In the volatile landscape of contemporary geopolitics, few arenas are as charged as Iran, a nation caught in the grip of severe internal unrest and external provocation. Waves of protest, driven by profound discontent with political oppression and economic despair, ripple through Iranian society, revealing a brittle regime struggling to maintain its authority. Into this tinderbox, the ghost of Donald Trump’s presidency throws a lit match. His past threats of “obliteration” and maximum pressure are not relics, but active components of a continuing crisis, a stark reminder of how external aggression can be wielded to stifle internal dissent and rally nationalist sentiment for those in power. Yet, Trump’s menace toward Iran is not an isolated incident; it is a single thread in a broader, more disturbing tapestry of ambition that forces a grave historical question: Are we witnessing the rise of a modern strongman, a self-styled “superman” in the mold of Hitler’s post-war fantasy, one who deliberately fuels global crises to erode the multilateral order and erect a new paradigm of personalistic, transactional domination?
Trump’s political brand, mirrored in the uncompromising ethos of leaders like Benjamin Netanyahu, is defined by an explicit rejection of established norms. They do not merely break rules; they operate on the premise that “they” are the new norm. International law, constitutional checks and balances, and human rights frameworks are treated not as guardrails for civilization, but as inconveniences to be bypassed or tools to be weaponized against opponents. This mindset transcends mere political incorrectness; it aspires to a form of political divinity, where their will is the only sovereign law. In Trump’s openly transactional coveting of Greenland’s resources or his administration’s ruthless immigration policies, and in Netanyahu’s relentless settlement expansions and prosecution of war, we see the anatomy of a modern colonial impulse. It is not always about formal territorial occupation, but about the occupation of “outcomes”: seizing resources, dictating terms, and subjugating sovereign will to their own strategic desires. They act as if granted a divine mandate, a dangerous self-deification that licenses the marginalization, suffering, and death of those deemed obstacles. History, however, is a cemetery for such pretensions to godhood. From Nero to Mussolini, the narrative arc is consistent: those who believe themselves above the fundamental laws of humanity and physics ultimately are undone by them.
This relentless pattern of inflationary ego and its inevitable collapse is not just a matter for history books; it is the very stuff of ancient morality. Aesop’s fable, “The Frog and the Ox,”*serves as a perfect and prophetic allegory for the political hubris we witness today. The story is simple yet profound: a frog at the edge of a pond observes a mighty ox. Consumed by envy and a compulsive need to rival its grandeur, the frog begins to puff herself up, demanding of her offspring, “Was I as big as that?” With each round of inflation, she grows larger, straining her form to its limits in a pathetic mimicry of power. The children, terrified, beg her to stop, but the frog, drunk on her own burgeoning size, continues to inflate until she bursts violently, leaving nothing but a rupture where ambition once lived.
The moral, “Attempting to rival the great in stature destroys the arrogant pretender,” cuts to the core of our modern political pathology. The “Ox” in our context is not a single entity but an abstract ideal of ultimate, unchallengeable power—be it historical empire, total control, or immortal legacy. The Trumpian and Netanyahu-like approach is one of frantic, performative inflation. The threats against Iran are a “puffing up”—a display of destructive capacity meant to intimidate rivals and mesmerize a base. The dismissal of norms is another puff, an assertion that their personal will can supersede collective systems. The colonial-style resource grabs are yet another inflation, claiming more, controlling more, to appear more powerful. Each act is a desperate strain to match a mythical, oversized ideal of dominance.
However, the fable’s genius lies in its physical inevitability. The frog’s skin can only stretch so far. Similarly, the structures that sustain power—be they alliances, economies, legal systems, or the very social contract—have elastic limits. Trump’s first term demonstrated this: the relentless norm-breaking led not to a streamlined autocracy but to administrative chaos, historic impeachments, a poisoned public discourse, and ultimately, electoral rejection. His threats of force created not submission but more resilient adversaries and deepened global distrust. Netanyahu’s similar path has led to unprecedented domestic division, repeated elections, and a catastrophic erosion of Israel’s international standing and internal cohesion. They inflate themselves on the hot air of crisis and division, but the body politic cannot contain it indefinitely. The strain becomes visible in protests, in legal challenges, in diplomatic isolation, and in the sheer exhaustion of their societies.
The burst, when it comes, is catastrophic not just for the frog but for all the lesser frogs around it. A burst in the form of a provoked war in Iran would unleash regional conflagration and global economic shock. A burst in the form of constitutional collapse in a democracy sets a precedent for chaos. The children in the fable, who watch in horror, are the citizens, the allies, the innocent bystanders whose stability is sacrificed on the altar of one figure’s insatiable ego.
Ultimately, Aesop’s tale is a timeless warning against the delusion of self-deification. Power, especially power untethered from ethics, law, and reality, is not infinitely expandable. The Trumps and Netanyahus of the world, in their quest to become the authors of a new, self-serving world order, forget a fundamental truth: they are not gods crafting destiny, but actors within a system far larger than themselves. They are frogs at the pond’s edge, mistaking bloated appearance for true strength. History’s law, as immutable as the physics in the fable, dictates that such inflationary pretensions must, one way or another, meet their rupture. The only remaining questions are how much damage their bursting will cause and whether the rest of the world will have the wisdom to step back from the explosion.
