Hot Type: How The US-Israel War in Iran Is Also Targeting European Democracy
Political columnist Heidi Siegmund Cuda investigates a key target in the US-Israel war in Iran: European democratic leaders who are damned if they do support the war and damned if they don't
You do this work long enough, you see patterns.
I didn’t set out to become a Russia watcher, but when I witnessed Russian military intelligence under the direction of Vladimir Putin attacking my country with active measures in 2016, I had no choice but to turn my investigative skills toward information warfare.
I had spent my career working in print journalism and broadcast news and watching the media’s abject failure to report on the rise of Donald Trump within the context of his ties to the Russian mob was like watching the same horror film over and over again, with truth as the perpetual victim.
So those of us who were independent reporters and could write truth to power had a duty to do so.
By now, I know to ask first – before anything else – in what way Putin might benefit from the actions of Donald Trump. Byline Times’ archives are filled with reporting on Trump’s fealty to Putin so to think he acts independently of the Kremlin is to believe in unicorns and fairytales.
When Trump, along with Israel, launched a war with Iran last week, global headlines parroted Trump’s whys – slippery, ever-changing, and basically, crazy-making.
I asked only one question: how does this war benefit Putin? His alliance with Iran is the kind of alliance criminal networks united by corruption make.
Oil, of course, was one answer – Trump is loosening Russian oil sanctions as demand for Russian energy gets a big bump from the war.
But that’s just an economic perk on Putin’s way to global domination.
The bigger target I see of Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu’s illegal war in Iran are the leaders of the remaining free world.
As the US becomes a drunken brawler, I see one clear goal emerge: taking down all remaining democratic European leaders, who are damned if they do support the war, and damned if they don’t.
This objective was easy to spot if you followed the events of Putin’s birthday in 2023 in Israel, which led to the demise of Joe Biden.
In the information war front, Biden was labeled ‘genocide Joe’ for a war he did not start. Suddenly, this veteran public servant who had revitalized the US economy and reassured our allies that the US was still their dependable friend became the target of the Russian-GOP war machine as he backed an allied country run by a corrupt leader, who has been in power almost as long as Putin.
I always recall that Netanyahu, after losing the Israeli election in 2021, called Putin and promised him: “I will be back soon.” And he was.
Netanyahu returned to power as Prime Minister in December 2022, and from January to October of 2023, large-scale protests against him arose across Israel. In particular, people were protesting the judicial coup that was taking place — the Government was trying to get full control of the Supreme Court and dismantle the Israeli Bar Association, weakening the rule of law. Those protests largely ceased after the October 7 attacks, which Netanyahu had been warned about in advance.
Found buried in the pages of the doppelganger affidavit, the nickname of the operation by the US Justice Department to take down internet domains run by Russia to mimic western news sites, were internal documents on how the Russians were looking for a proxy war as a way to destroy Biden’s reelection chances — a way to indirectly hit their target in the Great Propaganda Wars and pave the way for another Trump installation.
In 2022, Biden had accurately labeled what Putin was doing in Ukraine as a genocide. But instead, it was Biden who became synonymous with genocide just a year later. He never recovered from the one-two punch of a bad debate performance and the war in Gaza, and as Trump returned to the White House, his allegiance to Putin was obvious. Recall how he treated President Zelensky a year ago in the Oval Office, and alternately, the red carpet that was rolled out for indicted war criminal Putin on US soil.
So the indirect targets of US bombs – the leaders of democratic nations — are forced to make sense of the senseless, which degrades and disrupts their power.
These are serious times.
Bad Copy
As I reflected on the events of the week — how Russian-aligned states were at war with each other — and I watched leaders of the remaining democratic nations try to grapple with their response — I sighed at the headlines and bad copy, always parroting Trump and his point of view.
The Financial Times wrote:
Trump threatens to cut trade with ‘terrible’ Spain and calls Starmer ‘no Churchill.’
And the BBC weighed in with:
And this from Yahoo:
Trump tells Starmer: ‘Open up the North Sea. Immediately’
Politico’s headline about Friedrich Merz’s visit with Trump:
Germany’s Merz sits powerless as Trump attacks European allies in Oval Office
And French leader Emmanuel Macron, who started the week by accurately noting the US strikes on Iran ‘were outside international law’ earned this headline from the Kenya Times:
France’s Macron Folds Moments After Trump Threatened Spain
And on and on it goes, with each high-profile leader of the remaining free world under attack, weakening their position both internally and externally.
It’s weird watching gate-keeper fangs out on X/Twitter – as though to not support the war or Trump somehow makes you pro-abuse in Iran.
Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don’t
In reality, it’s okay to not support a convicted sex felon whose regime is buying warehouses to turn into concentration camps and who supports the murder of people in the street by brownshirts with a militarized budget.
“What we’re seeing is exactly what we would expect from fascism, which is wars of aggression that ignore any kind of international order,” philosophy professor Jason Stanley said in an interview this week. “White supremacy is now the official state policy of the United States. It’s the Government policy… so ethnic cleansing in the United States… who knows what’s next? Because now the US military is his toy, his play thing, like ICE is his play thing inside the United States.”
It’s okay not to support that.
It’s okay to not believe that Trump, who is systematically dismantling democracy in the US, has any interest in human rights in other countries.
Bizarrely, US Democrats in Congress have taken to X/Twitter to voice their disapproval of the war in short video clips that are uniform in their messaging – they believe the war is illegal – but limp in their efficacy. Law and order will not be restored in America by pearl-clutching on Twitter.
Their only effort should be focused on how to frog march Trump out of the White House.
The Age of Oligarchs
I’m reading the essential works of Anna Politkovskaya, an investigative reporter who was murdered on Putin’s birthday in Moscow 20 years ago.
In a passage titled “Old Ladies and New Russians”, she described how a former champion milkmaid and a former champion cowherd angrily shook their sticks at a bulldozer, in a desperate attempt to save rare species of ancient trees. As the “elderly people were beaten up,” she described how their protest proved futile in the “age of the oligarchs” where “every branch of government understands only the language of their rustling banknotes.”
She wrote: “It is we who are responsible for Putin’s policies. Society has shown limitless apathy.”
I fear this for America.
Jason Stanley, who wrote How Fascism Works, said the protests in Minneapolis offer a glimmer of hope, but that ICE will come back harder and “everybody needs to have basements with apartments where they can hide immigrants… That’s what we’re facing into.”
I hope European leaders understand that – a world-renowned expert on fascism is telling Americans to clear their basements to make room to hide people. That’s what we are confronting domestically.
So pretending these old alliances still exist will only expedite the end of each of their careers, as assassins of democracy take aim at European countries through wars in other places.
And again, who benefits from the demise of democratic leadership? Putin and other global autocrats who see democracies and international law as a hindrance to advancing their criminal networks.
‘Cool Head’
A Londoner who I met in Galway told me recently that when America sneezes, Britain catches a cold. I think about this as I watch Keir Starmer bravely vowing to keep a ‘cool head’ as he stands by his decision not to join the war.
I can only hope that UK citizens, and I share this hope with all of Europe, don’t follow America, which walked itself into hell.
Emmy award-winning investigative reporter, Heidi Siegmund Cuda is an American correspondent for Byline Times and her Hot Type column runs bimonthly on Byline Times Substack. She is the co-host of RADICALIZED Truth Survives podcast and her Bette Dangerous Substack is read in 99 countries.
I wonder what on earth the link could be between Putin, Netanyahu & Trump.
Do they each hold blackmail material on the other two, in the strangest circular firing squad ever?
Or is it just that they all face long jail sentences if they leave office alive?