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sop

(18,461 posts)
Tue Mar 17, 2026, 04:11 PM Tuesday

'Trump as Alexander the Great: A Theory That Explains Iran (And Everything Else)'

"Trump, it is increasingly clear, is a figure of enormous historical significance who is reshaping America and the globe in ways that will not easily be undone by Democratic wins in future elections...Liberals, naturally, would like to believe the opposite: that once they triumph at the ballot box, all can go back to normal. 'Time will show the Trump era to be less turning point, more freakish aberration,' Simon Tisdall, a foreign affairs columnist for The Guardian, wrote in December. 'In history’s bigger picture, Trump is a blotch, an unsightly smear on the canvas.' "

"This could not be more wrong. And the ill-conceived but also era-defining war in Iran — the seventh country that Trump has attacked in his second term — is just the latest manifestation of how Trump is irrevocably changing our world."

"My confidence in this prediction derives from an unlikely source. To try to make sense of Trump’s presidency, I recently returned to G.W.F. Hegel’s 'Lectures on the Philosophy of History,' which I had read many years ago when I was trying to understand his influence on Marxism. This may seem to be an unnecessary diversion — like studying quantum mechanics in order to repair a car — but Hegel’s theory of history maps remarkably well onto our current situation."

"Hegel viewed history as consisting of stages punctuated by times of upheaval. He assigned to what he called 'world-historical individuals' a special role in spurring the transition from one era to another. These individuals didn’t necessarily grasp the full import of what they were doing, and their actions, while transformative, didn’t necessarily result in the outcomes they intended. Trump, I have come to believe, is exactly such an individual: He is speeding the transition from one historical era to another. The ultimate results are very unlikely to line up with his exact ideological aims, but they will be profound. And the world is never going back to what it was."

Article at link:

https://www.notus.org/perspectives/trump-as-alexander-the-great-a-theory-that-explains-iran-and-everything-else

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'Trump as Alexander the Great: A Theory That Explains Iran (And Everything Else)' (Original Post) sop Tuesday OP
Could Be and the world order will shift to China , India ... Bread and Circuses Tuesday #1
My only problem with articles like this is that the intellectual analyses make Trump sound tanyev Tuesday #2

Bread and Circuses

(1,960 posts)
1. Could Be and the world order will shift to China , India ...
Tue Mar 17, 2026, 05:09 PM
Tuesday

And the two war criminal countries that started the Iran bombing again are going to be outcasts and begging for scraps.

Soon. soon. soon.

tanyev

(49,195 posts)
2. My only problem with articles like this is that the intellectual analyses make Trump sound
Tue Mar 17, 2026, 05:47 PM
Tuesday

way too cunning and capable. He wants things: praise, admiration, money and shiny gold baubles. Because he is a sociopath, he is willing to do things other people wouldn’t do to get what he wants. He enjoys punishing people who won’t give him what he wants, often resulting in large-scale destruction.

His instinctive knack for destroying and breaking things may give the same result as the prediction in this article, but I will never, ever believe that it happened because Trump carefully and painstakingly planned it.

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