O tem si še nisem povsem izoblikoval mnenja. Gre za predpostavko Trumpove racionalnosti:

(A) Če je Trump racionalen, ne bo tvegal popolne eskalacije in bo raje modeloval za konec vojne, kajti v nasprotnem primeru je njegove politične kariere in njegovega slovesa konec. In konec je ameriškega imperija, kot smo ga poznali.

(B) Toda če Trump ni povsem racionalen, lahko tvega eskalacijo, ker se ne more umakniti. Mora jo tvegati, ker verjame, da ne sme izgubiti. Pa čeprav ve, da bo izgubil in da bo s tem porazom konec ameriškega imperija.

I spoke with a macro hedge fund manager who manages billions in assets this week. He had reached out to talk about the war. One pushback he had has stayed with me.

He said he agreed that the US has been defeated; that the mature-strike regime necessarily meant that the world is multipolar; that Iran is a great power; and that the economic cost of trying to ‘finish the job’ was forbidding.

But all this did not necessarily mean that they will agree to a negotiated peace as my central scenario envisioned. The political culture in the imperial metropole, he suggested, may simply not permit even tacit acceptance of defeat required by a peace settlement.

If the gulf is destroyed, they can control the fallout by imposing export controls on US energy, and doling it out for political obedience by the Koreans, the Japanese and the Europeans.

Even if they are not fully prepared for the destruction of the gulf, they may be prepared to risk it, and it might end up getting totaled as they ride up the escalation ladder. They may be willing, in the final analysis, to stomach a prolonged global economic crisis and the attendant political costs for the imperial cause.

This is an important risk scenario to keep in mind. Analytically, this picture offers a useful model of irrationality with concrete implications. The source of the systematic error is the hypertrophy of the imperial parastate and the conservation of imperial political culture that is prepared to risk great destruction in a desperate bid to hold on to the empire.

Ultimately, however, the empire cannot be saved by imperial willingness to pay a very high price. In fact, by dramatically imposing costs on everyone and their mother, will only make the empire implode faster as appetites grow to challenge and contain the rogue great power in decline. This process may already be well underway in India and elsewhere in the global South. It looks very much like the West will be the last one to abandon ship.