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Trump’s illegal war against Iran was (is?) a bizarro amalgamation of historic crises and defeats—a dash of Napoleonic hubris, a morsel of Cuban Missile Crisis, a tablespoon of 1914 Sarajevo, blended on high-speed with a sprinkling of the USSR in Afghanistan—all willed into existence by one crazy person who should have no power over others, yet has lucked into more power than anyone else on Earth. We make ourselves his subjects if we convey, in word or deed, “glad he got it out of his system, now let’s move on.”

-snipping two paragraphs, one of them about Republicans doing nothing to stop Trump-

This is more important than domestic public opinion, or the battle for narrative control over Trump’s capitulation, or even the lasting geopolitical consequences of this illegal war of choice. Yes, Trump has degraded the U.S. and may have inverted the balance of power in the Middle East and empowered America’s greatest adversaries for a generation, and he did it all on a whim. All of that is quite bad enough, worthy of Trump’s impeachment or resignation in disgrace.

But the main thing is the usurpation of power—the full power of the United States—for the purposes of holding the entire planet hostage. Trump did that. Our greatest Cold War nightmares seldom contemplated the possibility that the Soviet empire might fall, through succession crisis, into the hands of a madman who’d begin hot wars with enemy client states, decapitate their governments, and threaten to nuke their civilian populations. We would have understood that, rightly, as subjecting human civilization to tyranny. For the sake of all humanity we would have made it the foreign policy of the United States to remove that person from power by any means short of global thermonuclear war.

Well, now that person is in power, here. Yes, he humiliated himself. Yes, he humiliated the United States. Yes, he should be brought low politically for it. And yes, we should hope that his experience here will deter him from doing the same thing again, to Iran or any other country—if only to avoid further narcissistic injury. But for the most part, life goes on when decadent empires weaken or destroy themselves. Life even goes on when empires lose wars. We can’t be certain it goes on when the person at the helm of the crumbling U.S. empire does what Trump did this week and faces no consequences.

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