The Emperor Has No Clothes: One Man’s Delusion Brought the World to the Edge

Let me start with what happened in the past week, because without that context, none of what follows will make sense.

On 7 April, a two-week ceasefire was announced. The world breathed. Oil prices dropped. Markets soared. Lebanese families displaced by Israeli bombing started packing to go home. Then the whole thing fell apart almost immediately.

Israel bombed Lebanon within hours of the announcement, killing 254 people. The Strait of Hormuz remained effectively closed, with Iran charging over a million dollars per ship for any vessel it permitted to pass. US Vice President JD Vance spent 21 hours in Islamabad in direct talks with Iranian officials and came home empty-handed. By 13 April, Trump had announced a full naval blockade of Iran’s ports and coastline. As of 14 April, oil prices are near $100 a barrel, the blockade is in force, Iran’s armed forces are on maximum combat alert, and the ceasefire is barely holding together.

I watched Jeffrey Sachs — Professor at Columbia University, one of America’s most respected economists and a former senior United Nations adviser — sit down with Glenn Diesen to make sense of all this. What he said was blunt, well-evidenced, and largely absent from mainstream coverage. I am going to walk you through his argument, and where I checked against other sources, I will tell you what I found.

There is no grand strategy. There is only chaos.

The first and most important thing Sachs established was this: stop looking for a coherent plan behind the day-to-day noise. There is not one.

He described the sequence — ceasefire announcement, carpet bombing of Beirut, a 21-hour negotiating marathon with no agreed framework, talks that collapsed, then a naval blockade declared on a Sunday morning on a social media platform — and reached a conclusion that many analysts are reluctant to state publicly: there is no deeper intelligence beneath any of it. It is chaos. One decision contradicts the last. Positions shift between news cycles. Frameworks that Trump publicly endorsed as a basis for negotiation were never raised again once the talks actually began.

I checked this against what the Council on Foreign Relations published on 14 April. CFR senior fellows Max Boot and James Lindsay asked the obvious question: if the problem is an Iranian blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, how does declaring a US counter-blockade help? Their conclusion was unambiguous: with two competing blockades in place, the standoff is a high-stakes test of which side blinks first — and they said they would not bet against Iran.

When the establishment foreign policy class in Washington is writing sentences like that, chaos is not a perspective. It is the observable situation.

Israel wants destruction. The United States wants an exit. These are not the same war.

Sachs was direct about a second, deeper layer of the problem. This is not a unified campaign with shared objectives. It is two partners pulling in opposite directions at every decision point.

Israel wants Iran destroyed as a functioning state and a regional power. That has been Netanyahu’s stated goal for thirty years — it is not hidden. The United States, or at least the part of it not controlled by one man’s impulses, wants an exit that it can dress up as a victory. Sachs told Democracy Now! in March that what drives this war at its core is “two malignant narcissists, Netanyahu and Trump, leading us to disaster.”

The ceasefire announced on 7 April exposed the gap between those two sets of interests with brutal clarity. Pakistan, the mediator, said explicitly that the ceasefire included Lebanon. Iran said so. Israel immediately said it did not — and bombed Beirut to prove the point. The United States hemmed and hawed, then quietly sided with Israel. The moment any restraint appeared on the table, Israel escalated. That is the pattern. It has been the pattern since the war began on 28 February.

Trita Parsi, co-founder of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and one of the most rigorous Iran analysts working in Washington, has been tracking what he calls the increasing desperation of the American position. He describes the blockade announcement as a symptom of a strategy that has run out of ideas — and notes Iran’s long-term economic control over Hormuz and its growing confidence in its ability to outlast American political will. He has also argued that the blockade threat should be read partly as a negotiating tactic rather than a terminal escalation, since neither side has formally declared that diplomacy is finished.

The distinction matters. But it does not change the fundamental reality that Sachs identifies: the US and Israel want different outcomes, and Israel has consistently been able to drag the US toward its more maximalist position.

Netanyahu sold Trump a war. And Trump bought it.

In a piece published in Consortium News on 10 April, Sachs laid out the inside account of how the war decision was made — drawing on reporting from the New York Times that was detailed, sourced, and not disputed by anyone involved. Netanyahu and the Mossad chief flew to Washington and pitched the war to Trump in a small group. The CIA director, the chairman of the joint chiefs, and JD Vance were all reportedly skeptical. Some in the room considered it farcical. But Trump said yes. The pitch: Iranian leaders were meeting together, and US-Israeli forces could kill them all in a single decapitation strike. Sachs’s summary of the episode was precise: Netanyahu presented rosy scenarios of regime change that contradicted the assessments of US intelligence, and Trump accepted them anyway.

This is not a government decision. It is a personal decision made by one person in a small room, based on a foreign intelligence agency’s optimistic projection, against the advice of the people whose job it is to provide sober military and intelligence assessments.

Sachs noted that the assumption behind the entire operation — that Iran’s government would collapse immediately under the shock of losing its Supreme Leader — turned out to be completely wrong. Iran did not collapse. It retaliated across the board, closed Hormuz, and demonstrated ballistic missile capabilities that exceeded what US analysts had projected. The regime proved far more resilient than anyone in that small Washington room apparently expected.

Sachs had said from the very beginning of the war, in a March interview with ScheerPost, that the assumption that Iran could be brought to its knees in a matter of weeks made no sense to anyone familiar with the country’s history, its military capacity, or its forty-year experience of surviving under comprehensive sanctions.

The US cannot militarily defeat Iran. The numbers make this plain.

Sachs’s most important analytical point is one that the official narrative has still not come to terms with: the United States cannot actually win this war militarily. Not in any meaningful sense of the word.

Al Jazeera’s economic analysis published on 14 April found that Iran exported 1.84 million barrels of crude oil per day in March 2026 — actually higher than its pre-war 2025 average of 1.68 million barrels per day. The price per barrel of Iranian crude did not fall below $90 at any point in the past month. Even at the conservative estimate of $90 a barrel, Iran earned close to $5 billion from oil exports in a single month — while the war against it was in full swing.

Iran has spent forty years building workarounds to American sanctions — ghost ships, grey market payment channels, alternative banking systems, barter arrangements. A naval blockade announced on a Sunday morning cannot undo four decades of institutional adaptation in a matter of weeks.

And the blockade compounds a crisis that was already approaching historic severity. Daniel Yergin, vice chairman of S&P Global and one of the most respected energy historians alive, described the current situation as without modern precedent: more severe than the oil crises of the 1970s, the Iran-Iraq war, and Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait combined. The IEA’s Fatih Birol called it the worst energy shock in history.

Trita Parsi warned in analysis for Al Jazeera that if the Houthis in Yemen were to restart Red Sea attacks alongside the current Hormuz crisis, oil could reach $200 per barrel. At that level, the pain on American consumers would be politically unsurvivable for any administration. The blockade risks producing exactly the outcome it is supposed to prevent.

Sarang Shidore, director of the Quincy Institute’s Global South programme, stated in Responsible Statecraft that the burden of the blockade falls most heavily on Asia, which depends on Gulf energy flows, but that everyone — including the United States — suffers. He described the situation as a “deadly race to the bottom” with no winners.

How a government collapses: amateurs and the end of institutional process

The war decision, and the handling of everything since, reveals something that goes deeper than one man’s personality. Sachs made this argument carefully, and I think it deserves full attention.

He compared the current process to the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 — arguably the last time the United States government faced a situation of comparable existential risk. Kennedy convened a formal executive committee with senior officials from every relevant department: Pentagon, CIA, State Department, Justice Department. They met repeatedly over thirteen days. Every argument was documented. Every option was stress-tested. Diplomatic back channels ran simultaneously with public positions. The result was managed de-escalation and the world did not end.

What is happening now is the structural opposite. According to Sachs — and this is consistent with the New York Times reporting he cited — Trump makes decisions with a small circle of yes-people, without the involvement of institutional processes, without documented options papers, without the kind of deliberation that is supposed to protect governments from their worst impulses.

In an earlier conversation with Diesen on 4 April, Sachs put the systemic failure in concrete terms: the trade war with China was handled by the same method — a handful of people with no professional expertise or experience in trade economics, implementing an illegal and destabilising policy that China reversed in two days by simply stating that the United States had lost. The Iran war is being handled the same way, by the same kind of people, with the same absence of institutional knowledge or process — just with incomparably higher stakes.

On the question of mental fitness

Sachs said something that took courage: he raised publicly the question of whether Trump has lost his grip on reality. He was careful to note that Biden’s cognitive decline in his final year was similarly managed by a small circle of handlers — citing the precedent of Woodrow Wilson’s stroke in 1919, where his wife and a small group of insiders ran the presidency while concealing the incapacity from the public.

The difference with Trump, Sachs noted, is that there is no concealment because Trump posts unfiltered, incoherent content in the middle of the night on his own platform. The instability is not being hidden. It is on continuous public display — from the post threatening to wipe out “a whole civilization,” to the post ordering Iran to open the strait by calling Iranian officials names, to the deleted image of himself portrayed as Christ, which he then claimed he thought was a picture of himself as a doctor.

He was not the only analyst making this observation. Dr. Ramzy Baroud, writing in CounterPunch, drew on a substantial body of political psychology research describing Trump’s leadership style as exhibiting traits — grandiosity, hypersensitivity to criticism, an overriding need to project dominance — that actively distort strategic decision-making. Within that framework, Baroud argued, escalation becomes a psychological necessity: retreating risks appearing weak, while compromise risks humiliation. For a leader whose identity rests on projecting strength, both are intolerable regardless of their strategic merit.

The structural failure: an empire that cannot see its own decline

Sachs closed with the biggest picture of all, and it is one that matters far beyond Washington.

The overarching explanation for everything — the delusion, the chaos, the inability to process the actual military and economic situation on the ground — is that the United States has not come to terms with the emergence of a multipolar world. It still operates on the assumption that it can dictate outcomes anywhere it chooses, that its military dominance translates automatically into political results, and that any state that resists will eventually fold. That assumption produced the disasters in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and now Iran. In every case, the enemy did not fold. In every case, ordinary people died for a fantasy held by men who were nowhere near the fighting.

Sachs laid out the legal dimension in Common Dreams in early March: the war on Iran was launched in flagrant violation of Article 2(4) of the UN Charter, without Security Council authorisation, and without any credible claim of self-defence. It constituted, in his assessment, an attempt to kill the international rules-based order itself.

China’s Foreign Ministry called the blockade “dangerous and irresponsible” and stated it would only escalate tensions. Russia warned it would continue to damage global markets. The UK said it would not participate. France announced it would organise a separate international conference for a peaceful mission to restore navigation. The isolation of the United States on this question is almost total — even among its traditional allies.

What this means for you

Sachs is not an academic talking to other academics. He is describing something that changes the price of everything — food, fuel, medicine, electronics — for billions of people who have never heard of the Strait of Hormuz and did not vote for any of the people who are deciding its fate.

Ben Emons, managing director at Fed Watch Advisors, confirmed that commodity prices for fertiliser and helium — both critical for food production and semiconductor manufacturing — continue rising on top of oil. The IMF and World Bank have signalled they will downgrade global growth forecasts and raise inflation projections, with emerging markets hit hardest.

The International Rescue Committee warned this week that the crisis has created a food security emergency, with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of pharmaceutical supplies stranded in Dubai, and fuel prices surging across Nigeria and Ethiopia. IRC President David Miliband stated plainly that when vital shipping routes are disrupted, the impact is not abstract — it shows up in empty shelves, shuttered clinics, and lives cut short.

Malaysia is a net energy exporter and benefits from elevated prices on some of what it sells. But our manufacturing costs, our food import bills, our shipping costs, and the ringgit’s exposure to a US economy sliding toward stagflation are all connected to what is happening in that 33-kilometre stretch of water.

The bottom line

Jeffrey Sachs is one of the most credentialed economists alive. He has advised the United Nations, heads of state, and international institutions over four decades. He does not reach for hyperbole. When he describes the handling of the Iran war as a one-man show driven by personal delusion, institutional collapse, and a refusal to recognise the limits of American power — and when the Council on Foreign Relations, the Quincy Institute, the IMF, the IEA, the World Bank, and S&P Global all reach compatible conclusions through their own separate analysis — it is worth sitting with that assessment rather than dismissing it.

The blockade announced on 13 April is not a strategy. It is a response to failure that risks producing greater failure. Iran has lived under sanctions for forty years. It will not capitulate to a social media post. The people who will absorb the pain of this standoff are not the people who started it. They are ordinary consumers from Kuala Lumpur to Lagos to Manila to Seoul, paying more for fuel, more for food, more for the medications their families need.

Sachs’s final reading of the situation was this: a personal delusion at the top, an institutional failure in the machinery beneath it, and behind both of those, the inability of a declining power to recognise that the world has changed. Other countries have adapted to that new world. The problem is that the one still holding the most weapons has not.

Sources: Professor Jeffrey Sachs in conversation with Glenn Diesen, 14 April 2026; Jeffrey Sachs — “Ending Israel’s War on Peace,” Consortium News, 10 April 2026; Jeffrey Sachs — “Iran War Broke US Empire and Alliance Systems,” Singju Post transcript, 4 April 2026; Jeffrey Sachs — “This Illegal US-Israeli Attack on Iran Is Also an Assault on the United Nations,” Common Dreams, March 2, 2026; Jeffrey Sachs on Democracy Now!, March 13, 2026; Jeffrey Sachs on ScheerPost, March 12, 2026; Trita Parsi — Quincy Institute/Responsible Statecraft, April 13, 2026; Trita Parsi on CNBC, April 13–14, 2026; Trita Parsi on Democracy Now!, April 6, 2026; Sarang Shidore — Responsible Statecraft, April 13, 2026; Dr. Ramzy Baroud — “Trump’s Iran War and the Politics of Ego,” CounterPunch, April 2026; Council on Foreign Relations — Max Boot/James Lindsay analysis, April 14, 2026; Al Jazeera — “How Much Will US Hormuz Blockade Hurt Iran,” April 14, 2026; Al Jazeera — “US Blockade Would Worsen Global Energy Crisis,” April 13, 2026; CNBC Hormuz energy analysis, April 13, 2026; NBC News live coverage; CNN live coverage; NPR Iran blockade; International Rescue Committee statement, April 2026; IMF global growth warning; IEA Fatih Birol statement; Daniel Yergin, S&P Global.