Eric Margolis Blog

June 16, 2026 Donald Trump, who managed to evade the draft during the Vietnam War, said recently that he wanted to be a ‘wartime president.’ He was clearly thinking of brass bands, fancy uniforms, medals and snappy honor guards to compliment his continental-sized ego. Well, he got his wish, and it’s been a disaster.

My column on foreign affairs has been on hold for two weeks due to health reasons. It will most likely remain off-line for another two weeks. Sorry for any inconvenience. Eric This post is in: Uncategorized

May 1, 2026 Trump’s Iran War has turned into a frozen fiasco. American motorists face steadily rising costs of fuel. Many retail prices are also rising as the now closed Persian Gulf causes commodity prices to mount. The Jeffery Epstein scandal, which lies at the heart of the Persian Gulf war, is beginning to break out into the open. The Trump administration just spent $20 billion to try to distract attention from it. What does Trump do? He blames Germany for being soft on what he calls terrorism.

April 20, 2026 Once upon a time there was a magical little country named Lebanon. It was created by French imperialists out of the post-World War 1 wreckage of the Ottoman Empire as a mountainous stronghold for Levantine Maronite and Orthodox Christians. Imperial Russia sought to assert its influence as defender of Lebanon’s Christians. The British and French thwarted Russia’s efforts and created two new states, Syria and Jordan. After the war, Israel was created by Britain.

April 10, 2026 The finest military modern thinker, Maj Gen. J.F.C. Fuller, stated that the true object of war is not victory but the peace that follows the conflict. By that standard, the Trump-Netanyahu war against Iran and Lebanon is an embarrassing political failure and an economic disaster. Trump rushed into the Mideast where wiser angels dared not tread, propelled by the blandishments of his Israeli partner, Netanyahu.

March 30, 2026 Speaking as a former harbor master, operator of cargo ships, and a military specialist on the Mideast, the current war in Iran is a fool’s errand. The much-ballyhooed Strait of Hormuz is only 33 odd kilometers wide and averages only 220 meters deep. It’s a bottom-scraper for the huge oil tankers that use it. What will happen if the Iranians scuttle one or two large tankers in these narrow waters? The Egyptians did so in 1956 in Suez and jammed up world oil traffic for months.

March 18, 2026 The ‘Great America’ that President Trump has been promising the public looks too often more like Al Capone’s gangster-ridden Chicago of the 1920’s – except even more violent. At least a senior member of Trump’s government has come out and spoken the truth: Joe Kent, the former US counter-terrorism official just resigned over the US-Israeli war against Iran. Kent, a true American hero and war veteran, asserted he could not “in good conscience support the ongoing war” against Iran.

March 5, 2026 Why did President Trump launch a war against Iran? Two reasons. First, electoral polls indicated a dramatic victory for anti-Trump Democrats in this fall’s Congressional elections. This would put a welcome end to Trump’s campaign to establish one-man rule in the United States. Losing the Senate and/or House would open Trump up to a host of criminal accusations.

February 13, 2026 As the White House threatens war against Cuba, I am reminded of the charming evenings my parents and I spent at Havana’s venerable ‘Floridita Bar, sipping a newly invented cocktail, the Margarita, with the renowned writer, Ernest Hemingway. `Papa’ Hemingway, who then lived in Cuba, loved this island with a great passion and wrote about it often. I feel the same way.

January 29, 2026 Vladimir Lenin observed that the fastest way to crush a nation was to debauch its currency. His famous quote was made in reference to Germany’s floundering Weimar Republic, but it is just as appropriate to today’s besieged Iran. Right now, a US fleet is steaming toward Iran, led by the powerful aircraft carrier ‘Abraham Lincoln’. Scores of US bases in the Mideast are on high alert. The US treasury wages war on Iran’s demolished currency.