JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon was quoted on Yahoo Finance that Americans “accustomed to the dollar sitting atop the global financial system” acknowledged that “US military supremacy may be one of the things keeping it there …”

“Should I annihilate Iran … should I drive them into hell with no chance of survival?” — Donald Trump addressing the United Nations General Assembly

Is Donald Trump the Caligula of the United States’ late Empire period? The Caligula who tried — legend has it — to make his horse a government official and who ordered his soldiers to attack the sea … the Strait of Hormuz perhaps?

Or is he the Emperor Commodus of the waning US Empire?

Commodus was absolutely in love with his own image. He was a certified narcissist, just like the boy from Queens, New York. That boy who is obsessed with gold now sees himself as emperor of the whole world. Commodus, on the other hand, saw himself as a reincarnation of Hercules.

Did you not hear him in front of the United Nations General Assembly? The arrogance, the unadorned contempt for humanity by him was astonishing but expected. Actually it was a two-part act. His mentor in all things — Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu — would follow him the next day.

Both he and Netanyahu, who convinced or blackmailed Trump to go into an illegal war of choice he could not win against Iran, have one trait in common. That is that every accusation made by him or Netanyahu is but a confession.

Netanyahu is not just the genocidal leader of a pariah nation but also, according to him, the great defender of Western civilisation. The contradictions confound the mind.

Will they go back to war over the next few weeks in order to reverse engineer their defeat even at the risk of accelerating a major collapse of the global economy? Who knows? But one thing we do know by now: both are fully capable of doing so if it serves their interests.

Not their national interest. Their personal and political interests. And that of the billionaire neoliberal oligarchs who support them, including Elon Musk.

These are the real leaders of the far-right fascist illiberal world they have created, along with their counterparts in Europe.

The likely targets upon failing to agree to Iran’s terms of surrender? Iran’s nuclear-powered electricity-generating facilities that would eliminate power and access to electricity and water to 90 million. If that is not the war crime of war crimes, then what is?

Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Australia and the rest of the European Union would likely say little or frame some sort or Orwellian false narrative.

Their elites, even in Britain, would quietly cheer Trump on.

The polls are not wrong. Trump is being squeezed by the state of America’s economy. That is the trap that the Iranians have set for him.

The sign? Look at the bond yields. Fitch Ratings and the IMF have warned of soaring yields “rising sharply” to “multiyear and multi-decade highs”, not just in the US but globally. There will be crushing interest rates accompanying those yields.

American troops and civilians are beginning to despise Trump for this illegal war. A growing number of his disaffected base now openly declare that the US should not be fighting and losing to Iran on behalf of Israel.

Some sanity in the midst of imperial madness is starting to take root among the American lumpenproletariat. But among Trump, Netanyahu and the oligarchs who support them, they will continue to turn the blindest of eyes.

Others, like the Maga movement types, are only now beginning to realise that the ideology of White supremacy and its anti-Black racism, and anti-immigrant hatred, is not going to pay their bills, feed their children nor stave off the bankruptcy of their farms.

In America, a substantial number of Mexican farm workers or pickers have headed back to Mexico over the past quarter alone. And harvest time is upon us. The Mexican workforce In the US agricultural sector represents 60 per cent of farm labour in the country. In the US Southwest, many fields are full of unpicked crops left to rot when they should all be harvested and trucked across the breath of the continent.

All of this is occurring on the US home front while anti-Americanism is sweeping the world, primarily owing to one of the worst geopolitical decisions by the US ever in going to war against Iran. Yet it’s becoming clearer they want more.

This is the barbarous world that the dogma of neoliberalism bequeathed to us in the 1980s from Freidrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and so many other malign actors.

Economist Paul Krugman, the former New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize winner, asserts that despite Trump’s prevarications and outright lies, the US is not seeing an “explosion” of economic growth whatsoever.

He added that when it comes to the US “they are however experiencing an explosion of misery”. If Americans are experiencing economic misery then what is beginning to emerge in the Global South because of that war?

A growing number of experts are asserting that globalisation as we have known it since the late 1980s is now over. This is not a good sign for the US, Europe or Bermuda. The US empire is breaking.

“The Western backlash is being kept alive because it goes to the heart of two things so dear to Western societies. Their heroic view of themselves — their identity and their money.” — Chris Osuh, the community affairs correspondent at The Guardian newspaper

Their identity and their money. I could not have said it better myself. The complete reordering of West Asia is taking place right before our eyes. Iran is deconstructing Western dominance that goes back 11 decades to the British and French compact to remake the Ottoman Empire in their own image and dominate the oil-rich region. They will not be satisfied until the US is expelled from the region entirely along with their data centres that now dot the Gulf, that Iran now demands must be removed or else.

Special mention should be reserved for one Elbridge Colby, Trump’s Under Secretary of Defence. Colby, is the quintessential Anglo-American. Call him Trump’s tactical nuclear weapon whisperer.

He has been one of the key administration officials at the highest level, strongly advocating for the US use of tactical nuclear weapon(s) as official government defence policy. He has conceived that they could be deployed in this case against Iran. The collective West has lost its moral compass, that is clear. Here we have another egregious example. It is virtuous in name only.

The world is now clamouring for the multipolar world. A different system that is more equitable; not the Anglo-American-derived system that is the backbone of the US’s declining empire. One that at least neutralises that power. Its financial weapons that gives the US the ability to impose financial tyranny upon the world we all live in. It’s coming. It’s inevitable.

All the while Elbridge Colby, I would guess, continues to whisper in Trump’s ear … Mr President, use a tactical nuclear weapon. It’s just a tactical nuclear weapon, Mr President. The harm will be contained to the target. Trust me.

The weapons, the technology — the means — have changed, but the intent remains the same. Such is the power vested in the amoral ones who surround and have access to the most powerful office in the world. And led today by an amoral madman.

I leave you with a provocative and poignant quote that shines a light on the world we now live in. Not the world of 1998 or 2007 during the heyday of neoliberalism and the US imperial writ and that of the collective West. But right now where the streets of Paris burn like it was 1968 all over again. Along with cities throughout Italy. It’s started.

Alastair Crooke is one of the truth tellers. A reformed former British diplomat and MI6 officer: “We cannot continue with the world order that is like it is. Where there are no values. Where everything is trashed. … the legal system is trashed, the UN has been trashed … the norms of civilised behaviour.

“All of this — trashed. All of this pushed aside in the intent of the US simply to preserve their financial primacy. Their political primacy …

“The Western elites are in a precarious space. There is nothing to keep Europe together. What they’re facing is unemployment, a huge cost-of-living rise … what they have left are financial levers. Their control of the global financial system. The business model has been broken. They’re now frightened that people are going to rise up against them.”

I can say no more …

• Rolfe Commissiong is a former MP for Pembroke South East