By: Linda Goudsmit | pundicity
Figuratively, the term Waterloo means a crushing defeat and is a reference to the Battle of Waterloo, the final battle of the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1825), when Napoleon was decisively and conclusively defeated. An interesting June 9, 2026, article by Michel Benchimol titled, “Israel’s Right to Exist & Trump’s Iran Gamble” poses the question:
The Iran Trap: Waterloo or Victory?
Trump’s Iran policy is the true test of his transformation. He has pursued maximum pressure—sanctions, tariffs on countries trading with Iran, and repeated military threats.
In June 2025, the U.S. and Israel struck Iran’s nuclear facilities in the largest Western attack since 1979.
Iran retaliated with a missile strike on a U.S. air base in Qatar.
Then came the pivot. In April 2026, Trump announced a two-week ceasefire with Iran, framing it as a dramatic victory. Tehran has shown willingness to negotiate on uranium enrichment but talks stall over U.S. demands to limit Iran’s missiles and proxies.
Critics call it a disaster. They argue that Trump is abandoning regime change, legitimizing the Iranian regime, and failing to achieve the doctrine Netanyahu vowed to destroy. Some analysts say Iran could become Trump’s Waterloo if escalation leads to sustained conflict, U.S. casualties, and a midterm disaster for Republicans.
The risk is that Trump’s signature tactic—construct a narrative, declare it true, and force the world to submit—doesn’t work when the adversary is a state with nuclear ambitions and proxy networks.
Benchimol’s analysis ignores the foundation of President Trump’s signature “Let’s make a deal” strategy, which assumes everyone and everything has a price that can be negotiated. And President Trump’s negotiating strategy ignores 1,400 years of Islamic religious doctrine that commits Muslims to establishing a worldwide Islamic caliphate.
For me, Benchimol is dancing around the problem and revealing his own bias by presenting Trump’s “Let’s make a deal” negotiating style as if it has a possibility of success––it doesn’t. Muslims are doctrinally obligated to destroy Jews and Christians (competing ideologies) to achieve Islam’s expansionist ambition––the establishment of the worldwide Islamic caliphate. Remember, according to Islam, there will be peace on Earth when the whole world is Muslim. That is not a slogan––it is a religious doctrinal imperative.
The better question is: Can Iran be trusted as a negotiating partner?
History is a great teacher, and what we learn from history is that some enemies can be negotiated with, and some enemies must be defeated unconditionally. Iran must be defeated unconditionally to secure the peace for the Western world because Iran is ideologically, religiously, and doctrinally dedicated to establishing the worldwide Islamic caliphate.
Iran advances on its centuries-old operating principles of hudna and taqiyya. Hudna is Islam’s fraudulent signature ceasefire agreement that gives a weakened Iran time to regroup, rearm, and reattack. Taqiyya is Islam’s doctrinal religious duty to lie in the service of Islam. Iran is not moved by “peace” deals, business deals, or any other deals.
Islam is a challenger civilization with a replacement ideology that is founded in a binary, supremacist, expansionist, religious doctrine. Islam’s singular goal is to make the whole world Muslim, including America. Iran is not and never was a trustworthy negotiating partner because peace is not and never was Islam’s goal.
America’s return to the negotiating table to give Iran one more chance to become a trustworthy negotiating partner is like a battered wife returning to her abusive husband thinking that this time will be different. Being out of touch with the historical reality is a lethal choice for nations as well as for wives.
No man, not Donald Trump nor any other human being, is going to change 1,400 years of Islamic doctrine with promises of peace and profits to Muslim countries doctrinally committed to the Islamic caliphate! It is an absurdity that lives in subjective reality without foundation in objective reality.
For me, President Trump now appears more like a battered wife who continues to give her husband one more chance, because she desperately wants to be happily married, or like the wife who knows her husband is cheating but refuses to acknowledge it because she desperately wants to stay married. These are flawed strategies in marriage as well as in international affairs because denial is not a survival strategy and both deny objective reality.
In my 2011 philosophy book Dear America: Who’s Driving the Bus? I present a universal paradigm of human behavior that explains why people do what they do. I explain that a state of mind is not fixed. It is constantly shifting along the growth continuum, anywhere from total, infantile narcissism to responsible adulthood, depending upon the level and stability of the individual’s inner development and the strength of the external pressures challenging it.
We are each the whole of our life experiences. The children we once were continue to exist inside our minds. So, the narcissistic infant; the demanding two-year-old; the insecure adolescent; the rebel; the adventurer; the happy child; the angry, frightened, timid, or lonely child we once were all persist as states of mind. Each inner child is an accessible entity that seeks to be in control of the individual’s mind. The inner child’s struggle for power continues to challenge the individual’s rational adult state of mind throughout his or her lifetime.
Anytime an inner entity is at the wheel, the individual has psychologically exited the factual real world of objective reality and entered the historical feelings realm of subjective reality.
The bus is a metaphor for our psychological selves. The bus travels along the timeline that is our lifetime. It picks up new passengers as we grow and develop, each new feeling and each new experience adding another rider. The driver of the bus is always selected from the passengers aboard, and the passengers are constantly competing to determine who will drive the bus.
To understand the often inexplicable inconsistencies in an individual’s behavior, and to understand how one person can perceive us in a completely different way than another sees us, we must ask ourselves the seminal question, “Who’s driving the bus?”
Sustaining our most rational adult state of mind is the challenge for preserving our constitutional republic, because freedom is an adult enterprise. It is my opinion that President Trump is being psychologically manipulated again, just like he was psychologically manipulated during Covid-19.
During Covid-19, the globalist elite triggered President Trump’s young, frightened, germophobic entity, and now they have engaged his businessman entity. Psychological manipulation is a powerful tactical weapon in globalism’s War on America. And anytime President Trump is triggered into subjective reality, it is problematic for America.
For freedom to prevail, President Trump must demand his most rational adult presidential self be in the driver’s seat. Watching the President realign himself and desperately try to make a deal with Muslim countries in the Middle East is like watching a fish flailing and flapping around on land. It will not end well. Israel knows it. Rubio and Hegseth know it. And our enemies know it because their social engineers remain in objective reality.
I thought we had learned the lesson in WWII that you cannot make a deal with a Nazi––it does not take a genius to realize that you cannot make a deal with an Islamist either. Why? Because, like Nazis, Islamists are ideologically committed to their doctrinal goals and ideological supremacy––everything else is details.
President Trump used to know this, but like the battered wife he is desperate to give the Islamists one more chance because his overarching goal is to be the man who makes peace in the Middle East. He is as desperate as the bruised wife going back to give the battering husband one more chance.
The difference between President Trump and the battered wife are the consequences. The battered wife will eventually be battered to death; a battered president leaves America vulnerable and weakened. I no longer trust President Trump’s foreign policy decisions in the Middle East because I no longer trust the entity that is driving his bus.
Just as the police know what will eventually happen to the bruised and battered wife, anyone living in objective reality knows the outcome of Trump’s Iran Gamble.
The Iranian regime will survive and become even more brutal against its own population, and its proxies will be more emboldened to continue terrorizing Jews and Christians worldwide. A battered president leaves a trail of destruction behind him because a president living in subjective reality cannot protect America.
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Space Is No Longer the Final Frontier––Reality Is is available in paperback, hardback, and ebook formats on barnesandnoble.com, amazon.com, and directly from Ingram in paperback.
