Mad Dog
ANGLO AMERICA, 9 Mar 2026
Michael Brenner – TRANSCEND Media Service
5 Mar 2026 – Trump’s USA is like a rabid dog prowling the globe. It strikes ferociously at whomever gets in its way or encroaches on its deranged mental space or simply is available to satisfy its lusts.
If the Middle East is your neighborhood, you live in dread of the equally depraved, murderous mongrel in Jerusalem.
How can you deal with its menace? Killing it is one theoretical option. That is impossible, though, because of the creature’s abnormal strength; the only instruments up to the job militarily put all parties’ very survival at risk. That strength also precludes capture and confinement.
What that leaves are strategies that aim to induce the monster to destroy itself. That is, its diseased body – the root cause of its demented behavior – might gnaw away at it from within. In order to accelerate the process, inhabitants of the global commons should put maximum stress on its pathological condition by doing the following: inflicting physical pain in retaliation against every offense. Rough him up – the way the Taliban did, the way the Iraqis did. Bloody him as the Iranians are doing. Undercut his sense of omnipotence – the way the Chinese did using the leverage of rare earth elements. Submit him to a barrage of mockery and ridicule. Torment him emotionally via insult and humiliation wherever possible and by any means that can be mustered. Picador tactics to confuse, to harry, to distract, to disorient. Play on his insecurities and fragile ego. Take surprise initiatives to keep him off-balance. Be prepared to make sacrifices in defense of national integrity is endangered (the ultimate example being Ayatollah Khamenei‘s supposed choosing de facto suicide so as to inflame Shi’a resistance across the region to the Israeli-American onslaught).
Admittedly, a strategy of confrontation means enduring an inescapable measure of pain and injury yourself. There is no other alternative, though, to avoid being chewed up one at a time by the mad dog.
The approach sketched here also carries a different sort of potential benefit. It improves the odds, however slim they might be, that the beast’s own immune system would be reset, invigorated enough to generate the anti-bodies that could cure the illness – or, at least, ameliorate the deadly behavioral symptoms.
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This outline of a strategy to check the United States’ increasingly audacious coercive efforts to subordinate other states to Washington’s will and control had no specific government in mind. Just, ‘to whom it may concern’. When we do address the question of who might buckle on the armor and seize the sword, candidates are few and elusive.
The nations of Old Europe? A laughable proposition given their chosen vassal status to Trump’s USA. Meek leaders like Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron, Friedrich Merz. Ursula von der Leyen, and Mark Rutte cannot even muster the courage, when in the presence of “Big Daddy,” to shift their gaze from their own shoes to Trump’s shoes.
India? Prime Minister Modi has succeeding brilliantly in discrediting India’s claim to great power status by hastening to Jerusalem to embrace Netanyahu on the very eve of Israeli’s latest aggression on Iran. He did so with the aim of currying favor with Bibi’s man in the White House and the Zionist claque in Congress with the futile hope that Washington will ease the terms of its economic extortion racket which Modi hasn’t the courage to resist. A putative great power cannot afford such craven, pandering conduct.
Japan? After 80 years of pursuing a reasoned and reasonable low-profile foreign policy, Tokyo under the current leadership is flexing its growing military muscle with the declared purpose of being an auxiliary to the United States in valiant defense of Taiwan/Formosa now pronounced part of Japan’s vital national security zone.
That leaves us China and Russia that, acting in tandem, could take on the United States following a comprehensive strategy of resistance and competition. So, this is for you President Xi and President Putin.
At the moment, that seems unlikely. The key questions are:
- Do they recognize the Leviathan that the United States has become, the threat that it poses to their well-being as well as to a stable international order, and the intractability of its leaders that makes a diplomatically fostered modus vivendi a near impossibility?
- Are they prepared to make the commitment to an open-ended, comprehensive combat that the challenge dictates?
Their answers to date are more implicit than explicit, and liable to modification in light of shifting domestic as well as external circumstances. We can only draw inferences from the soft evidence now available.
On question 1: Xi shows signs of having a clearer understanding of what is driving US actions than does Putin. The latter, although a very rational person who is dispassionate in thought and action, nonetheless possesses an evident, strong attachment to the goal of working out more or less cordial relationship with the United States – despite the manifest lack of his interlocutors having a matching accommodating attitude and a record serial duplicity.
On question 2: neither Russia nor China is ready to pick up the cudgels to do battle with a United States bent on imperial adventure and eliminating both of them as serious rivals – for complex and not identical reasons. Ukraine and Taiwan being the only two places where confrontation impels implacable opposition.
There are twin dangers in Moscow and Beijing’s strategy of restraint and patience.
The rapid pace at which Washington is extending and escalating its campaign of global domination carries the risk that it will come close to realizing its grandiose ambitions before its potential rivals are in a position to mobilize themselves to prevent that outcome.
Second, the recklessness of US unstable leadership, emboldened by the former’ passivity, could lead to an acute crisis wherein the inadvertent stake is national integrity – thereby, raising the specter of cataclysmic war. Iran already poses the deeply troubling possibility that an Israel, led by apocalyptic fanatics and facing an end to its viability as a state, could resort to nuclear weapons – and then all bets are off for everyone. Or, they might threaten to do so unless the USA invade Iran on the ground.
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Michael Brenner is professor of international affairs at the University of Pittsburgh; a senior fellow at the Center for Transatlantic Relations, SAIS-Johns Hopkins (Washington, D.C.), contributor to research and consulting projects on Euro-American security and economic issues. Publishes and teaches in the fields of US foreign policy, Euro-American relations, and the European Union. mbren@pitt.edu – More…
Tags: Anglo America, Anti-hegemony, Anti-imperialism, Evil empire, Psychopathy, Rogue states, State Terrorism, Trump, US empire, USA
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 9 Mar 2026.
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