Terry Glavin: Trump reaps the spoils of a global dumpster fire - National Post

U.S. President Donald Trump attends a meeting on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York on Sept. 22, 2026. Photo by Chip Somodevilla / Getty ImagesArticle content“To the victor belong the spoils,” U.S. President Donald Trump told the assembled diplomats and heads of state at the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Tuesday. Meant as a realpolitik rationale for his expropriation of Venezuela’s oil wealth, the banality serves just as well to explain quite a lot about the stubborn reluctance of America’s traditional allies to throw themselves behind Trump’s calamitous misadventures in the Strait of Hormuz.

After all, if the U.S. war on Iran is just another smash-and-grab operation that would leave the Khomeinist regime intact in the same way that the White House has colluded with the Bolivarian regime to dispossess the Venezuelan people of something like 65 million barrels of oil, what would be the point?

Columnist Jesse Kline keeps you up to date with what’s happening in Israel and the effects of antisemitism on life here in Canada. Friday mornings.

A welcome email is on its way. If you don't see it, please check your junk folder.

The next issue of Channel Israel will soon be in your inbox.

We encountered an issue signing you up. Please try again

During his visit to Ireland earlier this month, Trump reiterated the preference he’s more than once expressed for an Iranian endgame involving some kind of collaboration with a faction of the Khomeinist regime that would be allowed to stay in power. Trump said the U.S. would sooner or later end its military entanglement “unless ⁠we decide to stay and keep the oil like Venezuela.” In this way, he inadvertently answered the question he posed on his Truth Social platform on Sept. 1: “When are the Iranian people going to rise up and fight?”

The Iranian people did rise up and fight, in their millions, roused in no small part by Trump’s pledge in January: “Iranian Patriots, keep protesting – take over your institutions!!! Help is on the way.” And they did keep protesting, and they died in their thousands, and help came in the form of a war that has engulfed the Middle East, sent shudders through the global economy, alienated the United States’ traditional allies in the region and strengthened America’s primary adversary: the People’s Republic of China.

As recently as June, a reasonably creditable poll showed that public opinion in Iran was divided, with 44 per cent of respondents expressing a positive attitude towards their erstwhile American saviour and 44 per cent expressing a negative view. Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, the last person on Earth you’d call accommodating of the regime in Tehran, earned a 51 per cent favourable rating. One shudders to think what a similar poll would show now.