The Götterdämmerung of Donald Trump
In the space of weeks, the second Trump presidency has entered a phase that bears an unsettling resemblance to the final act of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung: a once-dominant figure, surrounded by flames of his own making, watches the structures he claimed to command begin to collapse. What began as a calculated show of strength against Iran has metastasised into a pattern of erratic decision-making that senior national-security professionals now describe, in private briefings and public retrospectives, as a direct threat to American and global stability. The sequence is now a matter of public record. On 27 February 2026, President Trump authorised Operation Epic Fury — a joint US-Israeli campaign of missile, drone, and airstrikes against Iranian nuclear and military targets. Within days he declared the Iranian military “destroyed.” Yet the conflict did not end. Instead, after a fragile two-week ceasefire, the…
