A Season of American Madness: Spectacle, Delusion, and the Coming Reckoning

It's too soon to tell...

The United States, under President Donald Trump, joined Israel in a dramatic military campaign, bombing Iran’s nuclear sites at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan. The strikes were touted by Trump and his allies as a decisive victory — “a victory for everybody,” in Trump’s words. Huge bunker-busting bombs were dropped in a display meant to evoke the “shock and awe” of past wars. Yet almost immediately, doubts surfaced about what had actually been achieved. U.S. defense intelligence suggested Iran’s underground facilities were only temporarily set back—if at all—with key components like enriched uranium and centrifuges largely intact.

As the dust settled, I recalled Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai’s reply when asked about the French Revolution’s long-term impact: “It is too soon to tell.” The same could be said now.

Supporters of the strike quickly declared it a triumph. They equated a mountain’s mutilation with a strategic blow, insisting that Iran’s regime was weakened. The White House dismissed conflicting intelligence as “flat-out wrong,” insisting the sites were obliterated. “Everyone knows what happens when you drop fourteen 30,000-pound bombs perfectly on their targets: total obliteration,” claimed Karoline Leavitt, whose disdain for the press increasingly suggests a transition to Fox News is inevitable. Pro-Trump envoys labeled any contradictory reports “treasonous.” While at the same time, they cancel Senate Intelligence briefings. Details…. However, in the narrative outside the classified chambers, there was no failure—only victory, obscured by media skepticism. This is how failure becomes liturgy: recited not to understand the world, but to sanctify delusion.

We’ve seen these illusions before: in McNamara’s Vietnam briefings, in the “Mission Accomplished” banner over an aircraft carrier. And now, in Iran, a perilous rerun unfolds—ritualized, almost religious, in its self-deception. This campaign, marketed as strength, may in fact have strengthened Tehran’s resolve. The regime emerged bloodied but unbroken, its hardliners arguably more emboldened in their pursuit of nuclear deterrence. Yet war pundits on television still cheer, as if a punitive airstrike and a ceasefire constitute victory. This is spectacle over substance—the same old carnival two decades on. Only now, the audience has seen the show before. The encore is obscene.

Trump’s approach to Iran was not grand strategy—it was domestic grievance masquerading as foreign policy. America, under his rule, behaves like a wounded ego armed with cruise missiles. A child-king wielding nuclear power, surrounded by flatterers confusing loyalty with wisdom. Strategy, as Robert Kaplan notes, is about knowing one’s limits. Resources are finite. Public patience even more so. Statecraft must operate within those boundaries. Yet in this case, restraint was discarded for theater. A performance designed not for diplomacy but for domestic soundbites.

Look, as Ralph Ellison urged us to, at the masks. “When American life is most American, it is apt to be most theatrical,” he wrote. Our penchant for spectacle often disguises darker motives behind patriotic pageantry. In this case, the posture of strength conceals a refusal to reckon with weakness. It’s power in costume; authority borrowed through a mask.

When we see masked figures abroad, we condemn them as emblems of terror and cowardice. Yet at home, we see the same aesthetic creeping into American life: riot police in mirrored visors, ICE agents in tactical masks. The purpose is identical—to project fear while erasing accountability. Ellison’s Invisible Man taught us to strip away those veils and confront what lies beneath. He believed the writer’s job was to force a nation to see its true face. Today, that face is bloodied and twisted in denial, that is, when it’s not covered.

James Baldwin warned long ago of the delusions baked into the American psyche. White Americans especially, he wrote, are “masters of self-delusion”—able to set the world ablaze while believing themselves peacekeepers. They send sons to die for ego, oil, and vengeance, and look away when the coffins return. Baldwin wrote, “People who believe that they are the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception.”

Nations too can build elaborate myths to evade the truth of their actions. America’s myth—that it is inherently righteous even in destruction—is one such lie. Baldwin and his contemporaries saw through it from within. They understood how the country’s denial of racial violence paralleled its global denials.

And now that same lie echoes in Trumpian foreign policy. The belief that American might justifies any act, no matter how reckless. That strength equals virtue. But every lie carries a cost. Many Americans treat life, as Ellison might say, like a carnival—a fantasy wagered in patriotic colors. All aspects of society are choreographed for the Klieg lights and condensed for social media. Meanwhile, the machinery of empire spins on broken bodies. Cities fall. Families grieve. And television blares triumphalism while hiding the ruins just offscreen.

The true cost of our wars—grief, chaos, ruin—is airbrushed out of the national image. We light the world on fire and call it a fireworks display for freedom. That is self-deception weaponized. A sickness in the soul. One scholar called it “moral bankruptcy and a shortage of love.” It’s how a nation stumbles into war after war, unable or unwilling to reckon with the aftermath.

Veteran strategist Steve Schmidt has called this out. But one voice isn’t enough. We need a chorus—Americans who demand truth over narrative, principle over pageantry. Because what we’ve witnessed in Iran is not strategy. It’s the culmination of a lie identified long ago: the myth of American innocence. It’s a lie that fuels reckless misadventures under the banner of righteousness. And, as Schmidt warns, the bill for that delusion always comes due.

This is no longer about politics. It’s about moral collapse. About a nation so intoxicated by myth that it treats truth as an enemy. In such an environment, facts are treasonous, and power defines reality by decree. That is not governance. It is pathology—internal dysfunction projected onto the global stage.

But reality is stubborn. It survives propaganda. And it now reveals a hard truth: this is not the dawn of a new American century. It is the slow, solemn procession toward something darker.

Unless we bury the rot—the lies, the narcissism, the forgetfulness of history—we will go on pretending righteousness while walking blindly toward collapse.

America has entered another season of madness. Yet in this darkness lies one final opportunity. We must confront our reflection—not the glossy mask on cable news, or the compressed staccato of social media, but the bloodied face beneath. To reclaim prudence over spectacle. Truth over applause. History has left us standing at the edge.

We can still step back. But first, the music must stop. The carnival must end. And beneath the broken big-top, amid the cracked mirrors and scorched ground, the reckoning must finally begin.