هذا التقرير متاح أيضًا بـ العربية
In his best-known political work, “The Prince,” Machiavelli emphasises the value of lying in politics. He was not proposing anything new: lying had always been part of politics. What he did was legitimise it, lending it theoretical appeal as a desirable political practice in the service of strong rule. If all leaders lie, then, what distinguishes Trump’s lies? Perhaps he has gone further: his lies ushered in what has come to be known as alternative facts. Trump does not lie; he offers “alternative facts.” Since his initial rise in 2016, he has opened up this debate in political science, a subject previously explored at length in one of NoonPost’s reports.
In the ongoing war on Iran, Trump’s lies, or alternative facts, call them what you will, have become more important than ever because they now shape the realities of the war and its possible outcomes. When Trump talks about striking Iran’s infrastructure, he opens up a wartime target in the Gulf states, within range of Iranian missiles. When he says an agreement is imminent, oil prices fall and share prices rise. His lies no longer merely create a world he likes to inhabit, where he can believe he enjoys mass popularity and that his inauguration was the largest in US presidential history. They now shape the course of war and the daily rhythms of the global economy. Here, we attempt, as far as possible, to trace how Trump’s lies have shaped the realities of a month of war.
How to lie the Donald Trump way
Jānis Sārts, director of the NATO Strategic Communications Center of Excellence, says: “We will no longer believe what we see. This is a radical shift in human history, and in addition to artificial intelligence and cognitive warfare, there are influential human factors as well, such as US President Donald Trump and his statements.”
Much of the media coverage of the war has therefore come to recognise Trump’s role in churning out lies and scenarios. Ironically, he was the focus of the panel discussion at which Sārts spoke, held at the latest Leipzig Book Fair and organised around an absurd question: has imagination become more real than reality?
Trump’s approach to lying is simple: he has dug himself into a hole. He campaigned successfully for the presidency in 2024 with the slogan “Drill, baby, drill”, a reference to the oil sector’s importance in reviving the country’s economy. Yet his war on Iran has been accompanied by a blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, which is hugely important to energy policy. The resulting market volatility and short-term price fluctuations make planning difficult in a sector that depends on stability to attract investment.
Trump has thus undermined what he achieved by abducting Venezuela’s president, Maduro, in the hope of controlling the world’s largest reserves of heavy crude oil. To revive Venezuela’s infrastructure, which has been deteriorating for decades, Trump needs billions of dollars in investment, specifically from the very industry he is now putting at risk through his war on Iran.
An article in the German newspaper Der Spiegel illustrates how Trump conducts his affairs through lies. Journalist Klaus Hecking portrays the wisecracking Trump as a war leader. The headline of his scathing article, published on 24 March, sets out Trump’s lies.
Hecking opens by saying: “Trump knows how to move markets. Shortly before 7 a.m. Monday, at his residence in the Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, global oil prices were nearing record levels, while stock prices in the United States were at their lowest. Then, as usual, the president stirred up a commotion on Truth Social. He began his post by saying: I am pleased to announce that the United States and Iran have held fruitful and very good talks over the past two days on a comprehensive and complete settlement of our differences in the Middle East.”
He then postponed the warning he himself had issued about bombing Iranian energy facilities if the regime in Tehran continued to close the Strait of Hormuz. Immediately, oil prices fell by about $8 a barrel, and in the futures market the Dow Jones industrial average rose by about 1,300 points. Those who had bet moments earlier on falling oil prices or rising stock prices suddenly became richer by thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even tens of millions of dollars within minutes.”
Disregard for reality and incessant chatter are the twin pillars of Trump’s machinery of lies, and the oil that keeps it running. In his effort to inject optimism into the markets, he ignores many of the facts on the ground. He brushed aside reports from two news agencies close to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard that no talks had taken place, claiming he was negotiating with a man he believes to be the most respected figure, and the leader.
That man is certainly not Mojtaba Khamenei. Citing an Israeli source, Axios reported that this “most respected leader” was Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of Iran’s parliament, with whom US envoy Steven Witkoff and the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, had negotiated. Trump claimed Ghalibaf was “pulling the strings,”. Ghalibaf strongly denied on X that any such negotiations had taken place, describing them as “fake news aimed at manipulating the oil and stock markets, as an escape from the quagmire into which the United States and Israel have plunged themselves.”
That means little to Trump, who said the Iranian denial was merely a misunderstanding within the Iranian leadership, according to Axios. This episode illustrates the two pillars described above: he ignored the facts and the embarrassing denial of claims made by a country the size of the US, and continued rambling that everything was fine, offering a handful of promises.
Trapped in his own maze
The news conference held by White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on 25 March shows how Trump continues to construct a world from his lies and insist on its reality. Despite Iran’s continued denial of any contact, Leavitt spoke on the president’s behalf of “productive talks” between the two countries and said Trump was now prepared to listen more closely to the Iranians. She repeated the claims Trump had made throughout the month: that the regime had been completely destroyed and its surviving members wanted to contact the US; that the country had been utterly defeated and its ability to harm US interests in the region diminished; and that Iran fully recognised its military defeat and was now looking for a way out.
Trump now appears to suspect that he has driven himself and his country into a dead end, reflected in the confusion of his decisions on the ground. He announced that countries benefiting from the Strait of Hormuz should secure it themselves. Yet he also gave Iran 48 hours to restore normal traffic through the strait, only to discard that ultimatum as though he had never issued it, later promoting the prospect of a comprehensive settlement.
The truth embedded in these lies is that they lend credibility to Trump’s lies elsewhere; the comparison helps us understand them. In the Ukraine conflict, too, Trump repeatedly issued final ultimatums to the warring parties, yet nothing changed. In that sense, his rhetoric towards Tehran’s leadership essentially reflects his personal inability to act in the face of an impasse of his own making.
From the outset, Trump’s delusions about the war shaped its current near-deadlock. He believed that eliminating Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would be enough to bring down the Iranian regime and greeted the news triumphantly. Yet the war continued for nearly a month afterwards, disproving his assumption. Trump then believed, and declared more than once, that killing many of the regime’s most senior leaders would be enough to end the war, and that he had wiped Iran off the map. But this changed nothing on the ground: the war continued, as did attacks on US interests in the Middle East.
What is happening here? Trump grows more certain by the day that, sooner or later, he will have to negotiate with the Iranian regime again. That is the least of it. The likely starting conditions will be far worse than before the attacks began on the last day of February. Trump will be forced to deal with a regime more radical and more confident than ever, buoyed by having shown the world that it can withstand a joint Israeli-US attack. Faced with all this, how can Trump, or Israel acting on his behalf ,proceed? Another moment in US history offers an answer.
The defeated player’s options in a game of chicken
The tragedy in which the world is now trapped is captured in words from another longstanding conflict. In his book “The New Cold War,” international relations professor Gilbert Achcar quotes historian John Lewis Gaddis condemning the decision to expand NATO at a time when the US was revelling in its achievements in Kosovo at the expense of an exhausted Russia: “If the United States could afford to be inclusive in dealing with its actual enemies, Germany and Japan, after 1945, why does it now exclude a country that was throughout the Cold War only a rival by default? The most common answer is that the Russians have no choice but to accept what NATO has decided to do … This view is not only arrogant, it is also shortsighted, because it assumes that defeated adversaries have no options …”
Defeated adversaries have no options. That is the conviction Leavitt attributed to Trump at her White House news conference. By assuming that Iran is already defeated and has no choice but to submit, Trump brings us closer to a step that would be all but catastrophic.
Trump then finds himself trapped in the classic theory of the “game of chicken”: a high-stakes conflict in which two sides race towards a direct confrontation. If one backs down, the other wins, and the first is branded the “chicken”, a derogatory English term meaning coward in this context. If neither yields and both stubbornly press ahead, they collide, with catastrophic consequences. In this case, that collision is the option Iran has but Trump believes it lacks: sending the Arab Gulf states back to the “Stone Age”, a threat favoured by Trump and his administration. That would not affect the Gulf states alone; it would drag the entire global economy into the abyss. Trump, meanwhile, has two options, both unpalatable.
The current wartime dilemma is likely tempting Trump to consider using a nuclear bomb again, tactical or strategic, as Maximilian Popp, deputy head of foreign affairs at Germany’s Der Spiegel, argues in his article “Trump Is Looking for a Way Out, but at What Cost?” This is the worst plausible option.
The second option fits the logic of the smokescreen Trump creates with his lies. Reading a recent CNN report, one gets the impression that Trump tried to buy time by talking about a settlement, a month-long ceasefire and other such proposals, while the US continued to complete its military preparations to seize Kharg Island, through which Iran exports 90 per cent of its crude oil.
If pursued, this option would neither resolve the problem of the Strait of Hormuz nor end the war, let alone prevent Iran from resorting to its zero-sum option of destroying the Arab Gulf. It would mean the US was on the verge of becoming entangled on the ground once again, repeating the scenarios of the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Vietnam, this time against a stronger adversary capable of driving the cost of war as high as possible.
Viewed through Henry Kissinger’s description of the Vietnam War, Trump’s predicament is this: the army loses if it does not win, while the guerrilla fighter wins if he does not lose. Trump thus remains bogged down in Iran for now, waiting for a solution beyond the war’s strategic realities that would allow him to emerge victorious. Otherwise, he will retreat, bringing his second presidential term to a farcical end after building his reputation in his first as a man of deals, not wars. Amid the contradictions between the two terms, Trump’s lies have always remained the constant, and the compass.