By Femi Akomolafe
Russian military strategy, Alexander Svechin warned: “The first duty of the art of politics with respect to strategy is to formulate the political goal of a war. Any goal should be strictly coordinated with the resources available to achieve it. The political goal should be appropriate to one’s war-waging capabilities. To meet this requirement, a politician must have a correct conception of the relations of friendly to hostile forces, which requires extremely mature and profound judgment; a knowledge of the history, politics, and statistics of both hostile states; and a certain amount of competence in basic military matters. The final statement of the goal would be made by the politician after an appropriate exchange of views with strategists, and it should help rather than hinder strategic decisions.”
Carl von Clausewitz – “War is merely the continuation of policy by other means” – On War (Vom Kriege).
There come seasons in the life of empires when inevitable decline ceases to be tragic, and they become indecent – when the mask slips, the overabused script dissolves, and power begins to babble incoherently.
Many geopolitical analysts have concluded that we are living through such a season.
Who would have believed that the almighty US, which has dominated the world for seventy years, would be unraveling in real-time, and so rapidly?
Today, we witness the once mighty US military being challenged not by true superpowers like China and Russia, but by an upstart like Iran.
Who would have thought that possible?
Enter Donald Trump, an uncultured and illiterate malignant narcissist of the highest order who now styles himself as a wartime virtuoso, conducting geopolitics like a drunken conductor who has misplaced both the score and the orchestra.
As we watch the US, what we are witnessing is not strategy but a spectacle – loud, vulgar, and increasingly unhinged, like what only a deranged mind could produce.
Let’s observe the pattern. One day, Trump is bombastically berating his NATO allies like delinquent tenants, demanding tribute with the gracelessness of a feudal lord who has forgotten that his castle is long gone. The next, he is publicly humiliating his own Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth – that curious wrong-Bible-quoting appointment who seems to have wandered into the Pentagon as if it were a television studio, casting him aside at the first whiff of difficulty, as though governance were a reality show and loyalty a disposable prop.
Then comes the unexpected ritual desecration. Pope Francis, that frail but persistent global moral voice, dares to counsel restraint, and Trump responds, as usual, not with argument but with insult, profanity hurled like a drunk’s bottle in a bar.
No other world leader would treat the Catholic Pontiff with such disrespect.
Trump’s tantrums are not merely offensive; they’re revealing. In this POTUS, we have a man who cannot distinguish between authority and noise, between dissent and disrespect. His vast ego would not allow him to behave anything less than the malignant narcissist that he is.
However profoundly ungainly that might seem, the true absurdity lies elsewhere, in Trump’s fever dreams masquerading as policy.
We are told, through late-night digital proclamations, that there exist “agreements” with China, with Iran, phantom treaties conjured in the echo chamber of PedoTrump’s own deranged imagination.
China and Iran, in this theatre of delusion, are reduced to extras in a script they have not read and will not perform.
Trump has degraded diplomacy, once the patient craft of statesmen, into a sequence of tweets, assertions without substance, and claims without consequence. His bombastic emissions in ungodly hours are as incoherent as they are off the mark. They fit the bill of a compulsive liar.
It is, however, Trump’s phantom blockade that reveals the full poverty of thought and the POTUS’ full-spectrum derangement.
Per Trump, the Strait of Hormuz, already one of the most militarized and surveilled chokepoints on earth, is to be “blocked,” sealed, shut down, as though geography were a door and the United States held the only key.
One is tempted to ask: blocked against whom? Against Iran, which sits astride the northern shore, its missile batteries and asymmetric naval assets calibrated precisely for this environment, and for which it has spent two decades practicing? Or, is it against the world itself, whose energy and agricultural lifelines pass through that narrow corridor?
This is not a strategy. It is cartographic illiteracy elevated to a doctrine by a president who looks increasingly out of touch with reality.
A blockade, in the classical sense, is an act of war requiring overwhelming maritime superiority, logistical endurance, and, above all, clarity of purpose. It is not declared in anger and sustained in ignorance as Trump does. It demands the capacity to interdict vessels across nationalities, to risk escalation with nuclear-armed powers, and to absorb the economic shockwaves that follow.
Questions left unanswered by Trump’s order include: Would American warships stop Russian tankers? Would they board Chinese-flagged vessels under escort?
At that moment, the fiction collapses. The United States, already overstretched across multiple theatres, does not possess the surplus naval architecture to enforce such a fantasy without courting catastrophe.
The U.S. Navy, formidable though it remains, does not have infinite capacity. Its carrier groups cannot be everywhere at once; its maintenance cycles cannot be wished away by presidential decree. The three Carrier Groups dispatched to the Gulf stay clear of the operation theatre.
Lesson learned: You don’t send CBGs to an environment dominated by drones and missiles.
Unlike Trump’s inner circle, reality does not applaud.
Meanwhile, Iran calculates with the cold patience of a civilization accustomed to siege. It understands that power in the modern age is not expressed through theatrical gestures but through control of systemic pressure points, energy and food corridors, regional alliances, and technological adaptation.
Here, the insights of Alastair Crooke resonate: the locus of influence has shifted from spectacle to structure. Iran does not need to win a war in the cinematic sense. It needs only to ensure that every American move becomes a liability. That is what, in Chess parlance, is called Zugzwang.
And so the paradox emerges. The louder Trump shouts, the quieter the world becomes. Trade routes begin to reconfigure. Financial systems mutate. Alliances solidify, not in admiration of American leadership, but in discreet preparation for its unpredictability. Even staunch allies like the UAE publicly announced a recalibration of their alliance with the US.
This is precisely how hegemonies erode: not through decisive defeat, but through the slow withdrawal of confidence by allies and vassals.
Trump’s supporters, ever eager for myth, speak of “5-D chess.” But, we are not fooled; there is no grand strategy here, only improvisation mistaken for genius, volatility mistaken for strength. What appears, to the uncritical eye, as cunning is in fact incoherence.
In geopolitics, incoherence is not merely a flaw; it is an invitation to decline.
Sadly, for Africa, the lesson is as stark as it is unwelcome. Iran, for all its contradictions, has pursued sovereignty with a discipline that many African states have abandoned. It has endured sanctions without surrendering its strategic autonomy. It has cultivated partnerships without dissolving its agency. It has refused, above all, to internalize the inferiority that still haunts the post-colonial imagination.
Contrast this with the comprador class that governs much of our continent – administrators of dependency who mistake Western approval for legitimacy, who would rather outsource their future than endure the rigors of self-determination.
The lessons offered by Iran could not be clearer, but colonized Africans watch this unfolding drama and learn nothing.
Power is not noise. It is coherence. It is the alignment of means and ends, the disciplined pursuit of national interest within the constraints of reality. What we are witnessing in Washington is the opposite: a dissipation of power through excess of words, of threats, of illusions.
Trump’s blockade will not succeed. Not because the world is benevolent, but because the idea itself is structurally bankrupt. It belongs not to the realm of strategy, but to that of performance, a gesture designed to impress an audience increasingly incapable of distinguishing between theatre and truth.
And so Generalissimo Trump rages – against allies, against adversaries, against the moral inconveniences of a world that refuses to bend to his script.
But history is not written in tweets. It is written in outcomes.
And the outcome here is already visible: an empire mistaking its voice for its power, discovering, too late, that it possesses less of both than it imagined.
©️ Fẹ̀mi Akọ̀mọ̀làfẹ̀ (1st Dan)
(Farmer, Writer, Published Author, Essayist, Satirist, Social Commentator, Geopolitical Analyst.)
My Mission: Ignorantia et stultitia delendae sunt / Ignorance and stupidity must be destroyed.
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