War With Iran: The Emperor Has No Clothes — And the Tailor Is Lying
- john raymond
- Jun 20
- 3 min read
Vladimir Putin needs a miracle in Ukraine. He cannot win outright; he cannot admit defeat. What he can do is change the subject. A widening Israel-Iran confrontation offers exactly that diversion—fracturing NATO attention, draining Western ammunition, and turning global headlines from Kharkiv to Qom. To pull it off he needs one reliable instrument: President Donald Trump.
Trump is tailor-made for the role—an emperor convinced he wears robes of strategic genius even as he parades naked through a minefield of his own making. His public statements shift hourly: Iran must surrender; Iran wants to negotiate; America controls the skies; Europe is irrelevant; bunker-busters are ready; diplomacy still possible—but only on his terms.
Each claim contradicts the last, yet the spectacle advances because the tailors keep flattering the emperor’s vanity. Chief among them is Benjamin Netanyahu, who assures Trump that decisive American strikes will tame Tehran and rescue Israel. In truth, they will rescue Moscow by yanking Washington into a second theater just as Russia bleeds in the first.
The pattern is unmistakable. When Bush sought war in Iraq, his cabinet stitched together weapons of mass destruction, al-Qaeda links, and humanitarian liberation into a single garment of inevitability. When Putin invaded Ukraine, he draped himself in invented NATO threats, phantom biolabs, and the supposed plight of ethnic Russians.
Now Trump rehearses the same pageant: whispered terror plots, satellite images of suspicious bunkers, warnings of an Iranian breakout forever “weeks away.” None need withstand scrutiny; they need only overlap until the public stops sorting truth from fiction.
Meanwhile, the institutions meant to challenge him—Congress, the foreign-policy establishment, large swaths of the media—hesitate. Some fear being labeled weak on Iran, others cling to polling minutiae, still others hope the crisis will pass without confrontation. All the while Putin watches, certain that every hour spent guessing at Trump’s next Tweet is an hour not spent arming Kyiv.
This is how the con works: Trump, the naked emperor, struts toward war; Netanyahu, the lying tailor, embroiders flattery and urgency; Putin applauds from a distance, eager for Western attention to fracture.
The cost will be borne by American service members asked to enforce a mission stitched from ego and misdirection—and by civilians across the Middle East who will pay for an imperial delusion.
We face the fable’s decisive moment. Do we stand in silence, afraid to be the first voice that says the emperor is unclothed? Or do we ask, loudly and relentlessly, the questions that strip the illusion bare? Why is a president with collapsing domestic credibility demanding yet another war of choice? Why must American troops fight a conflict that chiefly benefits foreign powers? Why should we trust a man whose every crisis has been padded with lies?
The danger is not merely that Trump may march us into catastrophe. It is that we might march with him, applauding invisible garments because doing so feels easier than naming the obvious.
But illusions survive only so long as spectators agree to see them. The moment one citizen points and says “He has nothing on,” the spell breaks.
So ask the question—ask it in every newsroom, every legislative hearing, every dinner table: Why is the emperor naked?
Ask it until the courtiers fall silent and the tailors flee. Ask it before the first missiles fly and the news cycle gives way to mourning banners. Ask it because Putin is counting on our silence, Netanyahu is profiting from our distraction, and Trump is relying on our reluctance to speak the simplest, most dangerous truth:
There are no clothes, only lies, and the nakedness leads directly to war.
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