American Power Plunges Under Iran Shock | Prof. Radhika Desai

## Trump speech and war trap The speech in question revealed less a coherent strategy than the exposed mechanics of a power in retreat: boastful rhetoric stitched together with contradictions, an administration attempting to manufacture a narrative of victory it does not possess. As the conversation underscored, the speech functioned as a political artifact of desperation. It sought to convert foreign adventurism into domestic legitimacy, but it could not do so without a tangible outcome—something that could be framed, however artificially, as triumphant. That outcome simply does not exist. What became clear in the exchange is that the war option had been presented to this administration as a politically expedient fix: a visible, headline-grabbing achievement to distract from economic stagnation, declining living standards, and a failure to deliver on campaign promises. And yet once military action began it revealed the classic trap of foreign intervention: escalation becomes self-feeding, objectives blur, and control slips from the initiator’s hands. As Prof. Radhika Desai put it, the United States is confronting a quagmire in which it no longer sets the timetable for a resolution. The capacity to declare an exit on terms that can be sold as “victory” has evaporated. This speech therefore functions as a signal of constraint more than intent. It tells domestic audiences that the administration remains tough and decisive, even as the regional dynamics show otherwise. The rhetoric attempts to square an impossible circle—asserting both that the conflict is won and that the fighting must continue until political objectives are realized. That incoherence is the political mirror of strategic overreach: a state attempting to impose unilateral outcomes onto societies that have their own commitments and resiliencies. ## Gulf bases oil shock and allies The military posture in the Gulf has long been the United States’ most visible instrument of regional influence. The conversation makes a persuasive case that those bases, once seen as shields and stabilizers, have become liabilities. In the recent round of strikes and counterstrikes, facilities that hosted U.S. personnel were targeted and damaged. The result is not merely tactical loss: it is a strategic recalibration in the minds of regional actors who now have to account for the possibility that U.S. presence attracts violence rather than deters it. Allied states are reassessing the calculus. Gulf monarchies and other partners cultivated the security umbrella because it underwrote their access to trade, investment, and energy flows. When the umbrella instead draws fire, it undermines the value proposition those states signed up for. The conversation highlighted a striking shift in risk perception: territories that once marketed themselves as safe platforms for global capital are now being pitched as potential liabilities. That change is bound to ripple through investment decisions, diplomatic postures, and military planning. Concurrently, this confrontation has exposed the fragility of European reliance on energy flowing through the Middle East. An oil shock triggered by destabilization in the Gulf does more than raise pump prices; it has macroeconomic consequences that constrain fiscal policy, spark inflationary pressures, and weaken political coalitions back home. The exchange revived historical comparisons to the 1970s: not as mere nostalgia but as a structural reminder that energy disruptions can unleash cascades of economic and political turmoil. Allies who assumed American power as a constant are discovering that strategic assurances can be undermined by operational realities on the ground. ## US revolution capitalism and empire The conversation moved from the theater of war to the factory floor and the ballot box, sketching a longer genealogy of American decline rooted in the political economy of the last half-century. The United States’ global posture cannot be divorced from domestic transformations: the transition from an industrializing, export-capable economy to one characterized by neoliberal financialization and deindustrialization has eroded the material foundations of geopolitical primacy. Prof. Desai framed this as the paradox of a revolutionary lineage that diverged into a bourgeois settler-colonial order. The founding revolution created a state and economy premised on internal colonization and exclusion—conditions that made possible rapid industrial accumulation. But once the United States moved from building national industry to extracting rents abroad and prioritizing capital mobility, the internal social contract frayed. Income and wealth transfers toward a small elite—embodied in deregulation, shrinking labor power, and the ascendancy of finance—have generated deep inequality and social fissures. Those fissures make coherent foreign policy harder to sustain because they produce volatile politics at home. Empire, in the modern American mode, has been less about formal colonies and more about an “open door” economic order: the ability to compel access to markets, inputs, and favorable rules. That mechanism has been strained by the rise of alternative poles of power—states that refuse to play by the old open-door script—and by the limits of coercion in an increasingly multipolar world. The conversation placed Iran, Russia, and China in a shared category: societies with revolutionary legacies or trajectories that imbue them with anti-imperial dispositions. Confronting such actors with traditional military tools yields limited returns and invites asymmetric retaliation aimed at the vulnerable seams of the U.S. system—energy supply, regional bases, and economic linkages. All this combines into a disturbing diagnosis: U.S. global reach is now constrained by domestic decline. A polity weakened by inequality and financialized rent-seeking cannot sustain the projection of power it once could. When internal legitimacy falters, foreign adventures become both tempting and riskier, because they are used to paper over domestic failures even as they expose the state to external shocks it can no longer absorb with ease. ## Trump antiwar brand collapse A striking political irony threaded through the dialogue: the administration elected on promises to avoid new foreign wars has presided over one of the most consequential regional conflagrations in years. The erosion of an “antiwar” brand—at least in political calculus—illustrates how quickly domestic political narratives can be cannibalized by strategic misadventures. The conversation argued that the president’s earlier appeal rested on criticising endless wars and focusing on “bringing troops home.” Yet the actual governance choices, influenced by class interests and the pursuit of symbolic victories, pushed in the opposite direction. This collapse has normative and practical implications for American politics. Normatively, it undermines the credibility of the promise that populist anti-establishment rhetoric can deliver peace. Practically, it fractures electoral coalitions: voters who supported noninterventionist messaging feel betrayed, while hawkish constituencies find themselves in a longer, costlier conflict than anticipated. The result is political incoherence that feeds further instability at home—splintered party coalitions, weakened governing mandates, and a public increasingly sceptical of diplomatic commitments. Beyond immediate politics, the conversation suggested that such brand erosion signals a broader disablement of American leadership. If political actors cannot credibly commit to either peace or victory, allies will look elsewhere for reliable partners. That search for stability will not necessarily lead them to mirror U.S. values; rather, they will gravitate toward arrangements that offer predictable outcomes—whether through regional balance-of-power arrangements, diversified energy partnerships, or hedging strategies

American Power Plunges Under Iran Shock | Prof. Radhika Desai US power looks trapped, brittle, and in decline. In this episode, I speak with political economist Radhika Desai about Trump’s Iran war speech, a deepening Middle East quagmire, oil shock, NATO strain, lost US credibility, imperial decline, domestic decay, and the risk of an AI and debt crash. Links: Radhika Desai YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@RadDesai Radhika Desai website: https://radhikadesai.com Radhika Desai Substack: https://radicaldesai.substack.com Neutrality Studies substack: https://pascallottaz.substack.com (Opt in for Academic Section from your profile settings: https://pascallottaz.substack.com/s/academic) Merch: https://neutralitystudies- shop.fourthwall.com Donation: https://neutralitystudies.com/donate Timestamps: 00:00:00 Introduction 00:00:49 Trump speech and war trap 00:05:00 Middle East quagmire and lost control 00:08:15 Gulf bases oil shock and allies 00:12:45 Iran war and imperial decline 00:16:37 US revolution capitalism and empire 00:24:51 Global backlash against US power 00:31:32 Trump antiwar brand collapse 00:39:14 AI bubble and crash risk 00:44:28 Where to follow Radhika #Pascal Welcome back, everybody, to Neutrality Studies. Today we’re joined again by Professor Radhika Desai, who recently started her own YouTube channel, where she’s interviewing a lot of very interesting people and doing great work under the name *Radhika Desai, Geopolitical Economist.* Please do look it up—but only after our discussion here. Radhika, welcome back. #Radhika Desai Great to be back, Pascal. Thank you so much—and thanks for helping promote my new YouTube channel. #Pascal Anytime. I love your discussions, and I love the approach you’re taking, because you’re coming at it from, of course, an economist’s—kind of a Marxist economist’s—view. You have a lot of very good discussions on there, so it’s highly recommended. Today we just wanted to talk a little bit about what happened this week. We’re talking on April 3rd, Friday—Good Friday. Happy Good Friday. The week was strange, especially because Donald Trump gave a very odd speech in which I actually kind of expected him to announce victory and just leave. But I think that’s not really what’s on the cards. Can you give us your interpretation of this Trump speech earlier this week? #Radhika Desai -- 1 of 15 -- Well, I think Trump basically gave what I’d call a word-salad of a speech—his usual, you know, peppered with bombastic boasts, superlatives, self-congratulation, self-contradiction, delusion, and everything in between. But basically, I think it’s very interesting. I agree with you—I also expected that the president would announce some kind of pause. But of course, he can’t announce a pause or an end to the war, because to do that he has to come out of it with something that looks like victory—something he can at least paint as a victory, even if he has to put a lot of lipstick on that pig. It has to ultimately look like victory, and he doesn’t have that. And what’s really interesting—and to understand why that’s the case—you have to see that, you know, people say this is a war of choice. And in one sense, of course, it’s a war of choice insofar as it’ s a war. But in another respect, I think Trump’s options were narrowing. Options for what? Options for what he can do to shore up his dismally sinking approval ratings. Over the past year, having been elected on promises he has neither the intention nor the ability to keep, he hasn’t made the world better. He hasn’t made America great again. He hasn’t made the ordinary working person’s life better. He hasn’t increased jobs. He hasn’t increased pay. He hasn’t increased manufacturing, because all of that would require him to restrict the options and choices of the very class—namely, the topmost corporate capitalist class—that he intends to serve anyway. That’s why he got elected. So these two things are pulling apart. And now, with the Venezuela misadventures, the crazy statements about Greenland, and what have you, what he’s been trying to secure is some kind of military victory. Given that he was already desperate to find something he could call a victory, he was very susceptible to Netanyahu’s claims that, somehow, if you start a war on Iran, it’ll be over within a weekend. The people in Tehran will rise up. They’ll take over the government. End of the day, you can declare a victory—“See, I’ve solved the problem that half a dozen of the previous presidents couldn’t solve,” and so on. But this didn’t happen. And Netanyahu, of course, has his own reasons for delusion. His political position is also extremely precarious. He needs a war as well. So anyway, Trump didn’t get it. Essentially, it was full of self-contradiction. On the one hand, “We’ve won.” On the other hand, “We still have to fight, make sure Iran doesn’t have nuclear weapons, and, you know, change the government,” and so on. So, I mean, on the one hand, he's going to negotiate with the new government, which is, you know, more sensible and all that. On the other hand, he's threatening to rain destruction on the energy infrastructure and so on. So it’s a completely incoherent speech. And the only thing it really tells you is that the United States has sunk into the mother of all Middle Eastern quagmires. That’s what the Trump administration—having been elected on a promise not to start new wars—has landed the United States in. That’s what we heard, yes, Thursday evening. Or Wednesday evening. #Pascal -- 2 of 15 -- Of course, basically leaving the Middle East at this point—you know why it’s probably also a bit naive from our point of view to think that Trump could actually retreat—is that it would mean he’d have to pull all Americans out of the region. He’d have to abandon all the military bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, Abu Dhabi, and so on—completely abandon them, right? And abandon them for good. We’re still a long way from that, even if a good part of the troops have been withdrawn. To actually say, “Okay, fine, we’re probably not going to come back,” would be a whole different level. And even then, Iran said, look, we're not going to stop firing. I mean, even if your people are gone, until and unless we say it's enough, our missiles are going to keep flying toward Israel. So, in a sense, it's not up to Trump anymore whether the war ends or not. And the Iranians are very adamant about this: this war will end when we say it ends. And so far, I think that's not just rhetoric. They believe that, and they say they’ll make sure the Americans don’t come back and that they pay reparations. But what do you think—do you think it’s already outside Donald Trump’s control at this point? #Radhika Desai Oh, completely. I think that’s partly what a quagmire means—you’re no longer in control of your situation. It’s like you’re sinking in quicksand and can’t get out. So absolutely. And I’d say that, you know, to me, it’s really interesting that the United States, in the case of Ukraine, fought Russia through a proxy. It hasn’t yet started a war with China—apart from the economic war, the sanctions war, and so on. But Iran, you know, it’s very interesting that Russia today, China today, and Iran today are all, in an important sense, products of their revolutionary societies. Russia is no longer Soviet Russia, but still, in many ways, its traditions and its understanding of the world come from that past, which has imparted to it a lot of strengths. So I think that, of these three, the United States has engaged in direct war with the first of them, which is Iran. And I think it’s very interesting that it’s going to come out of it looking extremely bad, essentially because the United States is not in control of when it can leave. The U.S. bases in the region have been badly affected. Its ability to surveil and monitor what’s going on has been radically depleted by Iranian missile strikes and so on in the region. So it’s almost as if they’re fighting sightless. From what I understand, the two big aircraft carriers it brought into the region have been damaged, and they’ve had to withdraw. #Radhika Desai Plus, this is also doing damage to the Atlantic Alliance, to NATO, because the European countries, which are dependent on the oil that comes from there, are in general experiencing an enormous oil crisis. And I know that, you know, they’re still trying desperately to hold on to the NATO alliance, but the best will in the world is not going to allow them to overlook the enormous oil crisis in which the United States is putting all its allies. Plus, you can look at the Gulf—the GCC countries, the Persian Gulf countries. They’re all beginning to realize that it’s more difficult—or, let me rephrase that—the -- 3 of 15 -- so‑called advantages of the U.S. security umbrella have been flipped into disadvantages, because their very raison d’être has been affected. You know, they’ve offered the world—or, you know, the rich people of the world—the security to come there, do business, to frolic and enjoy their leisure activities. And now, with the attacks on the very hotels where U.S. troops are being housed and so on, I think that this business model is being undermined. So, in all these ways, the United States is losing. And so, you know, at one level, I feel that we are looking at—I mean, I’ve been talking about the decline of U.S. power for a long time. I’ ve also said that U.S. power wasn’t—well, the United States was never hegemonic in any serious or stable sense. But nevertheless, it once had more power, and that power is now declining. And we are looking now at an acceleration of that decline in power, because if the United States is expelled from the region, this is going to be momentous. The United States has been, you know, involved up to its neck in the region for a century now. And if that expulsion happens—and I think this is what Iran will need—Iran cannot have the United States remaining there. There's one final point I’ll make for now, and that is whether it’s Iran, or Europe, or the Gulf countries, or Japan for that matter—whatever, all of these allies—why should they trust the United States? I mean, it’s not only that the United States has attacked Iran twice while in the midst of negotiations under Trump. But, you know, I was very intrigued that Martin Wolf, who is normally—you know, I mean, he says many interesting things, but obviously I don't agree with everything he says. And I certainly know that he is an Atlanticist if there ever was one. He said in a recent column that the United States is no longer a reliable partner, because any country that can elect a man like Trump twice is not to be trusted. Now, this is a huge breach. I mean, if people like him are thinking like this, it's a huge breach. And we haven't even talked about the economy, but the economic reverberations of all this— and then add to that the political and diplomatic reverberations—and I think U.S. power is now plummeting. #Pascal Yeah, it's quite interesting. I mean, you're the second person today who's made exactly that point to me. The first was Saul Takahashi, a Japanese-American human rights lawyer, who said he was actually in Abu Dhabi just recently when the war started and was like, yeah, the UAE and so on, they were really... they were gambling on this, right? This is security—security because the Americans are there. And now it's just like, no, the U.S. bases are not what keep you secure. They’re lethal magnets. They’re the reason you’re getting attacked. And even though they’re blaming, of course, Iran for this, a lot of people understand, look, this is a problem. This is a failed security strategy on our part, just as much as it is a product of the U.S.-Iranian confrontation, right? That illegal war of aggression. But this is leading to a rethinking. So also in Japan, right, people understand that even if they think this is ultimately Iran’s fault, the point t