Donald Trump’s narrative, based on the slogan “under me, no war would ever have started,” is shattering against the physical reality of naval movements conducted in plain sight, unseen by the world, of surprise attacks easily foreseeable yet ignored by all, of unpredictable and, indeed, unforeseen retaliations. Yet Trump wasn’t moving the aircraft carrier USS Gerald Ford and all the rest for a photo op!
Furthermore, a strike group like the one that moved simultaneously, from the China Sea to the Persian Gulf and from the Caribbean Gulf to the Mediterranean, not only sent a direct, and therefore obvious, signal to those who should have understood it, but also entailed an enormous cost, invisible but easily understood, amounting to millions of US dollars in fuel, supplies, logistics, maintenance, air and naval support, and the upkeep of personnel and equipment: such a force in combat readiness is simply dizzying. No administration, not even Trump’s, would burn billions of dollars in defense budgets just for a photo op. Trump may have studied his plans with his experts and advisors (who, like Hitler’s in World War II, were careful not to contradict him), but given the uncertainty following the first deadly strike of his very personal blitzkrieg, which made everyone think it was something improvised and unclear in its inevitable consequences, he seems to have applied the usual method of every Apprentice turned Master of Chaos (after all, his successful program was called The Apprentice): he amassed massive forces, feigning a willingness to make a deal, when the real objective was already preemptive aggression. While Trump was tweeting that he was ready for a “historic agreement” with Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, American ships had already taken up position and were about to attack Iran jointly with Israeli forces.
Putin, the other Apprentice, whom we unfortunately recently encountered, taught us this: massing troops creates its own political inertia. Once you’ve brought thousands of soldiers and tanks, or aircraft carriers, to the scene, the “economic cost” of the move and the “political cost” of retreating empty-handed become, in the minds of these evil geniuses, greater than the predicted (and ignored) cost of the war itself in capital, resources, armaments, and direct and indirect human lives. For Trump, as for Putin, turning back without a resounding result would have been perceived as a humiliating defeat before his supporters and the world. Logistics, in this sense, was Trump’s true declaration of war: two aircraft carriers loaded with missiles crossed the oceans not to negotiate, but to impose an outcome already decided long beforehand (only the timing of the attack was undecided because it depended on intelligence information obtainable only in the run-up to the strike regarding the whereabouts of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei). In this scenario of blatant escalation, the case of an Italian minister has become a symbol of Europe’s unpreparedness, not just Italy’s, because it could have involved any of the ministers kept in the dark about the detailed plans, not just the most inexperienced. Often, “falling into a trap” isn’t due to overconfidence in peace, but rather to the naive and desperate hope that the worst won’t happen. European allies and Gulf nations have, almost entirely, believed or pretended to believe in the negotiations between the United States and Iran, and in the deployment of forces as a means of pressure, to buy time, because they had no alternative but force to stop the US war machine, or because they were inadequate. Then there are some, naiver than others, who truly believed it; this time it was Italy’s turn.
The case of Defense Minister Guido Crosetto (who boasts extensive experience in the defense and defense industry, but who, as a politician, speaks and acts like an Apprentice, whom Trump allegedly fired on his TV show), caught on vacation in the Persian Gulf just as it was known the fuse would soon be lit, is not just a naive error of timing: it emblematically represents the failure of an entire European ruling class that preferred to ignore the evidence, not only from radar and intelligence services, but also the more down-to-earth (so to speak) evidence of newspaper reports and television news, in order to lull themselves into the illusion instilled by Trump of a diplomacy that no longer existed—in short, the US fleet’s relocation was visible to everyone. —While Washington’s “Cowboy” lassoed and mounted the bull everyone predicted would soon be unleashed in the Persian Gulf rodeo, Europe remained paralyzed, unable to read the metallic signals of an impending conflict and victimized by a psychological dependence on the orders of an increasingly solitary White House in command of the world.
It’s incomprehensible how European governments and the EU itself could truly believe Trump’s “I’ll make some noise to get a deal” narrative, believing that brute force was merely a complement to diplomacy. Military history teaches us that logistics never lies. Moving a Carrier Strike Group like the two aircraft carriers is not an act of “noise marketing,” but a maneuver with such a high political and economic cost that the failure to use force, after such a deployment, would be perceived as a fatal weakness. Putin’s precedent teaches us this: the “Запад (Zapad i.e. West)” exercises in late 2021/early 2022 on the Ukrainian border (with a declared 13,000 troops, but in reality, around 200,000 real ones according to NATO estimates) were the logistical prelude to the invasion, and Russian denials were mere hypocrisy (Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov and Putin himself repeatedly spoke of Western “hysteria” as they were preparing to invade shortly thereafter). But Putin wasn’t the first; in 2003, there was the precedent of Bush Jr., with the massive movement of troops into the Gulf that never left room for any real diplomatic action: the machine was too big to be stopped. And now for Trump: he has repeatedly demonstrated that when he deploys heavy assets—as happened with Iran already in his first term (the Soleimani case), or with Venezuela (the Maduro case), and now with Khamenei’s large-scale operation—the goal is the result of force, not the signing of an agreement: negotiations, even a child would understand, are openly a bluff.
Iran, however, in this case has demonstrated that it has learned the enemy’s lesson. Aware that it cannot counter the overwhelming power of the United States with a symmetrical military force, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei (and now Mojtaba Khamenei, long considered Ali’s most influential son and possible successor to his father) has activated a cunning resistance plan prepared in advance by his predecessor (as if it were a political-military testament, knowing full well that he could soon lose his life in an airstrike specifically aimed at him and his entourage). Tehran has transformed the Strait of Hormuz into an economic guillotine, blocking crude oil transit and simultaneously impacting global energy infrastructure. Iran, interpreting Trump’s “geoeconomic-military” teachings correctly, has imposed a “tariff” on the world in the form of “energy inflation” (oil above $150). The strategy is clear: erode Trump’s domestic and external consensus by hitting the pockets of his voters and those of his sovereigntist allies. The “endless war” that the United States believed it could manage remotely has become a global financial hemorrhage that threatens to engulf the West before the Iranian regime can fall.
In the background, the cynicism of grand bargains: the 2025 “Anchorage Formula” between Trump and Putin, which supposedly traded Venezuela and Iran for Ukraine, left Tehran isolated but also revealed the utter unreliability of Trump’s United States as an ally. This colossal blunder by the tycoon—based solely on brute force and lacking a refined strategy to divide the two eternally rival military formations within Iran (the Artesh, or regular military, and the Sepah-e Pasdaran-e Enqelab-e Eslami, officially known as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps)—will have consequences. It’s strange that Trump’s military advisors didn’t inform him. The competition between the two forces is based on the religious leadership’s historical mistrust of the Artesh, seen as a potential supporter of the return of the monarch’s successor, the Shah of Iran (Mohammad Reza Pahlavi), who fled into exile in 1979. Over time, the Pasdaran have gained economic privileges and access to advanced technologies (such as the missile program), often marginalizing the regular army in managing national security strategy. Attacking Iran indiscriminately, as the US and Israel have done, causing massive civilian casualties, only serves to consolidate these rival forces. Eliminating only the Pasdaran could have created a buffer in the regular army, the only one capable of effecting regime change because it has boots on the ground—those that the US, after the disasters experienced in Afghanistan, is no longer willing to deploy on Middle Eastern soil. And we know that without boots on the ground, no air strike, however prolonged, will ever bring about change, endlessly prolonging the war, increasing market uncertainty, and ultimately allowing Iran to win the geoeconomic-military war based on the unsustainable “oil tariff.”
This organizational-strategic confusion is acting as a driver, not yet very evident, for an increasingly perceptible acceleration in the direction of greater European integration. Faced with a United States that is bypassing its partners and causing permanent economic disasters, Europe will predictably be pushed toward the pursuit of an increasingly integrated, real defense, toward the pooling of many of its national strategic assets (not excluding the future nuclear deterrence of France and Great Britain, as recently put forward at the Île Longue naval base by French President Emmanuel Macron: a historic turning point in French nuclear doctrine that envisions a shift from the traditional “strict sufficiency” to the strategy of “advanced deterrence”).
The Iranian crisis could, paradoxically, be the birth certificate of a Europe that no longer delegates its survival to an ally that has become unpredictable and unreliable.
