The Pillars of Folly

There is a particular kind of incompetence that announces itself as strength. It arrives not with hesitation but with volume, not with strategy but with spectacle.

It confuses the commencement of violence with the achievement of an objective. It is the incompetence of a man who, having set fire to a building, declares himself an architect.

Operation Epic Fury—the name alone deserves a moment’s pause, carrying as it does the cadence of a video game rather than a military doctrine—began on the morning of 28 February 2026, when the United States and Israel launched coordinated strikes across Iran. The Supreme Leader was killed. Military installations were hit. President Trump announced the operation not from the Oval Office, not from a podium before the assembled press, but in an eight-minute video posted to TruthSocial at two o’clock in the morning. The Congress of the United States—the body constitutionally empowered to declare war—was notified shortly before the bombs fell, and the Armed Services Committees only after. Which is to say, the republic went to war the way one might order takeaway: impulsively, late at night, and with minimal consultation.

The objectives, as outlined by President Trump in that nocturnal broadcast, were ambitious to the point of incoherence. Prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Destroy its missile arsenal and production capacity. Degrade its proxy networks. Annihilate its navy. And—the quiet part, spoken with characteristic boldness—regime change, framed as liberation, the president addressing the Iranian people directly to proclaim that the hour of their freedom was at hand. Four objectives, each sufficient to sustain a conflict for years, bundled together as though war were a promotional offer. Buy one, get three free.

Within days, three American service members were dead. Five more were seriously wounded. Iran’s response, predictable to anyone who had studied even casually the playbook of asymmetric warfare, arrived in layered waves: missile strikes against American bases across the Gulf, cyber operations targeting critical infrastructure, and the activation of proxy networks from Lebanon to Yemen. The Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil supply passes, fell under the shadow of the IRGC’s stated control. Markets shuddered. Economists warned of stagflation spreading through the global economy like a fever. None of this, apparently, was foreseen—or if it was, it was judged an acceptable cost, which amounts to the same incompetence by a different name.

But if the operational failures constitute one kind of catastrophe—the strategic kind, the kind measured in bodies and barrels of oil and the slow erosion of deterrence—then what followed constitutes another. The diplomatic kind. The kind that reveals not merely a failure of planning but a failure of character.

On 3 March, seated in the Oval Office beside German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, President Trump turned his attention not to the war itself but to the allies who had declined to join it with sufficient enthusiasm. The targets of his fury were Spain and the United Kingdom—two sovereign democracies whose leaders had, in their different ways, attempted to navigate the impossible corridor between alliance obligations and conscience.

Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s Prime Minister, had stated that Spanish military bases—Rota and Morón, long used by American forces—could only be employed for operations consistent with the United Nations Charter. This is not radical pacifism. It is international law, articulated plainly. Sánchez called for dialogue and de-escalation, noting that one can oppose a hateful regime while simultaneously opposing an unjustified military intervention. For this—for the suggestion that legality and morality might share a sentence—Trump declared Spain “terrible” and instructed his Treasury Secretary to sever all trade between the two nations. The phrasing was remarkable in its casual enormity: “We’re going to cut off all trade with Spain. We don’t want anything to do with Spain.”

The threat was, in practical terms, likely unenforceable—the Supreme Court had already struck down Trump’s use of emergency powers for arbitrary tariffs, and Spain trades under the umbrella of the European Union. But enforceability was never the point. The point was the performance of dominance, the theater of punishment. The message, directed less at Sánchez than at every other leader contemplating dissent: comply, or be made an example of.

Keir Starmer received a different kind of humiliation. Britain’s Prime Minister had not refused cooperation outright. He had offered two UK air bases—one in Gloucestershire, the other at Diego Garcia—for what he carefully described as a “specific and limited defensive purpose.” He drew the line at Cyprus, where one British base had already been struck by an Iranian-made drone. This was, by any reasonable measure, the act of an ally threading a needle: offering material support while maintaining the legal and moral boundaries that distinguish a constitutional democracy from a client state.

Trump’s response was to compare Starmer unfavorably with Winston Churchill. “This is not Winston Churchill that we’re dealing with,” he told reporters. The remark was designed to wound, and perhaps it did, though it also revealed something about the president’s understanding of both Churchill and the alliance he invoked. Churchill, after all, was not merely a man who said yes to war. He was a man who waged war in defense of sovereignty—who understood that the strength of an alliance rests not on obedience but on the freely given consent of equals. To invoke Churchill in order to demand submission is to misunderstand Churchill so profoundly as to turn him into his own opposite.

And there was something else in Trump’s complaint, almost throwaway, yet devastating in what it exposed: “It’s taken three, four days for us to work out where we can land.” The president was lamenting the logistical inconvenience of not having secured basing arrangements before launching a war. This is not the language of a commander-in-chief. It is the language of a man who booked a flight before checking whether the airport existed.

Here, then, is the full shape of the folly, revealed in its dimensions. A war was launched without congressional authorization, without a formal address to the nation, without secured allied support, without a coherent set of prioritized objectives, and without an evident strategy for what comes after the bombing stops. A war was announced on social media at two in the morning. A war whose first diplomatic consequence was the public bullying of two democratic allies whose offense was to insist that international law still means something.

The Spanish government’s response was measured and dignified: the trading relationship was mutually beneficial; any review must respect international law, bilateral agreements, and the autonomy of private companies. Behind the diplomatic language was a harder truth—that Spain, and by extension Europe, was beginning to imagine a future in which American partnership could no longer be assumed. Supply chains would be diversified. Dependencies would be reduced. The threat, intended to discipline, may instead accelerate precisely the decoupling it claimed to prevent.

This is the paradox at the heart of the administration’s posture, and perhaps of the era itself: that every act of coercion intended to consolidate American power succeeds only in demonstrating its fragility. You cannot bomb your way to security and bully your way to solidarity simultaneously. The world is watching—not just Tehran, but Madrid and London and Berlin and every capital that has, until now, calibrated its future on the assumption that American leadership, however flawed, was at least tethered to something recognizable as strategic thought.

What they are witnessing instead is a presidency that has confused lethality with competence, volume with authority, and the commencement of destruction with the achievement of purpose. Three American soldiers are dead. The Strait of Hormuz is contested. The global economy trembles. And the President of the United States is on television, berating the Prime Minister of Spain for having the temerity to cite the United Nations Charter.

Perhaps this is how empires have always unraveled—not with a single catastrophic defeat, but with the slow accumulation of moments in which power, stripped of wisdom, mistakes itself for strength. The old question, the one that every architect of every war must eventually answer, remains: What exactly are we building here? Operation Epic Fury, five days old, has not yet provided anything resembling an answer. It has provided only fury. Whether even that will prove epic remains, mercifully, to be seen.