By iEpikaira
According to a sweeping new CNN poll, a staggering 71% of US adults now disapprove of President Donald Trump's handling of foreign affairs, marking a new low across both of his terms. Even more damning, 76% of Americans say the war has not been worth the toll in lives or financial burden, and three-quarters of the country recognize that the administration lacks any coherent plan to end it. Even Trump's own base is fracturing under the weight of this endless conflict, with approval among Republicans dropping significantly as the war drags on.
But while the American working class bears the domestic cost of this imperial misadventure, the geopolitical blowback is rapidly metastasizing far beyond the borders of the Middle East. Washington's reckless foreign policy is actively dragging Europe and the rest of the world into a devastating economic crisis.
Nowhere is the danger of this expanding war more acute than in the greater Middle East and countries like Cyprus that have already been dragged into the crossfire. The Eastern Mediterranean island is being forcibly transformed into a frontline target, courtesy of British military bases—a lingering, ugly scar of colonialism, that Nicosia lacks the nerve to evict, as we previously stressed. Just this week, reports confirmed that the British Royal Air Force is using its RAF Akrotiri base in Cyprus as a launchpad to provide military assistance to Saudi Arabia in its escalating conflict with Yemen's Houthi movement.
By deploying refuelling aircraft to aid Saudi fighter jets, the UK—acting in lockstep with Washington's regional hegemony—is actively tethering the island to a volatile regional war. This is not a hypothetical danger. In March of this year, Cyprus suffered drone strikes aimed at these very British bases, a terrifying preview of the blowback that comes with hosting the staging grounds for Western military intervention.
The fallout, however, is not strictly military. A profound economic shockwave is currently battering Greece and the rest of the European continent. The US-led escalation in the Middle East—and the subsequent disruptions in the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz—has thrown global energy, food and commodities markets in general into chaos.
Europe is now facing skyrocketing natural gas and oil prices, a crisis that hits energy-dependent nations like Greece and Cyprus with disproportionate brutality. But the most insidious threat lies in the agricultural sector. The conflict has triggered a massive surge in fertilizer prices, with urea prices in the Middle East jumping to $575–$650 per ton in recent days. The World Bank had already warned earlier this year that export disruptions linked to the Strait of Hormuz were driving the fertilizer price index to multi-year highs.
For Greece and the broader European middle and working classes, this translates directly into an escalating cost-of-living crisis. Higher natural gas prices mean exponentially higher costs to produce nitrogen-based fertilizers. This creates a disastrous domino effect: sky-high agricultural input costs inevitably lead to skyrocketing food prices at the grocery store, let alone the staggering inflation—with Eurostat confirming this week that Greece's inflation accelerated to 3.8% in August, driven overwhelmingly by surging energy costs. Ordinary Europeans are effectively being forced to foot the bill—through inflated utility bills and grocery receipts—for Washington's warmaking.
The CNN poll data reveals a structural shift in how Americans view the world: broad majorities now recognize that US interventionism is actively harming America's standing on the global stage. Younger Americans are overwhelmingly rejecting the hawkish consensus, and the perception of traditional allies like Israel and Canada is rapidly deteriorating.
Yet, the foreign policy establishment continues to double down on this violence. Paradoxically, this massive military escalation is part of a destructive exit strategy. Rather than seeking a genuine diplomatic off-ramp, Washington is deliberately orchestrating zones of deep, violent instability ("shatterbelts") across the Middle East—a scorched-earth tactic designed to leave behind a fractured region that no rival power can dominate, thereby covering its own strategic pivot to the Pacific. Under the guise of "offshore balancing," the US is recklessly shifting the burden of this burning region to regional proxies, ignoring the catastrophic risks in what appears to be an active effort to redraw Middle Eastern borders in blood. In this cynical game of global unrest, sovereign nations and traditional allies are entirely expendable; countries like Greece and Cyprus are stripped of their agency, reduced by US planners to mere "functional counterweights" meant to absorb the shock of Turkish regional expansionism while Washington ruthlessly watches from a distance.
The reality is stark. A foreign policy that isolates the US globally, alienates its own citizens, turns sovereign nations like Greece and Cyprus into crosshairs, and starves working people through inflation is not just a failure—it is a danger to global survival. Until a coordinated effort forces a halt to this imperial overreach, the abyss will only continue to widen.
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