George Monbiot got it right about Donald Trump’s attack on Iran for a simple reason: he looked past the noise and asked the one question that matters in war—why? His answer was brutal in its clarity: “The real reason for this attack is spectacle.”
That diagnosis has aged well in the space of about five minutes.
Within days of the bombing, the White House produced a dizzying carousel of explanations. It was about nuclear weapons. No—about regime change. Actually, about an “imminent threat.” Or perhaps about protecting allies. Or retaliation for something else entirely. The justifications spun so fast they could have powered a small wind farm. Even senior officials struggled to keep the story straight.
Monbiot’s point was that incoherence isn’t accidental; it’s revealing. When a government launches a war and cannot settle on a reason, the reason probably isn’t strategic at all. It is theatrical. Trump has always practised politics as performance—grand gestures, maximal headlines, the geopolitical equivalent of smashing a chair over someone in professional wrestling. The missiles are real, but the logic is scripted for television.
That’s why Monbiot also called Trump a “global chaos generator.” Chaos is not a bug of this style of leadership; it is the feature. Disorder creates drama. Drama creates attention. Attention is the currency.
And attention, as every demagogue understands, beats accountability.
Monbiot also reminded audiences of the longer memory of the Middle East: coups, interventions and clever schemes whose “short-term brilliance” ages into decades of blowback. History suggests that when Western powers stride into Iran convinced of their own strategic genius, the results tend to look less like chess and more like slapstick.
So Monbiot’s critique stings because it strips the event of its heroic soundtrack. Not a grand strategic gambit. Not a civilisational struggle. Just the world’s most powerful military pressed into service for the oldest motive in politics: spectacle.
And spectacle, as it turns out, is a very poor reason to start a war.
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