The documents show the fallout for the US in Bahrain, Indonesia and Azerbaijan as it struggles to catch up with pro-Iran messaging.
The Iran war is risking America’s global security ties and damaging its reputation, especially among the world’s Muslims, according to a set of State Department cables obtained by POLITICO.
The cables, dated Wednesday, described the fallout of the war for America’s standing in three countries in different parts of the world: Bahrain, Azerbaijan and Indonesia.
U.S. diplomats at embassies in the countries’ capitals painted damning portraits of an America under siege in multiple media spheres by pro-Iranian actors that are exceptionally agile in the digital space.
IMO Trump and co. might have wanted to pull a full coup on the US, but they’re so incompetent that they haven’t managed to do that. Even though they’ve had the US house, senate, executive and judiciary on their side, they haven’t done what’s typically done in a coup which is to secure everything that could allow opponents to resist. Sure, they control the supreme court, but there are plenty of judges in lower courts who keep interpreting laws honestly and finding that Trump broke those laws. A competent coup would have jailed judges who weren’t on their side using some pretext, and used fear to keep the other ones in line. Trump routinely breaks the law and then is astonished when lower-level judges find that whatever he did can’t go forward because he broke the law.
Because of that, I think there’s a decent chance that they won’t be able to suppress the outrage in the midterm vote. They’re doing all kinds of underhanded things to try to make it harder for people to vote and to have their votes counted. But, people are much more outraged than scared. I think there’s a decent chance there will be a big turnout in the midterm elections and that the GOP will lose bigly. That might be enough to put the brakes on what Trump is doing, until the next presidential election in 2028.
There may be people pulling Trump’s strings, but if so, it really seems like they’re fighting over the strings and getting in each-others’ way, rather than acting in some coordinated way to control him. More realistically, I think that there may be people who have tied strings to Trump and want to control him, but he’s not going along with it. It seems like the only skill he may have in life is ensuring that people around him are loyal to him personally, and anybody who isn’t is gone. It doesn’t matter how good they are at their jobs otherwise, the number one thing that matters to him is loyalty. So, he’s surrounded by idiots, but idiots who are loyal. That means that people who are trying to manipulate him have to do it with flattery and praise rather than threats, browbeating, etc.
Because of that, I think the US might survive Trump in some way. It will be diminished, and it will take decades to build back the trust the rest of the world had in the US. (And I’m not talking about blind trust, I’m talking about basic things like “The US generally takes its treaties seriously” or “If we negotiate a trade deal with the US it won’t just ignore its side of the deal”.) I do think that some values, like freedom of speech, will survive the post-Trump US. But, it won’t be in a position to police those values around the world.