The War That's Cracking Everything Open

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Trump’s at war with Iran. That part’s official. What’s less noticed is that he’s also at war with Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, the Wall Street Journal editorial board, and—if you read between the lines—chunks of his own advisers.

This is what happens when you go kinetic without consensus.

The Iran conflict has become a Rorschach test for everything broken about how Washington actually works right now. You’ve got White House staff getting warned not to insider-trade on the fighting. You’ve got the President publicly attacking media figures who dared question the decision. You’ve got European NATO allies quietly panicking that Trump will use their reluctance to back the war as justification to torch the alliance entirely. And you’ve got British leadership talking about how “shocks” like this conflict are becoming the new normal—a comment that reads less like analysis and more like a cry for help.

Let me walk through what’s actually happening here, because the individual threads matter less than the pattern they’re forming.

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When Your Own People Won’t Get In Line

Here’s the thing nobody’s saying directly: Trump’s advisers didn’t all want this war. According to reporting on how individual members of his administration felt in the leadup, there was real disagreement. But once the President decided, that became irrelevant. The machinery moved. The strikes happened. Now everyone’s supposed to perform loyalty.

Except some of them won’t.

When Carlson and Kelly—both part of the broader Fox ecosystem that’s usually friendly to Trump—started criticizing the Iran operation, Trump didn’t ignore it. He went after them by name in social media posts described as “lengthy” and “starkly personal.” That’s not presidential restraint. That’s not even normal political pushback. That’s panic dressed up as aggression.

I think what’s actually happening is that Trump knows this war doesn’t have the kind of unified support that makes a conflict sustainable. Iraq had Congress. Afghanistan had post-9/11 fear. This? This has Trump’s decision-making, which is real, but it doesn’t have the broader buy-in that usually gets people to shut up and fall in line. So when his own media allies start asking hard questions, it threatens the entire narrative.

The personal attacks are a tell. They suggest he’s vulnerable on this one.

The Insider Trading Angle That Nobody’s Really Discussing

Here’s a sentence that should alarm you: the White House had to warn staff explicitly not to engage in insider trading during wartime.

Let that sit for a second.

The fact that this warning was necessary—that there was apparently enough suspicious activity to warrant a directive—suggests something genuinely rotten about how intelligence and markets are interfacing. Someone, or multiple someones, had information about when things were about to pop off militarily and traded on it. Prediction markets. Oil futures. The timing was suspicious enough that the administration noticed and had to send out an all-hands memo.

We’re not talking about normal political corruption here. We’re talking about people using real-time knowledge of military operations—knowledge that only exists because they work in the White House—to make money. That’s the kind of thing that in previous eras would’ve triggered actual consequences. Now it triggers a memo.

My read is that this happened more than once, and they got caught more than once, and nobody’s going to jail because the administration needs those people to function.

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NATO’s Death Spiral, Coming Into Focus

Trump still wants Greenland. Let me just put that out there because it matters for context. While he’s fighting Iran, he’s also still fixated on acquiring Greenland. That’s not a joke—that’s a statement about priorities and mental real estate.

But the NATO stuff is urgent. Trump is explicitly using Europe’s reluctance to back the Iran war as ammunition for his larger argument that NATO is dead weight. He’s saying: look, when it actually matters, when America’s fighting, where are our allies? They’re not there.

The problem with that argument—and the reason it’s working—is that it’s partially true. European nations did express reluctance. They didn’t commit troops. They didn’t get behind this the way they did (eventually) get behind Afghanistan.

But here’s what Trump’s not saying: NATO was built for a different kind of conflict. It’s a mutual-defense alliance premised on the idea of collective security against territorial aggression. Iran isn’t a NATO theater. It never was. You can’t reasonably expect the alliance structure designed for defending Berlin in 1952 to automatically activate for operations in the Middle East in 2025.

That nuance won’t matter. Trump doesn’t traffic in nuance. He’ll use European hesitation as proof that the alliance is obsolete, and by Q3 or Q4, he’ll probably start the formal process of either withdrawing or restructuring it. And the Europeans—who’ve spent seventy years assuming America would always be there—will be left scrambling to figure out what European defense actually looks like.

My prediction: at least one major NATO member announces independent military spending increases or autonomous command structures by September 2025.

Starmer’s “We Can’t Control Events Abroad” Problem

The British Prime Minister said something interesting and honestly pretty damning: “We should not be at the mercy of events abroad.”

He’s right. And he’s helpless.

Starmer’s making this statement because the Iran conflict is a “shock” and it’s becoming clear that these shocks are happening more frequently. He’s not wrong. But he’s also acknowledging something that no modern government really wants to admit: you can plan domestic policy all you want, and then some external event forces your hand.

For the UK specifically, this is particularly acute because they’re still dealing with post-Brexit recalibration, domestic economic pressure, and now this. Every bit of political capital they spend reacting to Tehran is political capital they’re not spending on fixing housing or the NHS or whatever else they promised.

The Greens are already hammering Labour on housing—accusing them of failing to build enough social and affordable homes. Plaid Cymru is running on payments for children, GPs, and economic growth. These are the fights Starmer wants to be having. Instead, he’s managing a war he didn’t start and can’t fully control.

That’s the actual damage of the Iran conflict for UK politics. Not the direct military impact—it’s the distraction tax.

The Channel Crossings Keep Happening

While all of this is unfolding—trade wars brewing, NATO fragmenting, insider trading memos circulating—people are still dying trying to cross the English Channel.

Four people died attempting to board boats. Thirty-seven are in hospitals. And around thirty others just kept going anyway.

This matters because it shows that the stuff we’re talking about at the policy level—wars, alliances, economic signals—doesn’t actually touch the desperation that drives someone to risk their life on a rubber boat in cold water. The war with Iran won’t stop Channel crossings. NATO collapsing won’t stop them. The political debate in Westminster won’t stop them.

But Starmer has to deal with both the geopolitical shock and the domestic humanitarian crisis simultaneously. And voters will remember whichever one he fails at first.

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What I’m Watching

• Trump’s NATO withdrawal timeline: Watch for specific language about “restructuring” versus full withdrawal. If he starts using the word “reimagined,” that’s your signal he’s sketching out the architecture for a post-NATO relationship. The trigger will be the next European pushback on Iran-related operations or spending.

• Section 702 surveillance complaints in practice: The intelligence court objected to systems that can filter Americans’ messages outside querying limits. That’s a technical complaint with political teeth. If whistleblowers start citing this specific objection within the next 60-90 days, expect congressional hearings and potential Trump retaliation against whoever authorized the leaks.

• Oil futures traders getting indicted (or not): Someone profited from knowledge of military timing. If by June 2025 we haven’t seen at least one indictment in connection with the insider trading surge, assume the administration killed the investigation. If we do see indictments, watch whether they’re actually big names or just mid-level staffers taking the fall.

• How the next “shock” event is handled domestically: Starmer said shocks are becoming frequent. The next one—whether it’s a supply chain disruption, another conflict escalation, or something else—will show whether governments have actually learned to manage external chaos or just gotten better at pretending they can.