It has been fourteen months since Donald Trump returned to the White House. In that time, he has started wars in at least seven countries, threatened to annex three sovereign territories, triggered what economists are calling the worst energy crisis since the 1970s, and imposed tariffs that the OECD says are dragging the entire global economy into the ground.
And he’s only in year two.
Whatever your politics, it is impossible to look at the last fourteen months and describe them as anything other than a controlled demolition of the world order. So let’s go through it, methodically, with receipts.
The Wars Nobody Voted For
Wars of choice, at home and abroad, have become the defining feature of Trump’s tumultuous second term. From Minneapolis and Los Angeles to Caracas and Tehran, instigating conflicts with perceived adversaries has become his principal means of pursuing domestic and international goals.
He has deployed military forces in Iran, Venezuela, and at least five other countries.
That is, at least seven military engagements in fourteen months.
The Iran war, launched on 28 February alongside Israel, is the centrepiece. When pressed on civilian casualties, including a bombing that killed over 165 people, mostly children, Trump’s response was characteristically casual: “Like I said, some people will die. When you go to war, some people will die.”
Jiang Xueqin, the Chinese-Canadian historian who was dubbed “China’s Nostradamus” for accurately predicting that Donald Trump would return as the US President and the subsequent war with Iran.
In a 2024 lecture titled “The Iran Trap,” he said, “If Trump were to win a second term, he would likely contemplate invading Iran. While an initial invasion would seem successful, American forces would quickly become bogged down in Iran’s mountainous terrain.”
Recently, Jiang predicted that Trump could launch a “full-scale US invasion of Iran in March 2027, with the partnership of Israel and Saudi Arabia, as well as the support of the United Kingdom, Australia, the United Arab Emirates, and Poland.”
Washington-based political analyst Osama Abu Irshaid said, “The administration is updating the visual dictionary of fear. They are exaggerating the nuclear threat exactly as the Bush administration did with the ‘smoking gun’ metaphor. But there is a key difference: in 2003, US intelligence was manipulated to align with the lie. In 2026, the intelligence assessments actually contradict Trump’s claims.”
He explained further to Al Jazeera that, “Bush benefitted from the post-9/11 anger to link Iraq to an existential threat. Trump doesn’t have that. Iran hasn’t attacked the US homeland. So he has to fabricate a direct threat, claiming their ballistic missiles can reach America, a claim unsupported by technical realities.”
Irshaid put it plainly, “Trump is not building a coalition; he is alienating allies,” pointing to a pattern of extortion extending from tariffs on the European Union to attempts to buy Greenland.
He said, “The Europeans see the coercion used against Iran and fear it could be turned against them. Unlike 2003, only Israel is fully on board.”
The Tariffs
Before the Iran war, Trump’s signature second-term economic move was tariffs. He called them “the greatest thing ever invented.” Virtually no experts agreed, projecting that Trump’s tariffs would raise inflation, cut wages, impose an additional drag on US manufacturers, and weaken the stock market.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, Columbia University professor, former World Bank chief economist, and former chair of President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers, was blunt, stating, “Virtually all economists think that the impact of the tariffs will be very bad for America and for the world. They will almost surely be inflationary.”
He went further in a CNBC interview, saying, “Not great right now, and the prospects are that it’s going to get worse.”
Marcus Noland, Executive Vice-President of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, echoed this sentiment, saying “The impact of imposing these tariffs … [will] have the effect of depressing US economic growth, contributing to a higher rate of inflation, and those effects will be worse if the other countries retaliate in kind.”
Fellow Nobel laureate Paul Krugman didn’t hold back either.
In an April 2025 Substack article titled ‘Will Malignant Stupidity Kill the World Economy?’ Krugman wrote, “The tariffs Trump announced were higher than almost anyone expected. This is a much bigger shock to the economy than the infamous Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930, especially when you bear in mind that international trade is about three times as important now as it was then.
The size of the tariffs, however, wasn’t the only shocking thing about the Rose Garden announcement.
Arguably what we learned about how the Trump team arrived at those tariff rates, the sheer malignant stupidity of the whole thing, was even worse.”
Mark Zandi, Chief Economist at Moody’s Analytics, speaking with CNBC, said, “Even before the conflict, I thought recession risks were on the rise.”
“Recession risks are very high, and unless the hostilities are coming to an end now, the president figures out a way to stand down, declare victory and move on, and Iranians follow suit, I think recession is more than likely by the second half of the year.”
Zandi, in a series of posts on X/Twitter, also recently commented that, “Recession is once again a serious threat. Even before the recent disconcerting events in the Middle East, our machine learning-based leading economic indicator model put the probability of a recession starting in the next 12 months at an uncomfortably high 49%.
Behind the recent jump are primarily the weak labour market numbers, but almost all the economic data have turned soft since the end of last year.”
“It isn’t a stretch to expect the indicator to cross the key 50% threshold amid the Iranian conflict and the resulting surge in oil prices. Oil prices are an important variable in the model, and with good reason: every recession since WWII, save the pandemic recession, has been preceded by a spike in oil prices.
Higher oil prices don’t do the same economic damage as in years past, as we produce as much as we consume, but consumers still get hit hard and fast, and they were already increasingly nervous spenders.”
The OECD projects US GDP growth will slow to nearly half its 2024 pace, falling from 2.8% to just 1.5% in 2026. Global growth as a whole is expected to drop below 3% for the first time since 2020.
Read More: How Has Trump’s Family Wealth Boomed After Being Re-Elected As US President?
The Inflation Nobody Saw Coming: But Everyone Is Now Paying
Tariffs are a tax on imports, and that tax doesn’t stay with the government. It gets passed directly to consumers at the checkout.
Julian Hinz, Research Director at the Kiel Institute, who co-authored a study, ‘America’s Own Goal: Who Pays the Tariffs?’ said, “The claim that foreign countries pay these tariffs is a myth. The data show the opposite: Americans are footing the bill.”
Hinz explained how they “compared Indian exports to the US with shipments to Europe and Canada and identified a clear pattern.”
“Both export value and volume to the US dropped sharply, by up to 24 per cent. But unit prices, the prices Indian exporters charged, remained unchanged. They shipped less, not cheaper.”
On the timing, Stiglitz speaking at an event in 2025 said, “Tariffs are paid by American citizens. They increase the price, they increase inflation. And the timing couldn’t be worse because we’re just getting over an inflationary episode. And to put this inflationary pressure back on, it’s really crazy.”
Krugman identified the thing that makes this uniquely damaging, the uncertainty itself: “An unpredictable tariff rate that can change the next day really has a depressing effect on demand. And that’s clear for business investment, but it also affects consumers. It affects homebuilders. So the uncertainty is the reason why a recession seems likely.”
“The thing that’s extra damaging now is the craziness. Nobody knows what the tariff rates will be in six months. Businesses making investment decisions want to know what things are going to be like over the next five years, but nobody has the faintest idea,” Krugman warned in his Substack article.
Mark Zandi, in a LinkedIn article titled ‘U.S. Outlook: 2026 by the Numbers’, wrote, “Since President Trump announced hefty reciprocal tariffs on nearly all countries this past April, job growth has come to a near standstill.
Trade-sensitive industries, including manufacturing, agriculture, transportation and distribution, are suffering job losses. Healthcare is the only major industry still adding significantly to payrolls. And the job market’s difficulties will come into even sharper relief as the jobs data are ultimately revised down.”
The inflationary impact of tariffs is regressive; the bottom 10% of US households are expected to see their disposable income reduced by an estimated 3.5 percentage points. The people who can least afford it are paying the most.
The Land Grabs: Yes, This Is Actually Happening
Since Trump was sworn in, he has threatened to annex Greenland, strained traditional alliances with Europe, undermined the United Nations, and rattled international trade with sweeping tariffs, all within his first year.
On Greenland, the international legal community’s response was unequivocal.
Thomas Crosbie, a US military expert at the Royal Danish Defence College, stated that any attempt to seize Greenland “would constitute a criminal act, and Denmark, with the backing of its allies, would have the legal right to arrest any Americans involved and prosecute them under Danish criminal law.”
The geopolitical irony is almost poetic. Arne Bård Dalhaug, former head of the NATO Defence College, warned that Trump’s threats “come across as a gift-wrapped present from Trump to Putin, allowing him free hands in Eastern Europe.”
Foreign Policy delivered the most damning verdict on Trump’s resource grab strategy: “The biggest problem with Trump’s resource grabs is not their lack of economic foundation, which is nil, or their legality, which is none, but with what they do for US security, which is little or worse. Gunboat diplomacy is back, only this time without the diplomacy.”
Image Credits: Google Images
Sources: The Economic Times, The Indian Express, The Guardian
Find the blogger: @chirali_08
This post is tagged under: Trump, Geopolitics, Global politics, Global security, global tensions, International Relations, Iran US fight, Iran war, us iran, us Iran attack, us iran israel war, War, world politics, world war, world war 3, world war three, Chinese professor US Iran war, China Nostradamus, trump denmark, trump greenland, US, us denmark, us trump greenland, us india tariff, trump, trump tariff, trump tariff india, us india, us india relationship
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