Insanity 2.0

“In 1962, President Jack Kennedy warned that ‘the great enemy of truth is very often not the lie – deliberate, contrived, and dishonest – but the myth – persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Half a century later, this captures well the pernicious impact of America’s Iran mythology . . . More ominously, they are conditioning the political climate in the U.S. for an eventual war against Iran – just as in the late 1990s and early 2000s the political climate was conditioned for war against Iraq by falsehoods.” This quote from JFK opens the book Going to Tehran: Why America Must Accept the Islamic Republic of Iran by Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett.

I heard about this book, written in 2012, on a recent podcast with Seyed Mohammad Marandi who is an Iranian American professor and political analyst.  In an interview, he quoted one of my favorite thinkers: “God created war so that Americans would learn geography.”  

Mark Twain – he never disappoints

Like many Americans, I am still challenged to find some of our so-called enemies on a world map. But thanks to our many wars, I know where Vietnam, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Colombia, soon Cuba, Afghanistan, and now Iran are located. The “learning list” is much longer if you add in many countries in Africa plus regime changes, CIA led color revolutions, assassinations, and economic sanctions. Only Europe, where we like to vacation, sometimes gets a pass.

I don’t think Trump could find Iran on a blank world map but has said he could blow it off one. Well maybe not since things have changed. This isn’t leadership or intelligence; rather it’s what another famous person – Albert Einstein – said. “’Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” We’ve failed at every endeavour to make the world “safe for democracy.”

The Thucydides Trap – Xi’s message to Trump in May 2026

Perhaps the most important moment in their recent meeting was in the beginning when in President Xi’s address he referred to the “Thucydides Trap.” Goggle has never been so deluged with what’s that by China’s guests?

Traditional Russian wooden dolls depict China’s President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Donald Trump. AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky

A good explanation can be found in a recent article in The Conversation.* “The Thucydides Trap has become a staple of foreign policy commentary over the past decade or so. The phrase refers to a line from the ancient Greek historian Thucydides, who wrote in his History of the Peloponnesian War, “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.”

“This provides a conveniently packaged analogy: Rising powers provoke anxiety in established ones, leading to conflict. In today’s context, the implication seems clear – China’s rise is bound to provoke a collision with the United States, just as Athens once did with Sparta. Thucydides was more interested in why fear takes hold, how ambition twists judgment, and how leaders convince themselves that war is the only viable path left. It often arises not from necessity, but from misreading, miscalculation and passions unmoored from reason.”

Insanity 3.0

Most recently, the Department of Justice indicted the former Cuban President Raoul Castro (age 90) for authorizing the shooting down of a pair of planes in 1996. The operation was a CIA-backed network of Miami Cubans, the Brothers to the Rescue, who deliberately and repeatedly violated Cuban airspace. Even the Clinton administration warned the military and the CIA that the U.S. planes were “taunting” the Cuban government and could provoke it to shoot them down.

In stark contrast, the CIA-backed terrorists – those Brothers again – downed a Cuban airliner on October 6, 1976. Cubana de Aviación Flight 455 was brought down by 2 time-bombs that destroyed the aircraft, causing it to crash into the Caribbean Sea off the coast of Barbados. All 73 people on board died, including the entire Cuban national fencing team. Two Venezuelan operatives, Hernán Ricardo and Freddy Lugo, planted the bombs and served a portion of their 20-year sentences. The alleged masterminds, Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch, were never convicted of the crime and lived out their lives in Florida.

Many Cubans and Americans are unaware that their news about the island comes largely through a matrix of shady outlets quietly funded by the U.S. national security state via the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and USAID. Their purpose is to keep up the flow of negative stories in order to push Cubans into accepting regime change on the island. As we’ve seen in Insanity 2.0, the truth is always the first casualty of war.

Cuba faces some of its worst energy blackouts in its history, thanks to the U.S. blockade, which is attempting to strangle the island into submission. As a Communist state defying U.S. orders, Cuba has, since 1959, been in the crosshairs of Washington’s desire to overthrow the government. And yet, Marco Rubio, in his many roles at the State Department, recently said: “The future of Cuba belongs to the people of Cuba in terms of how they’re governed, what the system looks like and so forth, but the  imminent national security threat to the US, that’s 100% something we’re going to focus on because that’s about America.”  The actual threat is MIA.

I’m Waking Up and It Feels Good

When I first started paying attention to U.S. policies around the world, I was shocked. But after years of swallowing the lies we tell ourselves about who we are as a nation (and now a declining world leader) I needed to know more. Books like Going to Tehran are invaluable if you take the time. It’s a tough read because the authors make it clear that the U.S. never learns. We have been the dominant power (or think we are including our financing and weaponizing Israel) in the world for too long. A new day is dawning when simply overthrowing a nation’s duly elected (or not) government is our God-given right. We don’t bring these countries democracy, we bring them chaos, destruction, death, wars with their neighbors, and depart leaving them to pick up the pieces.

We sign numerous treaties and then break them. We believe hegemony is owed to us. We are given lies as facts and are dupes of enormous misinformation campaigns by those who stand to gain billions, power, or compliance with the deep state. Our knowledge of the world is an ignorance that those who profit from war and control count on.

The Tide is Turning

Most Americans are now against going to war with Iran (or any war), and a good percentage think the fictious mantra – Iran is a nuclear threat – is war-hawkish bullshit. Even Robert Kagan, Victoria Nuland’s husband and devoted neocon and war champion, had to admit that Trump’s on/off bombing, threats, and self-interested negotiators – all of it is a failure. And it wasn’t just Netanyahu who talked him into it.

I’ll close this post with a short, slightly glib summation of what often happens to “world powers”  who lose perspective as leaders from a recent post by James Howard Kunstler: “Michel Foucault (1926–1984), argued that power was all that mattered and that you could talk any absurdity about sex, mental illness, and criminality into mass belief. . . Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), argued that reality depends on how you feel about it. . . Jean-François Lyotard (1924–1998), denounced truth per se in favor of your truth.”

*If you would like to read the entire article, go to: https://theconversation.com/the-thucydides-trap-vital-lessons-from-ancient-greece-for-china-and-the-us-or-a-load-of-old-claptrap-252954

Photo credits: Insanity – Sohed Zaidi, Cuba – Barbara Clarke, Sheep – Andrea Lightfoot.