Martin Jay – Strategic Review March 11, 2026

Join up the dots and you come to the same conclusion. America and Israel are the biggest losers in the Iran war. But not Trump.

A recent poll in the U.S. concluded that Donald Trump tells the truth only about 3 percent of the time during his public announcements at press conferences. Perhaps it was his stint at being a celebrity on TV that taught him how gullible people in America are when fed the most fanciful, moronic lies a leading figure can tell, through the American media. Of course, it’s also about the journalists as well, and if there’s one thing that the Trump administrations have taught us, it is how poor the general level of journalism is in America these days. American journalists are not afraid to ask difficult questions or disbelieve what they are told. They simply don’t know how to do this in the first place.

Covering the Iran war, it is breathtaking, some of the brazen lies he tells while being questioned by journalists who are complicit in his dirty work. The mere idea that Iran, for example, acquired a Tomahawk missile and used it to kill its own schoolgirls is beyond absurd. How could journalists not question such a reply when it is so clear that Trump is lying through his teeth?

Because of this lying, we can see how Trump works, though. Unlike other U.S. presidents who have some shame and discomfort in lying to the press, Trump suffers no such handicap and so can take on bolder, more daring ventures on the global stage. In this environment, there is no respect for international law or even due process within the political framework of how Congress works. Trump hasn’t worked out how to defeat Iran, but he has all the contingent narratives to lay out afterwards to explain why everything that goes wrong is not his fault. We see that he is already preparing himself for the day of judgement by the press pack in the coming days and weeks by telling them that it was Jared Kushner, Marco Rubio and Steve Witkoff who told him to hit Iran.

The direction towards these three is revealing. Of course, we have learned the simple rule of Trump when it comes to decisions. When things go well, everything was his decision; when things go badly, blame others.

And so, the blaming of these three is a clear example and acknowledgement by Trump that the Iran war was a failure. The U.S. didn’t bring about regime change nor seek any military concessions from its government. In fact, it’s really hard to establish one minor point where you could say that the Americans chalked up any kind of victory, given the high energy prices around the world and the Straits of Hormuz still closed to oil tankers. Despite the U.S. being a net exporter of oil, the crisis is raising pump prices back home, and so it is Trump’s support base of blue-collar workers who are, once again, paying the price for his failed policies.

This last point about the Straits of Hormuz is worth taking stock of when we examine Trump’s lies, which just get increasingly fatuous by the day. It’s like we’re dealing with a child in power who has lost sense of any of the realities around him. One of Trump’s claims which he repeats over and over again is that the U.S. navy has completely destroyed its Iranian counterpart, and that all ships have been sunk. And yet there is no video evidence at all to support this, official or even just phone footage from even one U.S. sailor’s phone. Could this be another massive Trump lie, given that he is struggling to prove to the American people or the press that the operation has been a success? Very convenient that all Iranian vessels happen to have been sunk. Perhaps the truth sunk and the Iranian vessels are still operational. The saddest thing is that not one American “journalist” is even able at a press conference, or even in their copy, to ask the most obvious question about this claim, which is: “If there is no Iranian navy, then why are the Straits of Hormuz still closed to ships passing through?”

Or is it that the Iranian navy has been destroyed, but Iran’s control of the shipping and its threat against America’s aircraft carriers is so strong and prevalent that the U.S. navy doesn’t have the capability to break the siege?

Trump is busy building up a case to make him look less culpable in the whole war, which in itself is a massive admission that it has all gone horribly wrong. These indicators are subtle and sometimes are not easy to spot, like his recent comment that GCC countries helped the U.S. bomb Iran. So the mighty U.S. navy, air force and army did not come up to scratch and had to rely on regional partners? The president needs some help here with his messaging, as he is clearly trying to spread the blame and reduce his own importance, perhaps as a ploy to not only protect himself from impeachment but from facing international criminal courts.

The lie that GCC countries bombed Iran is even more laughable than the one about Iran bombing its own schoolgirls, but with no real journalists around who are even able to ask the most obvious questions, he’ll be able to get away with it, despite the odd dichotomy of logic shooting himself in the foot. The truth about the so-called Iran War is that almost nothing we see on our TV screens is anywhere near the truth. Sometimes it is simply omission, as in the case of the real level of destruction in Israel, which is not being reported due to a shameful agreement struck between U.S. networks and Israel to block the truth and only show bombs which have hit civilian targets rather than military ones. The biggest lie possibly concerns the reasons behind it, although blithering buffoons like Lindsey Graham can hardly keep the lid on it. Money. Do even Trump’s more vociferous supporters doubt for one moment that he hasn’t made billions out of it by manipulating markets?

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