by Laurence Peterson
One of the more potentially devastating psychological scars the Trump regime has foisted on all of us, I would submit, consists of its singular ability to separate effects and causes in time. This regime seems uncannily capable of postponing the seemingly clear, and nearly always disastrous, effects of its policies and interventions from inceptions often accompanied by the most crass, vulgar, tasteless, or blatantly offensive introduction to the public. There is a concept employed in philosophy (full disclosure: I was an Althusserian in my youth), history and sociology, and which originated in Freudian psychoanalysis, called overdetermination, which refers to effects which are determined by many causes operating simultaneously, each of which is sufficient to cause the phenomenon in question alone. It is almost like the Trump regime has shown itself able to invert this scheme: now occurrences which seem clearly to follow rather directly upon one or a few conditions are very delayed, or never come about at all. It results in a kind of effective resistance to what should be most obvious.
I am writing these lines on Sunday, July the 19th, 2026, after yet another week involving dire geopolitical gyrations (we have effectively gone from a state of questionable but real cease-fire in the war against Iran to a clear resumption of hostilities, and may, in fact be on the verge of invasion or occupation of Iranian territory), ominous financial and economic ructions (stock markets, led by declining technology–especially silicon chip producers–shares may be beginning another sharp downward reversal), the wild proliferation of scandals the like of which would almost certainly result in the certain downfall of any other administration, two more execution-like murders by ICE officers on the streets of American cities, the inception of a program to persecute leftist political organizations as nothing short of collections of terrorists, yet another attempt to weaken election protections, and, undoubtedly, a whole host of other politically, morally or legally dubious initiatives I simply can’t keep up with or even remember. In this piece I will focus on the Iran situation and the economic conjuncture, leaving aside relative trivialities like a possible–completely unprovoked and illegal–military assault on Cuba that is being considered by the regime now, or Trump’s ungrammatical, childish and overall insane speech to the nation on Thursday the 16th.
The war in Iran, as it stands now, has clearly been won by Iran. None of the publicized objectives given by the Trump administration for going to war–end of Iran’s nuclear program, destruction of its ballistic missile store, support for regional allies and full opening of the Strait of Hormuz–was achieved even in the Memorandum of Understanding back in June, and all remain unachieved now. It has been suggested that the Memorandum itself was employed as a stalling device, one that, especially, would presumably allow the US to rebuild its stocks of interceptor missiles and other necessary weaponry that had been badly depleted during the active phase of hostilities between late February and mid-June; such a delay would allow for an intensification of a bombing campaign that has clearly resulted in great devastation in Iran, extending far beyond the destruction of military targets to crucial infrastructure and, disgracefully, even to hospitals and schools; redoubling of this would force the Iranians to rescind terms that they had insisted on in the Memorandum, thereby offering Trump at least a face-saving partial victory at least. That, together, perhaps with a stock-market rally led impetus to economic growth, might allow Trump to do a kind of reverse George H.W. Bush (Bush, recall, racked up historically high approval ratings after the ultra-lopsided Gulf War I in February, 1992, only to lose the general election in November due to a widespread feeling of underlying economic malaise), by using the relief (or a simple dosage of good-old American amnesia?) factor from exiting the war to assist in a wealth-effect heavy sense of economic improvement amongst voters that might be sufficient to offset or, just maybe, reverse to a decisive degree, a nearly-certain–at this point–Democratic deluge in the midterm elections.
This interpretation is challenged, somewhat, when one considers President Trump’s cognitive or temperamental capacity to engage in coherent, ongoing negotiations, which, to all appearances, clocks in at about zero these days. Add to that his notorious suggestibility, which seems to allow those achieving (often enough, by paying some sort of bribe) access to him right before initiatives are committed to an extraordinary degree of power, and a picture fills in which militates against the formation of anything that smacks of the kind of strategic thinking briefly sketched in the last paragraph. This interpretation is more in line with the peculiarly erratic barrage of reversals that have characterized the conduct of this entire military campaign.
If the latter interpretation is dominant, that would account for the increase in commentaries expecting an expansion beyond the bombing campaign to an imminent (as of July 19th) boots-on-the-ground occupation by the American of Iranian territory. Trump is, basically, out of airborne options that could do the kind of immediate, unopposed (Iranian strikes on US armed assets in the Middle East, as well as on its US-allied Middle Eastern neighboring countries, and even, eventually, Israel again) destruction required to get the Iranians to backtrack on any of the conditions stated in the Memorandum (which will expire in days, anyway), so he feels he must employ some other means to intensify the conflict, and occupation of Iranian territory is the only, if exceedingly problematic–alternative. Especially problematic in the sense that US casualties will almost certainly increase exponentially as well as in the economic impact of an unavoidable, sustained closure of the Strait of Hormuz, if not cessation of wider Middle Eastern oil and other essential commodity inputs to the global economy. Because essential stocks of oil like the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve and Chinese reserves have been run down to dangerously low levels in order to keep the wider global market supplied during the last four and one half months, there is, at present, no possible buffer to make up for a continuation of any shortfall from pre-war levels, never mind a reduction to what little is getting through now; this will, on its own, result in a considerable, if not devastating global contraction in economic activity. Trump is truly boxed into a corner, one entirely (well, there is Netanyahu, and Epstein…) of his own making. Given his outrageous character a psychological deterioration that eclipses Biden’s, one cannot exclude the possibility that the frustration of a few weeks or months of economic turmoil (coupled with likely destruction in the midterms) might prompt him to employ tactical nuclear weapons.
That the economic consequences of what has already transpired, neither the impact on oil prices and the inflation ramifications of that worldwide, nor the exorbitant cost of the deployments and the expensive weaponry, nor the disruptions to trade, travel and global commerce (at a time when Trump’s Tariff tantrums continue to destroy demand), nor continued dramatic skewing of wealth and incomes towards the extraordinarily wealthy that has remained as the war continues, have reversed positive economic growth in the US. This is truly remarkable, and requires considerable speculative input to even attempt to account for it, like assumptions that the US Treasury may be making mass purchases of oil futures contracts as yet unsupported by actual supply arrangements. But, as the FT Alphaville piece mentions, bringing the multifacetly (apologies for the neologism, but the use of the construction seems appropriate here) lopsided state of AI into consideration spins the whole discussion into another dimension. As Adam Tooze (in German here) has pointed out, if AI is not a transformative technology, its bubble will eventually burst due to lack of demand and cause a stock market meltdown led by insanely overvalued AI and related stocks. But if it is, the transformative impact required to sustain current and future valuations will have to be so great that we can only expect a serious economic downturn from the ensuing destruction of consumer demand due to concomitant historic jobs losses. In any case, if, for any number of reasons, AI–and its related and, in many instances, financially intertwined industries, especially chips, which have provided an outsized contribution to economic growth in the last several quarters, cease to provide this lifeline to the economy on its own, we can only wonder at the devastation that would ensue if the situation in the Middle East tipped such a delicately supported economy into a serious downturn. And it doesn’t help to consider that much investment in AI originates or is even based in the front line Gulf states that have been so adversely affected by the Iran war already.
It is a shame that Beckett’s immortal work has served as the inspiration for so many lame titles, but I am going to add to the long, long list now. Freud, in The Future of an Illusion, refers to his “god Logos” as the embodiment of the spirit of free rationality that will replace emotional dependency on anxiety-ridden construction of supernatural beings in future. In Waiting for Godot, Beckett’s characters frustratingly express an expectant yearning for something that never arrives. By entitling this piece “Waiting for Logos”, I am trying to evoke an idea of a sensibility that arises when the things that make the most sense never seem to happen anymore. I believe that this condition will end very soon; I fear greatly that the economic devastation that we have somehow dodged so far (thanks in no small part to a useless mainstream media) will wreak clearly perceptible havoc by the end of the year. And I believe the Trump administration will do the previously unthinkable when this reality finally becomes evident to everyone. If this doesn’t happen, I will have to, for what it is worth, account to myself how the future of logos became a permanent illusion.
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