John Rachal's Blog

(written May 8)

Henry Kissinger had a maxim: “The conventional army loses if it does not win; the guerrilla wins if he does not lose.” I’ll modify it slightly: Great powers in a conflict lose by not winning; lesser powers and insurgencies win by not losing.

Trump’s war of choice, one that he and Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel started, has: (1) caused Iran to successfully close the Strait of Hormuz, which was open before the war and would be open now if Trump had not chosen this war; (2) revealed Trump’s arrogance in that he ignored military advice that Iran would do exactly that; (3) killed the 86-year-old-Khamenei, but installed his son, presumed to be an even more militant leader; (4) caused the deaths, so far, of nine Americans; (5) dramatically upset world oil prices; (6) caused gas prices in my city of Hattiesburg to leap from $2.29 the day before the war to $3.89 today, seven weeks later; (7) saddled Americans and the world with higher prices for everything that is transported by truck, train, or plane using fossil fuels; (8) initiated a disturbing depletion of American Tomahawk missiles and other war materiel; (9) cost America a minimum of $27 billion according to the pentagon as of several days ago; (10) delighted Vladimir Putin as American attention and war assistance are diverted away from Ukraine; (11) strengthened China’s hand for the same reason, potentially encouraging its takeover of Taiwan; (12) delighted Putin further given the increased polarization of Americans; (13) reduced American sanctions on Russian oil and thereby increased income to Russia by approximately $150 million per day; (14) offended even further our allies who were never consulted about the war and were then insulted by Trump as cowards for not taking the lead in opening the Strait—an extremely challenging task in any event; (15) increased the likelihood that Iran will in fact now move forward to develop nuclear bomb capability, an outcome the previous ayatollah had resisted; (16) further blackened America’s international prestige as an ally and as a nation with sane leadership; (17) given our adversaries Russia and China a very good look at our military capabilities and limitations; (18) taught Iran that it has a different kind of nuclear weapon—permanently controlling the Strait and charging tolls for ships to pass through it for the foreseeable future; (19) killed or made homeless untold numbers of innocent Iranians who may have hated the theocracy but at least still had a home and their lives, and now may have an even worse leadership, with no end in sight.

And all for what? I cannot think of a single, not one, upside to this war. On virtually every single measure we as a nation and the world at large are worse off, with no counter-balancing benefit. The objectives of the war (other than the primary one of making Trump look strong and tough and etching his name gloriously in the history books) were to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, to effect regime change and liberate the Iranian people, to acquire its nuclear material, and to degrade its conventional military capability and its ability to further support Hamas and Hezbollah, thus undermining its goal of destroying our partner in the war, Israel. The last of these has been partially achieved; the others not at all. Worse, since the war started, a new objective has emerged, one that did not exist prior to the war, and one that makes the others secondary: opening the Strait of Hormuz.

War is notorious for defying predictions (especially about how short they will be). Perhaps that counter-balancing benefit will emerge. But at least right now it’s hard to see any positive outcome of this war. It seems to fit Kissinger’s maxim quite well.

Here (well, at the bottom) is a question I think it would be interesting to pose to Trump supporters:

Let’s pretend that none of the following things ever happened:

Trump’s blatant, massive, and open-to-the-public corruption;

his 2016 promise to balance the budget in two terms;

his sudden claim that “affordability” is a Democrat “con job” now that he is back in the White House rather than Joe Biden;

his narcissistic, infantile, and pathetic need to plaster his name on ships and on the JFK Performing Arts Center, and proposed re-naming of Dulles airport in Washington, his image on commemorative coins, and replacing Benjamin Franklin with his own image on the $100 bill;

his destruction of the East Wing of the White House, after earlier lying that his new Trump ballroom would not endanger the East Wing

his extortion of news organizations (CBS, the Washington Post), Facebook, universities, law firms—either for their money or their submission (or both);

his flooding of mostly blue U.S. cities with masked agents in military gear who seem to answer only to him;

his attempted overthrow—“If you don’t fight like hell you won’t have a country anymore”—of a legitimate election that did not go his way;

his pardoning of all the January 6 insurrectionists, including those chanting “hang Mike Pence”;

his usurpation of congress’s control of taxes and tariffs and declarations of war as mandated by the Constitution;

his kidnapping the narco president (however murderous and illegitimately elected) of a sovereign country while pardoning Honduras’s former president convicted in a federal court of massive drug smuggling into the U.S.;

his leaving in place Venezuela’s vice-president Delcy Rodriguez who is wholly complicit in Maduro’s gangsterism, especially drug trafficking, while dismissing Maria Machado, the popular leading opposition candidate who was barred from running for president in Venezuela’s 2024 election (and who won this year’s Nobel Peace Prize —the Peace Prize Trump SOOOO wanted), as not having the support and “respect” of the Venezuelan people, as if that would be his right to determine;

his historic two first-term impeachments;

his fan-boy relationship with Vladimir Putin;

his illegal firings (including nineteen Inspectors General) and closings of institutions like USAID and Voice of America;

his almost hourly lying;

his further coarsening of American political discourse through his tweets and general vulgarity;

his turning the Justice Department—typically the most independent Cabinet position—into his personal law firm focused on revenge toward his enemies;

his 180 flip-flops and general flim-flammery concerning the files of sex-trafficking former friend Jeffrey Epstein

his making Project 2025, largely based on Viktor Orban’s authoritarian rule in Hungary, unofficial American policy;

his taking existing healthcare subsidies from millions of Americans to further enrich millionaires and billionaires with tax cuts;

and dozens of other actions and pronouncements and executive orders—some flagrantly illegal—that would have been major scandals under any other president—

So, to repeat: Let’s pretend that none of those things ever happened.

Instead of all that, let’s look at just one thing. On the sole subject of national security, how can Trump supporters possibly defend this president, given his actions that undercut our national security, including:

Undermining and even threatening withdrawal from the NATO alliance, causing Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada to bluntly state that Trump’s abdication of American responsibility relative to NATO is a “rupture, not a transition,” meaning that the other NATO countries should treat the U. S. as no longer a dependable ally and as having seceded from the alliance:

Insulting, even threatening (Canada, Greenland, Denmark, Ukraine), our allies and embracing our adversaries;

At the 2025 Davos Conference and in interviews actually mocking our NATO allies’ support and sacrifices in service personnel (this coming from President Bone Spurs) in the American war effort in Afghanistan;

genuflecting to Vladimir Putin and his chosen outcome of the Ukraine war;

firing and lecturing generals and admirals, though a draft-dodger himself;

installing an incompetent like Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense;

installing Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence, who was and perhaps still is a member of the secretive Science of Identity Foundation, a Hare Krishna spin-off, and who has defended both Putin and Syria’s former dictator Bashar al-Assad;

demoting or firing federal employees with national security skills and knowledge and replacing them with sycophants;

planning to build at untold cost (the aircraft carrier USS Gerald Ford cost $13 billion) so-called “Trump-class” battleships to pump an egomaniac’s ever-so-needy ego—ships that can be mortally damaged by several well-directed and comparatively dirt-cheap drones;

attacking and planning “to run” a sovereign nation after capturing its president, after all his “America First” promises of keeping us out of foreign wars and “nation building”;

So, back to my long-promised question: How can anyone justify such a president of either party frittering away American national security in a world where democracy, historically led by an American president, is in retreat, and threat environments—especially cyber ones, at least for now—are advancing?

From a long, long ago reading of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s grim The Gulag Archipelago, I still remember one particular scene. A high Party apparatchik was extolling the pretended glories of Stalin’s communist regime to an assembled (volutuntarily? Who knows?) group in a large room. At the end of the speech, everyone rose to applaud. And applaud. And applaud. This went on for several minutes, everyone afraid to be the first to stop clapping. Hands were tiring, even beginning to burn, Solzhenitsyn tells us. Finally, one person stops clapping. He is immediately arrested by Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD. He protests: “Someone had to stop clapping!”

“That is very true,” the arresting officer replies. “Just never let it be you.”

Let us all, especially a servile GOP and its supporters, stop clapping.

Donald Trump’s “peace” plan for the Ukraine-Russia war is, as sure as night follows day, a de facto Ukraine Surrender Plan, designed to offload a Trump headache, burnish (he thinks) his Nobel prospects, and give his friend Vladimir Putin almost everything he wants while rewarding him for his war crimes and his extinguishing scores of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian lives. The 28 point plan most affecting the one country disallowed any role in its formulation is in fact an ultimatum: surrender within a week or we cut you off entirely.

Putin is doing a happy dance, smiling at the ease with which he plays the American president. He gets to keep Ukrainian land he has taken by invasion, making Ukrainians in those areas suddenly Russian; Ukraine must unilaterally and significantly disarm, opening it to future invasion; it must forgo any hope of joining NATO, all while taking cold comfort in assurances that the United States, a totally undependable ally under the current administration, will be there when Putin comes back for more a year or two down the line.

The Ukraine Surrender Plan is one other thing: an absolute disgrace to the United States. It would shame us and haunt us. It already does just by being proposed. Being accepted in anything like its current form, it would further diminish us as the indispensable still-free (though starting to teeter) nation in the world, a world where democracy is in retreat, a world in which 72% of its eight billion inhabitants live under authoritarian regimes according to the Varieties of Democracy Institute and cited by PBS’s News Hour. Fortunately, Ukraine will save us most of that historic ignominy by rejecting Trump’s plan for its capitulation, by choosing not to live on its knees.

Pentagon correspondent and Atlantic writer Nancy Youssef and virtually the entire pentagon press corps—even Fox News—have been expelled from the pentagon building by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, obviously hampering them from doing their jobs of reporting how the military spends close to a trillion dollars per year and how it manages and deploys nearly three million personnel.

Their crime? Declining to sign a pledge that they will only report what Mr. Hegseth allows and approves. Rather than become a shill for Hegseth, the pentagon press corps has abided by its journalistic duty to be an independent source of news coverage for the American people. To do otherwise would be to become the American version of Russia Today, the mouthpiece of the Kremlin, concerning military matters.

As for Hegseth’s juvenile response to the press corps’ collective decision—a decision ensuring that you will get a straighter take on what your military is doing with your money and our young men and women in uniform—Youssef notes that that response was to post an emoji with a hand cheerily waving goodbye.

It should be noted that all responsible journalism is very careful not to report matters of critical national security. I cannot think of a single instance in which a time-sensitive, vital national security matter was revealed irresponsibly by the press. By contrast, Hegseth himself HAS revealed extremely sensitive information when, like a ten-year old showing off his knowledge of a secret, he blabbed the specific war plans to attack Yemeni rebels on a commercial, non-secure Signal platform, potentially endangering American pilots. He should have been sacked for that alone.

Of course his boss is not much better: Last week Trump publicly stated that he was sending a nuclear submarine to the Caribbean, though at least he did not give latitude and longitude. Normally submarine movements would not be publicly mentioned at all—there is a reason they swim UNDER water.

The womanizing, sometimes sozzled, administrative novice and Fox News spin doctor turned “Secretary of Physical Fitness” (as retired Naval War College professor and Atlantic writer Tom Nichols calls him) invites scatological commentary, as in “he’s a walking, talking, load of…well, to be nice, that other four-letter word starting with s, scat.” But a better analogy might be that of a 20-year-old kid playing Call of Duty or Hell Let Loose video war games on his computer twelve hours a day. This epic nonentity, so concerned about wokeness and pushups, knows something about actual national security, alliances, strategic defense, and the capabilities of our adversaries? This little pipsqueak thinks he should lecture some 800 generals and admirals on ANYTHING? He’s not fit to shine their boots. Even three Republican senators, including Mitch McConnell, voted against him, and he was saved only because of the tie-breaking vote of J. D. Vance.

Maybe Trump was right when he told the generals and admirals that America’s greatest threat is from “within.” But that threat from within is not who he says it is—all he has to do is look in the mirror. And as for the threat from without, if you think Trump and Hegseth have made the nation more secure in a world where autocracy is on the march, think again.

On my previous question on Facebook of who is the second-most dangerous person in America, there were two votes for Robert Kennedy Jr., one for Ron DeSantis, one for Mike Johnson, and two who were simply overwhelmed by the multitude of possibilities. My thanks to all. I guess I’m in that last camp as well, but since I asked for one individual, I guess I should give just one myself. My candidates were: Secretary of Health and Human Services RFK Jr., Secretary of DEFENSE (not “War”) Pete Hegseth, Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Vice-President J. D. Vance, House Speaker Mike Johnson, Presidential consigliere Steven Miller, OMB Director and Project 2025 co-author Russell Vought, and finally Chairman and CEO of Fox News, Lachlan Murdoch (his father Rupert is now Chairman emeritus).

Under this administration, America faces a vicious interplay of actual threats from the White House and loss of respect from abroad. From the administration’s anti-science ignorance represented by Kennedy; to the autocracy-loving malice of Miller, Vought, and Hegseth; to the clinking of champagne glasses in Moscow and Beijing after the demolition of agencies like Voice of America, Radio Free Asia, USAID, and others; to the firing of senior military officers and intelligence personnel considered insufficiently Trump-loyal, the sunsetting of American democracy and the wavering in national security are clear and present dangers.

As for my own choice, my original thought was Robert Kennedy, autism provocateur and Center for Disease Control and National Institutes of Health deconstructionist. I do believe there is a high probability of people getting diseases or dying who might not have done so with a competent health professional in his place. Under his rule at HHS, we will be less prepared for our next pandemic or measles outbreak. But I also believe that he is an ideological ignoramus, at least more than he is a malicious underminer of national security. And since I am particularly concerned with American decline on the world stage, America’s retreat from democratic principles, and its slide to join the autocratic world with no other equally strong democracy in the wings, I ruled him out. As journalist and historian Anne Applebaum has succinctly noted, we have entered a new era: the “post-American world.”

I toyed with Murdoch, given his extraordinary influence through Fox News, the propaganda arm of the Trump administration. Perhaps unknowingly employing an apt term from the Reagan administration—“perception management”—Fox News*  has captured the minds of far too many Americans who love Trump’s bogus machismo and his daily falsehoods. I also toyed with Hegseth, an unqualified macho Signalgate  incompetent and former Fox News host subverting our national defense and obsessed with “lethality” and “warfighters.” The chasm between him and former Secretaries of Defense like James Mattis, George Marshall, Clark Clifford, Leon Panetta, or Robert Gates is almost as wide as the Grand Canyon between Republican Presidents Donald Trump and Abraham Lincoln.

But finally I settled on Vance. Sure, he has Trump’s ear, “couldn’t care less about Ukraine,” excoriated Trump in 2016 but in a fit of fevered ambition flipped to unabashed Trump lapdog, all while exhibiting his own fascist instincts—his embrace of the German extreme right-wing party AfD and “the professors are the enemy” speech as two examples. But perhaps his greatest threat lies in the future, when he is likely to be the GOP presidential candidate in 2028. If he wins, he will assume the Trumpist mantle and agenda, he will know where Trump faltered, and with his cunning, intelligence, and lean and hungry look, he would make restoring democracy and actually making America great again an even more distant goal.

*Exemplifying Fox News’s extreme Trump bias, Charlie Warzel, writing of the Jeffrey Epstein “birthday book” in which Trump has apparently drawn a “bawdy” picture and says “May every day be another wonderful secret,” notes that “Fox News’s article about the birthday book, which was on its front page earlier this evening, mentions Clinton in the headline [and text] but contains zero mention of Trump at all.” “You Really Need to See Epstein’s Birthday Book for Yourself,” digital Atlantic, 9/9/25. Interestingly, the Wall Street Journal, owned by the Murdoch family, first reported the Trump quote.

Republican representatives and senators assure us that President Trump’s “one big beautiful bill” will “rein in the national debt.” They assure us that the only folks who will lose Medicaid are people here illegally and able-bodied recipients unwilling to work. They assure us that we need the bill to cut taxes—but they will never be honest enough to add the necessary four words “mostly for the wealthy.” In truth, estimates are that the senate version of the bill will add $3.3 trillion to the debt. Back in the day, Republicans and conscientious Democrats were concerned about the debt. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that under the House version of the bill 7.8 million Americans will lose their insurance, a majority of whom already work. Polls show low levels of support for the bill nationwide—a Fox News poll showed 38% favored and 59% opposed, while The Washington Post had it underwater by 19 points and Pew Research by 20. And yet it will pass. I join with Old Testament Jeremiah in asking, “Why does the way of the wicked prosper?”

Donald Trump was once asked what his favorite Bible verse was. He said he didn’t want to say, that it was too personal—which almost certainly meant that he didn’t know one. For about three decades my favorite Old Testament one (among quite a few I’m not at all crazy about) has been Micah 6:8. You can be Buddhist, Hindu, Christian, Jew, Taoist, Zoroastrian, agnostic, or atheist and still like it: “Do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with thy God.”

I can’t help but ask, Did the Republicans in Congress who passed the “Big Beautiful Bill” with not a single Democratic vote do justice in giving great tax breaks to the wealthy and adding trillions to the national debt? Did they love mercy in stripping ten million of their health insurance? Did they walk humbly with anyone other than Donald Trump, with whom they were humble indeed?