Tehran Times - It’s said that Donald Trump is likely to win re-election in 2020 if he avoids war with Iran, keeps up the tariff and political pressure on China, and if the Democrats nominate a neoliberal like Joe Biden or even Kamala Harris.

Conversely, if the U.S. attacks Iran militarily (the U.S. and the world are going to regret it mightily), Trump won’t win re-election. And it’s also likely that there are only two candidates, both of them often scorned or ignored, one for his “socialist” policies and the other for an anti-war posture, who have any chance of beating Trump assuming Trump does not bomb Iran. They are Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii. Both these Democrat candidates are consistent, recognize the failures of U.S. policies, and don’t seem to have been bought off by anyone to any significant degree, it at all.

But there is a caveat, too.

Trump is absolutely desperate in the face of slowly souring economic data in the U.S. and also in Asia and Europe, to weaken the dollar (and improve U.S. exports) and to keep the U.S. equity market near or above its recent all-time high. Trump “owns” the markets now, because he has been crowing for two years about how “great” he is and that his policies have caused the markets in the U.S. to rocket to all-time highs, and he has also claimed he is responsible for low unemployment (almost exclusively in very low-wage jobs) in the U.S., too. But all his claims are a chimera. The only thing that has happened since the crises of 2008-09 is that the Federal Reserve Bank printed trillions of dollars to bail out businesses and banks that ought to have gone bust and all the extra money went largely to further “credit” (debt) creation and into the stock markets while many corporations were buying back their shares -- which was illegal until 1982 when Reagan was President -- to boost quarterly (and annual) per share profits. Really, there has been almost a decade-long orgy of misallocated fiat “capital” and the chickens are soon going to come home to roost with what may become the worst economic contraction since the Great Depression of the 1930s, which affected the entire world. Also, the world is being fed truckloads of propaganda by the Trump gang about China and the Federal Reserve as the scapegoats for systemic economic problems made worse by the policies Trump pushed like financial heroin since taking office, but which originated during Barack Obama’s tenure in the While House.

Indeed, U.S. hostility towards Iran, aside from the ever-present, crude and greedy Zionist demands and the Saudi fear of competition in West Asia, is sparked by what appears to be a tide of growing solidarity between Asian countries, led by China, to create a world of secured and growing trade ties that, because of U.S. intransigence and paranoia, threatens to exclude the U.S. Iran has become one of the key countries in this tidal movement given its location and size and its wealth of resources both human and natural. Moreover, the UNDP has designated Iran far ahead of most other countries as “very high” on human development. Anyone with a scintilla of knowledge about Iran loves its cinema, its poetry and its deep culture -- one honed over thousands of years – and even its food. And there is no basis for the hostility except: solidarity with other countries battered by Western imperialism, Iran’s support of Syria under attack by Western funded terrorists and mercenaries, and Iran’s moral support of Palestinians living under a cruel apartheid system that makes South Africa’s apartheid system before Nelson Mandela was freed and rocketed from jail to the Presidency look like something far milder but still reprehensible.

Iran has been threatened by the U.S. and its “allies” in the Middle East with something at least a destructive as what the Mongols meted out to West Asia in the 13th century, and it is stunningly bad as policy. But slowly and surely, counter moves are developing, and most recently one move involves deeper ties and potential military cooperation between Russia and Iran.

The Trump Administration witnesses this expansion of cooperation between Russia and Iran along with other developments across Asia and seems to be inadvertently pushing the U.S. into the terminal phase of its unsustainable “empire”, and this would only be hastened by any military attack on Iran. Quite aside from the dangerous threats of climate change, for example, it has even been suggested humanity itself may not long survive if the U.S. and its “allies” start yet another war in the Middle East.

Iran, meanwhile, has been scaling back its commitments inherent in the more or less defunct and disrespected JCPOA, which makes sense. Making no sense at all is Trump’s sanctioning of Foreign Minister Javad Zarif because, some have opined, he “intimidated” with his deftness and smarts the bully Mike Pompeo, who has become a laughing stock. If anything, this sanction tells you a lot about the fragility of the U.S. government under Trump and minions. This fragility will be increasingly apparent, too, when the U.S. economy and markets unravel in the next year or two.