The US president has been difficult to pin down when it comes to the country’s true goals for its intervention in the Middle East. An imminent threat to Israel, regime change, stopping Iran developing nuclear weapons, freedom for Iranians – all of these reasons have been floated without an apparent coherent strategy.
But could personal enrichment and consolidation of authoritarian power be the goals of Donald Trump’s war on Iran?
In a special episode of The Morning Edition, hosted by Samantha Selinger-Morris, international and political editor Peter Hartcher answers questions posed by readers and listeners. Every week we receive plenty of comments from our listeners, so we put a call-out for the burning issues you’ve wanted to ask Hartcher about.
Listener Lyn asked: “Is Donald Trump gaining financially from the war in Iran or the Middle East wars?”
Peter Hartcher: “I’ve maintained that Trump has two overriding aims in this presidency. Number one is his personal enrichment, and number two is the consolidation of authoritarian power insofar as he can possibly manage it. Trump’s negotiating team that he sends everywhere, sends to Russia, to Ukraine … to Islamabad to negotiate with the Iranians… [is] Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff. Kushner is not a member of the US administration. He calls himself a volunteer. Witkoff is an official [but] is not a diplomat. He is a New York real estate billionaire and pal of Trump’s. This is not a traditional American diplomatic negotiating team. This is the family and the crony.
“Trump has made more than $20 million personally from his Arabian Peninsula, Gulf Arab investments and projects, and invested $US17 billion in total in that region.
“Then there’s the drone businesses. Just in the last couple of months, his sons Eric and Donald Jr have invested, have bought three companies that manufacture drones. At the same time, Trump has passed a new regulation stipulating that no foreign companies are allowed to sell drones to the US anymore, because quite a few were, so this will assist his sons in tendering to the Pentagon.”
Listen to the conversation by clicking the player above, or read on for an edited extract of the episode.
Listener Andrew McKenzie remarked that the US economy, particularly the stock market, appears little damaged by Trump, his tariffs, the war in Iran, skyrocketing health costs and so forth. He asked: “Why are all the economic consequences of the Trump regime’s decisions so easily passed to the rest of the world? At what point will the US public feel some consequences for their choice of leadership.”
Peter Hartcher: I’d make two points. First is that there is some considerable pain being felt in the US. Already, 55 per cent of Americans in a Gallup poll a couple of days ago said that their personal financial situation was getting worse. That’s a record high. Inflation is rising. Trump’s so called Big, Beautiful Bill has severed a lot of assistance programs to low-income people, while redistributing wealth to billionaires and the rich. So there is some pain.
“The second point I’d make is he’s right about the stock market. The US stock market is booming in spite of all of that. The explanation to resolve the paradox is that most of that boom is fuelled by the frenzy over data centres and AI where hundreds of billions of dollars are going in capital expenditure on the ground to build facilities, and many, many hundreds of billions more are chasing that investment through the sharemarket. We’ve seen this before. Then the dotcom frenzy turned into the tech bust.
“I can’t see the future, but I would strongly suspect that we are going to see something similar.”
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Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: www.smh.com.au
