile strikes as it did when it replied to the assassination of its chief military strategist and diplomat General Qasem Soleimani at Baghdad Airport in 2020.
Five days later, the IRGC launched more than a dozen ballistic missiles at Ain al-Asad Airbase in Al Anbar governorate, western Iraq and at another airbase in Erbil. But it warned the Iraqi government first.
This time round, Iran would use its arsenal of short and medium range missiles, estimated by the US Central Command's General Kenneth McKenzie to number over 3000 missiles. Iran would have no reason to hold anything back.
Its senior diplomats have already said its response would be asymmetric and it would regard Israel’s regional partners such as the United Arab Emirates and Azerbaijan, from whose territory drones operate, as particular targets.
The Saudis, with whom Iran maintains good relations after decades of hostilities, are concerned that an attack on Iran would quickly develop into a war that spreads like wildfire through and down the Gulf. And for good reason.
A war like this would be impossible to limit geographically. Iran has a reach which extends from the Caucasus to Yemen, from Lebanon to Afghanistan.
The axis of resistance may have been severely dented by the loss of Syria, but its core components remain in place in Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen.
In brief, I would not like to be the US Pentagon planner tasked with war-gaming a short and limited set of air strikes, as Trump has ordered.
A third Gulf War is in Trump’s and Netanyahu’s power to start, but it would not be in either man’s power to stop.
The prospect of a third Gulf War has been propelling regional attempts to construct a diplomatic off-ramp. But these are complicated.
Serious negotiation?
There is a view in some circles in Ankara that Iran would welcome a US strike to consolidate domestic support for the state.
Turkey’s Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan has been trying to build an international forum of regional foreign ministers to take part in negotiations. The idea behind this is to prevent negotiation becoming an arm wrestling match between Trump and Khamenei.
A meeting between Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, Witkoff and Kushner was scheduled to take place in Istanbul on Friday, before the Iranians said they wanted it switched to Oman.
The supreme leader, however, is thought to have rejected the idea of a regional forum, and wants one-to-one negotiations with the Americans in Oman and only about Iran’s nuclear enrichment programme.
Iranian acceptance of talks is also heavily caveated. An Iranian diplomatic source told Reuters that the planned meeting would show Iran whether the US intends to conduct serious negotiations.
As ever, the Iranians intend this meeting, if it ever takes place, to be just the start of a long process. Trump expects immediate results. He has no patience for negotiations. For him, every deal is take it or leave it.
Iran has already taken its ballistic missile fleet off the table. To surrender this, it would leave the country defenceless. Trump expects it to be on the table.
The Iranians will not negotiate seriously with a sword of Damocles hanging over their head. At some point in the negotiation, they are bound to demand the withdrawal of the US armada, as a proof of good faith, before any progress or offer can be made on their uranium enrichment programme.
All about the oil
Trump has a bad record with Iran. In his first term as president, he pulled out of the JCPOA nuclear accord which remained the best and only path to controlling and monitoring Iran’s uranium enrichment programme.
He launched a surprise attack last year in the midst of negotiations. Iran is right to demand from him - in particular - a gesture of good faith before talks continue.
Trump must surely refuse. For him, Iran has to be seen to be folding under duress, as he now imagines Nato to have done over Greenland.
With all these points in mind, I would conservatively put the prospects of talks averting war at about one in ten.
This collision course is nothing new for the Islamic Republic, which has a historical memory deeper than anything floating around in Trump’s Fox News-informed head.
From 1954 - the year after the overthrow of Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in a coup organised by the CIA and MI6 - to the 1979 revolution, control over Iranian oil was held by the "Seven Sisters", a consortium of the world’s leading oil companies: Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now BP), American oil companies (that together were to become Mobil, Chevron, Exxon and Texaco), Royal Dutch Shell, Compagnie Française des Pétroles (now Total), and a smaller group of American companies.
How similar this looks to Trump’s "Board of Peace".
Iran's Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi got only half of the profits from the 1954 agreement, but by 1973 even he was weary.
A new 20-year agreement was signed granting the National Iranian Oil Company operational control. The Shah was setting the stage for nationalisation, but it was too late, as a series of workers' strikes preceded the revolution.
Does anyone think Iran, a proud nation with a history going back 3000 years, will tamely revert to the days of foreign domination by Trump’s equivalent of the Seven Sisters?
Does anyone imagine that an Islamic Revolution that has survived eight years of war - which included gas attacks by Saddam Hussein, that survived sanctions and assassinations, will fold like a pack of cards when faced by Trump?
Does anyone seriously think that Iran would now follow Iraq’s lead? Since 22 May 2003 - the date of an executive order by President George W Bush - all revenues from Iraq’s oil sales have been funnelled directly into an account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Trump is just the latest configuration of a colonial bully that Iran is only too familiar with.
Trump should read history before making what could prove to be the costliest foreign policy mistake of his presidency.
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