Trump's need for glorification
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Trump's need for glorification is the explanation John Kiriakou offers for why the 2026 Iran war happened at all. The premise is a claim about character: "one thing about Donald Trump's personality is that he craves glorification", "constant glorification."

The smaller version

The examples Kiriakou gives are naming rights. In the middle of the night, Trump added his own name to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, "one of the most beautiful buildings in the entire country", so that it now reads as the Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Center.

Two others involve leverage rather than signature: withholding highway funds unless Dulles International Airport is renamed for him, and blocking completion of a New York City subway tunnel unless the George Washington Bridge is renamed the Donald J. Trump Bridge.

Why that isn't enough

Kiriakou's argument is that renaming buildings cannot deliver what Trump is after: "Real glory to him can only come with war."

The specific place in history he identifies as the prize: "the president who overthrew the Iranian government when every other president since Jimmy Carter failed", followed by peace and prosperity across the Middle East, "and now it's the land of milk and honey and everybody's going to live happily ever after."

Who sold him the house of cards

The reason the plan failed, in Kiriakou's account, is that Trump believed the Iranian government would collapse the moment the first shot was fired, and he attributes that belief to a particular constituency: "these wealthy Iranian-Americans, mostly in Southern California," who "convinced him that the whole was a house of cards and that it was so unstable the first rocket would make the whole thing fall apart."

It did not. "And they're not afraid of our missiles. And they have 92 million people. And the country is the size of all of Western Europe."

That leaves, in his framing, only two options and no good one: keep launching "pinprick missile attacks, because they can take those for the next hundred years", or put troops on the ground "and then tell Americans to expect 10,000 dead soldiers in the next 6 months. So now we're stuck."

"Obliterated"

On Trump's claim that the Iranian nuclear programme had been obliterated, Kiriakou offers three possibilities and no fourth: "either he lied, he was tricked, or he's too stupid to know that he wasn't able to obliterate it."

He notes the thirty-ton bomb used the previous year was dropped on a site where "they had an idea where it was. They weren't sure if there was anything in it."

The cost to American credibility

The consequence Kiriakou singles out as most damaging is not military. Russia announced it would no longer take part in US-brokered settlement talks with Ukraine, on the grounds that the United States had been ostensibly negotiating with Iran and then attacked it.

The Russian reasoning, as he relays it: "Why should we trust the Americans to broker talks with Ukraine when they could just as soon turn around and attack us in the middle of the talks?" Kiriakou's verdict on that objection: "I think that's exactly right."

See also

- John Kiriakou
- 2026 Iran war
- Donald Trump
