SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
global economy
Incompetent Trump Is Driving Us Toward Global Political-Economic Collapse
Operation Epic Fury is only the most severe example of President Donald Trump's poor decision-making, which is likely to produce one mega-disaster after another.
Apr 07, 2026
On March 13, buried in The New York Times’ coverage of the US-Israel-Iran conflict was a headline that would have been easy to miss amid the din of war coverage: “As El Niño Simmers, Scientists Warn of Weather Extremes Starting in Late Summer.” Many readers may not even have noticed it, but that article noted that scientists at the Climate Prediction Center, a part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, had raised their estimate for an El Niño event this summer from 60% to about 80%.
Admittedly, in this strange world of ours, that hardly seemed like an earth-shattering revelation. But if you had read the piece more closely, your alarm bells should instantly have gone off. Forecasters now predict that the coming El Niño—a warming of the Pacific Ocean that deeply affects global weather patterns—is likely to be as severe as the one in 2023-2024, which triggered severe flooding and prolonged heatwaves around the world. As the article noted, however, average world temperatures are now actually higher than they were at the height of that previous El Niño, thanks to global warming, and so it’s likely that we will face even more intense heatwaves and flooding this time around.
Consider that news alarming enough. Unfortunately, the bad news didn’t end there. The Times article went on to report that, since early last year, the Trump administration has laid off thousands of Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) workers, greatly diminishing the agency’s ability to respond to such impending weather disasters. And then there’s the dismal fact that Trump has overseen the dismantling of the US Agency for International Development, which once sent humanitarian aid to disaster-struck countries.
And, sadly enough, it only gets worse from there. After all, we know that the Trump administration is doing everything it can to boost the production of fossil fuels—the consumption of which is the main driver of global warming—even as it also works to impede global action to slow the warming process. On January 7, for example, the president announced that the United States would withdraw from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the bedrock treaty upon which most international efforts to rein in that onrushing nightmare are based.
In other words, the rest of us will not only be deprived of emergency assistance during future climate disasters, but also lack timely information about oncoming hazardous weather patterns.
Likewise, on February 12, the administration repealed the scientific determination (called the “endangerment finding”) that gives the government the legal authority to combat climate change. And that’s not all: On March 15, the Times also reported that the administration was preparing to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the nation’s premier institution for studying global weather patterns—including the severe climate disturbances we can expect from the coming El Niño and higher world temperatures. In other words, the rest of us will not only be deprived of emergency assistance during future climate disasters, but also lack timely information about oncoming hazardous weather patterns.
As I consumed all of that—in the midst, of course, of President Trump’s ill-conceived war on Iran—it struck me that we need to brace ourselves for ever more calamitous outcomes from Donald Trump’s extreme leadership incompetence. In fact, his incompetence is likely to produce one mega-disaster after another, culminating perhaps in global political-economic collapse.
Trump’s Profound Incompetence
Donald Trump’s leadership incompetence has already been demonstrated in one bad move after another. His capricious imposition of ever-fluctuating tariffs on US imports, for example, has caused prolonged misery for farmers and many small and medium businesses that depend on predictable trade patterns. Likewise, his heavy-handed deployment of armed Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal agents to Minneapolis achieved little in the way of apprehending dangerous immigrants but caused widespread disorder and violence, while killing two nonviolent protesters. But the most severe example of his governing incompetence to date has been his handling of Operation Epic Fury, the war with Iran.
While devising an elaborate plan to destroy Iran’s conventional military capabilities and shatter the regime, the Trump team appears to have made no preparations to eliminate the Iranians’ extensive drone capabilities or their ability to disrupt oil production and transit in the Persian Gulf area, with far-reaching global consequences. As of this reporting, the critical Strait of Hormuz through which one-fifth of the world’s oil supply passes every day (along with a substantial share of its liquefied natural gas [LNG] and chemical fertilizers) remains largely closed to commercial traffic. This has produced energy shortages in many countries that are heavily reliant on imported oil or LNG and, because oil is a globally-traded commodity, it has boosted gasoline prices in the United States, despite the fact that this country doesn’t import much Middle Eastern oil.
None of this should have been unexpected. The Iranians have, on numerous occasions, threatened to block the Strait of Hormuz in response to a US attack on their country, while their efforts to build up a vast stockpile of drones and missiles (and to hide them in remote underground sites) were well publicized.
Any intelligent war planner—of which there are many in the US military establishment—would have known of these realities and planned for them. Indeed, US planning to secure the Strait goes back to 1980, when President Jimmy Carter’s White House issued what became known as the “Carter Doctrine”—an assertion that any move by a hostile force to impede the oil flow in the Persian Gulf “will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.” To enforce that edict, the Pentagon established the US Central Command (Centcom) and established a network of military bases throughout the Gulf region. Since its inception, Centcom has repeatedly stressed its ability to keep the Strait open in the face of any Iranian drive to block it.
Trump obviously ignored all such intelligence—collected over many years by top American officials—and started his war without the slightest apparent plan for keeping the Strait safe for energy shipping. Not only were US naval forces unprepared to escort oil tankers through it, but Trump failed to enlist US allies in such efforts—a glaring fault that only became obvious after the war began when he suddenly called upon them to do so (and chided them when they proved reluctant).
And consider all of this sheer, unadulterated incompetence, on a massive scale.
The Blows to Come
We have yet to witness all the consequences of Trump’s incompetence in undertaking the war against Iran. The shutdown of fertilizer exports from the Gulf is already causing the price of that critical commodity to rise around the world. In doing so, it threatens agricultural production as farmers balk at the higher costs—a trend likely to result in higher food costs everywhere, including the United States. That will, of course, result in increased hunger for those least able to afford the higher prices of food and rising inflation. The rise in food and energy prices could also diminish consumer spending and investor confidence, possibly leading to a global economic slowdown (or worse).
And don’t imagine that those are the only major shocks to the global system we can expect in the months ahead—shocks the Trump team is unlikely to address with competent leadership. At the January convocation of business and political elites in Davos, Switzerland, the World Economic Forum released its “Global Risks Report 2026,” identifying what experts believe are the greatest future threats to global stability and prosperity. According to those experts, the top risks include extreme weather events, state-based armed conflict, and a global economic downturn—real-time threats that Trump has already encountered and failed to address successfully. As those perils gain momentum in the months ahead, Trump’s incompetence will result in ever greater hardship and suffering.
The Adverse Effects of AI
That Davos Risk Report also identified another category of threats for which the Trump administration is woefully unprepared: “adverse outcomes of AI technologies.”
Beginning with AI’s impending impact on employment, the report cites one study suggesting that “AI could eliminate up to 50% of entry-level, white-collar jobs within the next five years in the United States, potentially driving unemployment to 10-20%”—an enormous threat to social and political cohesion. At the same time, a massive buildup of computing data centers is putting extreme stress on local energy and water supplies across the US, introducing an added layer of popular unease and conflict.
Nowhere does Trump’s plan acknowledge the potential for catastrophic job losses from widespread AI utilization or the risk of AI going rogue and threatening the survival of humanity.
Hovering in the background of all this is the threat of “rogue AI”—the possibility that computer scientists at OpenAI, Anthropic, or one of the other leading AI firms will create a “superintelligent” version of AI capable of outperforming humans in most cognitive tasks and selecting its own objectives, independent of human wishes or instructions. Think of “Skynet,” the superintelligent AI in the Terminator movie series that chooses to eliminate humans by inciting a global nuclear war. While the Davos Risk Report doesn’t address the risk of advanced AI development directly, there is growing talk in the scientific community of just such an outcome, as vividly suggested, for example, by the 2025 book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.
And I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that President Trump and his entourage are wholly unprepared to address the very idea of such a possibility. Rather than emphasize safety in the development of advanced AI models, Trump has called for their untrammeled evolution. In his major policy statement on AI, “Winning the Race: America’s AI Action Plan,” he made his top objective overridingly clear: “It is a national security imperative for the United States to achieve and maintain unquestioned and unchallenged global technological dominance.”
That means, as his plan explains, eliminating all barriers to the development of advanced AI models, including any legislative restrictions on their release and any local environmental impediments to the construction of mammoth AI-driven data centers nationwide. Nowhere does Trump’s plan acknowledge the potential for catastrophic job losses from widespread AI utilization or the risk of AI going rogue and threatening the survival of humanity. Rather than offering Americans the slightest protection from such potential calamities, he is ensuring that they will become more likely and that the rest of us will suffer the consequences.
Keep ReadingShow Less
How the Iran War Could Lead to a Crash Worse Than 2008
It’s too late to prevent the inflation of an AI bubble or to advise against a US attack on Tehran. At this point, the most we can do is to hope for a quick end to the war and for some improvisational brilliance among the world’s leaders of government and finance.
Mar 21, 2026
Several commentators have remarked that the United States’ war on Iran carries echoes of 2008. I’ll argue here that a potential financial crash this year could actually be much worse.
The Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008 was the biggest economic crunch since the Great Depression. Unemployment surged, topping 10% in the US. Global stocks lost trillions of dollars in value. Major brokerage houses collapsed. The US auto industry only survived thanks to enormous government bailouts. How could another crash top that?
Consider the causes. The 2008 Great Recession resulted from a confluence of three factors:
- Failed US wars in the Middle East, in that instance against Iraq and Afghanistan. Many economists argue the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars contributed to the GFC by fueling massive American budget deficits and worsening trade imbalances, and by creating a “capital flow bonanza” that triggered the US credit boom. While not the sole cause, the war compounded the vulnerability of the US economy.
- Soaring oil prices, following the plateauing of world conventional oil production in 2005. Oil demand continued to rise but the global supply of oil did not follow suit. On July 11, 2008, crude prices hit $147 per barrel, their all-time high. Since the economy runs on energy and oil is the world’s most important energy source, oil prices have a way of impacting all industries. Financial markets crashed three months after the oil-price peak.
- A bursting financial bubble inflated by subprime mortgages in the US and financial derivatives traded worldwide. The mortgage bubble involved $1.3 trillion to $1.5 trillion in high-risk loans issued during the 2000-2006 housing boom. It was a house of cards waiting to tumble.
The resulting unwinding of debt and derivatives came within a hair’s breadth of turning into a massive bank run and general economic collapse. Governments (led by the US) bailed out industries and banks, lowered interest rates to zero, purchased large tranches of financial securities, and instituted enormous fiscal stimulus programs and tax cuts. Even with these rapid and maximum-scale efforts totaling hundreds of billions of dollars, the GFC led to widespread housing foreclosures, a near-40% downturn in the S&P 500, and a substantial increase in the poverty rate.
Now consider the following:
- Today’s AI financial bubble is four times bigger than the subprime mortgage bubble of 2008 and 17 times bigger than the dot-com bubble of 2000.
- The Iran war, though so far not involving US ground troops, could possibly end up being more problematic than the Iraq invasion of 2003, if only from the standpoint of flows of energy and international trade. The war is likely to result in real oil shortages and prices potentially even higher than those seen in 2008. Additionally, more of the Middle East is now involved in hostilities, and oil and gas production and shipment infrastructure is being damaged or destroyed, thereby undermining the long-term economic prospects of the region, as well as destabilizing its politics. No one knows how this will end.
- For the US economy, warning signs were already flashing before the war: Stubbornly high inflation, a bad jobs picture, and worsening consumer sentiment were indicators of a looming recession.
- The final factor can be stated as a question: Would today’s US Treasury head be as successful at averting financial doom as was Henry Paulson in 2008? Then, the US was able to enlist government and business leaders from the world’s key countries in cooperating to fashion a collective survival strategy. Would current US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent have similar success, given the recent global collapse of trust in US leadership?
In view of the possibly catastrophic consequences of the attack on Iran, many people wonder what motives could have justified it. Logan McMillen argues in Foreign Policy in Focus that the so-called “Donroe Doctrine” intends to freeze China out of the Western Hemisphere and to deprive it of cheap energy:
The strategy is entirely zero-sum. By turning the Middle East and the Caribbean into militarized chokepoints, the United States is suffocating China’s independent oil supply lines, starving its industrial capacity while guaranteeing temporary windfall profits for Western supermajors. Concurrently, from the lithium flats of Bolivia to the ports of Peru, Washington is deploying right-wing proxies and military coercion to systematically dispossess Chinese capital in Latin America, re-colonizing the Andes to secure the supply chains of the 21st century.
Other commentators see the war as being spearheaded by members of the Christian Zionist movement, which desires a fulfillment of biblical prophecies of the battle of Armageddon and the return of Jesus.
Even if McMillen’s analysis is sound and there is an arguably rational motive behind the war, that doesn’t mean the campaign will go according to plan or that it will achieve its aims. Many analysts see it already careening off the rails.
It’s too late to prevent the inflation of an AI bubble or to advise against a US attack on Tehran. At this point, the most we can do is to hope for a quick end to the war and for some improvisational brilliance among the world’s leaders of government and finance.
Meanwhile, it would be smart to make whatever preparations you can. For folks in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s time to start planning this spring’s food garden. You might want to plant a few more rows of beans than you do most years, so you have enough to share with neighbors.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Trump and Israel’s War on Iran Once Again Exposes the Folly of Fossil Fuel Dependence
The world’s leaders should not only condemn US and Israeli aggression that has thrown the global economy into a tailspin but also take action to insulate their economies from this relentless cycle of fossil-fueled violence, volatility, and instability
Mar 19, 2026
As the US and Israeli war on Iran continues into its third week, the human, economic, and ecological impacts are devastating. Some 3,000 Iranians have been killed, including 165 children in one school strike, 10,000 injured, and 3.2 million displaced.
The war has caused a crisis. The World Health Organization has warned that with many oil storage tanks hit, resulting in “black rain” falling on Tehran, there is "danger for the population." The debris contains toxins that can cause respiratory and neurological damage, as well as certain kinds of cancer. For US consumers, who were promised that President Donald Trump would stop foreign conflict, the war is costing more than $890 million a day in direct costs, before we factor in the rising costs of energy. This is money that could be spent on education and healthcare.
The war has also brought chaos to global oil markets. Middle East producers have cut oil production by at least 10 million barrels per day, sending oil prices soaring. With no end to the conflict in sight, oil markets remain jittery and volatile.
Spikes in the price of oil affect billions of working people worldwide. They are forced to pay more to fill up their tanks, heat their homes, and even purchase food, since fertilizer is often made from fossil fuels. Rising energy prices can also cause knock-on inflation in the price of other consumer goods.
It is nonsensical that the global economy is so dependent on a 21-mile strait of water staying open to tanker traffic.
On Tuesday, the price of a barrel of Brent crude, the global benchmark for oil, was close to $104, up almost 50% from before the conflict started. By Thursday, after strikes on Gulf oil and gas infrastructure, oil was $119 a barrel and gas jumped 30%, with industry insiders calling it an “Armageddon scenario.” “The world does not need $120 oil,” said Steven Pruett, chief executive of one Texas-based oil producer, Elevation Resources. “It’s going to cause economic destruction.”
Last week, the global energy watchdog, the International Energy Agency, said that oil markets are suffering “the largest supply disruption in history.” The boss of Saudi Aramco, Amin Nasser, has warned of “catastrophic consequences” for the world economy if the US-Iran war drags on.
The problem lies with the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway between Iran, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman. A quarter of the world’s oil—some 20 million barrels a day—passes through the Strait, which is only 21 miles wide at one point. And now, in retaliation for the US and Israeli aggression, Iran has effectively stopped traffic through the Strait by bombing tankers.
For decades, academics and the oil industry have warned that war in Iran could cut off the Strait in times of conflict. The industry has long feared what would happen if the Strait were to close. Chevron boss Mike Wirth recently said: “We do crisis management exercises… the big one has always been something in the Middle East that shuts the Strait of Hormuz… Markets are very uncomfortable, uncertain, volatile, and unpredictable.”
It has become increasingly apparent that Trump had no plan for dealing with the Strait’s closure after pleading earlier this week with European allies to help keep it open. In a scathing editorial, the New York Times wrote: “President Trump went to war against Iran without explaining his strategy to the American people or the world. It now appears that he may not have had much of a strategy at all.”
It added that he also “failed to plan for a predictable side effect of a war in the Middle East: a disruption of oil supplies that causes a price spike and impairs the global economy.”
The evidence bears this out. The threat of closing the Strait remained unseen by the Trump administration, bloodthirsty for regime change and blinkered by the ease of removing President Nicolás Maduro from power in Venezuela.
Before the strikes on Iran, Trump’s Energy Secretary Chris Wright had told an interviewer he was not concerned that the looming war might disrupt oil supplies in the Middle East and wreak havoc in the markets. Since the crisis began, Wright and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum have appeared “flummoxed” by the surge in prices, according to Politico. One industry official has called Burgum the “Where’s Waldo” of the crisis. Both men have been scrambling, but failing, “to head off a bout of energy-driven inflation.”
After a closed-door briefing to lawmakers last week, one Democratic Senator, Chris Murphy, said on social media that the administration had no plan for the Strait of Hormuz and did “not know how to get it safely back open.”
It's not all bad news for the oil industry, though.
Oil companies are set to make obscene profits. Oil Change researchers recently calculated that if oil prices rise just $20 a barrel, US producers will rake in $280 million in extra revenue every day. That’s over $100 billion a year. Shares in the six oil majors, BP, Chevron, Eni, ExxonMobil, Shell, and TotalEnergies, have soared by more than $130 billion in the first two weeks of the war.
This isn’t the first time global oil markets have been thrown into upheaval by war, and by looking to the past, we can see the dangers and possibilities created by oil shocks. In 2022, oil companies were able to use the invasion of Ukraine to increase their already massive profits.
For long-term economic security and stability, as well as a future safe from climate disasters, there needs to be a radical shift to renewables.
The five Big Oil companies—BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, and TotalEnergies—reported combined profits of $196.3 billion the following year, more than the economic output of most countries. Working people around the world, as well as our climate, paid the price for Big Oil’s greed. For example, the war cost Canadians $200 billion over the next three years due to inflation spikes.
After the Ukraine war, Pakistan prioritized renewables. Energy analysts in the country believe that solar expansion has helped insulate the power sector from the spiraling energy costs.
“While we’re certainly seeing some impacts, the expansion of distributed solar in the country has provided a cushioning effect against the impacts [of the energy crisis]” Nabiya Imran, an associate at Renewables First, a Pakistani think tank, told The Guardian.
The world’s reaction to the 1973 oil crisis shows that a different path is possible. After oil prices quadrupled, there was significant investment in renewables and energy efficiency. Back then, the US government worked on a program to promote wind turbines and energy efficiency, which would be antithetical to the Trump administration.
Indeed, the madness of Trump’s current war on renewables is such that the administration is reportedly planning to pay nearly $1 billion to French energy company TotalEnergies to stop further offshore wind development.
Despite this, the chaos in the energy markets has led to renewed calls to get off oil and decarbonize. In the UK, The Guardian editorial board argued: “After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Europe swapped Russian pipeline gas for American LNG [liquefied natural gas]. Dependency didn’t disappear. Britain just changed suppliers. That is one reason among many why this crisis must see the government focus like a laser on faster decarbonisation, not more drilling.”
US tech corporation Microsoft, which donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund, has also said the war strengthens the case for investment in clean energy sources and battery storage. “Wind and solar as, as part of that mix, is a huge benefit from the standpoint of price stability, because once you install it, you have more certainty around what that actual cost profile looks like,” the company told the Financial Times.
It is nonsensical that the global economy is so dependent on a 21-mile strait of water staying open to tanker traffic. It is nonsensical that oil prices are so volatile that they whipsaw on a tweet from Trump or even a misleading one from US Energy Secretary Chris Wright claiming the US military had successfully shepherded a tanker through the Strait. And it is deeply unjust that this volatility affects the household bills for billions of people.
As some pundits have pointed out, even if Trump declares victory, it is now up to Iran when they will allow the Strait to reopen. It can close it at any time in the future. Iran has the means to hold much of the global economy to ransom.
So, for long-term economic security and stability, as well as a future safe from climate disasters, there needs to be a radical shift to renewables. Leading pundits agree:
There is evidence that the war in Iran is beginning to cause the same shift in thinking that the 1973 oil crisis did. South Korean President Lee Jae Myung said this week that it was time to prepare major measures to conserve energy as the situation deteriorates. These include promoting energy conservation and “rapidly transitioning away from fossil fuels to renewable energy.”
It's also worth remembering that the US military is the largest emitter of greenhouse gases of any institution on Earth and the US is the largest producer of oil and gas globally. The military uses much of that might to defend US interests in fossil fuels.
The world’s leaders should not only condemn US and Israeli aggression that has once again thrown the global economy into a tailspin but also take action to insulate their economies from this relentless cycle of fossil-fueled violence, volatility, and instability. Moving away from fossil fuels does not guarantee world peace. We are already seeing conflicts over the rare earth minerals needed for solar and other green technologies in places like the Congo.
But it can insulate working people from the shocks triggered by the reckless aggression of powerful nations that consider themselves adequately protected from the consequences of their actions.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular