LinkedIn on Monday, March 2, 2026
The government of world’s greatest economy misses the point.
Standing there at the podium from the tush of our government in Mar-a-Lago, and then later in The White House situation room, our President, wearing a white trucker hat with “USA” embroidered on it, announces and then watches our attack on Iran, code name “Epic Fury.” The imagery of it screams immaturity and incompetence.
His is a “might makes right” philosophy of world peace. Our military is the most powerful, so why not use it, proactively, to kill people into submission. Use violence for self-defense? Sure. When someone points a gun at you with the intent to use it, being the first to fire makes sense, but that’s not really what’s happening here.
Our invasion of Iran is a display of brute force, an exercise in power which is all our President and his administration understand. Unfortunately, the use of violence in this manner only encourages the use of violence all around. What’s the real difference between us and the terrorists we abhor? The extent of our power and style of the death and destruction we cause? Shouldn’t violence be wrong, period, regardless of your points of view or ability to inflict it as a means of implementing change?
Forget about the fact that Donald Trump is mentally ill. We, as a people, are not, and yet the governments we keep electing are missing the point. True, at great expense, our military may be currently the most powerful in the world – as if that’s all that counts, the only measure of our strength and national worth. But then what is also true is that our economy is the largest and most powerful. Do any of you reading this seriously think we can’t use our economy, our capitalism and prodigious skills at marketing ice to Eskimos for good? To change the way people think about violence without using violence to accomplish that objective?
Do any of you not get the point that, as a rule, people who have a measure of economic success and equity in their economies and societies are far less prone to violence than those who are struggling and have less than they and their families need? This is a realization we can use to our advantage, to build our economy beyond the borders of our homeland and do so for the good of other people in less fortunate countries.
The United States of America – the economy, not the war machine – has been for some time and is now, together with our capitalist allies in Europe and Asia, in a position to build the economies of authoritarian governments for the benefit of their people. We can – if only we decide to do it – develop these merchant and middle classes to the eventual point of their taking charge of their governments without the firing of a single shot. That’s the right and civilized way to do it. To effect regime change peacefully when the regimes in question have the wrong attitude toward violence and are depriving their constituents of the basic personal freedoms we enjoy.
That Trump, the idiot bully, doesn’t get this point isn’t the least bit unexpected. His way is neither kind nor does it work. What is surprising is that we, the people, and the Congress that represents us put up with it.
-Les Cohen
