Carlsbad, CA
June 17, 2025

by Rich Scheck

Trump’s effort to intimidate the Mullahs into capitulating to his unilateral demand for zero enrichment is unlikely to succeed.

The Iranian leaders are arguably as fanatical and self-destructive as the zealots currently
motivating the Netanyahu regime’s plan for Greater Israel.

Lying just below the surface of Bibi’s latest escalation is the punitive notion of the Samson Option that Seymour Hersch described back in 1991 as the policy of taking down your enemies with you as a final act if defeat seems inevitable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Samson_Option:_Israel’s_Nuclear_Arsenal_and_American_Foreign_Policy

Irrespective if Trump even knows that his threat to annihilate Tehran and kill the Ayatollah lacks not only constitutional authorization from Congress but any validity under international law, his need to adapt bullying tactics as part of whatever deal-making strategy his years of real estate negotiations have implanted in his brain is inadequate to defuse this crisis.

This artless brinksmanship not only imperils his MAGA base and America’s national security, his reckless posturing represents a perilous course of violence that conceivably can take down most of human civilization.

It is imperative that all rational citizens here in the State’s heed the warnings of those loudly rejecting Trump’s misguided embrace of the very Neocon policies he recently denounced in his West Point and Saudi speeches.

Congress must immediately evoke the constraints of its war powers along with widespread
media condemnation and citizen protest across the entire political spectrum.

Sadly, Trump has morphed into the authoritarian figure his detractors portrayed him as being by ignoring the non-interventionist pledge to avoid more failed foreign wars that distinguished him from his Democratic opponents over the last three election cycles.

With new evidence emerging that the Samson Option is more than just an academic possibility, the level of danger is now flashing red in ways that make the Cuban Missile Crisis seem almost tame by comparison. https://stateofthenation.info/?p=23190

Focused action by the UN Security Council, world leaders, American politicians, the media and the US Body Politic is needed now to stop this Armaggedon Scenario and find a more peaceful way forward for us all.