Alan Zendell, August 28, 2026

Respected journalist Stephen Erlanger said it clearly and succinctly in this morning’s New York Times. “The Trump administration has replaced its military war [in Iran] with an economic one, but the result is likely to be no different … with a lack of American clarity about goals, a decline in American credibility and a strategic defeat.” Powerful as those words are, they mask details that are far more damning.

Whether or not there was a credible justification for starting a war with Iran, its planning and execution have been a disaster for the United States, the Middle East, and the world. The over the top war mentality of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth that played directly into Donald Trump’s delusions of grandeur will surely be noted by historians who document this debacle as a dangerous inflection point in the history of our country.

I was an optimist about America all my life, at least the first eighty-one years of it, even through the Nixon Watergate years and the wrong-headed twenty-year conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the last two years, Trump has demonstrated how fragile our super-power status really is. He has undermined our credibility as the most powerful military force in the world, the standard-bearer for world peace and international cooperation, and as a nation that keeps its commitments to its allies.

Combine that with his very obvious corruption and his attempts to undermine the principles on which our nation was founded, and we have a modern day version of the Roman Emperor Nero. The parallels with Nero are striking. As the last emperor of the Julio-Claudian Dynasty which presaged the fall of the Roman empire Nero was primarily known as a tyrant with many of the same narcissistic tendencies as Trump. It’s not clear whether Nero actually fiddled as Rome burned, but that legacy isn’t far from the truth.

The Great Fire that destroyed most of Rome in 64 AD, was alleged to have been started by Nero himself to clear space for the magnificent palace he intended to build for himself. Sounds scarily like Trump’s ballroom fantasy and his attempts to turn the White House into a Mad Hatter’s playground. To deflect blame for the fire, Nero began a terrible persecution of Christians whom he blamed for all of Rome’s ills. Doesn’t that sound very much like Trump’s defamation of all immigrants as rapists and murderers and the brutal way in which ICE, at Trump’s direction, have violated their civil rights, even many who have been hard-working American citizens for decades? And Nero’s well-documented debauchery smells like Trump’s desperate attempts to hide his involvement with Jeffrey Epstein.

Nero also apparently thought nothing of squandering Rome’s resources to enrich himself and his friends, which is a frightening metaphor for Trump’s overall performance in office. To take a few examples, he has wasted billions of dollars worth of military hardware and high-tech weaponry, drastically reducing our strategic readiness around the world. By now, most of us understand that the prosecution of his Iran war had more to do with Trump’s ego and mental illness than any rational attempt to solve the problem of the danger Iran poses to the world. As a result, we have a Navy that is drowning in the mess he created. The tragic and embarrassing spectacle of an aircraft carrier filled with thousands of highly trained military personnel and equipment that is so bankrupt it can’t feed its own people and a naval force teetering on insolvency illuminates the incompetence of the administration.

But that is hardly their only failure in foreign policy and security. The madness of Trump’s two-year non-shooting war against our longest standing and most reliable ally, Canada, may be the most damaging thing Trump has done over the long run, assuming his out of control war with Iran doesn’t result in upsetting the entire western alliance. His lies and exaggerations about Canada ripping us off since World War 2, while once simply offensive, have forced a neighbor on whom we depend for energy and mineral resources that are essential to our economy and security to  look elsewhere for reliable partners. That has not only weakened us in North America, but shown the world in the clearest possible terms that America cannot be relied on.

The problem goes way beyond Trump, although he is its principal catalyst and perpetrator. What Trump exposed to the world is the fundamental flaw of our once vaunted democratic process. His obsessive drive toward autocracy and his gangster-like control of the MAGA movement have shown that our two-party system is unsustainable. If a greedy and venal minority like MAGA supported by greedy billionaires can overwhelm our governing process every four years, our allies cannot rely on treaties or trade relationships and our adversaries can count on the fact that if they simply have patience, something Xi Jinping and China have in abundance, a system like ours is terribly vulnerable to self-destruction.

That’s the path Trump has us on. If his hand-picked Supreme Court allows him to disrupt the November election and Republicans in Congress don’t find the courage and integrity to remove him from office, I shudder at what America will look like by the end of his term.