Among the supporters of the US-Israeli war on Iran are those who believe that Donald Trump is secretly working to dismantle entrenched global power structures. According to this view, the war is a form of “5D chess” aimed at bringing down what is often described as the “Deep State”.
These arguments are closely associated with the belief in “QAnon”, which during his first term as president cast Trump as a messianic savior engaged in a covert struggle with the hidden powers-that-be.
Within this belief system, if Trump appears to be acting contrary to Americans’ interests, the US Constitution, or international law, it is just a necessary ruse to ultimately expose and defeat the secret cabal that rules the world through its control of the financial system and governments, including the US.
The current war against Iran has been similarly interpreted by many Trump loyalists as a move aimed at weaking or collapsing the existing global order.
Since I’ve encountered this belief among my own readers and in my social networks, I’d like to briefly address it.
One conundrum for the QAnon-type narratives is that the Deep State has clearly been wanting to overthrow the Iranian regime since the 1979 Islamic Revolution that ousted the US-backed Shah, or king, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi.
General Wesley Clark, a former NATO commander, explained in 2003 that the illegal war of aggression against Iraq, waged on a pretext of lies, was just the first step of a plan to overthrow the governments of six additional countries: Syria, Lebanon, Somalia, Sudan, and, finally, Iran.
Suddenly now we’re supposed to believe that instead of advancing the Deep State’s agenda, overthrowing the Iranian government is somehow intended to push back against it. That doesn’t make much logical sense, but let’s run with it for the sake of argument.
We can stipulate that there is a Deep State that runs things behind the scenes in the US government. We can also stipulate that it operates in coordination with a broader cabal that manipulates global events to accumulate wealth into the hands of a few and to assume ever more power over us.
It is not my purpose here to challenge that paradigm. Instead, I’ll assume it.
But if we are to believe that Trump has some secret plan with his war on Iran to end the Deep State, what is the ultimate means by which he aims to achieve that result?
When the war was launched, Iran was involved in ongoing negotiations to allay concerns about the nature of this nuclear program.
But instead of negotiating in good faith, Trump issued Iran an ultimatum to surrender the right to enrich uranium for civilian purposes, which is recognized as “inalienable” under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), or to face military assault.
Although Iran was willing to make enormous compromises, including strict limits on the level of uranium enrichment and stockpiles, Trump proceeded to join with Israel in bombing the country.
The Deep State utilizes the US government and military to advance its agenda, which necessitates deceiving the masses about the supposed benevolence of the government and its actions overseas.
So, one could argue that Trump aimed to undermine the Deep State’s ability to maintain the deception by proving to the world with absolute clarity that the US government cannot be trusted to engage in good-faith negotiations.
One QAnon-like narrative on the Iran war that I’ve encountered is that Trump aims to bring down the global financial system based in the City of London. According to this narrative, Trump’s secret goal is to eliminate the last vestiges of the same British empire that Americans fought during the Revolutionary War.
The US never really freed itself from British rule, according to that story line, but Trump is now in the process of doing so by waging war on Iran. Somehow.
The UK seems like a convenient scapegoat given Trump’s anger toward the British government for not being more willing to support his war on Iran. It reminds me of how Americans were told to substitute “freedom fries” for “French fries” because of France’s refusal to join the US and UK in the illegal war of aggression against Iraq in 2003.
But set that aside. It is certainly true that there exists a centralization of power involving a global monetary order that facilitates an upward transfer of wealth from the masses to the class of political and financial elites.
There are certainly entrenched structures of power that serve narrow private interests at the expense of the rest of us.
Central banking is a key mechanism by which the elites control the masses.
The US Federal Reserve is a government-legislated private monopoly over the currency supply. It exists to defraud us of our wealth by engaging in legalized counterfeiting, monetizing government debt by purchasing US Treasuries with dollars created out of thin air—literally lent into existence.
Governments love central banks because they enable profligate spending without having to directly tax the people, which would cause protestation. The masses are deprived of the fruits of their labor through the stealth tax of monetary inflation without realization of how they are being robbed.
Since most people don’t understand how they have been enslaved, they maintain the delusion that they are free, and consequently, they do not protest their servitude.
It is also true that the City of London is a key hub in the global financial system. We’re not talking about London, the city, but the financial district where the Bank of England is located.
However, a fundamental problem with this narrative is that the global financial system in our modern era is not centered in London but in Washington, DC.
Since the Bretton Woods agreement in 1944, the global financial system has been organized around the US dollar as the world’s primary reserve currency.
Key commodities—most importantly including oil—are priced in dollars, creating persistent demand for this currency.
The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries—where the US maintains military bases—sell oil for US dollars, which they then recycle back into the US economy, such as buying arms or US Treasury securities.
This is what’s known as the “petrodollar” system, which enables the US government to continue spending by monetizing its debt and then repaying investors with devalued dollars.
This petrodollar system creates demand for US dollars that puts upward pressure on prices for Treasuries, decreasing yields and enabling the US government to issue new debt at lower interest rates.
In other words, the petrodollar system helps keep the government’s borrowing costs down.
The newly issued debt is then also often monetized by the Fed, creating more artificial demand, putting even more downward pressure on interest rates, and paying for the government’s massive spending by stealing Americans’ purchasing power.
So, the QAnon faithful could more credibly argue that Trump’s secret plan to bring down the Deep State is to hasten the end of the petrodollar system with his war on Iran.
The GCC states, located across the Persian Gulf from Iran, are faced with the reality that their security arrangements with the US and the presence of US military bases on their soil are not protective but place them at risk.
Besides the potential damage to their energy infrastructure, if Iran were to target the desalination plants that GCC countries rely on for their water supply, it would be devastating.
The best argument one could make to support the QAnon belief system, as far as I can see, is that Trump’s secret plan is to compel the GCC countries to expel US forces from their soil and to begin reducing their own dependency on the US dollar system by selling oil for the Chinese yuan and other currencies.
The collapse of the petrodollar system would mean reduced demand for US government debt instruments, pushing up interest rates and increasing the government’s borrowing costs.
This would limit the government’s ability to spend dollars on destructive purposes—like senseless and illegal wars of aggression in the Middle East.
We can only hope.
If anyone can come up with a better war aim to support the belief that Trump is secretly trying to bring down the Deep State and global financial system, let me know in the comments below.
