Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 02, 2026
by Tony Wikrent
War
The Math Behind The U.S. Defeat in Iran
Spencer Ackerman, 30 July 2026 [forever-wars.com]
… By spreading out missile and drone attacks across a wide arc of U.S.-used or aligned military bases and civilian infrastructure (energy, data and desalination facilities) spanning from Kuwait to the United Arab Emirates—and now spreading inland—Iran has forced the U.S. into firing off lots of its interceptors. It also successfully attacked on-base radars that the interceptors rely on for accuracy. While story after story reported that Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned about the limited supply of interceptors, known as magazine depth, President Trump insisted that the U.S. had sufficient capability to fend off Iranian attacks.
The actual magazine depth of the U.S. military is understandably classified. But yesterday, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a think tank with impeccable establishment credentials—Kissinger was a trustee—published an estimate of the current state of U.S. interceptor stocks. I don’t know what exactly I expected, but the burn rate of the interceptors is so extreme as to make this war look doomed from the outset.
According to CSIS, the U.S. had 2330 Patriot (smaller, short-range) interceptors and 452 THAAD (larger, long-range) interceptors at the start of the war. Five months later, it has between 759 and 827 Patriot interceptors and between 234 and 278 THAADs. Those aren’t figures for the interceptors the U.S. has in the Middle East. They’re the figures for all the interceptors the U.S. has, period.
In other words, the U.S. has so far used up around 66 percent of its Patriot stocks and around 40 percent, conservatively, of its THAADs. It did that in five months across a war it chose. A war that Trump said would be won in four to five weeks.
The rate of expenditure hasn’t been static in those five months. Remember that there was a ceasefire declared on April 8. CSIS’ figures, understandably, show the most intense period of interceptor usage occurring in just the first five weeks of the war. All this helps explain why Trump had to pursue a ceasefire in the first place….
U.S. general warns Pentagon he lacks sufficient forces to protect Israel
The top U.S. general in Europe privately warned the Pentagon this week that he lacks sufficient naval forces to continue protecting Israel from incoming ballistic missiles, officials said, illustrating how the ongoing Iran war has imposed constraints on the military.
Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, the head of U.S. European Command, sent written notification to senior Pentagon officials saying that without another Navy destroyer he will be forced to choose defense of the United States “homeland” over that of Israel, said the officials, who like some others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the correspondence.
Israel and US consider Iran land blockade
Connor Stringer, July 31, 2026 [The Telegraph, via yahoo.com/news]
The United States and Israel are discussing a possible land blockade of Iran, The Telegraph can reveal.
The proposal is one of several options being explored by Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu to ratchet up economic pressure on the regime after months of strikes and a prolonged campaign failed to bring it to heel….
Iran shares borders with Iraq, Turkey, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Armenia and Azerbaijan, meaning the leaders would have to persuade these countries, many of which they are not allied with, to co-operate.
Washington may view Pakistan and Iraq, which are not considered its close allies in the region, as weak links.
If any of the seven countries bordering Iran agreed to co-operate, they would face their own economic consequences and the threat of retaliatory strikes by the Islamic Republic….
Trump not violating any law
‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’
Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025
‘The Boss Wants This Money’: Inside Trump’s Unprecedented Fundraising Operation
Josh Dawsey, Dana Mattioli, Annie Linskey and Emily Glazer, July 30, 2026 [Wall Street Journal, via PoliticsNC]
Almost every night in the White House, President Trump calls his fundraiser, Meredith O’Rourke, for an update.Trump asks O’Rourke which companies and donors have cut checks and which haven’t, and for how much. He often asks her to make much larger financial requests than she was planning—for some donors the ask is $5 million, for others it is $50 million. And the president gives her names to call, often including people who have recently met with him, according to people with knowledge of the calls.“This is very important to the president. He’s asked me to call you and ask you for this donation,” O’Rourke has relayed on phone calls with companies, persistently following up with them. In some calls, she has referred to Trump as the boss, saying “the boss wants this money.” In turn, Trump has called her the “princess of darkness” because she is such a “killer” with donors, according to people who have heard his comments….Trump stands out for taking personal control of the fundraising, and no sitting American president has ever raised these amounts for his pet projects. At the same time, companies have paid new attention to the White House as Trump has gotten involved in regulatory decisions that once were made by independent agencies, dramatically shifting the balance of power across Washington.Trump has been demanding large checks from companies for a range of political and legacy projects—telling executives and lobbyists that their companies should give $25 million or $50 million. He has sometimes offered donors special access….“Trump is shattering all fundraising paradigms in regards to hitting up corporate America for donations. The scope is mind-bogglingly large,” said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian at Rice University. “We used to talk about the Lincoln bedroom being for sale, but this is just a wholesale money trough that’s totally different.” Critics alleged in the 1990s that the Clinton administration allowed overnight stays in the White House’s Lincoln bedroom in exchange for campaign contributions….The White House referred requests for comment to Alvarez. She said the president is the “most successful fundraiser in modern political history” and that Trump plans to use the money to “help Republicans win big in the midterms, build an enduring political infrastructure and continue advancing innovative private-sector initiatives.”“One thing has never changed. President Trump can’t be bought,” she said….Several CEOs and board members said they believe there is a link between their contributions and their access to the president. One chairman of a publicly traded company said that if you give the money, you know you are either checked on a list, or crossed off a list if you don’t….Companies have traded notes about what Wall Street analyst Blair Levin calls “The Trump Transaction Tax,” or a payment outside of the cost of normal business. “Another way of saying it,” Levin said, “is simply that we’re replacing the free market with the market for Trump’s affections.” ….
Christopher Armitage, Aug 01, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]
Trump’s Constitutional Dictatorship
Mark Danner [The New York Review, August 20, 2026 issue]
Reviewed:
Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump
by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan SwanSimon and Schuster, 464 pp., $34.00… The scene is irresistible: the president of the United States sitting at the Resolute Desk and comparing himself blithely to Mao, Hitler, and Stalin. Still, what does it tell us? That a tireless and amoral will to power is deeply embedded in Donald Trump’s narcissism and vanity is not exactly a revelation: anyone who has watched him perform a ninety-minute stand-up routine before a crowd of supporters—drinking in, with almost erotic delight, the fervent worship of thousands—cannot have failed to notice. And after the undermining of NATO, the destruction of USAID, and the calamity of the Iran war, Trump’s name is more likely to appear on lists of leaders who have diminished their country’s power than lists of those who have increased it. But that he has become one of the most powerful American presidents—that he has since his second inauguration “put on a demonstration of raw executive power the country had not seen since the presidency of FDR”—is well-nigh indisputable. One could go further and say that not only has Trump, like Roosevelt and Lincoln, successfully imposed on the world’s first modern democracy a “constitutional dictatorship,” he is the only president to have done so in the absence of a true emergency.
How did he do it? Aggressively, brutally, relentlessly—weren’t we all watching him? The more specific answer is that he did it by exploiting the chief executive’s myriad emergency powers or, as Haberman and Swan rather politely phrase it, by “redefin[ing] the very concept of an ‘emergency.’” Another way to put it is that Trump did what Trump does as easily as he breathes: he lied. Is the trade deficit, in uninterrupted existence for half a century, an emergency? Can a country leading the world in energy production be said to be undergoing an “energy emergency”? Can we consider that the southern border, where crossings dropped 77 percent after Joe Biden’s executive order limiting entry, remains in the grip of a “border emergency”? The answer is no. But it doesn’t matter. In issuing more than 140 executive orders in his first hundred days in office—Roosevelt issued ninety-nine—Trump declared that the country was beset by no fewer than ten separate emergencies.
And in the face of this supposedly unprecedented onslaught the president must have unprecedented powers to confront them….
Trump’s National Killer Police Force
[The Intercept, July 24, 2026]
Within the span of a week, federal immigration agents shot and killed two people in Maine and Texas, and another was hit by a truck and killed in Florida after trying to avoid ICE agents. A fourth person recently died in ICE custody after reportedly being denied medication.
Their deaths prompted yet another round of questioning as to how federal immigration agents have amassed so much power and so little accountability. This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Akela Lacy speaks with Naureen Shah, of the American Civil Liberties Union, and Nayna Gupta, of the American Immigration Council, on the consequences of allowing the government to build a national policing force that’s bringing Trump’s war on immigrants into communities across the country.
“The $240 billion injection that the Trump administration has given ICE and Border Patrol make these agencies — which already were the largest federal law enforcement agencies — make them far larger than anything that we’ve seen at the federal law enforcement level,” says Shah. “Their budgets are bigger than that of many, actually most militaries around the world.” ….
