Por Mohamad Shaaf
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Photograph Source: Margo Martin – Public Domain |
The US-Israel war on Iran is now two months old. By every measurable indicator, it is a catastrophe.
Operation Epic Fury began on February 28, 2026, with joint US-Israeli strikes that killed Supreme Leader Khamenei. The architects of this operation apparently believed that decapitating Iran’s leadership would produce capitulation. They were wrong. Iran retaliated by doing precisely what every serious analyst had warned it would do: it closed the Strait of Hormuz — the narrow chokepoint through which roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil supply flows daily. Two months later, the ledger reads like a horror story: over 10,000 Iranian targets struck, more than 1,500 Iranians killed, crude oil above $100 a barrel, NATO allies refusing to help reopen the Strait, Moody’s putting global recession odds at 49 percent, the OECD projecting US inflation at 4.2 percent, and American consumers paying 30 percent more for gasoline every time they pull up to the pump.
Iran rejected Washington’s 15-point peace plan outright and countered with five demands of its own. President Trump is cornered — trapped between the hawks in his administration who want escalation and the brutal economic reality that demands a way out. The war has no exit ramp, no victory condition, and no public support once people see their grocery bills.
But there is a path — a revolutionary one — if Trump has the courage to take it. Building on my earlier published work on a US-Iran peace framework and what I have called the Global Strategic Peace Economy; I propose that President Trump go before the American people and announce twelve points that would not only end this war but fundamentally transform the global order. This is not wishful thinking. This is economic logic, strategic necessity, and moral clarity fused into a single actionable plan.
What Trump Should Announce Tomorrow
Point 1: Acknowledge that past US decisions regarding Iran were not right.
The President should tell the American people the truth: that Israel and his advisors did not give him the full picture of this war’s consequences. They did not adequately account for Iran’s ability and willingness to close the Strait of Hormuz. They did not model the economic fallout. They sold him a clean, surgical operation and delivered a geopolitical quagmire with a $100-a-barrel price tag.
No US president has ever made such an admission about Middle East policy. Not after the overthrow of Mossadegh in 1953. Not after the hostage crisis. Not after the decades of sanctions that punished ordinary Iranians while strengthening hardliners. This alone would be revolutionary. It would restore US credibility worldwide overnight — not because it shows weakness, but because it shows something the world has never seen from Washington: honesty.
Point 2: Accept all five of Iran’s demands, effective immediately.
Iran’s five demands are: a complete halt to aggression; guarantees against future attacks; war reparations; sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz; and the inclusion of Tehran-aligned groups in any settlement. Washington’s foreign policy establishment will howl that accepting these terms amounts to surrender. They are wrong. It amounts to strategic genius.
Accepting these demands immediately reopens the Strait of Hormuz. Oil prices crash back toward pre-war levels. The recession probability drops from 49 percent to single digits. Inflation projections normalize. The stock market recovers trillions in lost value. American consumers stop hemorrhaging money at the gas pump. The economic math is not complicated. The only thing standing in the way is pride — and pride is a luxury the US economy cannot currently afford.
Point 3: Unfreeze all of Iran’s frozen cash and assets.
The United States has held billions of dollars in Iranian assets frozen since various rounds of sanctions. These were Iran’s assets — seized in violation of international norms, wielded as leverage in a coercive diplomacy that has produced nothing but resentment for over four decades. Returning them costs the US Treasury nothing. These are not American taxpayer funds. But the diplomatic capital gained — the signal sent to every nation watching — is enormous. It says: America deals in good faith.
Point 4: Propose a permanent peace between Israel and Iran with mutual respect for sovereignty.
For decades, the Israeli-Iranian rivalry has been the engine driving instability across the entire Middle East — from Lebanon to Syria to Yemen to Iraq. Proxy wars have killed hundreds of thousands, displaced millions, and drained US resources at a staggering rate. A direct, permanent peace agreement between Israel and Iran, grounded in mutual respect for sovereignty and non-interference, would do more for Middle Eastern stability than every bomb dropped since 2001 combined. Both nations are ancient civilizations. Both deserve security. Neither achieves it through the other’s destruction.
Point 5: Reject Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine, Globalist Doctrine, and Zionist Ideology.
This is the most radical point — and the most necessary. Full Spectrum Dominance is the Pentagon’s post-Cold War doctrine of maintaining overwhelming US military superiority across every domain: land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace, simultaneously and everywhere on earth. It is the intellectual foundation of every war the United States has fought since 1991. And it has produced nothing but endless wars, trillions in debt, and global instability. The Iraq War alone cost over $3 trillion by conservative estimates. Afghanistan consumed $2.3 trillion over twenty years and ended in the same place it started.
Rejecting Full Spectrum Dominance does not mean abandoning national defense. It means abandoning the fantasy that one nation can dominate the entire planet militarily and that attempting to do so makes anyone safer. It signals a genuine paradigm shift — from dominance to partnership, from coercion to cooperation. The Globalist Doctrine of forcing market liberalization on unwilling populations and the ideological commitments that have entangled US foreign policy in another nation’s territorial ambitions must be examined with the same critical eye. These frameworks have not served the American people. They have served defense contractors, financial speculators, and a foreign policy elite that rotates between government and the think tanks that justify perpetual war.
Point 6: Call for all wars, including Ukraine, to be stopped through UN approval without the US veto — achieving true peace with Russia.
The United States has used its veto power at the UN Security Council dozens of times — more than any other permanent member in recent decades — primarily to shield allies from accountability. Waiving the US veto for a comprehensive global peace resolution would be unprecedented. It would restore the United Nations to its original purpose: a genuine multilateral institution for peace, not a rubber stamp for great power politics. The Ukraine war has killed hundreds of thousands and pushed Europe into energy crisis. Ending it through genuine multilateral negotiation, without any single nation holding a veto over peace, would demonstrate that the new American posture is real.
Point 7: Move all US military structures from Taiwan and recognize it as part of China.
Taiwan is the most dangerous flashpoint on earth — the single issue most likely to trigger a direct US-China military confrontation that could escalate to nuclear war. Removing US military infrastructure from Taiwan and recognizing the One China principle eliminates this existential risk. The economic upside is massive: genuine US-China cooperation, instead of the current trajectory of decoupling and trade war, unlocks trillions in potential economic activity. The United States needs Chinese markets. China needs American innovation. Both need to stop spending hundreds of billions preparing to destroy each other.
Point 8: Cut military spending to demonstrate US seriousness toward the Global Strategic Peace Economy and the elimination of all nuclear weapons worldwide.
The United States currently spends over $900 billion annually on its military — more than the next ten countries combined. Even a 30 percent reduction would free $270 billion per year. That is $270 billion that could go toward paying down the national debt, which now exceeds $36 trillion at 101 percent of GDP. It could fund infrastructure repair, universal healthcare initiatives, public education, and the reindustrialization that both political parties claim to want but neither fund. The US is currently running a $1.9 trillion annual budget deficit. The money is not abstract. It is being borrowed, often from the very nations the Pentagon is planning to fight, and spent on weapons systems designed for wars that must never be fought. This is not national security. It is national insanity.
Point 9: Effective immediately, the US and Israel stop military operations in Iran, requesting Iran to do the same.
This must come first and it must come now — not after negotiations, not after preconditions, not after another round of diplomatic theater. An immediate, unilateral ceasefire. The economic benefit alone justifies it: the Strait reopens, oil normalizes, markets stabilize, and the recession clock stops ticking. Every day of continued bombing is a day of continued economic hemorrhage — not just for Iran, but for the United States and the entire global economy. The war hawks will say you cannot stop without conditions. The economists will tell you that you cannot afford another week.
Point 10: Call on all UN members collectively to prepare a permanent peace for the collective world, regardless of ideology, economic system, or political system — respecting each country’s sovereignty.
This is the principled foundation beneath all the other points. Every nation has the right to choose its own political system, its own economic model, its own path. The era of regime change must end. The era of color revolutions, of funding opposition movements to overthrow governments that refuse to comply with Washington’s preferences, must end. Sovereignty is not a privilege granted by the United States. It is an inherent right of every nation. A genuine commitment to this principle — not the rhetorical version trotted out when convenient — would transform the United States from the world’s most feared power into its most trusted partner.
Point 11: Order the President of Venezuela to be freed to return to his country, and respect Venezuela’s sovereignty.
Actions speak. If the new doctrine of sovereignty and non-interference is real, it must be demonstrated immediately — not promised for some future date. Freeing Venezuela’s president and respecting Venezuelan sovereignty is a concrete, immediate good-faith action that costs the United States nothing and gains it credibility across Latin America, Africa, and Asia. The nations of the Global South are watching. They have heard American rhetoric about sovereignty for decades while watching American interventions topple governments on every continent. They will not believe words. They will believe actions.
Point 12: Propose a new World Reserve Currency based on all countries’ currencies weighted by their Real GDP using Purchasing Power Parity, adjustable monthly or quarterly. All nations welcomed as SWIFT members, managed by a collective-partner country arrangement.
This is the economic capstone of the entire proposal. The US dollar’s role as the sole world reserve currency has given the United States what French Finance Minister Valéry Giscard d’Estaing called “exorbitant privilege” — the ability to run massive trade deficits, borrow at lower rates, and effectively export inflation to the rest of the world. But it has also enabled the weaponization of the global financial system through sanctions, SWIFT exclusions, and asset freezes that punish entire populations for the decisions of their governments.
A Purchasing Power Parity-weighted World Reserve Currency would create a fairer, more stable international monetary system. PPP adjusts for the real purchasing power of each nation’s economy, not just nominal exchange rates that can be manipulated by capital flows and speculation. Monthly or quarterly adjustments would keep the system responsive to real economic changes. Welcoming all nations into SWIFT and managing the system through genuine collective partnership — not American unilateral control — removes both the ability and the temptation to use financial warfare as a substitute for diplomacy. The dollar does not lose its importance; it takes its rightful place among the world’s currencies rather than above them.
The Global Strategic Peace Economy
The GSPE is the intellectual framework that ties all twelve points together into a coherent whole. The world currently spends over $2.4 trillion annually on military forces — money that produces nothing but the machinery of destruction. Every dollar spent on a missile is a dollar not spent on a hospital. Every billion allocated to a carrier strike group is a billion not invested in clean water, housing, or education. This is not rhetoric. It is accounting.
The GSPE proposes a systematic, global redirection of military spending toward the elimination of poverty and homelessness; the treatment of addiction as a public health crisis rather than a criminal one; universal healthcare and education; infrastructure repair and reindustrialization — particularly in the United States and Europe, where decades of offshoring have hollowed out productive capacity; clean energy development; and the reduction of sovereign debt that threatens to destabilize the world’s largest economies. The US national debt stands at over $36 trillion — 101 percent of GDP — with a $1.9 trillion annual deficit. These numbers are not sustainable. They are a slow-motion crisis that military spending accelerates every single year.
This is not utopian. It is arithmetic. The resources to solve humanity’s most urgent problems already exist. They are simply allocated to destruction instead of construction. The GSPE provides the framework for reversing that allocation — not through charity, but through the recognition that peace is more profitable than war for everyone except arms manufacturers.
The Economic Impact: A Real Peace Dividend
The combined effect of these twelve points would dramatically accelerate the circuit of all forms of Capital — Productive Capital, Financial Capital, Commercial Capital, and Rentier Monopoly Capital — worldwide. But critically, it would shift the balance from speculative capital to productive capital. For the past four decades, the neoliberal era has been defined by bubbles: housing bubbles, stock market bubbles, gold bubbles, crypto bubbles — speculative manias that inflate, burst, and leave wreckage in their wake. The 2008 financial crisis wiped out $10 trillion in American household wealth. The crypto collapse erased hundreds of billions. These are not anomalies. They are the predictable consequence of an economic system where speculative returns consistently outpace productive investment because productive investment is starved of the capital and stability it needs.
Under the GSPE framework, capital flows back into the reindustrialization of the world. The United States and Europe need this most urgently — they must catch up with their commitments to their own populations and address the massive debts, budget deficits, and trade deficits that threaten their long-term economic viability. When you stop spending $900 billion a year on military hardware and redirect even a fraction of that toward manufacturing, infrastructure, education, and research, you create the conditions for genuine, sustainable economic growth — not the sugar-high of stock buybacks and quantitative easing, but real growth that employs real people making real things.
The economic transformation produces a real and permanent Peace Dividend. Not the hollow “peace dividend” promised after the Cold War ended in 1991 — the one that was immediately consumed by the Gulf War, the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and now Iran. A genuine structural shift. One that raises living standards worldwide, moves toward the elimination of poverty and homelessness globally, and creates a stable international economic order where nations compete through innovation rather than military intimidation.
The Question That Matters
All major powers — China, Russia, India, Europe, Iran, and yes, Israel — would accept this framework, because it serves everyone’s interests. China gets stability in the Taiwan Strait and a fair international monetary system. Russia gets a genuine path to ending the Ukraine war and reintegration into the global economy. India gets a multipolar order that reflects its rising economic weight. Europe gets energy security and relief from the refugee crises generated by American wars. Iran gets sovereignty, security, and reparations. Israel gets permanent peace with its most powerful regional adversary. And the United States gets something it has not had in decades: solvency, credibility, and a foreign policy that its own citizens can afford.
The question is not whether this proposal is realistic. The question is whether the alternative is sustainable. Two months of war with Iran have already demonstrated the answer: it is not. The United States cannot bomb its way to prosperity. It cannot sanction its way to stability. It cannot Full-Spectrum-Dominate its way to peace. Every war since 2001 has proven this, and every war has been followed by another war that proves it again. At some point, the lesson has to land.
Trump has courage — he has demonstrated that repeatedly. He went to North Korea when the entire foreign policy establishment said it was madness. He questioned NATO when questioning NATO was heresy. He pulled out of agreements that were not serving American interests. Now he needs not just courage but vision. These twelve points offer both. They offer the United States a path from empire to republic, from dominance to partnership, from the most expensive military posture in human history to the most productive peace economy the world has ever seen. The resources exist. The framework exists. The moment exists. The only question is whether the will exists to seize it.
Mohamad Shaaf, MBA, PhD, is an Emeritus Professor of Economics at the University of Central Oklahoma, an empirical research-analyst and has published on a variety of economic issues in professional journals, using Artificial Intelligence, Dynamic Programing, and Econometric Models. His email is: drshaaf@gmail.com
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