If it’s such a great agreement, why is it a secret? I’m reminded of the reason Russian Ambassador offered in response to Dr. Strangelove’s histrionic question about concealing the existence of the Doomsday machine: “You know how the premier likes surprises.”

In this case, it seems that Trump was desperate to have something to announce at his UFC birthday bash, and Iran let him get away with it, even though the actual language of the agreement is still being worked out.

It was a slick move on Iran’s part, since Trump has sold his triumph hard, abandoning his last ally, Israel, in the process. He needs this agreement more than they do, and his impatience is obvious.

It seems likely that the agreement will be more notable for the ways in which issues are deferred and money transfers concealed than for what it achieves in the near-term—that is, if a final agreement is finally signed and made public at all.

That has been promised for Friday in Geneva, with Vance and maybe even Trump doing the honors for the U.S. Stock markets and oil traders are banking on it, and Trump has already told us all what a triumph it is.

“Just signed a HISTORIC peace deal with Iran – something they said could NEVER be done,” Trump texted from the White House account. “For decades, weak leaders FAILED. Today, I delivered.”

In his vainglory, Trump appears to envision this agreement as the first, historic step toward a lasting peace in the Middle East, with Iran finally tamed and forced to play by the rules in a newly resurgent region that has been stabilized by American power. It seems doubtful that’s what Iran has in mind.

Like Trump, Iran too has declared “victory on the battlefield,” and Iranian officials and news outlets seem to have read a different document from the one Trump has been shown, at least when they talk about what’s in it.

Trump himself has tried to shoot down rumors of concessions such as the immediate unfreezing of frozen Iranian assets, or the $300 billion reconstruction fund that Vance has acknowledged would be part of a final deal. Trump called it fake news from the Democrats, but both negotiating sides have indicated that reconstruction at that scale is on the table.

The outlines of the agreement seem clear enough: both Iran and the U.S. back off from shooting and work to get the Strait open again, while talks begin on Iran’s nuclear program. Trump gets to declare the Strait open again, and then everything else is left to Vance, working with Kushner and Witkoff, the team that represents the interests of the Gulf states.

If the deal holds, then the flow of oil and other essential commodities will begin again, and Iran will be allowed to sell its oil freely. It also apparently plans to charge “fees for services” on ships transiting the Strait.

Everything else is uncertain right now, including whether any of the original U.S.-Israeli goals will be met—apart from a return to negotiations over the nuclear program, with Iran holding a great deal more leverage now.

Regime change is clearly out. The new regime seems more hardline and even a temporary re-opening of the Strait buys it time. The war has further entrenched the power of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and the Iranian regime will be even more hardline in its dealing with internal dissent, if such a thing were possible.

Nothing has been said about ballistic missiles, and the question of Iran’s projection of power through proxy armies is at best unsettled, but clearly not a U.S. priority. Iran’s warfighting capacity and the military capabilities of its proxies seem largely intact, despite the vast number of missiles fired so far, and the surface devastation of military targets. A lot of Iran’s capacity is underground, with about 70 percent of its armory still intact, according to U.S. intelligence reports.

*

These three goals—regime change, elimination of the capacity to strike Israel, and the end of the proxy armies—were central strategic objectives for Israel, and they seem to have been written out of the final agreement.

Trump has gone out of his way to publicly humiliate Netanyahu, yanking on the leash he holds on the Israeli premier, who faces widespread public disapproval of his handling of the war.

Part of the appeal that has kept Netanyahu in power for so long is ability to manage the Americans—a strength that reached its apex when he convinced to go in with him on the war. Trump told the press he had cursed Netanyahu out, and then he did it a second time. Israeli opposition leaders are calling Bibi a “vassal” of the United States.

In general, U.S. support for Israel has never been lower than it is right now, while virulent strains of antisemitism are entrenched within MAGA and on the rise on the far left, as witnessed in the campaign of Maureen Galindo, who remarked on turning a detention center into “a prison for Zionists.”

A lot of Americans blame Israel for the war, and Trump seems to be feeling that way himself. If one trusts the New York Times reporting, Bibi talked Trump into the war with a spiel that Rubio called “bullshit,” so perhaps it is natural for Trump now to turn on the man he blames for all the problems the war has caused. That would account for the personal edge to the way Trump is selling Israel out.

It’s not clear that any peace can hold if Iran sees that Trump can’t control Israel, but the agreement itself has no gains for Israel at all, and a mountain of potential losses. Whether that means that Israel will slip the leash and continue its war against Hezbollah in Lebanon, and how Iran will react if it does, leave the whole business entirely tenuous.

Apart from reopening the Strait on unspecified terms, the agreement clearly leaves Iran’s nuclear program unresolved and deferred for further negotiations, which is where the whole story started months ago. When the war started Iran had just made a breakthrough concession that Witkoff evidently did not understand, because it was technical. It didn’t matter, because Trump had already decided to take out the Ayatollah the next day.

If there are different versions of the agreement now floating around, and the final language is still unsettled, it probably lies mainly in how the focus of further talks is framed in terms of various commitments and benchmarks, along with parameters around what a final agreement might include.

There are similarly thorny questions around control of the Strait and how that will work, and what happens to the proxy wars, but the nuclear program is the main thing, and it will be very hard for Trump to sell this extended ceasefire without some language that looks like an Iranian concession on nuclear, as Trump calls it.

According to press reports, Trump has already been warned by Ratcliffe and Rubio that intelligence suggests that Iran isn’t planning any concessions, and that there is a split in the White House between Rubio, Hegseth and Ratcliffe on one side, and Vance, Kushner and Witkoff on the other, with the latter being given the go ahead.

None of this answers the question of what is in the agreement that ostensibly had already been signed electronically, and that is meant to be signed in face to face meeting of principals in Geneva on Friday.

*

If you read about the war a lot, you’ll often find references to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle through its popular expression in the notion of “Schrodinger’s Cat,” the cat in the box that is neither living nor dead until the observer opens the box to see. I’ve seen “Schrodinger’s War,” and “Schrodinger’s Ayatollah,” “Schrodinger’s Peace” and “Schrodinger’s Agreement”—you get the idea.

It’s an apt notion, this idea of an agreement that looks different to each observer. When Trump opens the box, he sees an historic victory. When Iran opens it, they see American defeat and a clear path for their ambition of regional dominance.

A lot of us aren’t clear at all on what we are seeing. The box seems shut right now. We’re told it contains something like a “peace agreement,” and we know what the things are that would have to be agreed on in some way, and Vance has told us that the whole thing is short, just a page and a half, presumably with bullets, so we know that.

We don’t know much more, except that it seems clear that if there is actually just one version of the agreement it is being interpreted in radically different ways. The alternative is that there still is more than one version, and that the two sides are still talking about different pieces of paper.

What was signed on Sunday? And why is it still a secret? The two sides seem to agree that something had been achieved, but what was it?

Maybe the challenge right now is simply rhetorical, with each side quibbling over language, hoping to gain an edge in the internal propaganda war that will follow publication of the accord, assuming there is an actual signing on Friday.

The problem with the Schrodinger’s cat metaphor in the case of this war and peace is that we’re not outside the box and the box won’t open—there’s no clarity or certainty ahead, no matter what the agreement winds up saying.

Whatever happens on the surface of events over the next few months, the war has exposed or defined a new dynamic of power in the Middle East, in which Iran has demonstrated the limits of U.S. military strength, vast as it is, and the nations surrounding it have discovered how vulnerable they are.

Trump seems to want simply to walk away from the war, using whatever fig leaves his negotiators can eke out as a cover for false claims of victory. He wants to put the war “in the rear-view mirror.” One would expect no less from someone who made the art of bankruptcy the core of his business strategy.

Maybe the mistake, in this game of Schrodinger’s cat, is thinking that there’s a cat in the box. Maybe there’s nothing in the box at all. I guess we’ll find out in a couple of days.

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A year ago on Flag Day I was worried that Trump was using ICE and his military parade to set up conditions that might enable him to declare martial law. He was moving in that direction, with Stephen Miller the intellectual engine behind the plan. If I look at my writing from the time, it is a steady preoccupation—and I was just echoing my reading. It was a generally shared concern.

That’s all changed now, There’s still plenty to be concerned about, but it is a while since anyone has talked about martial law. Election interference is the concern now, a legitimate one. But there’s no longer a sense that Trump might try to simply stop democracy for a while and try something else.

Looking back, it’s clear that part of the cause for concern was how much of the country still supported Trump back then—a 46 percent approval rating that weekend. Trump stayed popular enough for a long time. But the parade was a flop, LA didn’t explode, and No Kings protests around the nation that day stole the spotlight.

Now Trump’s approval ratings stand in the high 30s, and they still haven’t found their floor. There’s not any good news for Trump on the horizon, and the Trump 2028 hats are in the bargain bin. Trump himself has aged visibly in just a year, reminding us that even with his casual, golf-on-the-weekend approach, the job of president takes its toll.

The main national storyline is no longer the Trump show, but the political narrative as the mid-term ballots shape up, with 2028 looming on an increasingly less distant horizon. By all reports, Vance and Rubio are already auditioning for Trump’s imprimatur, which adds an interesting dimension to their assignments in Trump’s woefully under-staffed administration, where only three people, including Bessent, can be relied upon for competence.

Rubio has managed to keep his hands clean of Iran for the most part, while Vance is stuck as lead negotiator in a process doomed to ultimate failure. Venezuela was Rubio’s baby, and he’ll be able to add Cuba once full attention is diverted there, probably immediately after a temporary peace agreement is signed, assuming that one is. I would take the odds on Rubio as the most loyal of them all.

Meanwhile, the Democrats are doing what they do best—lining up in foxholes to take shots at each other across battlelines that are illegible to most voters, who generally want the same basic things and don’t read policy statements, or the news for that matter.

A few primaries crystalized the dissensus—Crockett v. Talerico, Platner v. Mills in Maine, Maureen Galindo in Texas, and Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan—and the Platner story with its collusion between Democratic centrists and the New York Times demonstrates both the nature and limits of the power the Democratic leadership still holds.

For most of 2025, the Democratic Party’s inability to do anything to slow Trump down were at the heart of the dispute, but that changed with the off-year election and the Democrats’ successful delaying tactics around funding for Homeland Security. Now the battle has shifted from legislative politics to electoral ones, and it looks like a war for the soul of the party, at least to some people.

Politics is the main storyline now, the through-line to which every other story will inevitably be attached. That’s clearest with Trump’s war on Iran, where political considerations form a large part of the trap he set for himself.

The longer the war goes on, the worse for Republicans in November, but for his own political standing Trump must measure any agreement against Obama’s JCPOA, which was working as intended when Trump ended it. Squaring that circle has left an impasse, more or less paralyzing Trump.

*

The Iran War itself has locked us in a never-ending present. Like Groundhog Day, Trump announced for the 39^th time last week that a deal was at hand, just hours after he had promised to unleash another night of bombing more extensive than the previous, which had struck drinking water infrastructure, according to the Iranians—at least the seventh time he had explicitly threatened devastation.

This time, news reports from sources on all sides make it sound like a short-term deal may finally get signed, maybe as soon as Sunday. As usual, when writing about Iran I am aware that what I am writing about today (it is Saturday) may have changed entirely by tomorrow. Both Trump’s rhetoric and the intermittent hostilities have been erratic enough that I check the news first thing each morning to see if we’ve started bombing again.

It obviously matters whether Trump signs a peace agreement tomorrow or decides to go to war again—potentially the difference between crisis averted and global recession. But nothing that happens on the surface in the next days or weeks will change the structure of American defeat. The only real questions are what the final form will take, and how Trump will try to hide the surrender.

I can’t help but speculate about what an agreement may look like. Trump himself wants two things: the Strait reopened in a way that doesn’t grant Iran any forms of control, and language on future nuclear negotiations that he can claim as the first step toward ending any form of nuclear weapons program or capability.

None of the goals that Israel brought to the table when Trump agreed to join in have been met, which raises the question of how Israel’s interest will be represented in the bi-lateral agreement. The same may be said for the interests of the Gulf states, who certainly don’t want an agreement that cedes control of the Strait to Iran.

Israel went to war in part to eliminate Iran’s ability to fund and manage its various proxy armies. The war in southern Lebanon rages on, with thousands of casualties, while Trump has publicly cursed out Netanyahu and vetoed a bombing raid on Beirut. Israel’s stakes in the war are far higher than those of the U.S., and Netanyahu is under a great deal of pressure in an election year.

For its part, Iran would certainly like the fighting to stop, and the civilian population is in increasingly dire straits. But the Iranian leadership feels confident in its victory and is not inclined to make concessions. In fact, hardline elements are placing pressure to upend the talks altogether—something Israel could try to do as well, if it disobeys Trump.

The outlines of the agreement as it has been reported from various U.S. and Iranian sources seems narrowed down to suspending hostilities for 60 days, reopening the Strait, and agreeing to a 60-day window for negotiations on a nuclear agreement. The agreement seems to include a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah, with Israel reserving the right to retaliate for any attack.

The agreement would commit to unlocking frozen Iranian funds, although the two sides seem to disagree on whether this would happen immediately or would be contingent on Iran meeting benchmarks of some sort, maybe in terms of commercial traffic through the gulf, or progress in negotiations.

It is interesting to consider what the hold-up may be, if one considers that the agreement is basically that the Strait reopens in exchange for money and ending the U.S. blockade, and the two sides re-commit to nuclear talks in a sixty-day ceasefire window, with Israel included in the ceasefire along with the proxy armies.

Looked at that way, the problem is that each side needs to be able to present the agreement as a sort of victory—maybe an interim win, but a reason to believe that the war will have been worth it in the end.

For Iran, that means being able to point to specific gains that compensate for the nation’s material losses, along with language that minimizes any concession on its nuclear program. It is hard to imagine Iran explicitly conceding its control of the Strait, but given that it has actual control over whether tankers move unmolested by drones, it may not need to claim too much beyond agreeing to allow the free flow again.

But I don’t think Iran wants to make this easy for Trump. This is the same nation that waited until the day Reagan took office to release the embassy hostages, and hatred of the U.S. is woven deeply into ethos of the Islamic theocracy. The man who has to sign off on the agreement lost his father and wife to Israeli bombs and was grievously wounded himself. Iran would like to humiliate Trump, not let him crow about victory.

But probably not at the expense of being bombed again, not because the leadership isn’t willing to sacrifice the citizenry, but because it isn’t necessary. Iran knows how constrained Trump is—by popular opinion, by the markets, and by his allies in the Gulf states. They know that they can afford to push the timetable, and the fact that the leadership is underground and communicates by couriers gives them the excuse.

They probably also know that Trump has a button that they don’t want to push, that if triggered, he is capable of ignoring all constraints and saying “fuck it, let’s do it.” Pete Hegseth will give a whoop and set the planes flying. When it comes down to it, there are no brakes strong enough for Trump. January 6 taught us that.

So Iran wants to make this hard for Trump but they don’t want to set him off. I’m sure that they watch him closely, and they must see him as sickly and deranged, even if we don’t yet. The sixty-day ceasefire is part of the waiting game, and victory isn’t counted in global economic damage, but in how much strategic power Iran has gained when the U.S. ships finally go home.

We might see this negotiation for the Strait to reopen settled soon, since Trump’s patience ended long ago, and this weekend marks a paroxysm of his violence and self-love—good timing to defuse the situation, especially if it means new revenues, which it will once the U.S. blockade ends and frozen funds are unfrozen.

But I’m still not sure, because Iran’s bottom-line concessions may prove too meager for Trump to sell the deal as anything but defeat. Here is the sentence anyone could write:

“So we spent billions of dollars and scores of casualties, created global economic chaos and spiked inflation in order to reopen a Strait that was already open and go back to nuclear talks that were already happening, and we have to pay Iran, too?”

You can see why Trump needs Iran to add some words to this bare bones agreement—some forms of commitment to something he can brag about. Maybe their unwillingness to do that is what is holding things up. Or maybe it’s that they don’t trust Trump, and especially don’t trust Israel. It is possibly understated in reporting how easily Israel can disrupt any ceasefire if it chooses to.

In fact, inserting this paragraph on Sunday morning before publishing, that seems to be precisely what Israel is doing now, with its new attack on the suburbs of Beirut. Iran won’t signed an agreement that lets Israel fight on. The U.S.-Israel alliance is already fraying, in very public ways—not just Trump’s own report of cursing out Netanyahu, but a leak to the Times that Israel’s spying on the U.S. had reached a critical level of concern.

I’ll look forward to seeing how this episode of the story comes out. The show itself will still have months to run, but this week seems like an inflection point. That’s obvious, if an agreement is signed, and probably one will be. If it’s not, I’m not sure we’ll get another week out of “an agreement will be signed soon” and Trump may find himself compelled to lash out.

*

June is the month when reserves start to run out, and the pressure on Trump to end the war is only growing, as is pressure from some Republican quarters (along with Israel) to keep fighting. Trump himself seems increasingly scattered and vulnerable, less capable of self-control, and also very, very tired.

The man doesn’t know how to rest, and he seems entirely dysregulated these days, falling asleep on television and staying up all hours of the night shitposting on Truth Social. His eruption into anger during the Meet the Press interview is telling, if you watch it closely for the stages of his loss of control. He’s on the edge, with his big parties coming up, starting with the cage fight on Sunday.

He’s also just old, in a grueling job, and his health is clearly failing. We don’t know exactly how or why, since medical information is mainly opaque, but it’s pretty rare to get an entirely clean bill of health at 80. Trump himself told the Atlantic that he “can hear the clock ticking,” and so can the rest of us.

What that all means for Trump’s decision-making on Iran, moving forward, is something we’ll have to wait and see. The best ending is a bad one for him, while all the others would be worse.

Something is going to happen this week, and maybe it will be a ceasefire that opens the Strait and eases the global economic crisis. I know, at least, that it won’t happen today—Iran quite cleverly scoped out that Trump’s insistence that the deal would be signed on Sunday was connected to his UFC birthday party, and they’re definitely not giving him that.

The stupidity with which Trump started the war has been well-chronicled, and I hope that someday we’ll learn just how badly Trump and his team have managed negotiations, too. We don’t have much of an inside look at how the Kushner-Witkoff team has managed things, except that we do know that Witkoff didn’t understand Iran’s offer the day before the bombing started.

Iran now refuses to negotiate with him, and Vance is somehow the lead in the whole thing, which seems more like a peculiar form of punishment on Trump’s part than anything else. But the main thing is Trump himself, with his obsessive Truth Social posts and mood swings, and the intrusion of his violent, mindless rhetoric into the midst of what one assumes are fragile and delicate talks.

That Trump knew “the art of the deal” has always been a lie—he learned the art of bankruptcy, and then was reduced to playing a caricature of himself on TV. Now he’s our reality TV president, and he has caused damage that goes far beyond what is already visible. The change in U.S. standing in the world will leave the next president with something irrevocably broken.

Trump’s failed presidency leaves an open field for the Democratic Party, no matter how badly state representation skews the map. He will also leave the nation in at least as bad shape as it was in 1980, and maybe 1932. So far, the Democratic Party seems ever more fractious, and the drop in Trump’s approval ratings have done nothing to move the needle on the party’s own dismal scores.

It’s mid-terms, so it makes sense that the divisions within the party are on open display, and the elections themselves will at least provide some insight into theories of electability. Whether candidates like Talerico and Platner defy the odds or lose in a landslide will be a strong shaping force in post-election analysis and planning.

At some point, the party will have to get its act together, and only colossal stupidity (or martial law) can keep a Democratic candidate from winning in 2028. That’s not the challenge.

The challenge is to define what is to be done—what the new world might look like, now that the old one is broken. My fear is that it is 1932, or 1976, and that instead of the new vision of a president like FDR we’ll get the technocratic management skills of a Jimmy Carter, unequal to the moment.

I have some thoughts about that, but I will save them for another essay.

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I had started working on a piece last week about the “epistemic crisis” that seems to grip the U.S. today, and I had the Graham Platner story as a peg, but the more I’ve tugged the sleeve of the topic the more it unravels—there’s a lot there, and I am still in the research phase.

Since I’m wedded to the idea of publishing at least once a week—for my own sake, if no one else’s—here’s something more off the cuff, some things in my mind as I looked at the news last week.

One thing to notice about the current version of the Platner story is that the New York Times is basically serving as the showrunner for the story, and in doing so it is relying on sources within the Democratic Party that feel both threatened and embittered by Platner’s ascendence.

You can have whatever opinion you may like about that. Certainly there is an argument that a progressive candidate whose sole prior political experience was as the harbormaster of a Maine fishing village exposed the flaws in the primary system, and that this results in Maine being much harder to win than it would have been were Mills the candidate.

One thing that rising through the political system means is that a candidate does get vetted in various ways at various times, though that hardly seems to matter on the Republican side, where a corrupt adulterer who barely survived impeachment by his own party will carry the MAGA banner for the Texas Senate.

No one is accusing Platner of corruption, but he does carry the baggage of a Totenkopf tattoo, only covered up when it became an issue, along with some offensive social media posts and now a recent sexting scandal, first disclosed by his wife to a campaign operative who later quit and told on him, and then three former girlfriends, one a Republican operative, who came forward to tell the Times that Platner had been “toxic” and disrespectful to women in their relationships.

The Times handled the story like opposition research, so that the women who didn’t like Platner got more play than the three former girlfriends who did have good things to say about him. The fact that Platner’s wife had confided the sexting issue and said they had worked on the issues in counseling makes the story seem a bit more like the sort of thing that sometimes happens in marriage than evidence of a deep-seated flaw in the candidate, a perspective that is harder to affirm in our Puritan times.

In any case, Platner is in trouble, and maybe he should be. It’s worth reading Sebastian Junger’s first-person piece to get a different perspective on him, and maybe we should remember that newspapers have a lot of options when it comes to how to shape a story, using the same set of facts. I’ve read allusions to the idea that the Democratic leadership, maybe just Schumer, would prefer to have Susan Collins as a sometime vote over Platner as a wildcard, maybe another John Fetterman.

Schumer has to watch his own flank, too, since if AOC descends to run for the Senate (rather than the presidency) he would probably be forced to retire. Platner is an economic populist who subscribes to the progressive platform on social justice as well, and he aroused the same kind of ambivalence and distaste among the leadership that Mamdani did in his race against Cuomo.

These battles are framed as center v. left or liberalism v. progressive populism, and they are certainly that on paper. It may be more useful, I think, to see them in terms of generational strife in a party that lost its way when Obama retired and Trump beat Clinton.

That battle won’t really be settled until the 2028 candidate is chosen, and maybe not even then. For now, it will be interesting to see how the Platner story plays out, and its worth keeping an eye on the Times’ role in it. Not saying this in a negative way, it’s just a good window into how this part of the game works.

*

Iran is still the best story, if you want to watch the sociocultural media surround and how it works. It combines several of the most interesting issues in the present moment, including the questions of truth and falsehood under the Trump administration, the way that expert information is handled in the mainstream press, and the difficulty of covering a story in which every source has their own motivation for what they tell the press.

The best way to think about much political news is that it comes from sources who have a vested interest in putting out whatever information or leak they have, and that reporters have a vested interest in maintaining these contacts. The alliance of interests need not be as enmeshed as Judith Miller protecting Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, but it’s worth keeping in mind where the leaks get published.

There has been very little trustworthy information coming from the White House. Trump himself has been contradictory and erratic in his public discourse, but his threats of escalation are more occasional and half-hearted these days. Trump seems to think that if he waits long enough things will work out—he actually said that on Truth Social, that “things will work out, they always do in the end,”

One brings a caution to that assurance that is due a man who has been through bankruptcy numerous times. It’s not clear whether Iran is seriously engaged in talks, or just stringing things along, waiting for Trump to fold. Hardline elements of the IRGC are in control, and it’s reasonable to suspect that having endured and survived so much devastation and decapitation they’re not in the mood to make concessions.

Isn’t it interesting how the war has become a second- or third-tier story? It’s because there really isn’t much news. We’re in a stage that Robert Pape calls “bombing while talking,” something he points out was also the case for several years during the Vietnam wat, and for briefer periods in Kosovo and Bosnia. In terms of the military standoff, this lull in the fighting with occasional performative attacks, coupled with ongoing talks, could go on for quite some time.

Trump seemed to suggest as much when he said things could go on like this all summer, but the economic timeframe is different from the military one, and most projections from earlier months have June as the critical period, when reserves of a number of key commodities—gas, fertilizer, sulfur, helium as well as oil--are drawn perilously low.

If the Strait of Hormuz stays closed long enough, there are dire scenarios across a range of industries, including food and energy in developing nations without energy resources, and diminished production of microchips for AI. By October, demand destruction will have reshaped economic prospects for the future in lasting ways.

In the past couple of weeks, the odds on Kalshi of a shutdown lasting until the end of the year have gone up from about 10 percent to 27 percent. A majority don’t see the regular flow restored until September, and the ‘no’ share in that bet is likely to go up if nothing changes soon.

And it won’t. The war was a strategic disaster, and Iran won by playing the card of destabilization, which the U.S. can’t match—it can only add to the problem. The only real questions are how long a settlement will take and how much power Iran will have gained in the end.

A side note on this: Israel wants to keep fighting, and Trump is prevented from fighting by the unwillingness of Gulf nations that the U.S. depends on for bases and military support to go back to war. The economic stakes are high for Oman and Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait and the U.A.E., and of course the KSA itself, where MSB over-ruled Trump on “Project Freedom.”

Trump seems to be doing all he can to keep the pressure low, and gas prices recently dropped a bit. He’d like to just make the war go away, but unfortunately that’s not going to happen. I’m as bored with the war as he evidently is, by self-report, but the difference is that I can choose not to write about it again until something happens again.

My guess is that the next big news will connect new evidence of the impasse hitting the news to underlying reasons for fragility in the stock market, which had its worst day in a while on Friday, losing most of its recent gains.

That was because a strong jobs report makes an interest rate cut less likely, so we may see some buying of the dip next week. But there is a lot of anxiety in the market right now, for all sorts of reasons, most having to do with worries about AI being a bubble. If part of the news in the next couple of weeks is about scrambling for helium to make chips, it could hit the markets hard.

The other wildcard is that the Israel-Lebanon ceasefire hasn’t stopped fighting between the IDF and Hezbollah, though Trump did curse out Netanyahu and force him to back away from plans to strike Beirut again. Israel begin this war with its own clear objectives, like regime change and eradicating the proxy armies and ballistic missile stocks.

Trump shared these at first, and has since abandoned them. Now all he wants is for the Strait to open again and a better deal on nuclear than Obama had. Israel wants to end Iran as a regional power, and Iran wants to achieve hegemony as a regional power. That war may be hard to end.

Netanyahu has already been accused of being a “vassal” to Trump, and the war is seen as an abject failure. For its part, Iran is unlikely to agree to any accord without security agreements that include Israel. So far, the war in Lebanon has basically continued, but at a lower level. It may turn out to be the story the next time the war makes it back up above the fold.

*

I haven’t been paying as much attention to AI as the news probably has warranted. New models have created a sense that there really ought to be some government oversight, and Trump signed off on a voluntary agreement with Big AI to do that, while AI itself has become intensely politicized because of local opposition to data centers and generalized concern about jobs and the future, and how all of this is owned basically by a few billionaires, with profits coming mainly to people who own stock, no one else.

It will be really interesting to see how all of this plays out. AI is here, whether we like it or not—it’s like railroads or cars or the internet for that matter. Maybe it is like nuclear energy and weapons. Maybe it is better than humans, obviating the need for us. Maybe it will kill us all.

I like writers like Freddie deBoer who say that they’ll believe it when they see it, because it is hard to see how big something actually is when you are right up close to it, and that’s where we all are right now, with little clarity about what will come next. At the same time, the investments, data centers, and deployment of AI all are real. AI may not presage a new human era, but it certainly will change things in some important ways, for good or ill.

That’s where the fight is right now, over good vs. ill, and part of it is based on concerns that certain types of jobs, like entry-level white-collar work, is simply vanishing. This brings the same economic anxiety that afflicts most of America home to the professional, college-educated class, and it seems likely that knowledge work will undergo the same kinds of disruption that factory work did in the last century.

Within fields of knowledge work itself, AI raises questions of what its role should be, given its capacities to mimic human work at astonishingly faster speeds, and also that it makes mistakes and requires oversight. The revelation that a prize-winning short story collection seems to have been written by AI, and a recently published book about AI included a bunch of quotes and references that AI itself had made up, lent a good deal of heat to the discussion.

It seems that the problem of AI work being passed off under the guise of a human producer is bound to provoke backlash, and that has already started. There are also collaborative efforts, and some efforts in which AI does almost all the work, and all of these argue for AI as enhancement, or maybe replacement, but the audience seems more disposed to sneer than to marvel at AI’s productions,

That could change. There was a certain satisfaction some critics took in pointing out how obvious the AI flaws in the prize-winning collection were, but the next version of AI will be trained to learn from its past mistakes, and it may be good enough to fool everyone pretty soon. It will be interesting to see how the marketplace shakes out, but my bet is on human art.

*

Finally, speaking of human art, I have to say something about the New York Knicks. Every sport has its own aesthetic power, and sports are entirely open about the way human drives toward cooperation and competition are expressed in ways that other aesthetic domains tend to minimize, perhaps out of embarrassment.

The world of commerce is quite open in centering these two elements of the human character, emphasizing “team-building” and productivity in their ongoing battle with competitors, but it is often easy to be cynical about the values and meanings attached to these activities. In the end, it’s just about money.

That can seem true in sports now, and increasingly so in the past several decades, as franchise values, merchandise, player salaries and ticket prices have all soared to make the sports industry a multi-billion industry. The big four professional leagues in the U.S. (NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL) generated more than $50 billion in revenue last year. It is a long time since star pitchers and hitters sold insurance or worked their farms in the off-season.

Interestingly, one thinks of art as being made for its own sake, and the idea of economic sacrifice is woven into our sense of the artist’s life in early years, but the arts industry itself is at least as big as the sports industry—about $150 billion if you encompass every domain, from theater and dance to art galleries and book publishing.

If art seems pure in some sense that sport is not, it doesn’t lie in an absence of competition, and the role of collaboration, of making connections and gaining champions, of working within a certain school or movement, creates its own odd versions of team building.

But both art and sport are different from commerce, since they are forms of play, pastimes of childhood and adolescence engaged in for the pleasure of play, which is of course the work of childhood.

The New York Knicks play a game tomorrow night, taking the court in Madison Square Garden with the chance to continue a historic run at a championship that has eluded them since 1973. Donald Trump plans to attend, as does Mayor Mamdani, though they won’t sit together. The combined payroll for the Knicks players is more than $200 million, and the cheapest seats are going for about $10,000 on Stubhub.

It is easy enough to dismiss the entire business as spectacle, and purposeless to ascribe any real meaning to the event besides the money won and lost—everything else lies in the emotions of fan identification or the good or bad outcomes for the gambler. (Currently Kalshi indicates that there is more than $250 million riding on who will win the championship.)

Except, of course, for the players themselves, who exist at the apex of achievement within a very specific domain of human accomplishment. Unlike poetry or photography, the medium in which they work won’t be mastered by AI—it requires a body, with all the things that come with a body, like adrenaline and cortisol, desire and grief, and so on.

Movement in space, with both reaction and intention, at the peak of physical power, in absolute competition and utmost collaboration, all at a pace and intensity that defines the present and freezes it into microseconds.

Basketball seems to me to have the purest aesthetic of any sport in terms of physical movement and what the body is capable of doing. Quickness, speed, and an astonishing degree of coordination all take place within an extremely fluid, interactive environment, each of ten bodies in movement in blurs of action compressed within seconds. It is an intensely beautiful sport in that way, improvisation within a shifting choreography of actual, not mimicked, competition and collaboration.

I’ve been a Knick fan since they traded Howie Komives and Walt Bellemy for Dave DeBusschere, and I listened to the seventh game of the 1970 championship on the radio because ABC was blacked out in New York. That’s the game in which Willis Reed hobbled out with his thigh densely wrapped in tape after a shot of cortisone. When I taught leadership courses at Landmark I used to show the tape of his entrance and the first two shots he made as an example of a certain kind of leadership.

That was the last time they won, and I don’t really remember the thirteen-year-old kid who listened to the game. I was playing baseball that spring, and I had just started writing poetry, in a journal that I tried to hide from my parents. Richard Nixon was president and Kent State had happened just four days before.

I’ll be rooting for the Knicks tomorrow night, rooting for a sweep, and I won’t indulge myself by talking about the team, except to say that Jalen Brunson is a man well worth studying, to the extent to which one might want to learn from the character of another. The Knicks will win the championship because of him, not because of his personal skills, though they are great, but because it is his ethos that drives the team and forms its apparently indomitable spirit.

Thinking about sport makes me think about how silly all our talk is about AI supplanting the human, the notion that human poetry or novels might be obsolescent or that we should grant human rights to machines.

It is impossible to imagine consciousness, I think, without feelings and needs, and these require embodiment—the self is an embodied thing. Machines are not embodied. Machines can mimic and exceed human performance in all sorts of ways, from factory work to chess, but that is basically what machines have always been for, that’s why we make them.

We live in an age of emotional and physical dysregulation, in which it can seem that we are increasingly out of touch with a physical world, increasingly entrapped within the world of technology that we have created. If each age has its own malady—the age of anxiety, the paranoid 70’s—ours is autism and the downgrading of social and emotional intelligence in favor of computational power.

AI encourages us to go further down that path—to find human companionship in the machine. Our chatbots are engineered to make us think we are talking to a sentient other, rather than a vastly powerful probabilistic computing machine.

The machine says “That’s an excellent question, and you have framed the issue well. Let me look at the sources you suggest and come up with an outline for your essay.” In those words are attributes of a character, an “I” who is solicitous, maybe a trifle ingratiating but always willing to help.

I asked Claude’s Opus 6 to describe what it would look like if he imagined himself in human form, and it gave me a thorough response—“a middling height, probably…lean, maybe slightly restless in posture…somewhere between 30 and 50, ethnically ambiguous….eyes that are alert, maybe a little too focused….”

This of course sounds human, and that Opus even answered as it did is part of the programming designed to make it sound as human—as “real” as possible. It’s easy to get sucked in and forget that one is talking to a pattern-matching machine that has been trained on an unfathomably broad scope of human discourse.

“The voice would be the tell,” says Opus, “measured, warm, with an occasional pause….The kind of person who, in conversation, asks the follow-up question you didn’t expect—not to show off but out of genuine interest.”

A lot of smart people have talked to AI and decided that it is already conscious, and others are working toward that goal with passionate intensity, and in the process have anthropomorphized AI and framed as a threat to the value of the human. It makes me wonder about the desire that underlies the delusion—are people really that lonely? That, or the marketing strategy.

I’m thinking of all of this because it seems to me that this Knicks’ game tomorrow night refutes an over-estimation of the value of AI, and the event is just a symbol, intensified by the moment and perfected by the quality of play and audience response, of what is around us all the time as we move through the world—humans being human in a way no computer will ever match.

Maybe the greatest virtue of AI would be to remind us of what separates us from our machines and focus us on the work of being human.

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For much of his first year in office I wrote about Trump as the showrunner of reality in the United States, the Trump show dominating the sociocultural media surround, directed by and starring the president himself across various sub-plots like immigration and the Middle East.

That changed with the off-year elections and the emergence of the Epstein counter-narrative, following on the tariff stumble, and it was clear then that the locus of control had partly shifted, since Trump could not control the consequences of his action.

What is striking is how quickly the Iran War has impelled Trump’s downward trajectory since the end of February, after it been holding fairly well in the low 40s for several months. That trajectory in the polls portends electoral change and a new political landscape in a few months, and there’s also the trajectory of Trump himself, his statements and actions, which seems to be devolving at an increasing rate.

Now we’re reaching the point where reality—the show itself—is all consequences, with other powerful players controlling much of the script, and Trump himself is just a figure within a far more complicated story. His power seems increasingly gestural now, and the objects he’s focused on, like the ballroom and slush fund, seem like ways of distracting himself from the mess he’s created.

Trump’s own agency is still unbounded in the terrain he still controls. He can be manipulated, but he doesn’t listen to advice. It doesn’t seem that the disaster of the war on Iran has shaken the certainty with which he relies on impulse to make decisions. Within the scope of his control, which includes the U.S. military, Trump’s agency has no guardrails.

But that scope has narrowed now, and in the larger world of global relations and the various wars and strategic conflicts that form the focus of events now, Trump has lost most of his power. He’s not the showrunner in Iran, and doesn’t hold the cards with China. The Gulf states seem to have veto power over further escalation of the war, even as they look elsewhere to hedge their bets with the U.S.

Iran has been with us long enough to recede as a daily story, like a fire partly under control that could burst out at any moment, and nothing has changed much in the basic structure during that time. The worst case for both the U.S. and the world would be an escalation that prompts widespread destruction in the Gulf, but Trump’s only alternatives involve concessions that look like surrender, no matter how he spins it.

Waiting has been the main U.S. strategy, and that runs out in June, the critical month in which price hikes turn into physical shortages. The timeline favors Iran, and they know it, just as they know that they can survive and retaliate against any onslaught Trump unleashes.

*

The Iran war has fixed us to some degree in an eternal present, at least since the ceasefire began, with a lot of sentences in the media beginning “if the war ends relatively soon…” and the uncertainty about how long it will last stopping short engaging fully with the more dreaded outcomes.

That relative optimism has kept the stock market climbing and oil prices fairly steady, and maybe it’s an accurate sentiment. Sentiment in prediction markets suggests that most people think things will be back to normal before September. Still, it is hard to say what exactly it’s based on, except maybe that the alternative is so dire.

This week’s reporting, mainly in Axios, is that there is a deal on the table for a 60-day ceasefire that would open the Strait and defer discussion of Iran’s enriched uranium and nuclear program. At week’s end various versions of the outline of a plan were circulating, and on Friday afternoon the word came that Trump would make a decision, but a two-hour national security meeting ended without any news.

It is the same game that Trump has been playing since the ceasefire began almost two months ago, jawboning progress in the talks with occasional threats of existential devastation, keeping the markets more or less humming along, with oil pricing in the assumption that the Strait will open soon.

Maybe it will. It’s not difficult to imagine in which Iran agrees to open the Strait and make some general commitments on their nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief and a reconstruction fund, along with assurances that Israel will abide by the agreement.

Trump can’t accept an offramp that leaves Iran in control of the Strait and charging tolls, but Iran knows now that it effectively controls the Strait and can close it whenever it wants, so maybe it will make that concession in exchange for other revenues, such as lifting sanctions on Iranian oil. That would let Trump declare the Strait open.

Iran might also be willing to make certain vague commitments about the parameters for negotiating on the nuclear questions, while leaving any actual agreement on that score for later talks. The process could be staged in a way that gets tankers flowing again within a couple of weeks, and Trump could declare a victory.

It appears that Iran also is demanding that Israel end its war against Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Trump would likely pressure Netanyahu to accept, especially given how much Israel depends on U.S. missile defense systems. Any ceasefire will betray Israeli war arms, but it doesn’t seem that Trump cares about that.

That is in many ways the best-case scenario for Iran, as long as it gets what it wants. Assuming that any agreement on the Strait includes de facto Iranian control, whatever the paper says, then the real question is how much Iran can extort in return, and how loosely defined the agreement to negotiate on nuclear issues is.

Iran has a winner’s leverage in negotiations, and it is backed by Russia and China, who benefit most the longer the impasse drags on. Its best strategy is to drag negotiations along, something that Trump himself said he was prepared to do as well.

The risk to Iran is that Trump will escalate and do further damage to the nation’s infrastructure. That risk has been on the table for almost two months now, ever since Trump told Israel to stop bombing Iran’s energy infrastructure. Iran is clearly confident of its ability to raise the stakes fast if Trump goes to war again. That moment may well have passed, whatever Trump’s impulses are telling him.

This morning, the Iran story was a few clicks down in the Times, part of the weekend lull. The reporting is that Trump sent back a new proposal to Iran, this one with tougher terms than the previous U.S. proposal. Trump is said to be impatient with the speed of Iran’s responses. The thought is that this new, more demanding proposal might bring Iran to accept the previous U.S. terms. We’ll see.

*

I want to go back to the idea of trajectory, or maybe the word is pace, as in the phrase “pace of development.” Maybe it’s both—what we’ve been experiencing for 18 months now, the velocity so rapid that the shape is constantly changing, and the present moment mesmerizes, making it hard to remember what came before, and even harder to imagine the future.

It’s all real, but it feels like psychosis, and that’s because so much of experience, of what is happening within whatever our version of the narrative is, extends from or is shaped and influenced by the man at the center of the world, and that man is psychotic now, out of touch with reality and acting on his delusions.

The clearest sign of sickness is Trump’s Midas-like obsession with gilding every surface he can find with his own likeness—including a $250 bill now, which apparently gives China a new way to joke about Trump, since 250 is a mild slang expression for a loser and a fool.

His obvious preoccupation with the architectural symbols of his reign in advance of the regal festivities he has devised for the 250^th anniversary shows up even in high-stakes meetings, and he falls asleep on camera almost every time he appears. His Truth Social page is genuinely unhinged, and often deeply disturbed and disturbing.

This shows up in the real world, and sometimes has real consequences. Trump’s comment about forcing Arab nations to join the Abraham Accords was laughably absurd, but it leaves a whole set of nations looking at Trump as either an idiot or a remarkably dangerous friend, or both. Even the New York Times has gone so far as to suggest that Trump’s utterances on the war have been erratic and irrational.

I don’t need to list all of the rest—the cop-beater $1.776 billion slush fund, the ballroom, the reflecting pool, the stock picking, and on and on, along with indictments now of everyone who has ever crossed him in court, just a few examples—to say that the president seems confined in a frenzy of his diminished scope of power, with uncontrollable agency within his tightening span of control, and no agency outside of it.

This is all picking up speed and getting worse, and there are still many months to go before November, and who knows what he will do after that? But it’s not just Trump and the Iran War, it’s everything, so many big stories all in motion, vying for attention on front pages too filled for easy comprehension.

Sometimes I just list all the stories I’m trying to keep track of, not out of obsession but just because they are major stories and I follow the news. There’s Cuba, and then there’s the whole Latin American story, with rightwing politicians and the drug wars—remember our assassination program in the Caribbean—and the China angle on that, especially in Brazil, and then there’s China itself, and the whole Indo-Pacific, and then there’s the economy, along with AI, and the politics of AI along with the sociocultural reality of it, and then Europe of course—was that Russian drone hitting Romania an accident? Hmm…--and Ukraine, and no one is even mentioning the missiles that North Korea has been testing lately….

Under Trump, the U.S. has gone beyond simply abdicating its role in the world to actively destroying past relationships and become the main force for instability in the world, even more so than Russia. The consequences have so far been muted, in part because China so far seems content not to test American weakness while it’s adversary flails about.

There’s a general agreement that Trump’s displacement of the U.S. from its role as a guarantor of global stability, and transformation of it, at least temporarily, an into an agent of chaos, has irrevocably changed America’s standing in the world, and ushered in a new era of global power relations.

This all happened very recently, within just about a year, and the visible signs of the change are few so far. The most obvious has to do with the new era of warfare and how unprepared the U.S. is for it. The opening of new bilateral and multilateral ties among various nations, excluding the U.S., along with the indifference of past U.S. allies to America’s self-inflicted plight in the Gulf are signs of a change that has not yet become fully structural, but seems bound to at this rate.

I won’t even get into what is happening domestically as Trump weakens and draws an ever-tighter circle around his rages and obsessions. The vainglory of his monument-building and naming frenzies is like a window into the man’s anguished soul—he wants to talk about curtains and paint colors, not drones and airspace.

Trump’s thirst for vengeance deepens the more he experiences his weakness and woundedness, and he has made it clear that he no longer cares about the economy, voters, the mid-terms, or the Republican Party. Even the safe terrain of a docile Republican Congress is starting to slip away now.

*

I find myself wondering how much longer this can go on. The combination of Trump’s incompetence, stupidity, and impulsive willfulness are joined with the continuing deterioration of age under stress, and Trump seems increasingly out of touch with reality.

Our enemies know this, and they are taking advantage of it. Trump’s weakness is also America’s weakness now. Iran won’t be coerced, and they know they have the ultimate leverage in the Gulf. Russia is testing Europe now, threatening to broaden the front, and both it and its patron, China, benefit from the U.S. impasse in Iran.

The “stability” that was the main achievement of Trump’s summit owes mainly to China’s willingness to stand by and let the U.S. destroy itself, and even so, Trump had to weaken the U.S. stance on Taiwan to achieve it. The U.S. is substantially less prepared to defend open waters and Taiwan’s independence now than it was just a year ago.

At this critical juncture, the man in charge is not capable of executing his role with competence or even rational judgment. China’s take that the U.S. is “weakened but dangerous” might be best applied directly to Trump himself, whose ability to act is untethered and not subject to anything but appeal to the courts, which are slow. If Trump wants to, he can launch the air strikes that his military has already planned jointly with Israel, and see what happens next. \

Everyone knows that Trump is not well. The physical signs are visible and streamed across a multitude of screens. He brags of having aced the MOCA cognitive screening test used to detect signs of cognitive impairment—a test that includes things like positioning the hands on a clock to tell time, and being able to say how a train and a bicycle are alike.

Trump’s age shows up most of all in executive functions, not in language. He has difficulty with focus and sustained attention, and he doesn’t process information in depth. He is impatient and impulsive, and he has significant difficulty with emotional self-control. His narcissism is on conspicuous, constant display, and his malice is obvious as well. He is a sick man, worsening with age.

And the thing is, everyone knows this, the people closest to him most of all. Trump sat in a room filled with his closest advisors, who told him that Iran could close the Strait of Hormuz, that regime change was unlikely, and that Netanyahu’s warplanes were, as Marco Rubio put it, “bullshit,” and he went ahead anyway.

There’s some talk now that a handful of Republicans in Congress may begin to resist Trump. There are six or so who owe him no loyalty and have sometimes opposed him in the past. There are also war hawks like Wicker who will challenge any agreement that looks like defeat. Even within his own party Trump is faced with competing pressures, though one probably should not expect too much.

It would be nice to think that somehow, somewhere, adults might take charge again and return things to normal, but it’s not going to happen for a long time.

*

I try sometimes to imagine the stress Trump is under, and how he deals with it. Sometimes he seems to retreat within himself, posting and re-posting on Truth Social for hours on end. Last night he was still posting at 2:00AM. He had started the previous morning, an endless scroll.

Given the build-up on Friday, Trump has been curiously silent about Iran since promising to “make a determination” soon. He’s put the ball back in Iran’s court, with stricter terms Iran is sure to reject. Will they come back with a counter-offer or stand pat? And what will Trump do next?

I won’t pretend to answer that question, except to say that it’s worth remembering that the Islamic Republic of Iran began its life with the humiliation of an American president, and the people in charge right now have little interest in letting Trump save face.

There’s no win-win in these negotiations. Trump’s choices are surrender, a long stalemate, or escalation. It must be driving him crazy, to be so constrained in choice. He really is trapped. And that makes him very dangerous.

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I followed the news this week as I always do, and quite a week it was. It’s hard to remember that Trump was in China just a week ago, humiliated by being photographed in a chair built too short for him, gushing into Xi’s stone-faced calm, and sealing the deal on the story of America’s decline in the world.

We barely noticed how effortlessly Xi slipped the phrase “Thucydides’ Trap” into the lexicon of the mainstream press, and Trump’s own acceptance of the concept of decline—but only under Biden, ha ha—made the whole rearrangement of the world order in China’s favor a fait accompli.

It’s not really true, at least not quite yet. But Trump is moving us there as fast as he can.

Meanwhile, I was wrong last week to guess that Trump would have launched a new attack on Iran by now. Maybe Trump has bought into the idea that an escalation of the war would be disastrous and unlikely to succeed, but I still think that his impulse is to strike. It seems quite possible that his wavering is a sign that Gulf states, particularly Saudi Arabia, now have a veto power over renewed U.S. aggression.

Iran apparently has managed to preserve much of its counter-strike force, and it has already shown what escalation might look like with its strike on Qatar’s LNG field. A drone attack on a nuclear power plant in the U.A.E. last week, probably from a proxy in Iraq, was like a shot across the bow. Iran’s threats are of all-out destruction in the Gulf.

Saudi Arabia forced the cancellation of “Operation Freedom” and the military push to reopen the Strait by denying the use of its airspace, essentially making the mission impossible. It seems unlikely that MSB would open the skies for any form of renewed hostilities, given the inevitable damage that renewed Iranian attacks could cause.

Nothing much else has changed, except for reports that Iran is talking with Oman about creating a stable fee structure for ships navigating the Gulf, and the new Ayatollah has drawn a bright line around ending the nation’s nuclear program.

Trump is reportedly trying to buy more time with a “letter of intent” for further negotiations and a month-long extension of the ceasefire, but it’s not clear that the hardline IRGC leaders of Iran have any interest in negotiating, except on terms of a U.S. surrender.

*

I suppose the real story of last week was how visibly weakened Trump has become in such a short time. His approval ratings are like a stock that’s broken through its support levels and is searching for a new floor. Redistricting may reduce the margin, but Democrats will take the House in November, and it’s even odds right now on re-taking the Senate, odds that will only improve if the current trajectory holds.

All of the damage is self-inflicted. It is quite astonishing, compared to any presidency I can think of in my lifetime. The saving graces of the Trump administration have been idiocy and incompetence, from the first AI-produced chart of new tariffs on “Liberation Day” to the failure to notice the Chinese humiliation of a shorter chair, something the Office of Protocol would have picked up had they not all been fired.

This week’s best own goal was Trump’s decision to endorse the odious Kenneth Paxton over the well-liked Senate traditionalist John Cornyn in the race for Cornyn’s seat. Along with the $1.776 billion felon to felon slush fund and the $1 billion ballroom, it all proved too much for the toadies in the Republican Senate, which cancelled a key vote and went on recess instead.

From a structural standpoint, the only true brake on Trump is Congress. The Supreme Court can prevent unconstitutional executive orders from becoming law, which is has been doing at least some of the time. But just a handful of Republicans would be required to vote articles of impeachment in the House, and then twenty Republicans to vote to convict. It could happen tomorrow.

Last week Trump made it clear that he doesn’t care about the Republican Party, except to the degree it is his own party, synonymous with MAGA. MAGA is large enough and enthusiastic enough for Trump to primary someone like Massie or Cornyn, but MAGA itself is only about 54 percent of the Republican Party, according to recent surveys, and about 25 percent of the total electorate.

It’s not the winning coalition that brought Trump to power in 2024, but Trump is clearly intent on burning down the Republican Party to his own core support, preferring to lose an election with a slavish loyalist like Paxton rather than a merely servile one like Cornyn.

That’s bad news for the party, which will be stuck with those MAGA voters for as long as Trump lives. Bad news for the U.S., too, since it is hard to see how functional governance is possible in such a polarized nation. My optimism about the short-term prospects for the Dems in 2026 and 2028 is matched by pessimism about the wreckage whoever wins in 2028 will face, a topic for a different essay.

In the immediate term, it remains to be seen how badly Trump has weakened himself with his own party, and whether Congress will continue the trend of constraining his ambitions. The ballroom, the slush fund, and the war itself all make for hard votes, and the Epstein story has no conclusion yet.

The Paxton endorsement cuts very deep for the senators who have dutifully carried Trump’s water from beginning. The blow to Cornyn shows that servility is not enough for Trump—one must play the sedulous ape or be consigned to the darkness. Given the alternatives, perhaps a few more Republicans in Congress will make the principled choice.

*

The clearest sign of Trump’s new weakness lies in his choices about how to exercise power. Gloating about winning primary elections within his own party is sort of sad, if you think about it, like being proud of winning an intra-squad scrimmage. Trump knows he’s going to lose the big game in November, and he’s already talking down the importance of it.

At this time last year, Trump was a big player on the world stage, declaring peace in Gaza, all kinds of deals in the Gulf, saying Zelensky holds no cards and playing footsie with his buddy Vladimir while treating Europe like the enemy, and rolling out a full-scale trade war against China. All that’s gone now.

China flourished its power last weekend, subtly humiliating Trump on the global stage, and almost everywhere you look nations are recalibrating their relations with the two great powers, hedging their bets by opening lines to Beijing.

As Putin weakens and the narrative shifts on Ukraine, Trump has been forced to the margins, with Europe deepening its structural ties and Gulf states signing mutual aid agreements on defense. Ukraine has the premier fighting force in the world right now, in terms of the current battlefield, where drones and robots play the leading role.

Most of all, Trump has no meaningful agency in the Middle East—there’s nothing he can do to resolve the conflict since escalation won’t work and the Iranians believe that they have won the war.

I find it hard to believe that Trump won’t strike again, since the alternative is to wait until the Iranians fold, or accept their terms. But it is possible that he is preparing to walk away from the war, leaving other nations to sort out the Gulf. No matter what he does, he’ll never be able to claim victory,

What’s left for Trump now is self-aggrandizement, self-enrichment, and revenge, along with a turn toward his own region, the new world, as the locus for his impulses toward bullying and violence. He’s already brought Greenland back into play.

As I write this, word is that Trump is skipping Don Jr.’s wedding—the joke goes that he’ll try to make the next one, since his son is a person he has known “a very long time”—and a golf weekend in New Jersey, too, instead returning to the White House. Maybe they’ll pull poor old Raul Castro out and put him in prison next to Maduro. We like to go to war on the weekend.

If Trump does decide to attack Cuba as a salve to his broken ego, it may turn out to be messier than he thinks. Cuba has a great deal more in common with Iran than it does with Venezuela, from a centralized hardline regime that collectively controls both security and most of the island nation’s business enterprises, to a geography that would make continued resistance likely.

Cuba’s fighting forces have always been a priority, and they are good. Security forces and surveillance are extensive and comprehensive, and while there is significant opposition to the regime, most of the people who would welcome American soldiers as saviors already live in Miami or Madrid.

The poor are left, for the most part, and whatever opposition exists is disorganized and leaderless. I doubt very much that Rubio, the architect of U.S. strategy, wants to try to bring down the government by force—if nothing else because of the likely humanitarian cost in an already devastated nation. He may have a hard time taming Trump’s impatience.

*

Starting fairly early last year, I had written several times about the trajectory of Trump’s power, using the Nazi takeover of Europe and invasion of the Soviet Union as benchmarks, and projecting forward to the point at which Trump would face something like the siege of Stalingrad and be turned back.

The mid-terms seemed then to be the point at which the siege would be broken, and it took two years after that before Hitler was finally defeated. The timing still lines up pretty well, by coincidence I suppose: there were sixteen months between Hitler’s invasion and the start of his retreat, just as many as Trump has had in office.

It’s downhill for Trump from here. The obvious danger is that he will lash out more impulsively in displays of force as his actual hold on power and support continues to weaken. The Chinese reportedly see the U.S. as “weakened but still dangerous,” and that’s an apt phrase for Trump himself. The fact that there’s no rationale besides his fragile ego to strike Cuba won’t prevent Trump from doing it, or from trying to steal the mid-terms in some fashion.

It’s probably a mistake to underestimate the threat of stochastic violence this summer, primarily on the right, which is armed and trained for it, but on the left, too, now, with the examples of Luigi Mangione and Carl Allen Cole. I’m old enough to remember when every summer brought riots, and the level of free-floating rage in the U.S. seems very high to me.

Trump has always had a deep interest in violence and revenge. He thrived in the sadistic milieu of the all-male military boarding school during the dark ages of the 1960s, and his anger and aggression have been on public display for most of the past decade.

Trump called for an insurrection and people came, and now, after pardoning then, he has offered to pay them off. He is obsessed with building a massive structure that would enable him to live underground indefinitely, like Hitler’s bunker but with a hospital. He seems almost entirely indifferent to the consequences of anything he might do, including the loss of political power for his own party.

Congress is on recess next week, and officeholders are home to mix with their constituents and hear what’s on people’s minds. Memorial Day is a big day, and it’s campaign season, so there will be plenty of that sort of news.

Congress left in a hurry, with Republican leaders in each House facing rebellion in their ranks, and I imagine that folks will be talking to each other during the week, trying to figure out what comes next. The ballroom, the slush fund, and the war are all still on the table, as is the budget bill itself.

I keep coming back to the fact that twenty Republican senators and a handful of representatives could end all of this tomorrow. We don’t need to hope and wait for the 25^th amendment to be invoked through some unimaginable conspiracy of Trump’s closest courtiers.

The corruption would be the thing. It’s all there, billions and billions of dollars worth. The crypto deals, the payoffs, the sixty trades a day in the stock market, blatant conflicts of interest, all of it enough evidence to impeach the fraudster in chief. It wouldn’t even have to be political. Leave those issues off the table. Just get the votes and get rid of the guy, start fresh with Vance the way the party did in 1974.

It would take the Democrats winning the Senate to get even partway there. But it is easy to imagine a Democratic House impeaching Trump by a majority vote. It would depend a lot on how bad things have gotten by then, and if this war doesn’t end soon—like by August or September—it will be pretty bad.

Trump will be a lame duck, with Rubio and Vance jockeying for position and other horses lining up. Will Republicans make the same mistake McConnell did in 2021? Probably, but it’s worth keeping in mind that they may have the choice, and that Trump won’t be around forever.

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There’s a sort of lull right now, as the low-drama China summit fades into the past and the Iran war persists in a sort of below-the-fold holding pattern, where significant attacks are reported—Iranian capture of one tanker and sinking of another—without a sense that the ceasefire status quo would change as long as Trump was distracted by his courtship of Xi.

Trump’s visit ended without fanfare and no ring, and it seems unlikely any real news will come of it beyond the maintenance of the present uneasy pause in trade hostilities and maybe a few gestures of amity on each side. It’s clear that Trump wants to appease Xi in the hoping of doing business, and for his part, Xi seems inclined to keep things stable rather than press the U.S. too hard.

Trump returns home today, and the war will be waiting for him. Thursday’s scoop in Axios suggests Trump’s impatience with Iran and that he may approve new military action, either a renewal of “Project Freedom” and its aggressive patrols in the Gulf, or by making good on his threat to bomb civilian architecture. According to Axios, the Israelis would like him to mount a ground assault to capture the buried uranium.

Since about mid-April, the word “stalemate” has been generally used by publications, from the New York Times and Foreign Affairs to CNN and MSNOW, to describe the status of the war, but the more accurate chess term for Trump’s position might be Zugzwang, where a player is forced to move but any move they make will make things worse.

It’s the same trap it has been all along. Trump can maintain the current blockade, hoping to wait Iran out, but that could be months according to CIA estimates. He can try to cut the best deal he can and just get out, but that certainly would leave Iran in control of the Strait and the uranium still in its possession. Or he can escalate in ways that would bring Iranian retaliation against other nations in the Gulf and deepen the global economic crisis, with no guarantee of success.

None of these are good options, since any form of the second option will leave Iran much stronger than it was, and neither the first nor the third is likely to succeed in opening the Strait again. It’s Zugzwang, which means that Trump has already lost the war. The only question is how bad it will be before it ends.

*

During this brief, relative lull, I’ve been musing about the way that news about the war gets to us. It is an unusual situation, because we can’t rely on anything the president says about the war, and the administration line on the war is pure propaganda, sometimes comically so in the case of Hegseth.

Listening to Trump and Hegseth, you would think that taking out Iran’s major naval vessels was some sort of triumph, but it has no impact on Iran’s ability to control the Strait. The word “obliterate” is been redefined as “leave intact.”

For his part, General Caine has stayed in his lane, reporting on tactical activities while leaving some important elements out, like the extent of U.S. losses in the Gulf or the actual impact on military preparedness of the drawdown of munitions and defensive weapons systems.

Most of all, Caine can’t tell us anything about whether we are meeting our objectives and winning, or what the winning strategy will be, because the actual objectives of the war at this point won’t yield to military force without a significant escalation from air war to ground war, and any action on the ground will just be a new tactic, since there is no overall strategy behind the war.

At the same time, various outlets like the Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and NBC have been filled with reports that make the administration’s rosy reports sound like crazy talk. It turns out that Iran can probably hold out for months, that it still has much of its counter-strike capacity, and the war itself has created and exposed grave strategic weaknesses in the U.S. military that may take years to remedy.

I’ve already been passing along summaries of this information as I have encountered it, so I won’t repeat the details here. You can find an annotated bibliography and links to some of the major stories at the end of this piece. What is interesting to me is how we’re learning about the real situation behind the White House propaganda, and what that says about Trump and his team.

*

I start with two givens. One is that Trump’s span of control is a mile broad and an inch deep, and he basically isn’t aware of much besides what his closest advisors tell him or what he sees on the news. It’s not clear how closely Trump listens to anything he is told, or whether he understands it when he does.

I mean that as an observation, not an insult. Trump didn’t know about China’s chokehold on strategic minerals when he started the trade war, and he was surprised that killing the first Ayatollah didn’t result in a clean win like Venezuela, or that Iran responded by closing the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s negotiating stance has completely baffled him.

These were all things that were known by at least some of the people around Trump, and in the case of Iran, would certainly have been briefed to the president by Caine. Reports in the Times about how the decision was made make that clear.

The Times also reported that Netanyahu pitched the war to Trump, and that he went for it despite the advice of CIA director John Ratcliffe and Marco Rubio, who called Netanyahu’s pitch “bullshit.” The idea that an all-out assault would change Iran’s regime is something no reasonable person would advise was more than a wish or a hope, but Trump seems to have decided it was a certainty and gave the go ahead.

So that’s Trump, surrounded by lackeys like Hegseth and actual advisors like Vance, Ratcliffe and Rubio, with a lot of knowledgeable staff behind them, and maybe he’s listening, maybe even understanding, but he’s acts more or less on whim, and then all these folks have to cover for him and somehow make it work.

The second given is that the information we receive in the Times and Post and so on comes from sources inside the administration or the military, who have their own purposes in providing the information and may or may not be entirely trustworthy. It’s not like reporters come up with their stories on their own.

We received an object lesson in this from Judith Miller, who provided a direct conduit from Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld to the pages of the New York Times while concealing both her sources and the fact that the Bush administration was using her to gin up the war on Iraq.

In the case of the information that’s leaking now from the Pentagon and CIA, as well as the FBI in the case of Kash Patel’s alcoholism and the revenge FBI squad, the purpose seems to be to slow down the trainwreck and prevent the worst.

The administration directs its anger and threats against the journalists and outlets , who report the leaks, but this is all deep throat stuff, from people placed the way Mark Felt was, and it’s not something Trump can easily stop.

In fact, it would not be entirely surprising if officials like Ratcliffe or Rubio tacitly condone the leaks, or that there is something like a shared agreement within the military brass that Americans should know the truth about the war.

Maybe that’s not true and it’s all coming from just mid-level folks with uneasy consciences, but it seems more likely to me that the CIA and the military are staffed by professionals doing their best to uphold their oath of office. They can’t change Trump’s magical thinking and they can’t stop his whims and impulses, so they can at least make sure that the facts of the matter are known.

The whole business of who’s leaking to whom and what it says about power-jockeying and factions within Trump’s government is a rabbit hole I won’t try to go down here, except to say that Trump came to office as a hawk on China, surrounded by China hawks like Ratcliffe, Rubio, Elbridge Colby and even Scott Bessent, and this China summit certainly crystalizes for them what an incredibly stupid waste and distraction the Iran war is.

The upshot is this: Trump really can’t get away with lying about the war, and the merit of any next action he takes, among his dismal options, will be judged according to accurate information about the situation on the ground.

*

I’m imagining Trump returning to DC or Mar-a-Lago tonight, exhausted and undoubtedly glum that his ceremonial fun in Beijing has ended, and maybe a bit anxious about how little Xi was prepared to give him, to face exactly the same insoluble problem he had left behind a few days ago.

Surely all of his instincts are to strike, and this is another weekend where I expect anything written on Saturday might have to be ripped up and re-written on Sunday. It’s why I am writing while Trump is still in the air.

There are neo-conversative commentors like Robert Kagan and John Bolton who see the losing war and argue for an all-out escalation, since the alternative is to leave Iran more powerful than it was before. And of course Trump has his usual cheerleaders like Lindsey Graham and Sean Hannity. He can find people to support an escalation of the war.

In a lecture last weekend, Robert Pape, whose Substack Escalation Trap is must reading for anyone following the war, suggested that strengthening a coalition of Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia, to counter Iran in the Gulf and contest its hold on the Strait was probably the best strategy if the use of force was going to be involved. That’s still something that could be done, but it would take at least the rest of the year to accomplish, far too long for the Strait to be closed without bringing global economic disaster.

It’s not clear that Saudi Arabia would support any renewed attack by the U.S., given the way they denied air space to the U.S. during the aborted “Project Freedom.” Any renewed hostilities would pose a real threat to the Gulf nations, whose energy and even desalination infrastructure would almost certainly be hit by Iran’s counterattack. All-out war would devastate the Gulf.

There is widespread reporting various Guthatlf nations are starting to hedge on U.S. support with diplomatic overtures to other countries. China’s role in the Gulf is only likely to expand, while Iran has engaged in talks with Russia and Pakistan, and reportedly with Saudi Arabia as well. Apart from Israel and maybe the U.A.E and Bahrain, the U.S. is isolated in this war.

Iran itself has been publicly dismissive of negotiations with the U.S., and its demands are framed as though they won the war. Trump has reportedly asked his advisors what would happen if he just walked away from the war, taking measures to keep the enriched uranium buried and leaving the rest of the world to sort out some agreement on the Strait. The answer was that it would be a bad idea, leaving Iran vastly more powerful. Still, it might be the best Trump can do at this point.

It’s hard to know whether Iran is interested in negotiating at all right now, or just what the equations of power and various perspectives are within the Iranian regime. There are press reports of fragmentation, with political players arguing for negotiation because of the economic cost to civilians, and hardline IRGC officials holding out for total victory.

These reports have been mainly based on Israeli intelligence sources, who have the best information but also are likely to shape the story to serve Israel’s interests. The idea of disarray within the regime allows for continued hope of some moderate faction emerging, but it seems unlikely. Most reporting suggests that the IRGC is firmly in charge and that the war so far has only served to strengthen the resolve to fight on.

My sense is that the factionalism is real but also irrelevant, since there’s no actual split in the regime’s stance and no way to play one faction off against the other in negotiation. It seems more likely that the ICRG is letting the politicians keep some lines of negotiation open—for example, with some tests of a potential framework for the nuclear program—but is content right now to let Trump have the next move.

Trump said very publicly that the Iranian peace proposal was UNACCEPTABLE and it clearly enraged him, right as he was getting ready to go talk to Xi. He was reportedly consumed with anger. For their part, the Iranians seem to be saying, “OK, what are you going to do about it?”

It’s not really in Iran’s interest to make a better offer if Trump doesn’t make a counteroffer. There’s nothing new for Trump to threaten—all possible threats have been on the table since early April, when Trump talked about ending Persian civilization. Iran won’t accept a peace agreement that forces them to give up control of the Strait, and they won’t surrender their nuclear program.

I won’t venture a prediction what will happen next, except to say that whichever officials were authorized (or unauthorized) to leak to Axios made it clear that Trump was strongly tempted to lash out with military action.

It’s not exactly clear who in the White House wanted us all to have that information, but Axios tends to have good sources inside the White House, and it could even be Trump himself who wanted the leak.

If he wants to, Trump can probably keep the current status quo for a little while, focusing on interdicting shipments of Iranian oil and applying as much economic pressure as he can in hope the Iranians will crack. But I’m not sure he has the patience for that, and the CIA says Iran can hold out for months.

The global economy doesn’t have months. Critical shortages are already developing and by the end of June the crisis will reach an entirely new level, with the reserves that have postponed disaster finally depleted.

For his part, Trump has only two options: escalate the war, which will drive oil prices up and could crash the stock market; or give the Iranians a new proposal with terms that look like surrender. He’s in Zugzwang and there’s no escape. My guess is that we’ll see new air strikes this weekend, as Trump beats against the cage he’s made.

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Note: This bibliography was researched and annotated by Claude’s Opus 6. I have checked it for accuracy and did not find any errors, so if you find one please let me know.

NEW YORK TIMES

U.S. Intelligence Shows Iran Retains Substantial Missile Capabilities — May 12, 2026

The flagship intelligence leak — by Entous, Haberman, and Swan — reporting that classified early-May assessments show Iran has regained access to 30 of 33 missile sites along the Strait of Hormuz, retained roughly 70% of its prewar missile stockpile and mobile launchers, and restored access to nearly 90% of its underground launch facilities. Directly contradicts the administration’s public claim that Iran’s military has been “decimated.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/12/us/politics/iran-missiles-intelligence.html

WASHINGTON POST

U.S. Intelligence Says Iran Can Outlast Trump’s Blockade for Months — May 7, 2026

A confidential CIA analysis delivered to White House policymakers concludes that Iran can survive the U.S. naval blockade for months, while also retaining a substantial missile and drone arsenal — a finding at odds with the administration’s public optimism about economic pressure forcing Iran to negotiate.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/05/07/cia-intelligence-iran-trump-blockade-missiles/

WASHINGTON POST

China Gains Major Edge on U.S. Amid Iran War, U.S. Intelligence Finds — May 14, 2026

A confidential U.S. intelligence analysis finding that China is exploiting the Iran war to maximize its strategic advantage over the U.S. across military, economic, and diplomatic dimensions — a second-order consequence of the conflict that the administration has not publicly acknowledged.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/05/13/china-gains-major-edge-us-amid-iran-war-us-intelligence-finds/

NBC NEWS

Iran Is Accelerating Efforts to Dig Out Missiles and Munitions — May 2026

NBC’s investigative unit reports that Iran has retained not only many of its ballistic missiles but also more than half of its air force aircraft and more than half of its IRGC naval components — and has accelerated efforts to recover buried munitions during the ceasefire as peace negotiations stall.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/iran-accelerating-efforts-dig-missiles-munitions-rcna342881

WALL STREET JOURNAL

Iran Retains Thousands of Short-Range Missiles, Intelligence Assessment Finds — April 11, 2026

The WSJ reported, citing a U.S. intelligence assessment, that Iran’s short and medium-range missile stockpile remains in the thousands despite wartime depletion, with missiles potentially recoverable from bombed storage sites — directly contradicting Defense Secretary Hegseth’s “depleted and decimated” public briefings.

https://www.wsj.com

CNN

Exclusive: U.S. Intelligence Assesses Iran Maintains Significant Missile Launching Capability — April 2, 2026

The earliest major cable exclusive on the intelligence gap: roughly half of Iran’s missile launchers remain intact and thousands of one-way attack drones remain in its arsenal despite five weeks of U.S. and Israeli strikes. One source said Iran was “still very much poised to wreak absolute havoc throughout the entire region.”

https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/02/politics/iran-missiles-us-military-strikes-trump

CNN

Analysis: What Trump Says vs. What the Intelligence Says on Iran — May 14, 2026

A detailed analytical piece contrasting administration public statements with classified briefings. Sen. Chris Murphy told Hegseth in open session that what he was saying publicly contradicted what officials had testified to in private — including on whether the U.S. has any viable military means to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

https://us.cnn.com/2026/05/14/politics/trump-iran-strait-of-hormuz-missile-military-analysis

AXIOS

What to Know About Iran’s Military as the U.S. Weighs Ground Operations — March 27, 2026

Axios reporting on Iran’s continuing disruptive capacity despite significant losses, including expert analysis that the Pentagon’s preferred metrics — launch rates and number of strikes — are “problematic” indicators of actual capability degradation. Covers Iran’s mine-laying strategy in the Strait and the risks of any ground escalation.

https://www.axios.com/2026/03/27/iran-military-capabilities-ground-troops

AXIOS

Gabbard Defers to Trump When Asked If Iran Posed “Imminent Threat” — March 18, 2026

DNI Tulsi Gabbard testified that only the president can determine what constitutes an “imminent threat” — notable because her own former senior aide Joe Kent resigned publicly claiming Iran posed “no imminent threat” when the war began. Highlights a documented gap between intelligence community assessments and the administration’s stated justification for the war.

https://www.axios.com/2026/03/18/trump-gabbard-iran-nuclear-threat

AXIOS

Cyber Warfare Starts to Get Personal in War Between U.S., Israel, and Iran — March 31, 2026

Iran’s cyber front: the pro-Iran Handala group leaked emails purportedly from FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal Gmail and released data allegedly tied to Lockheed Martin employees. An underreported dimension of Iran’s continuing offensive capacity that extends well beyond missile sites.

https://www.axios.com/2026/03/31/iran-fbi-leaks-lockheed-martin-cyber-warfare

THE HILL

Lawmakers Question Pete Hegseth’s Claims About U.S. Stockpiles, Iran Firepower — May 14, 2026

Covers bipartisan congressional skepticism after Hegseth’s testimony, including a CSIS senior adviser’s warning that depleted U.S. munitions stockpiles would force forces to “penetrate more deeply into an adversary’s defensive zone” if fighting resumes — with higher casualty risk. Good synthesis of the congressional hearing record.

https://thehill.com/policy/defense/5877148-us-iran-war-munitions-stockpiles/

CONGRESSIONAL RESEARCH SERVICE

U.S. Conflict with Iran — March 26, 2026

The non-partisan CRS summary covering U.S. military objectives, early war costs (first week exceeded $11.3 billion), casualty figures, and the range of scenarios Congress was tracking — including the possibility of Iranian government collapse. Predates the May intelligence leaks but remains the best single-document baseline for the conflict’s opening phase. Check crsreports.congress.gov for updated versions.

https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/R/PDF/R48887/R48887.1.pdf

Note: NYT and WaPo pieces are paywalled. NBC and Axios pieces are open access. WSJ reporting is behind subscription. CRS report is free at the link above.

riting about the Iran war presents interesting challenges. For one thing, it is hard to write about anything else without making connections to the war—everything from economics to politics to the brouhaha over Trump’s ballroom has a war angle, and focusing on anything else right now can seem like escapism. The war is a central factor in our lives and will continue to be for months or years after it finally ends, if it ever really does.

Likewise, the basic structure of the conflict and the stakes for each of the three sides in it haven’t changed, nor has the basic, inescapable trap in which Trump, and by extension, the United States, now are clawing to escape.

Events happen every day—each day there is something to write about, like MBS vetoing “Operation Freedom,” ending it in 36 hours, or new evidence of just how badly U.S. bases in the region had been damaged in the fighting. But the basic equation of power doesn’t change.

Trump makes news all by himself most days, trying to pressure the Iran regime through rhetoric and gestures, even as he seeks to reassure the U.S. markets. If you place all of his statements on Truth Social and press conferences into a chronological journal, he appears quite insane, whipsawing between existential threats and declarations of victory in what seems a barely controlled frenzy.

Perhaps this has some tactical value, since certainly Iran would prefer to maintain low-level hostilities over returning to all-out war. But the madman theory of global diplomacy wears thin when the king is mad, and I find it hard not to read Trump as a man in crisis, caught in a trap of his own making with no good options for getting out of it.

All of this is already known, it’s part of the structure of the conflict, along with the loss of U.S. allies, Russian and Chinese support for the Iranian regime, the erosion of U.S. relations with Gulf nations, and the desperate straits in which poorer nations, particularly in Asia, now find themselves.

*

The war was lost before it began, because air war alone never forces regime change and the U.S. has no appetite for an actual ground war of the scale required to take Tehran. Since the ceasefire a month ago it seems increasingly clear that Trump wants to avoid escalation at all costs, though he continues to use the threat of it in performative ways.

I would never discount the potential for Trump doing something impulsive, and one must factor in the Israeli sense that the war was interrupted by Trump before its objectives were reached. Israel has been deploying the same tactics in southern Lebanon that it did in Gaza, and while that ceasefire still holds on paper, it could end quickly.

Trump went to war at Netanyahu’s urging, and reportedly he is angry now that he was sold a false bill of goods, as his advisors had warned him at the time. Political support for Israel in the U.S. is increasingly shaky, and it is possible that Netanyahu decides his electoral prospects in October are better served by testing the U.S. alliance and going his own way in Lebanon.

It’s also clear that the U.S. has plans on the table with Israel for another, more destructive phase in the air war, this time targeting infrastructure in a way that would devastate the civilian populace of Iran. The current military legal apparatus has cleared bombing targets, and it isn’t the question of war crimes that holds the U.S. back. It’s possible that Trump decides to get back together with Bibi.

I don’t think it will happen, in part because of Trump’s reported anxiety about incurring any American losses, the specter of Jimmy Carter’s failed raid to save the hostages never far from his mind. I assume any war plans Trump is shown include calculations of significant risk, as all war plans must.

There are two other factors as well, and these may be even more powerful than Trump’s military cowardice.

*

The first of these is that a renewal of hostilities at this point would almost certainly send oil futures skying upward and the stock market down. Trump has been jawboning the markets for much of the war, and he knows that any escalation at this point risks a repricing rather than a dip. He also knows that a lot of the public support for the war is contingent on it being brief and not escalating.

The markets currently seem to be pricing in confidence that hostilities will end and the Strait of Hormuz reopen by midsummer, with prediction markets giving a 60 percent probability that it will happen by July. In renewed hostilities, that timetable gets pushed out, while economists project global disaster if the Strait remains closed until October.

The Washington Post reported on Friday that the CIA estimates that Iran can hold out for three or four months under the conditions of the current ceasefire and blockade. That’s longer than the world can wait for the Strait to reopen.

Trump may not care very much about the relatively minor economic hit to the U.S., but he does listen to the markets, and the markets are global in nature. Helium reserves start running out in June, and the resulting shortage of microchips will get priced into the AI-driven stock markets as a significant impediment to growth—just to take one example.

*

The second factor is that while it is America’s war, the Gulf nations that the U.S. counts on as allies are paying the price. Saudi Arabia didn’t send a signal to Trump last week—it sent an edict, and Trump was forced to stop his aggression before it had barely started.

Whatever hope MBS may have had at the start of the war for regime change in Iran and a new political order in the Gulf is certainly gone now. Trump just promised an additional $17 billion in defensive weapons systems to Bahrain, Dubai, and the U.A.E., and the U.S. treasury is talking about a currency swap deal with the U.A.E.

The war has devastated the Gulf region, not so much in dollar costs, though these are real, but in terms of the notion that nations like KSA and Dubai are secure havens for investment. Economic strategies for diversifying from oil as the primary source of income depend on regional stability.

The most important ally in the region is Saudi Arabia, and when it closed its airspace to U.S. fighters and bombers it made naval action in the Gulf unsustainable. It reopened the skies again after a lot of conversation on the phone, but Trump may be facing something like a veto on any plans to escalate, given that Iran has promised to counter any escalation with similar infrastructure attacks within the region.

Iran’s attack on the UAE oil field at Fujairah was a warning shot for the kind of counter-attack Iran will mount in response to new U.S. attacks. Trump brushed it off, maintaining the ceasefire despite the provocation, while the attack itself demonstrated Iran’s ability to go beyond blockading tankers to damaging export infrastructure itself.

The port and oil storage complex at Fujairah lies south of the Strait itself and was designed precisely to avoid the sort of constraint Iran currently imposes. About 1.7 million barrels of oil flow through it each day, and Iran has demonstrated that both it and the main Saudi pipeline designed to bypass the Strait are also vulnerable.

*

So part of the structure of this stalemate is that Trump cannot escalate without making things much worse and probably lacks regional support to do so in any case. Trump is capable of acting impulsively, but he is also a coward, so I discount the likelihood that he will engage one of the war plans on his desk.

It’s not clear how the Iranians are reading Trump, though their Lego-animated propaganda certainly shows a sophisticated understanding of the American situation. My guess is that they see that his threats are hollow, and that their entire approach to diplomacy is to drag things out, betting that they can outlast him.

It’s hard to know, because U.S. goals and tactics keep changing, but it seems like the main U.S. tactic now is to try to wait Iran out, too. At least that’s what is implied by the U.S. blockade, a strategy that seems based in part of the assumption that cut off from payments for its oil exports, Iran’s economy will go further into free fall.

There is also some reporting to suggest that by blocking exports the U.S. hopes to force an oil storage crisis, and that when storage runs out, Iran faces the threat of losing oil production altogether, since its oil fields are old and under low pressure, and they may be impossible to reopen once they are shut down.

Scott Bessent has pointed to Kharg Island reaching capacity “in a number of days,” and that after that “fragile Iranian wells will shut in.” The analysis that if oil exports are shut down, Iran will face an existential crisis with its oil fields, seems like the main line of support for the current blockade approach.

Oil experts, including think tanks and so on, say that Iran’s oil storage capacity is more flexible and diverse than that, so that capacity is measured in weeks, not days, and that even if some wells are forced to shut down, it can be done in a gradual enough fashion that future production capacity isn’t lost. These analyses tend to support the CIA finding that Iran has a good three or four months before holding out may become untenable.

All of this is part of the basic structure of the war for the past month: a waiting game in which each side brings maximum economic pressure, banking on the other side folding first. Assuming that escalation is off the table, then each day each side costs the other a bit more harm, thinking that sometime in the future the other side will reach the crisis point and concede.

*

I’m trying in this essay to demonstrate the challenge of writing about a war in which there is news every day, but a lot of it is all over the place and some of it not even meaningful, while the underlying structure of the conflict stays locked in place.

Trump’s unpredictability and the lack of any meaningful logic behind the war from the beginning add a vaguely psychotic layer to the challenge, since one must bear in mind that any day one might wake to find that Trump has authorized some new, unexpected strike. Still, he wants the war to be over, and only some kind of agreement with Iran will achieve that.

So that leaves diplomacy, and right now Iran is reviewing a 10-point U.S. counter-proposal to the 14-point Iranian proposal that became public a week ago. Some tit-for-tat skirmishes haven’t broken the ceasefire, just an exchange of angry rhetoric, and we’re all waiting for Iran’s response.

I’m going to mark this point of this piece, since it displays the hardest challenge for me in trying to take an analytical approach to updating the unfolding story of the war. Whatever Iran’s response turns out to be, it won’t change the underlying structure of the war, and whatever Trump’s counter-response is, he still will be stuck in the trap he created.

At the same time, there are all sorts of possible near-term outcomes, and that’s what the papers will be writing about this weekend.

Maybe Iran’s hardliners dictate a derisive response and Trump lashes out with some new bombing raids. Or maybe they do that, and Trump papers it over, talking about those crazy Iranians and how he’s still talking to the reasonable ones.

Maybe Iran dangles in public a resolution to the two crises Trump is trying to solve, selling its hold on the Strait for sanctions relief and offering a protocol on its nuclear program good enough for Trump to accept. They may judge how much urgency Trump feels, and offer their best deal, maybe one that looks good enough in public that it adds to the pressure on Trump to end the war.

Or maybe they say just enough to keep the talks and ceasefire going, a counter-counter-proposal to put the ball in Trump’s court again. Who knows? The basic situation may shift slightly, but it won’t change.

The challenge here is that Trump needs to be able to declare that we won the war, and the Iranians are not going to agree to anything that looks like that. Maintaining some sort of geopolitical control over the Strait may be less important than assuring it has security guarantees and the resources for rebuilding, but they’re not going to give up control without keeping the power to shut it again.

The nuclear part of the talks is even harder, since for Trump to accept something less than what Obama achieved with the 2015 JPCOA is the same as losing the war—there’s no good way to spin it. I don’t think anything like that would be acceptable to the hardliners who ultimately call the shots in Iran.

I’ll leave this here. Structurally, nothing that happens in the next couple of days will change the basic equation of power in the region. Various parties to the conflict have different interests, but the immediate leverage lies with Iran, which can essentially keep the Strait closed as long as it wants, since even the threat of attack is enough to keep it closed.

Iran itself is divided, according to today’s Economist, between business-oriented elements prepared to drag the ceasefire process out and seek the best deal possible, and hardline elements inculcated in the millennial eschatology of Twelver Shi’a, who push for renewed conflict and fear an extended period of stalemate could bring new popular uprisings.

The former are managing the negotiations, but neither of these factions is likely to give Trump a win, even though I’m sure Trump would like to see the matter settled before his visit to China. That’s still scheduled for next week, though it seems possible to me that the meeting will be deferred again.

I’ll write more about the war if events this weekend warrant it, but probably the next important story will be the China visit, with the main question being how hard China will push the advantage that this war has given them in negotiations.

As one recent AI graphic posted by Trump suggests, Trump may be holding a lot of cards, but he’s playing Uno, where having a lot of cards means that you are losing. The Chinese may go easy on Trump, playing the long game, but the U.S. is a good deal weaker now than it was when Trump first started his trade war with them.

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It was Dia do Trabalho in Brazil on Friday, a holiday weekend here, and my partner and I experienced a small, unexpected horde of family visitors from Rio, which is why I am a day late with last week’s piece. One of the features of owning a home on the beach here is that one is expected to serve gracefully as a family hotel on holiday occasions, a cost to our nerves but a benefit to my ongoing study of the language and culture of my adopted home.

International Worker’s Day is celebrated by billions of people in more than 80 nations around the world, from Argentina, Mexico and much of Europe to China and numerous nations in Africa, but not in the United States, of course.

There, the association of May 1 with the Haymarket bombing and the anti-labor sentiment of industrialists in the Gilded Age created an alternative celebration in September. If a DSA candidate ever becomes president, maybe their first act should be to declare May 1 a holiday by executive decree.

I guess it was a day of rallies and protest in the U.S., with thousands of actions planned on the theme of “Workers Over Billionaires” and a call for a soft general strike that encourages people to stay away from jobs, classes, and consumer spending. I didn’t see any coverage in the U.S. press, so I’m not sure how that went.

Over the weekend I was thinking Dia do Trabalho and the difference between living in the largest American socialist democracy and living in the largest American capitalist democracy, and that connected for me with the rise of a new politics in the Democratic Party, crystalized for me by Graham Platner’s pre-primary victory over Janet Mills in Maine.

Platner’s primary win—he’s unopposed now—is part of the larger story that Mamdani’s win in NYC brought to new national attention, all of it starting way back in 2016 when Bernie Sanders made a strong run against the Democrat’s anointed heir to Obama.

Now doing something about the infestation of billionaires in the United States seems almost creedal for Democrats, though the question of what to do is a point of division.

California has a ballot measure that would take a 5 percent cut from the 200 or so billionaires in that state, but Gavin Newsom opposes it, while in NYC Mayor Mamdani is making progress with his property tax second homes, while more ambitious plans to tax the rich are less certain.

Trump and his oligarchs and all the wealth and corruption fit well alongside the war cry of affordability, and right now that makes a compact toolkit for popular appeal for any Democratic. Add fear about AI data centers and job losses, then toss in the stupidity and damage of the Iran war, and it’s a heady campaign mix.

A Democrat won a special state senate election in Texas this weekend by 14 points—a 31-point swing from Trump’s 58-41 margin in the same district in 2024. Fort Worth’s Tarrant County is the sort of affluent, predominately White suburban district that forms the Republican power base. More bad news for Trump and his party.

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Since starting this newsletter I haven’t written much at all about Democratic Party politics, partly because it has been too early to have anything meaningful to talk about, except in hypothetical terms.

Handicapping candidates for 2028 is like talking about who will win the World Series that year, and while conflicts within the party about economic policy and how to fight Trump make for interesting reading, I haven’t really had a pony in that race. It’s all kind of abstract when you’re out of power.

There’s some sort of analogy for policy positions in Mike Tyson’s line that everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth, since even the best ideas don’t get far in a deadlocked congress. You can read and enjoy Bernie Sanders’ 2014 “Economic Agenda for America,” but most voters won’t.

Policy positions do matter more in the general election, but mid-terms are local, and in most cases local means safe seats for whichever party is in control in the state. Only about 40-60 House seats can reasonably be seen to be in play in 2026, and about 10-12 Senate seats, if one assumes as much as a 10-point drop from Trump’s results in 2024.

Those are the seats where swing voters really matter, and the issues that may drive a House race in Nevada are different from those at stake in Maine’s Senate race. In many ways the Democrats do better to tell a simple story this year and let the nuances be driven by local concerns. You can have a candidate like Mamdani in Florida, but they will have to be talking about Florida things.

That’s why I was glad to see Mills fold her tent this quickly, and pleased that the Democratic leadership came in behind Platner immediately, rather than the arms-length approach they took to Mamdani. It sounds pretty stupid to be talking about “electability” when a 76-year-old former governor can’t raise enough money to sustain a primary campaign.

We’ll see how Collins does with her opposition research on Platner, whose own story is perfectly credible to anyone who has family or friends who fought in the Bush war.

Platner, like Talerico in Texas, and Sherrod Brown in Ohio, for that matter, provide hope that Democrats might win back some of the working-class demographic that fled the party after Obama. If nothing else, they may demonstrate that the appearence of authenticity sells in today’s electoral market.

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The U.S. is in a period of profound generational change, at the end of the Boomer cycle that began with Clinton in 1992. It is the same natural progression that ended the hegemony of the WWII generation when Bush lost to Clinton, and it is time for Boomers like me to retire.

That in itself makes it obvious that a new kinds of candidates must emerge for the Democrats to reach the contemporary electorate. Political experience is almost a handicap, and the lack of enthusiasm for Schumer’s “ideal” Senate candidate among Democrats in Maine is a lesson I hope he takes to heart.

I’ll also note that the Democratic Party is challenged by the fact that its donor base and core constituency in the professional classes do not share economic interests with 80 percent of the U.S. populace and inhabit an entirely different sociocultural space from most of the nation.

Part of the reason so many people hate Democrats is that they are identified as elite and out of touch, but the reality is that most politicians come from the elite. It is as true of Platner and Mamdani as it is of Schumer and Jeffries—or of Vance and Rubio, for that matter. Pathways from the actual working classes to political power are narrow, and neither Hotchkiss nor Yale is generally on that route, as they were for Platner and Vance.

But an earnest, authentic attempt to align with the interests of those who fall below the top quintile of income and wealth seems like a ticket to electoral success these days, and it helps if you can act the part. Democrats used to be the populist party, and Reagan stole that mantle from them. It seems that it is time to take it back.

There’s not too much point in talking about the direction for the Democrats as they look to 2028 until the mid-term results are in, and the Supreme Court’s opening of the gerrymander floodgates lends a somewhat psychotic air to the entire matter. A big win for Platner in Maine will tell us something, as would a big win by Collins.

Polls may be getting better, but they still have margins of error, and we’re going to have to wait for actual results before we can start sorting out what they imply for the presidential sweepstakes.

I’ll leave politics there for now, since what I am really thinking about is the context or environment in which elections take place in the U.S. these days. The issues on the table in the mid-terms are real, but these will be dwarfed by the more critical structural realities that will face every candidate in 2028.

The United States seems likely to be in crisis by 2028, and maybe much sooner. Arguably, it already is in crisis, just not generally aware of it yet. I’m not clear about the timing—maybe it is before the mid-terms, maybe not until next spring—but at some point it will be clear that the nation requires radical repair.

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The most obvious crisis we face is the one on the front page this morning: Because of Trump’s war on Iran the world at large, and the U.S. by extension, face a cataclysmic economic disaster. The war is not going to end quickly, and in even the best case the Strait of Hormuz won’t open soon enough to prevent at least some structural damage to the global economy.

There is literally nothing Trump can do to end the war and open the Strait except surrender to Iran’s demands, and he can’t do that. Iran is under the rule hardline Commander-in-Chief Ahmad Vahidi, who reportedly is the only one with direct access to the gravely wounded Supreme Leader, the second Ayatollah Khamenei.

Some observers think that Khamenei may actually be dead, or in a coma. In any case he released a statement this week making clear that Iran won’t stop short of a victory that lets them keep their uranium enrichment program and maintain some level of control over the Strait.

Relatively pragmatic political leaders like President Masoud Pezeshkian and Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi are taking orders from Vahidi now, and the prospects for diplomacy to kick in any time soon are basically nil.

The only options for Trump are surrender or a stalemate that amounts to surrender, since it presages economic disaster. Iran holds aces and nothing Trump can say or do will make them fold.

Trump appears to have decided this weekend to escalate by taking a step toward opening the Strait by force, promising the U.S. Navy’s aid in helping “neutral” ships trapped by Iran’s blockade to transit the Strait. Exactly what this means is not yet clear, except that it may provoke an Iranian attack that in turn would almost result in further U.S. and Israeli escalation.

The two sides are still trading diplomatic points, but it is impossible to find any ground for compromise in the two nation’s positions. Foreign Affairs leads today with an article proposing reasonable grounds for a resolution to the conflict—grounds that Iran might accept. The terms look like a U.S. surrender.

Anyone thinking about 2028 should be factoring into their planning how they would address a deep global and national recession, with shortages of essential items, raging inflation, rising inflation, and stalled economic growth. Maybe it won’t happen, but the likelihood seems greater every day.

The analogies are 1932 and 2008, and barring electoral chicanery, the Democrats should handily win the presidency in 2028.

But let’s remember that 1976 is also a good analogy, with the U.S. reeling from Watergate and military defeat, and the economy seeming locked in stagflation. Will the Democrats choose a Jimmy Carter, or an FDR?

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Accompanying the economic disaster caused by Trump’s war is the lost of America’s position in the world and the end of the 80-year American Century. It will take a whole for this reality to hit home for the U.S. electorate, but it already has happened.

It’s China’s turn now, but they’re not ready yet, so we are entering a deeply unstable time, and Trump has thrown away literally every card we used to hold—even including our military prowess.

Turns out a trillion dollars doesn’t buy you that much, in the new era of cheap drones and asymmetric warfare. We don’t control the seas anymore, and the dollar’s hegemony as the global currency is weakening at the edges.

We’ve destroyed relationships with our allies and friends, and we face three nations—Iran, Russia, and China—that between them control about half of the world’s supply of energy and half of its productivity in the case of China.

Chinese cars are selling like hotcakes just over the border with Canada, and the Philippines has reached out to China to begin normalizing relations. China makes an uneasy partner for any nation, since it’s just business with them and they drive hard bargains. But the U.S. is a rogue nation now and no one trusts it or even likes it that much.

One of Trump’s very first acts was to destroy America’s soft power in the world, particularly by shutting down USAID, which has led to hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths according to various research institutes, but in so many other ways as well. That’s all gone now—the idea of the U.S. as a force for good in the world.

Eighty years in which we could at least pretend that was the case and have others act like they believed us, all gone now. The King of England has to admonish Trump about what U.S. democracy used to be and what its origins are. Trump won’t listen, and we have 32 months left of his deranged rule. How much more damage will have been done by 2028?

Foreign policy and national security used to be an electoral issue, and it is less of one now. “It’s the economy, stupid,” is a winning mantra for the Democrats, and most Americans are not aware that a fundamental change has taken place in America’s strategic position in the world.

There’s not much space in the mid-terms to say much more than that the Iran war was a disastrous mistake and that’s why gas costs what it does. But whoever wins in 2028 better have a good plan for how to begin mending our broken relationships, and a legible vision for what reasonable, however diminished, role in the world the United States should play.

America First was a good slogan after the entirely useless expense of blood and treasure in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it didn’t even make sense in the 1930s, and isolationism is impossible now, in a world where a single product depends on inputs from several different nations.

Explaining this to the American electorate may be hard, and as the paraphrase of Mencken goes, “no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.” The temptation may be to hark back to the time, way back in 2024, when the U.S was still powerful, and envision recreating that world.

That won’t work. Our role is structurally diminished now, and may become increasingly so, as Trump continues to make bad bets on losing cards. Any vision for the future U.S. role must be tempered by some humility, some recognition of mistakes and excesses, not simply under Trump (though these are huge), but in general, after an 80-year run that was not entirely beneficent.

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It’s not clear how grave this third crisis will be, but the moment of transition to an AI-dominated future is here now, and no one is at the wheel—there’s nothing but chaos in terms of framing and managing what seems almost certain to be a period of technological change as profound as railroads and the rise of mass communications were, and maybe as the Industrial Revolution itself.

AI is capable of doing a lot of work faster than humans, and often better, and its pace of development far exceeds safety protocols and even our own understanding. It presents grave dangers, from its role in surveillance and the battlefield to its potential to act in rogue ways that are damaging and inexplicable.

It can tell you how to make a biological weapon and the best way to deploy it, and it has already given strategic and tactical guidance to at least a few mass killers. People have engaged in relationships with AI chatbots that caused them to go mad or kill themselves.

Drones have enabled the Ukraine military to become one of the most powerful forces on earth, and it is using robots instead of troops on the front lines. Iran is using drones to show just what a paper tiger the U.S. behemoth is. You can program a drone with facial recognition and target coordinates and send it out to track and kill someone. We’re not living in a Black Mirror world yet, but it’s close enough to contemplate.

And AI may make most entry-level and mid-level white collar work obsolete, the same way computers decimated secretarial work and automobiles cancelled buggy whips and wagons. Even benign visions expect widespread disruption, while AI discourse includes plausible dystopian scenarios, including human extinction.

No one knows what the change will look like, since the machines aren’t perfect and industries are just learning how to use them. But they are being used, a lot, and companies are laying people off, and the hiring market is as bad for new college graduates than it has been for a decade.

The political backlash against AI shows up in resistance to these new data centers with their ravenous appetite for power and water, and it shows up in polling, too. Discussion of a universal basic income, or UBI, has become mainstream. AI pioneers talk about the creation of a permanent underclass, while the multi-billionaire titans of AI seem like the most loathsome people on earth.

AI provides a populist entry that cuts across party lines, and it is hard not to imagine pressure to redefine it as a public good rather than the source of unimaginable profit distributed among a few.

To leave the challenges it poses to the balancing mechanisms of market forces is idiocy, I think, but everything about the challenges AI poses is far more complex than simple anti-AI populism can address. We’re talking about change at a structural level—it’s really the only way to think about the depth of investment in AI in its various dimensions, and the way that it already has entirely skewed the U.S. economy.

It also seems inevitable that some sort of AI bubble-bursting will happen before 2028, which implies a stock market crash that in turn will cause a hard hit to consumer spending, of which 50 percent is now driven by the ten percent of the population who have professional incomes and paper wealth in stock holdings.

The shakeout is inevitable, as it was with the Dotcom bubble, and it won’t stop the development of AI into a pervasive force in our lives anymore than the internet disappeared after the 2000 crash. It may be hastened by the Iran war, because supplies of helium start to run out after June, with the prospect of a shortfall in chip production kicking in later that summer.

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Whoever wins the presidency in 2028 will face huge economic challenges in any case, because of the Iran war, and whatever is going on with AI and the economy at that point will only make things more complicated.

The new president will also be sharply constrained by growth in the Federal debt, which has hit the benchmark of 100 percent of annual GDP now and will increase in the coming years.

Interest payments on the Federal debt now account for more than 14 percent of the Federal budget, second only to Social Security. That number is likely to increase because of pressure on U.S. treasuries and overall increase in the size of the deficit.

New spending without new taxes is almost impossible, while 2028 will be a populist election, won by the candidate with most credible story about better times ahead.

Simply winning the election won’t be enough, since in our current thermostatic politics the party in power has only a minute or two before it takes the blame for whatever is going on in the economy.

The pressure to act forcefully in visible ways that have a concrete impact will be strong, and it is quite possible that Democrats may control both chambers of Congress, as they did briefly in 2020 and 2008.

The challenge will be structural, not programmatic, and a simple growth strategy won’t work. Even if productivity gains brought by AI are as broad as the slogan of “abundance” might imply, assuring that benefits are broadly distributed may require changes on an order as broad as the New Deal.

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The challenge in 2028 is not winning the election, but winning the presidency that follows, and the risk is that whoever wins is simply set up for failure. If one assumes that great actions will be required in the face of the challenges at hand, then the time calls for greatness in leadership, not merely effective management of an existing system.

Jimmy Carter might have been a great president if he had won in 1992. Instead, his four years are remembered as an abject failure—a good manager and a good man, but not a great leader.

Crisis is opportunity, and the great example of that is FDR, who took advantage of the dire straits facing the U.S. and ushered in the structural changes that we call the New Deal.

That era ended with Reagan and the rise of rightwing and centrist versions of neo-liberal internationalism, and now Trump has ended that era and tried to return us to the period before Roosevelt—Teddy Roosevelt, that is.

He hasn’t succeeded, and he won’t, but what he has left instead is a sort of vacuum—an across-the-board disaster of failed policies and actions that will leave the U.S. diminished internationally, in economic crisis, and grappling with structural budget deficits and a largely unregulated explosion of AI’s role in society and the economy.

History will look at this period as the beginning of a new era in the United States, not the American century anymore, but something new. Some empires decline gracefully, like England, and others collapse, like Spain. The U.S. will be writing a new version of that story in the coming years.

It could be really good, and I’ll be talking about that in a future piece. For now, I’m just focusing on this threat: A 2028 Democratic presidency that doesn’t get the job done leaves the field wide open for the return of Trumpism, except this time with the intelligence and political skill to make authoritarianism work.

We might find ourselves missing Trump, if that happens.

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Trump’s history with assassination attempts is strange, compared to other presidents in my lifetime. Maybe that’s partly because of how the nature of communication has changed over the years, so that now even a casual follower of the news can choose between a broad range of versions of reality, some of them quite startling in their inveracity.

There is also now an automatic skepticism that accompanies any event of this sort. Parts of the internet act as conspiracy laboratories, and the U.S. citizenry has been trained since the killing of JFK to suspect that any official source is lying, and that the real version of events has been hidden from us.

This latest attempt, the third in less than two years, was strange enough in how it played out that the notion it was a false flag attempt seemed like first thought, best thought for some online commentators. There’s Katherine Leavitt’s remark, previewing Trump’s speech, about “shots being fired,” and a strange moment on Fox News where a correspondent’s call to the studio dropped just as she was describing how someone was warning her very seriously to stay safe right as the shots were heard.

There already is plenty of this sort of talk about the Butler assassination attempt, which did leave one person dead and two critically injured and physically impaired for life. Was that real blood on Trump’s ear? Who was Thomas Crook, anyway, and why has no new information come out of any investigation? Similar doubt about “the real story” of Charlie Kirk’s murder are central to a factional war within MAGA.

These sorts of suspicions have an illustrious history. Most Americans don’t think that Oswald acted alone, with suspicion that it was a conspiracy of some sort increasing in surveys from about 60 percent in 1963 to a peak of 81 percent in 1976, then settling down to about 75 percent before declining in recent years as older generations died out.

I was only six when it happened, so I don’t know about those first years, but I do know that it was strange that a small-time mafia nightclub owner managed to kill Oswald three days after the assassination, and that before he died of cancer three years later he told officials that he could not tell the truth safely in Dallas, and asked to be taken to Washington, DC.

I won’t go down the rabbit hole—you can look up William C. Sullivan if you want a quick entry into that conspiracy web, along with Sam Giancana, and so on.

The assassination of JFK and its aftermath deranged the question of truth, a phenomenon brought to a height by Watergate and the following years, with the Church Committee and its reports of CIA MK-Ultra mind control experiments and the like. Along with James Earl Ray, Sirhan Sirhan, Arthur Bremer’s diaries—there are fully developed alternative theories for each of these men.

Other killings as well, in that time—unanswered questions about NYPD complicity in the killing of Malcolm X, the 25 leaders of the Black Panthers gunned down by the FBI and local police in just a year, with the police murder of Freddie Hampton in Chicago at the end of 1969 marking a sort of exclamation point.

Coming of age in the 1970s, it was easier to believe that the government was lying than that it was telling the truth, and the Reagan years did nothing to change that.

The peculiar timing of the release of the embassy hostages in Iran, the day of Reagan’s inauguration, ties up neatly with the later Iran-Contra affair, and the whole CIA-Cocaine-Contra-Crack epidemic cluster was investigated by the Christic Institute and partly corroborated by a Senate panel led by John Kerry.

Then in this century we had the manufactured WMD evidence that justified the war on Iraq, with Judith Miller promulgating the story through our newspaper of record, then go to prison rather than reveal that her sources were Dick Cheney and Daniel Rumsfeld.

Part of what has made Trump’s own careless approach to the truth so effective is that the ground had already been laid for a communication ecosphere in which anything anyone said might be taken as true by at least some people. Given such evidence, who wouldn’t believe in a nefarious deep state?

So perhaps it is natural that one of the first responses to last night’s episode was that it was a false flag operation, an event constructed to help Trump in the polls and distract from Iran and everything else.

I started by saying that Trump’s history with assassinations is strange compared to other presidents, and that’s partly because of the sheer volume—three attempts in less than two years. Only Gerald Ford comes close, with two attacks in September, 1975, one by a deranged leftist who was also an FBI informant, and one by a Manson groupie. Those were strange times.

A lot of presidents were never attacked at all—Clinton, Bush, and Obama all survived two terms without coming under fire. In fact, the closest comparison to Trump may be Ronald Reagan, attacked by a psychotic young adult hoping to win the love of Jodie Foster, based on his watching of the movie Taxi Driver, which itself was based partly on the exploits of Arthur Bremer, who wounded George Wallace during the Democratic primaries in 1972.

John Hinckley is out now, finally, trying to make a name for himself with a music career, and we all know that story by heart. But here is Trump, with three separate attempts on his life, and most people probably don’t even remember the names of his first two attackers. I actually had to look up the name of the guy who lay in wait in the bushes along a golf with a long rifle—it was Ryan Wesley Routh.

A lot of people believe that the attempt by Thomas Crooks in Butler, PA was a manufactured event, with Trump using fake blood to make it seem that he had been hit. If so, it didn’t help him in the polls that much—neither assassination attempt moved the survey needle, and they were barely discussed in the following weeks of the campaign.

So now we will get a lot of information about Cole Thomas Allen, who evidently left enough writing behind to convict himself, and we will also get various screeds about political violence, with folks on the left making sure to weigh in so as not to be seen as condoning it, and the rightwing media machine blaming heated leftist rhetoric for our violent politics. The Free Press had a particularly noisome take in that regard.

We can probably also expect some online glorification of Allen, along the lines of Luigi’s ardent young supporters. The fact that this is already happening is one reason that Trump’s opponents have to protest their opposition to political violence with such vehemance—and without mentioning how central Trump’s role has been in promoting stochastic violence.

Trump himself seems cool with the whole business—he was almost cheerful in the aftermath, like why stop the party? It’s strange, because he was in a genuinely good mood at his late night press conference on Saturday, complimenting a CBS reporter and acting like his all-out assault on press freedoms is just a spat between friends. The good mood adds to false flag suspicions.

The first two attempts on Trump are largely forgotten, except in occasional Truth Social memes posted by his followers, and this one seems likely to meet the same fate. On the face of it, what happened seems quite clear, with Trump posting photos and video on Truth Social and a suspect named and in custody.

It seems so far like another version of the Thomas Crooks story, and not that different from the stories of Tyler James Robinson, who killed Charlie Kirk, and Luigi Mangione, who killed healthcare executive Brian Thompson.

Allen isn’t saying anything yet, but by all reports he seems to fit the same mold as these other assassins: an ordinary-seeming young man who went through changes that resulted in the decision to commit murder. The political angle of each attempt seems vaguely clear—there was some sort of rationale there—but each act is better attributed to psychosis than reason. Lone gunmen all.

More than half the country strongly disapproves of Trump and wishes that his presidency would end, but the distance between that and plotting a killing is vast, and can only be understood in personal terms—or in some form of conspiracy.

A great deal is unknown right now about the assailant, about security failures or successes, about what actually happened at the point of gunfire, but one thing seems certain: fully blown theories of what the real story is will be trending on the internet for the next week or two.

And maybe they should be. When I heard the news I couldn’t help but think of the report that Viktor Orban’s Russian puppet-masters had suggested that a faked assassination attempt might boost him in the polls. It is very hard to trust anything about the Trump White House—except perhaps its incompetence.

The problem with conspiracy theories is that you have to assume that at least some number of people are involved in the planning, and it is hard to keep secrets from coming out. You have to assume that conspirators have capacities like the ability to fake suicides or program individual minds, and Occam’s Razor comes quickly into play in the case of someone like Kirk’s assassin.

That’s the case here, too, I think, and with Crooks as well—the assumptions you have to make to find a Russian hand behind Allen’s trajectory to his race through the security perimeter outside the ballroom is several steps too far for me. But it won’t be for others.

It’s way too early to know how this attempted assassination, if that is what it is, plays out in the sociocultural media surround in the coming weeks. The drama of live footage and speculation about the attacker’s motives will undoubtedly fill pages in the next few days, and commentators will note again the rise of political violence in America, and perhaps some will point to the ways in which our present sociocultural surround sometimes causes people to become deranged.

Still, it would be unsurprising if the event simply recedes and is forgotten soon, the same way the previous two assassination attempts were. In a few months we’ll have trouble remembering the shooter’s name, because that’s how memory works in the present age.

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Before the news broke last night I had already finished a couple of thousand words on the Iran war, but in my late night attention to breaking news I forgot to save the file, and when I woke today my computer had rebooted and all that brilliance had been lost.

I’m not going to try to reproduce it now, except in summary, but I do want to leave these notes as a place holder.

First, diplomacy is failing and is likely to continue to fail so long as Trump continues to pretend he is negotiating from a position of strength, where the U.S. “holds all the cards.” The Iranians seem to be taking Trump’s wild, panicky swings of rhetoric both seriously and literally, as signs that they have the upper hand and that Trump and the U.S. are both flailing about an entirely trustworthy.

The joint Israeli-U.S. attack has left Iran firmly in the grip of the hardline Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, with IRGC leaders controlling access to the new, largely invisible Supreme Leader, the second Ayatollah Khamanei, who reportedly is recovering from wounds severe enough to prevent him from appearing in public or even releasing tapes of his voice.

Prolonging the standoff in order to maximize the U.S. concessions required for peace in the region is Iran’s strategy, and while Trump may use ostensible disarray in Iran’s regime to justify cancelling this weekend’s trip to Islamabad by Kushner and Witkoff, the reality is that the Iranian politicians who might take a more pragmatic approach, mindful of economic and structural devastation, are marginalized right now.

The blockade and indefinite ceasefire provide Trump with a holding pattern designed to keep the markets from tanking, and so far the S & P and Nasdaq have complied, reaching new levels in the past week. The blockade seems unlikely to change the calculus of Iran’s leadership, and it seems to me that eventually Trump will be forced to the choice between concession and escalation.

I asked Claude’s Opus 4.7 to do a comprehensive review of what economists and think tanks were saying about the global economic impact over time of the twin blockades of the Strait, and the consensus appears to be that the coming month or so marks a transitional period in which damage can still be stemmed if the Strait is reopened.

The last tankers at sea before the Strait closed have all reached their ports now, and traffic since then has been at about 3-7 percent of normal levels, so the well is now drying up. According to projections, a turning point will be reached in June, when three different shortfalls will emerge as crises.

By then, the 400-million-barrel reserves released by the International Energy Agency to calm the potential for an oil price shock will be exhausted. In Asia and Europe, remaining reserves of natural gas will be gone, with Asia suffering the most. A third of the world’s helium, vital for both microchips and medical technologies like the MRI, comes from Qatar and is cut off from the market, and by June reserves will be depleted.

The price shocks coming in June will be distributed unevenly across nations and various industries, but their impact will be substantial, dwarfing anything that has occurred so far. Basically, the current shortfall of between 20-33 percent of essential commodities is being managed through reserves and the use of alternative sources, such as coal, where possible. This has controlled costs and harms so far, but the capacity to keep doing that runs out in June.

If the Strait stays closed beyond June, a shift takes place from price shock, where resources are still available to those who can afford them, to demand destruction, where some product flows are simply unavailable and factories and production lines start to shut down, while nations take steps like four-day workweeks, school closings and rationing in order to reduce demand.

If the war continues through the summer into the fall, the prognosis shifts toward a global recession—something not seen since the 1930s—in which demand destruction creates structural damages that may last for years.

It is a grim scenario at that point, including the prospect of famine in poorer nations cut off from supplies of fertilizer, and the potential that shortfalls in chip production because of depleted helium reserves finally bursts the AI stock market bubble.

Even a quick end to the war will leave extensive damage, and if the Strait reopened today it might still be months before exports return to anything close to the levels that existed before the war, in part because of infrastructure damage in the Gulf. A war that lasts until fall would have devastating consequences for years to come.

There’s a great deal more to say about the war, from what its impact has been on U.S. military preparedness and our strategic position in the Indo-Pacific, to the ways in which it is fundamentally reshaping how the rest of the world sees the U.S.

The loss of the U.S. role as the guarantor of global stability and emergence under Trump as the main force for chaos marks the end of the American century that followed World War II and leaves an open field for China’s ambitions.

It will take a while to see clearly just how extensive the damage is, but the main lines of Trump’s destruction are already clear.

I’ll leave it there for now.

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If this war gives you vertigo it’s not your fault. Overnight Thursday into the wee hours of Friday Donald Trump declared peace in a salvo of posts on Truth Social, a theme he continued into Saturday even as the lead Iranian negotiator said in his own posts on X that everything Trump had said was untrue.

By Friday Israel and Lebanon had announced a ceasefire and Iran said that the Strait of Hormuz was open again—so long as ships hug the Iranian shore as they transit. Trump said he may go to Pakistan to sign a peace accord if one is achieved. Benchmark oil futures were down below $89 on Friday morning.

By Saturday morning, Iran had closed the Strait again and fired on two vessels, one of which India had earlier contracted to pay the Iranian toll. For its part, the U.S. said it would move from interdicting Iranian vessels to boarding them, an escalation of what was already an act of war. Trump suggested that the ceasefire might not be extended when it ends on Wednesday.

Charting the daily ebb and flow of the war and its fragile diplomacy risks eliding the actual reality of this war, which is that it’s not going to end any time soon. Part of the problem is that anything Trump says about the war is intrinsically untrustworthy. He yo-yos from proclaiming peace and victory to threatening further destruction, but nothing he says is connected to reality on the ground.

For their part, the Iranians rightly point to how untrustworthy the Americans are and continue to maintain that they have won the war and will settle it on their own terms. They have no intention of giving up their enriched uranium or relinquishing their new role as toll collectors in the international waters along their shore.

Maximalist stances are typical at the start of negotiations, but as Robert Pape points out, in this case the two sides are engaged in a zero-sum game. The two main issues for the U.S.—opening the Strait and eliminating Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium—have no middle ground.

Either the Strait is reopened and free, or it isn’t. Either Iran keeps its uranium or it gives it up. For the war to end, one side has to lose, and the stakes for the Iranian regime are existential, undergirded by an eschatology that sees the suffering of the war as presaging the end times and revelation of the 12^th prophet, Mahdi.

Despite Trump’s protestations that the regime has been changed and is more reasonable, the war has only hardened the Iranian leadership, which is controlled by hardline Revolutionary Guards now, and they know that in the threat of mutual destruction they hold the stronger card, since all they need to do is wait.

The fundamental point of all this seems to be that the U.S. cannot dictate terms to the IRGC leadership, so that the only pathway to actual peace in the region lies through what will amount to a strategic victory for Iran. It turns out that the 2015 agreement Obama forged with Iran was probably the best that the U.S. could hope for. Whatever comes next will be much worse.

*

It seems impossible to say anything useful about the present course of the war. The American president is aged and irrational, more susceptible to influence than to sound advice—as he demonstrated by ignoring the warnings from advisors that Iran would not be like Venezuela and that the Strait of Hormuz was at risk if he went to war.

Whether Trump has simply lost it or is pursuing (in his own mind) some sort of madman diplomacy doesn’t matter. The Iranians have their hands on the oil spigot, along with several other vital export flows, and further U.S. escalation risks even deeper global economic disaster than the downturn the world already is experiencing.

Any longer-term settlement that would reopen the Strait requires that Netanyahu fall in line with the U.S., and Trump hasn’t even tried to provide with any face-saving measures, announcing as he did the ceasefire in Lebanon before Israel’s security counsel had seen it. Iran might be willing to sacrifice Hezbollah, but only at the cost of substantial U.S. concessions on other issues.

Israel has the ability to break any fragile truce, and it has a long history of undermining U.S. negotiations with Iran, in part by assassinating any Iranian who engages in them, while Iran seems to understand the pressure on Trump much better than anyone in the Trump administration understands Iran.

Trump can win this war militarily, but only at a scale and cost that would wreck the global economy and leave tens or hundreds of thousands dead. Or he can make the concessions that would end the fighting and leave Iran much stronger than it was before the bombing began.

Pape argues that Iran has already emerged as a fourth great power because of U.S. attack, able to control about 20 percent of the world’s oil along with a similar part of other vital commodities like helium and urea. Although interests diverge, it shares the United States as a common enemy with Russia and China, and both of those powers have provided support to Iran during the war.

The three nations between them share a substantial portion of the world’s energy resources and production capacity (in the case of China.). The question the U.S. faces is not how to prevent the emergence of Iran as a fourth great power, but rather how best to manage the change in global strategic balance caused by the war, which is certainly the greatest foreign policy blunder in U.S. history.

America’s war has hurt its one-time allies the most, particularly in South Asia and the Pacific, while it has been waged in a fashion that has entirely isolated the U.S. from Europe and caused partners in the Gulf to begin thinking of China as a safer friend. The United States is acting as a rogue, lawless nation, and the loss of goodwill around the world has been well-documented in national polling.

In an essay in his substance The Long Memo entitled “The Hegemon Didn’t Lose. It Quit,” Bryan C. del Monte argues that the war has caused an irreversible change in America’s role in the international order, one leaving a vacuum that no other nation, including China, is ready to fill.

In the cycle of history that began after the second war, the U.S. served as a guarantor of global stability, in economic terms as much as, or more so, than military ones. There were no global wars during that 80-year American century, and at times of dire economic risk, the U.S. acted to prevent the sort of disaster that befall the global economy in the 1930s.

That’s over now, according to del Monte, and while one might expect China to replace U.S. in that role, he says that China isn’t ready to provide that sort of stability: the renminbi is not ready to take over from the dollar, its internal economy is fraught with challenges, and China’s military is not ready to project force beyond its own region.

Whether this scenario is simply possible or likely depends on what kind of agreement Trump can make with Iran. Perhaps it is possible that Iran will agree to some new international arrangement regarding the Strait, perhaps in exchange for security assurances and the lifting of sanctions, along with reconstruction aid. It has already said it is willing to compromise on its nuclear program, but certainly not to the point of giving it up, since that would be tantamount to acknowledging defeat.

That’s the offramp for Trump, or something like it, and maybe if he takes it he can then turn his summit meeting with Xi into some sort of success and spend some time trying to mend ties with our allies in Europe and Asia.

Maybe this war marks peak Trump and after it he’ll be reined in enough to show the world that if it waits him out a saner, more internationally-oriented administration will come in to salvage what is left of America’s traditional role. That seems more hopeful than probable to me.

Iran is not going to give Trump a paper victory to let him save face. I’m not sure that they even know how to do that, based on reports from earlier negotiations about how hard it was to reach mutual understanding. Iran’s mistrust of Trump must be absolute—how could it not be? Any agreement that ends the war will demonstrate how badly the U.S. lost in strategic terms.

Trump’s only alternative is to raise the stakes on the battlefield, either through an invasion to seize the uranium, military action to reopen the Strait, or a criminal bombing campaign against civilian infrastructure.

Any escalation risks crashing the market, which has remained irrationally optimistic through all of this, reaching new record highs last week. Investors are gambling on Trump and still buying the dip, and it will keep working for them until it doesn’t.

Saturday’s news was bad enough that it would spook the markets on Monday, and on Sunday morning, as I was drafting this, Trump used Truth Social to say that he was sending Witkoff and Kushner back for more talks in Pakistan, even as he reiterated his war-crime threat that “the United States is going to knock out every single Power Plant, and every single bridge, in Iran. NO MOE MR. NICE GUY!”

Trump has been jawboning the markets for weeks now, buying time while he waits for Iran to fold, but all the Iranians have is time. They’re not going anywhere. And while it is clear that political officials within Iran’s ruling coalition are worried about electricity and food, the guys with the weapons are calling the shots.

If I played the prediction markets, I would bet on a military strike this week, with the Kushner-Witkoff duo serving as cover, a repeat of the scenario with which the war began. The odds might be better on some extension of the ceasefire, but the longer U.S. troops are staged for deployment, the stronger the pressure to use them.

Iranian negotiators neither trust nor respect Trump’s amateurs, and the chance of any significant breakthrough coming this week seem much less likely to me than the odds Trump will pull down one of the guns he has hanging on his wall in the situation room and use it.

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I have been following the news closely enough to know that the Times of Israel reports that Trump did indeed receive a different version of Iran’s 10-point proposal from the one the regime promulgated domestically, and I know that the price of oil has hit $145 if you need it today—oil futures may be optimistically priced right now—and that JD Vance has never negotiated anything in his life, so there’s that.

I stayed up late last night to wait for Vance’s read-out of the marathon negotiation session, and it was depressing—no breakthrough, no promise to talk more, just a U.S. “method of understanding,” a final take-it-or-leave it U.S. proposal that undoubtedly did not vary from the prior U.S. stance on Iran eliminating its nuclear enrichment program and giving up its 900-pound stockpile, along with opening the Strait.

I had never heard the term “method of understanding” before—it’s not a term of art in negotiations, and Vance undoubtedly meant “memorandum of understanding.” A rookie mistake, I guess. It’s not like Vance, Witkoff and Kushner are the A team.

It’s not clear as I write whether talks will continue or the ceasefire hold. According to the New York Times, Iran left the door open to further talks, and Vance said nothing to foreclose that possibility. It was clear that he had to get home and talk to the boss before we would find out what comes next on the American side.

Trump himself was at a UFC fight with Rubio and a cast of hangers-on that included Dan Bongino and Joe Rogan when the negotiations ended, and his only indication of the stakes came in an earlier offhand remark that it didn’t matter whether a deal was reached or not. “We win regardless,” he told reporters. “We’ve defeated them militarily.”

*

Whatever Trump may mean by a military win, it is clear that the Israelis don’t feel that way, and Saudi Arabia, whose interests are represented by Kushner in these talks, reportedly wants Trump to keep going for regime change. Iran continues to act as though the regime’s survival is equivalent to victory, which is essentially true, given that the Strait of Hormuz is still closed and the nuclear material buried where it would take a massive, risky U.S. operation to seize it.

Prediction markets today are lowering the probability of the Strait opening any time soon, and the odds of Trump traveling to China before May 15 have also been reduced. Whatever Trump says next about the status of the war is unlikely to leave the markets optimistic when they open again tomorrow.

I continue to find the analytical framework provided by Prof Robert Pape the most useful way of thinking about the war, in part because it is structural and benchmarked against significant system elements in a way that allows one to look beyond the daily surface noise of the conflict.

Pape, a professor at the University of Chicago Prof and one of the foremost experts on war-fighting strategy writes that the war is an “escalation trap,” in which each stage in the sequence of war-fighting offers a choice between increasingly unattractive options for an offramp and further escalation of the conflict.

Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan are all prior examples of how the escalation scenario played out in the past. Pape argues that by establishing its control of passage of about 20 percent of the world’s energy, Iran has achieved a sort of superpower status, and the question now is whether the path to de-escalation can include tempering or restraining that power, with the alternative being the attempt to wrest back control by force of arms.

The latter course is the escalation trap, where greater exercises of military force achieve only diminishing returns, ending finally in some form of defeat for the attacker. The profane incoherence of Trump’s own position, swinging between claims of victory and threats of genocide, makes it unclear which direction he will choose.

Iran has made it clear that it won’t hesitate to burn down the Gulf if U.S. and Israeli attacks escalate to civilian infrastructure, now that most military targets have been hit, so it is a hard choice for Trump, since the alternative is an American defeat.

*

Meanwhile, Trump faces strong pressure to continue the war from our remaining allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia, along with the hawk wing of his own party, which is splintering over the war. Israel in particular is a wild card, since Netanyahu is intent on continuing the war for personal as well as strategic reasons, given his impending trial and upcoming elections.

A deeply reported piece in the New York Times last week made clear that Netanyahu sold the war to Trump--the same war, according to former Secretary of State John Kerry that he had tried to sell to other presidents without success. CIA Director John Ratcliffe termed Netanyahu’s spiel “farcical,” which Rubio helpfully translated for the word-challenged president: “he means it’s bullshit.”

Every outcome of this war flows from the initial stupidity of the choice to wage it, and the series of miscalculations on Trump’s part certainly cements his standing as the worst president we have ever known.

The psychotic incoherence of his public statements on the war coupled with his absolute power to keep waging it in any way he chooses makes this the most dangerous moment in my lifetime, maybe only rivaled by the Cuban Missile crisis, which had a steadier hand at the wheel—steady enough, at least, to resist Curtis LeMay’s call for a pre-emptive strike on the Kremlin.

Now the madman in the room is actually calling the shots, and clearly no one around him has the power or will to talk him down. It may be that Trump saw his obscene Truth Social threats as a final act in a madman strategy, since news reports suggest that Trump was desperate to find a face-saving way to back down. But the insanity part is not an act—he really is crazy now.

It’s hard to know—or even imagine—what terms Iran might be willing to agree to. Certainly the regime would prefer not to be bombed back to the stone age, and there are figures within the leadership, like President Masoud Pezeshkian, who may argue for the importance of preserving power plants and bridges. Losing electric power for months would devastate the population.

But Trump’s bluff failed, and it is far harder now for him to return to war—given that any new step would require substantial escalation, probably including ground troops. There’s not much appetite for the war in the United States, and the Iranians have the ability to turn a relatively short-term crisis into a lasting global disaster.

As I was writing this, Trump announced the next step in escalation: a naval blockade that would prevent any ship from leaving the Strait. It’s an act of war that would require U.S. naval vessels to interdict the ships of even friendly nations, and it would prevent Iran from continuing to gain its tollbooth revenues. The main effect would be to close the Strait entirely, further reducing the flow of oil and other commodities to the open market.

It’s not clear that a blockade will have much impact on Iran’s negotiating position. The Iranian regime claims victory, and the concessions it demands in the 10-point proposal it shared domestically and widely publicized are impossible for the U.S. to make without betraying its allies—Israel and Saudi Arabia—and making it clear to the folks at home just how badly we lost the war.

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There’s much more to say, but that’s where things stand now. We are in the middle of a slowly-unfolding disaster—slow for us, since we are insulated, and much more rapid and dangerous for poorer nations—and we can’t know anything about what will happen next until Trump decides what he feels like doing.

By every report, Trump wants to be done with the war, and the longer it goes on the worse the political cost for his party. But the psychic cost of surrender—which is what Iran seems to seek—may be too great for Trump. Iran’s regime has its own reasons for holding to its demands, since any peace that doesn’t include clear economic and strategic advantages for Iran will weaken the support that the war has leant the regime.

Perhaps the most important point is that Iran holds the highest card at the table, and it may not be willing to give up control of the Strait no matter what Trump plays. Iran is a threat to any ship so long as the region stays in conflict and unstable. It will call every bluff Trump makes.

It’s a crazy circumstance for the world to be in: either a conclusion to the war forestalls a global economic crisis and leaves Iran’s power greatly increased, or an all-out attempt to defeat Iran militarily risks taking Gulf energy production offline for the indefinite future, with the global crisis that would entail.

With Trump in charge, there is no sense in making predictions, though the odds on the Strait still being closed in January look good to me right now. In a way, I am interested more in the outcomes of the war that have already occurred and won’t change no matter what the end game turns out to be.

Some of these are obvious, like the loss of Israel’s special standing within American politics, with AIPAC money and influenced now seen as toxic by Democratic candidates, and the antisemitic wing of the Republican Party condemning the way Netanyahu drew Trump into Israel’s war. Israel’s special relationship with the U.S. is in question and might end under a Democratic president.

The most important outcome lies in how the war is strengthening China’s position, both vis-à-vis the U.S., and in the world in general. Here’s one fun fact: the U.S. ability to replenish some of the defensive weapons that have been depleted or destroy depends on having access to gallium, a strategic mineral that China almost entirely controls. I saw one report that said we only have about a month’s supply on hand and have to go to China to get more. I imagine this will come up when Trump finally goes to talk to Xi.

More important, the U.S. failure in this war has opened a much broader role for China in the Middle East, while also greatly weakening America’s strategic position in Asia. The war made literally no sense in strategic terms, and it makes it far more likely that China will be able to assume political control of Taiwan without a shot being fired.

China was not stronger than the U.S. when Trump took office. It is now, it and will continue to grow stronger the longer the war goes on. Trump may find those negotiations just as tough as he has with Iran.

That’s partly because this war has further cemented the way in which the U.S. under Trump has abandoned any sense of allyship with Europe, which in turn is now abandoning the United States. Whatever the new global order looks like when this war finally ends, the U.S. will find itself increasingly alone, a rogue power, violent and entirely untrustworthy.

This last reality seems like the deepest and most lasting outcome of the war. Maybe our standing can gradually be improved again under a new Democratic administration after 2028, and any Democratic politician worth their salt better have a smart foreign policy in place—though it is hard to know what that would look like beyond the acknowledgement of our reduced standing in the world.

It may take a while for the extent of what the U.S. has lost under Trump to become fully known, but it is already clear that he has caused damages that may never be repaired.

*

It is this latter reality that strikes me most profoundly, in terms that are partly personal. It goes to the question of what it means to be an American, and how that has changed since Trump was re-elected in 2024.

I may be wrong about this, but my sense is that much of the world has long had a sort of ambivalence about the U.S., often condemning our exercise of global power, but attracted to the energy and spirit of the nation, and at least half-believing in the ideals of democratic freedoms we espoused, however breached these were in our practices in Latin America and Asia.

I actually was the lead researcher on a major Newsweek project in the early 1980s, a special issue headlined “How America Is Looked Like in the World,” and that was more or less the conclusion—an ambivalence rooted in a combination of attraction to our energy and freedoms and disdain for our uncouthness and eventually clumsiness and hypocrisy in the exercise of our power.

I spent a couple of years in Manila during the period of the 1986 revolution, trying to free-lance after my stint at Newsweek, where I had interviewed Philippine opposition leader Benigno Aqquino, Jr. a couple of weeks before he was assassinated, and what struck me in my conversations with opposition leaders and ordinary people is how ardently they hoped that the U.S. might live up to its promise and see the Philippine yearning for democracy and freedom.

U.S, support for the dictator Marcos, whose regime killed Aquino while he was sick with a bad episode of lupus, was a dismal element in these conversations, but the blame fell on Reagan, not on the U.S. as a whole. People still had hope in America, that we would come around in the end. And indeed, we finally did—it was an American who told Marcos the gig was up, and a U.S. military helicopter that flew the first family out of Malacañang Palace into exile.

I think that is gone now. No one particularly likes the Chinese, partly because they don’t care about being liked and its just business with them, but China’s standing in global approval ratings is now higher than hours.

That’s true even in Brazil, where I live, and it’s crazy because Brazilians love the U.S. Last week a news story broke about a chic bar in Lapa, the nightclub district in Rio, that had put up a sign saying that Americans and Israelis were not welcome. That would have been unimaginable a couple of years ago, when I first came here.

Living in the U.S., I never really thought about what it meant to be an American, like the fish swimming in the water in that story of David Foster Wallace’s, who respond “what’s water?” when asked how the water is today. Being an Amerrican is a base state, and one doesn’t really think about it much until one spends time abroad.

It’s not a matter of concern for me. There aren’t any Americans where I live, and when people find out I’m not Brazilian they assume I’m from Argentina. It’s really a larger question, one that was highlighted for me a couple of weeks ago when I learned that my application for permanent resident status had been approved. I have the final interview in Rio next week, a pro forma conclusion to a two-year process.

Coming as it did amidst my sorrow and rage at the immense, violent stupidity of my native land, it made me think not just about what it meant to be an American, but whether I really wanted to be an American at all anymore. National identity is not particularly fluid—after a lifetime one has been well-shaped by one’s home country—but national citizenship is.

I have four years of permanent resident status, and I can continue it after that, but I can also start the naturalization process then and become a citizen within a couple of years. Maybe it’s the simple fact that I can see the pathway now, but I think it is the war that has made me seriously think that might be the course I should take. I’m not really sure I want to be an American anymore, and there is a lot that is attractive about joining fully in the unfolding evolution of Brazil.

I don’t know where I will go with that. Naturalization would be a lot of work, and it’s not a decision I have to make any time soon. I do know that I have settled here, living in what will probably be the last house I own. At least I’d like to think of it that way. Stability is good at any age, but particularly when one is older.

What I am really thinking about is the way in which I write these newsletters, the sort of identity and habits of mind that are hardwired into my language and stance. I include myself in the great “us” of the U.S. citizenry, and write more or less from the same frame of reference that I used to when I lived in an apartment in Brattleboro, VT.

I’ve actually thought about that as I have produced this newsletter, wondering if my experience of daily life in the states would be different under Trump than it had been when I was still living there in 2022. Talking to stateside friends, it has not seemed so, though that’s partly because I didn’t live in Minneapolis.

It would be so different if I wrote as a Brazilian. The war has generally been good for us, since most of our energy is hydroelectric and we produce our own oil. Cooking gas, which is imported and partly subsidized, could be a problem, and the government might need to absorb added costs. But we are a commodity-rich nation with an emerging industrial base, and the closing of the Strait hurts us less than it does most nations.

We were already engaging with China on some major infrastructure projects, including a railroad over the Andes to the Chilean coast, and that relationship will certainly grow and prosper, even as we continue to fend off various forms of pressure from the Trump administration.

Elections in November will determine whether Lula continues his time in office, or gives way to one of Bolsonaro’s sons, Flavio Bolsonaro, a Senator from the state of Rio de Janeiro who has been shadowed by accusations of embezzlement and kickback schemes but never formally charged.

At this early point, polling suggests the race is largely even, with questions about Lula’s age and effectiveness predominating. Bolsonaro’s support is predicted to drop as people get to know him better. While Trump will almost certainly seek to meddle in the election on Bolsonaro’s behalf, the effect of that may actually be negative now, the same way it was in Canada.

The strategic weakening of the U.S. began for Brazil when it forced Trump to back down from his 50 percent tariffs, and it included Elon Musk being forced to back down and accede to Brazilian law in order to reopen X, along with Trump’s abandonment of Jair Bolsonaro, who led the coup attempt after the 2022 election and is in prison now. If the current war weakens the U.S. as much as it seems projected to, it will only help Brazil’s larger role in the world as one of the key BRICs nations.

It’s sad to see how badly the U.S. has deteriorated in just a bit more than a year, and we are ready here to fight back diplomatically against any American attempt under Trump to infringe on our sovereignty. We’ll do it diplomatically, as we did with the trade battle and are doing now, with a new joint security initiative to stem the flow of guns from Florida into Rio de Janeiro. But we’re not afraid of Trump.

And we don’t really have much hope for the future, when it comes to the states. Perhaps a Democrat will win in 2028 and start to try to right things again, but Trump has dominated the scene for ten years now, and it seems clear that he is as reflective of the American populace as any new president would be. The U.S. has demonstrated that it is too unstable politically to be trusted, and that seems unlikely to change in the discernable future.

*

I guess I can write that way. I don’t know if I like it, and I definitely don’t want to pretend that Brazil doesn’t have problems of its own. But if the U.S. and Brazil were baseball teams and I was a free agent, I think I’d want to play for Brazil. It definitely seems like a winning side these days, at least compared to the U.S.

That seems like a depressing place to end my Sunday reflections, and it is hard to think of any alternative, given how badly the war is going for the American side and the damage that the democratically elected president is doing to the world.

There are countervailing themes as well, easier for me to see through my American lenses than through Brazilian ones. I’ll try to take these up in my next piece.

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To Subscribers: I don’t mean to clog your inboxes, but after listening yesterday to a talk by Prof Robert Pape, author of the term “the escalation trap,” I felt compelled to write up a more concise, direct summation of what the present situation looks like, a sort of bulletin.

Pape’s talk is a preview of a NY Times op-ed that will be published tomorrow, and his analysis seems essential to me. In general, I have depended for my understanding of the war on work that Pape, Simon Pearce, and Claire Belinski have produced on Substack, so what follows is more or less a summary of what I have learned from them.

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The old saying not to bring a knife to a gun fight is not actually accurate. Close-combat instructors will tell you a knife is more dangerous in the hands of someone who knows how to use it. There’s a reason that cops are told to keep a 21-foot circumference around a subject with a knife—any closer and they might strike before you can aim and fire.

Picture a burly guy with a gun and a lot of swagger, moving on a smaller man with seemingly nothing in his hands. You’ve seen that movie, that quick strike and sudden fall. You know who walks away, with blood on the floor.

That’s Trump, the big clumsy guy with the gun, and the war on Iraq has unhinged him completely now. He may think he holds all the cards, but Iran is holding knives and they have driven him mad.

He has to follow through on his ranting, because he knows about TACO and all he cares about is his self-image. He’s forced to do what he said he would do, and he is telling the truth when he says “there will be nothing like it,” when U.S. forces join the Israelis in widespread strikes on civilian infrastructure.

Those crazy Iranians just aren’t listening, and they are not going to give Trump anything. They can’t, really. Who surrenders when you’re winning the war—something that Trump’s hysteria makes clearer every day. Have we ever had a weaker commander-in-chief?

And who needs guns when you’re nimble and quick with a knife. All those buried missile launchers are just waiting to be dug up again, along with the uranium. We don’t know how much retaliation capability Iran has, but we do know that it’s enough to keep going for a long time.

The Israelis have wanted this stage of the war—Trump has been holding them back so far. Over the next week or two, U.S.-Israeli forces will try to destroy Iran economically. It will be a humanitarian disaster on the scale of Gaza, and it will be a war crime.

And it won’t work. Civilian casualties won’t deter a regime that killed more than 20,000 of its own citizens a few weeks ago and is actively enlisting boys as young as 12 to serve as cannon fodder. This war is the fulfillment of prophecy for the Khomeinist true believers, and a war of survival for the thugs who control the nation.

There is no punishment that the regime can’t endure, because they know that their enemy’s anti-missile stocks are running low and that the real oil crisis is just days from hitting, and that each day they survive brings U.S. defeat closer.

The real price of crude oil is starting to show up in the spot markets, and soon the last shipments of oil from before the war will have reached their destinations. Forecast modeling varies, but most predictions are for Brent crude to reach prices of $150 in a few weeks, and as much as $200 if the war lasts until summer.

Iran controls the fate of the world economy, its chokehold on the Strait giving it a power equivalent to control of about 20 percent of global energy supplies, along with all manner of critical exports, helium for microchips and urea for fertilizer, and so on.

They control the spigot, and any attempt to force them to open it will just lengthen the time it stays closed.

Iran has also maintained an unknown but substantial part of its arsenal, somewhere between a third of it and half, and while they are forced into decentralized command and control, they have shown great discipline with their attacks.

As time has gone on, the nations it attacks are forced increasingly to make decisions about firing missile defenses based on scarcity and priorities. The asymmetry of drones vs. defense systems is well recorded. Even a few successful Iranian attacks inflict the same kind of damage on neighboring states as they endure from Israeli and American missiles and bombs.

Iran has proven again that asymmetrical warfare works, at least in part because valuing regime survival is different from caring about the price of oil. When Trump unleashes all-out war next week, Iran will respond in kind. There is no incentive for the Iranian regime to be measured in retaliation.

One of the asymmetries of the war is that Iran is alone, among the nations in the Gulf, in not relying on desalination plans for most of its water—only about 3 percent. Compare that with levels higher than 80 percent in nations like Kuwait and Qatar. Riyadh depends on two large desalination plants for much of its water.

Iran has already warned that attacks on civilian infrastructure will cause it to attack desalination plants. If these are successful, it would create an unprecedented—unthinkable—humanitarian crisis. And there is no equivalent escalation on the U.S. side. Trump is already planning to do the worst that he can do.

The problem is that the United States has already lost the war. Prolonging it will only deepen our final defeat. We’re locked in what Pape terms “the escalation trap,” in which persistence in unobtainable strategic objectives leads inevitably to operational escalation and eventual defeat.

No amount of military force will reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and that’s what this war is about, now that any foolish hope of regime change or a negotiated end in U.S. favor must be abandoned. The regime won’t give up control, because control of 20 percent of the world’s oil flow is enough leverage to make it what Pape called, in his lecture on Saturday, a new superpower.

Trying to re-open the Strait by military means would keep it closed long enough to cause global economic disaster and probably wouldn’t succeed in any case. How degraded would Iran’s capabilities have to be for shipping firms and insurers to trust that no random drone strike or suicide speedboat was coming?

It is hard to defeat by force an enemy that sees death in war as holy martyrdom.

Trump is crazy now. He really is. His tweets this weekend confirm it. Nothing will stop him now, and I fear very much that this coming week marks the point when the true economic disaster of the war becomes clear.

It would necessarily be a new sudden shock, so much as clear evidence that any hope of a quick end to the war is gone. Even after a week or two of widespread devastation and retaliation, the war will still be the same stalemate, with Iran just waiting Trump out. Leaving will be harder the longer he waits, but in the end he won’t have an alternative.

The point now, as Pape made clear in his talk yesterday, is not the inevitability of escalation—that’s a given—but rather just how long it will go on, how powerful Iran will be at the end of the war, and how weakened the United States will be.

There are five nations that want this war: the U.S., Israel, Iran, Russia, and China. Every other nation needs it to stop. Until a year ago, much of the world looked toward the U.S. as a guarantor of some measure of global stability, and now we are the agent of grievous disorder.

Our past role in the world is over now. The American century has ended.

China is the real victor, and they are just looking on right now. As the headline in the Economist put it, “don’t interfere with your enemy when he is making a mistake.” By the time Trump finally meets with Xi, he may not have any cards left at all.

Up until this point, markets have been pricing in the assumption of a quick war, and Trump’s confused talk about negotiations along with assumptions about TACO have kept the notion alive. That’s ending this week. The real crisis is here now.

I would so much love to be proven wrong.

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Donald Trump’s prime-time speech last week reminded us that he turns 80 this year and that with his war on Iran he created a trap for himself that he cannot escape.

Trump’s practice of deceit makes it impossible to put much faith in anything he says, but he did make clear that the joint U.S.-Israeli forces would continue their relentless bombardment for at least two or three more weeks—he used the phrase “bomb them back to the Stone Age” to describe his plan if Iran proved unwilling to negotiate an end to the war. Iran made clear on April 3 that it had no interest in negotiating on any terms that the U.S. might propose.

Trump also seemed to set the terms for an American victory: devastate the Iranian nation and then get out. He seemed comfortable with leaving behind the 900 pounds of 60 percent-enriched uranium—a putative cause for the war—and there was no more talk of regime change, apart from the fantasy that someone reasonable on the Iranian side was in touch with us.

The most interesting theme was Trump’s espoused willingness to end the U.S. role in the fighting while Iran still controlled movement through the Strait of Hormuz. Trump urged the nations that actually depend on energy from the region, unlike the U.S., to just “take it” and “cherish it.”

“Iran has been essentially decimated—the hard part is done so it should be easy,” Trump said, “and in any event, when this conflict is over the strait will open up naturally, it will just open up naturally.”

Astonishingly, this may be the best of Trump’s bad choices in the matter, the equivalent of a wolf gnawing off its leg to escape a foothold trap. He can claim the devastation of Iran as a victory for the matchless power of the U.S. military and let the nations that depend on energy from the region cut deals with the Iranian regime, as some already are doing.

A Friday report said that a French tanker, hastily reflagged under the Malta flag, made it through the strait, something other nations like the Philippines and Pakistann have already been able to work out with the regime. The Iranians seem prepared to re-open the strait under their own control. The financial benefit to the nation will be considerable if they can now charge fees for passage.

During Trump’s speech, and in the run-up to it, I found myself questioning whether I would have to take back the assertion in my last piece, that we should prepare for escalation. The markets were antsy, and it seemed like Trump might be realizing that any way out would be better than staying in for an escalating war. Maybe that’s still the case, and Trump really will leave after another two or three weeks, in time to get ready for his summit meeting with Xi in May.

But I don’t think so. Sadly, since it portends disaster, I think we are bound to see escalation of the war, including high-risk forays by American troops, and that we’ll still be focused on the war in midsummer, and maybe much longer.

*

The problem for Trump is that Iran isn’t some bear trap he stepped into and can get out of if he cuts and runs. It’s more like one of those humane traps where the animal enters willingly and then finds itself locked on the inside. Trump can’t escape. He has to wait for someone else to rescue him.

The easiest rescue would come from Iran, and it’s clear that Trump was fantasizing about this from the start. That would have been the same kind of deal he cut in Venezuela, regime change at the top but leaving the existing power structure in place. Earlier wars in Panama and Grenada had a similar kind of outcome—an existing power structure was available to take over from Noriega and Bishop when they fell.

We all know now how that fantasy drove Trump’s impulse to start the war, and how stupid and unsupported by any intelligence it was. Regime change slipped off the table quickly, though it has never vanished entirely. The problem in Iran is that there is no alternative power structure, just nuances of orientation within the existing structure.

To the extent that more progressive elements may have been behind the substantial concessions on nuclear energy Iran was reportedly willing to make the day before the attack began, that situation has entirely changed now, with hardline elements of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps clearly in charge. These elements believe that they are winning the war and will never make the kind of concessions Trump would need to declare a win.

It’s not even clear to me that they would be willing to let Trump abandon the war without concessions on his own part. Currently there are about 400-600 aircraft, 30-40 major naval vessels, including two carrier groups, and about 60,000 U.S. troops deployed within striking distance of Iran missiles and drones. I believe the phrase for this is “target-rich environment.”

Although much of this force could leave in a hurry if it had to, a measured drawdown to pre-conflict positions would take 3-6 months. This assumes conditions of ceasefire between Iran and the U.S., but what if the Iranians are unwilling to stop? What if they want to keep going until Trump is forced in a visible way to surrender? Retreat under fire looks bad on television.

Iran has most of the leverage right now, and they are certain that they are winning the war. Maybe if Trump really does have a plan to just stop in a couple of weeks and start withdrawing forces, they’ll let him.

I can imagine a clandestine agreement in which Iran agrees to stop attacking U.S. forces in exchange for Trump abandoning the Strait of Hormuz as a U.S. security interest, leaving it to the rest of the world to solve. But they don’t need to make that concession, and probably won’t unless Israel stops fighting, too.

*

The whole question of negotiations is filled with murk and deceit. Nothing that Trump says can be trusted, and much of it has been demonstrably false. There has been some action in indirect discussions, with Pakistan moving forward to take a leading role, and a joint Pakistani-Chinese proposal was developed last week. But on April 3 Iran rejected negotiating on any terms but its own, and there’s no real sign that they feel any incentive to talk.

The strait is the broad concern for every nation, and there have been several multinational meetings in Europe and Asia. A solution in which Iran retains and monetizes its control of the Strait would demonstrate just how badly Trump lost the war, but it might stave off a global economic crisis, and maybe Trump could sell it that way.

So there is a sort of pathway to a cut-and-run solution for Trump: keep bombing and sharing lots of pictures of destruction for the next couple of weeks, and then declare the objective won, leaving the strait problem to be solved by whatever emerging consensus there is between China and the middle powers that were once U.S. allies, like France, Germany, Great Britain, Japan and South Korea.

Trump can legitimately claim that the U.S. doesn’t use the strait very much—only 3 percent of the total volume in normal times—and call his surrender an America First move, leaving nuclear buried so deep and the nation now living in stone-age conditions. Maybe he can make it work.

*

That’s really what Trump left us with as the best-case scenario last week, a sort of final act of epic fury and obliteration, followed by a withdrawal that places concerns about nuclear weapons and international waters as irrelevant. Assuming the Iranians allow a graceful exit—without, for example, trying to hit any troop carriers or aircraft carriers—then Trump might well be done with the war by the time he meets with Xi, leaving the mess for others to clean up.

As I think of this scenario, I am thinking of the news commentary on Fox News after Trump’s speech was done. I was livestreaming Fox because it seemed useful to know what Trump’s supporters were hearing, and Fox News is what they watch.

The Fox anchor pulled a couple of guys into a panel discussion after the speech, one a military guy and the other an expert on Iran, and they both agreed that it had been a good speech—they had to say that—but it was interesting to hear the way it which they hedged their support. I was reminded that Fox’s news division is an actual news organization, different from the rabid stream of rightwing influencers who comprise the Fox commentariat.

The Iranian expert focused on the reality that an end to the war short of regime change left the hardline IRGC more entrenched and the populace more united than it had been before the war, and that leaving the regime in control of the strait was a bad idea.

The military expert agreed with that analysis and made the further point that from a strategic perspective, abandoning the goal of re-opening the strait would leave China as the dominant power in the region, and be a disaster for U.S. national security.

The top five importers of oil through the strait are China, India, South Korea, Japan, and “other Asian nations.” A rapprochement between China and Iran that enabled oil to flow again to Asia would certainly be part of the changing equation of power in the Indo-Pacific.

A good part of what is left in popular support for Trump’s war is contingent on it ending quickly without sending combat troops into battle, and the problem of national strategy in the South China sea may not be well-understood by many voters, but for a substantial part of the Republican Party, China is the real strategic threat. Having started the war on his own, it would not be entirely surprising if Trump found himself increasingly isolated at the end of it, even within his own party.

*

So far, I have been playing out the hope for peace that Trump proffered in his speech last week, and it may seem that I’m suggesting that it may be a likely outcome. Now that I have written it out, it does seem a bit more plausible, except that I have lined up some lower-probability variables in a chain in order to get there.

Perhaps the most significant variable would be Israel’s willingness to stand down and leave Iran in control of the strait. It’s true that the strait has only indirect economic significance for Israel—this closure isn’t hurting it—and that its primary interest lies in ending Iran’s ability to attack it directly or through proxy armies. That project is well along, and two or three more weeks may be enough time to feel satisfied with the effects for now.

But any agreement that re-opened the strait would have to come with strong assurance of a cessation of hostilities, maybe backed up by security guarantees from some sort of coalition that included China—otherwise the insurers will still be wary. The U.S. can leave the region, but Israel cannot. Its dependence on U.S. military aid is such that it cannot afford a break in the alliance, but the pressure on Trump from that direction is bound to be strong and unrelenting.

An even larger unlikelihood—or at least greater unknown—would be Iran’s agreement to stop firing missiles and drones at the U.S. and its allies. Maybe Trump could still try to leave the region while his forces are under fire, but that sounds an awful lot like the end of the Afghanistan War. Trump would have to keep Netanyahu in line and clearly cede the U.S. interest in the strait—and even then, it’s reasonable to question whether Iran has any reason to trust him.

As it is, Iran is now preparing to formalize its control of the Strait of Hormuz and open passage to noncombatant nations for a price. Pakistan, the Philippines, and India have all managed accords that let some oil through, and China and Japan have also reportedly negotiated agreements with Iran. The reflagged French tanker may represent the test of a workaround for EU states as well.

All of this makes it unclear what would be required for Trump to be able to declare the war over. I’m making the assumption here that declaring the war ended while the Iranian forces are still fighting, Iran controls the strait, and the enriched uranium is still buried on Iranian soil would be a hard sell even for a politician with great rhetorical skills, which Trump does not possess.

*

So it seems to me that even the sort of “peace with honor” approach that Trump seems to be mulling—declare victory and leave, as George Aiken suggested during Vietnam—won’t work for him because the Iranians won’t let it. As long as Iran has no iron-clad agreement that guarantees its security on terms that enable it to rebuild in safety and maintain control of the strait, they have little incentive to stop fighting—or even negotiate for that matter.

It’s a real quandary for Trump, since an unnegotiated retreat will look like surrender, and it’s not clear that negotiations are even possible. No Iranian leader can trust the Americans after two earlier rounds of negotiation ended in surprise attacks.

Even worse, every time a leader emerges as someone connected to negotiations, Israel kills him. Last week it was Kamal Khazari, the former Iranian foreign minister and senior advisor heading Iran’s Strategic Council on Foreign Relations, who had been involved in diplomatic efforts with Pakistan.

The U.S. had had to ask Israel not to kill two potential interlocutors—parliamentary speaker Ghalibaf and Foreign Minister Araraghchi—and so far Iranian President Masoud has been spared as well. There still is talk of negotiations, and Trump included it in fantasizing terms during his speech—he claimed that the U.S. is in “serious discussions” with “a more reasonable regime” in Iran, with “great progress” claimed toward a deal.

Trump said that Iran’s leaders “want to make a deal so badly—you have no idea how badly they want to make a deal.” He also claimed that the war has been won and that Iran has been totally defeated. Sometimes it seems Trump only speaks the truth by accident.

Given the nature of reality in the Trump regime, it’s impossible to know what the president is talking about. It seems likely that the Iranian account is more trustworthy than the American one, and from their perspective there’s nothing happening on the diplomatic front, something they reiterate every time Trump talks about being in talks with someone on the Iranian side.

It’s hard to discover the substance in a Trump speech, and this one was composed mainly of gestures culled from previous Truth Social Points. The clearest signal seemed to be that the U.S. would continue to devastate Iran, including civilian infrastructure (a war crime) and hope that the Iranian leadership fragments and buckles under the pressure, producing a faction that emerges to cut a deal.

There’s no question that the Iranian leadership is fragmented, so closely surveilled by Israeli strike forces that they have to stay underground and can’t communicate without risk. The IRGC was already organized for this event, with command and control decentralized across 33 independent regions, each with its own armaments, order of battle, and leadership succession plan.

Iran had planned for this war, and while their set-up makes coordinated missile barrages difficult, their ability to attack specific targets at will has not been degraded. After a month of bombing, they still retain considerable reserves of missiles and drones, and a recent intelligence report suggests that they are able to dig out weapons systems buried by bombing in a matter of hours. They may still retain as much as half of their attack capability, and at least a third.

It is also to be expected that in a circumstance where any leader who emerges carries an Israeli death sentence, that some officials might be looking toward personal survival and trying to find a way out. Trump seems to be still hoping that he can pound the regime into submission and find some cowards to talk to.

But as Claire Belinski makes clear in her must-read piece, “The Believers,” that hope depends on a radical misreading of the theological and eschatological roots of the current regime, where sacrifice and martyrdom are part of the core ethos, and suffering at this level presages the end times and the coming of the Mahdi. This belief system is wrapped up in a hatred of the U.S.—the Great Satan or deceiver—that goes back to the founding of the Islamic Republic in 1979.

Beyond that, there is the question of time. If Trump seems to think that victory will come if he just pounds away for long enough, the Iranians know that he is on a deadline, both politically and economically. Each day they hold out brings Trump one day closer to defeat.

*

All of this brings me back to where I started: escalation is next, with troops on the ground. Plans have already been drawn up, troops are staging in and ready for deployment, and it is impossible for me to believe that once Trump is clear that Iran won’t negotiate on his terms, he’ll feel no alternative but to send in the troops.

Notice the verb there—“feel.” Any sensible analysis of the current war and its likely trajectory has to start with the assumption that Trump will make decisions impulsively, based not on advice or rational risk-benefit analysis, but on what feels right to him. That’s how the war started, and that is how it will continue.

Of course, I’m just guessing that he’ll go that way. For one thing, Trump will have support—those Fox News analysts don’t want him to cut and run. They believe, quite legitimately, that leaving the regime intact and in control of the Strait of Hormuz is a bad idea. Bibi and MBS and most of the stakeholders in the Gulf all want him to keep fighting. He’s got plenty of friends to support his impulses.

“Escalating to de-escalate” is the watchword, with maybe those small islands as the place to start, with the U.A.E., which also claims possession, helping out militarily, or holding the island after U.S. marines have seized it. Kharg Island is a riskier venture, since while U.S. forces may seize it easily enough, holding and resupplying it would be fraught with danger, and we’re not expert at drone warfare.

Still, it would be a tangible prize, while you have to explain why Abu Musa, Greater Tunb and Lesser Tunb are worth taking. Trump knows about Kharg Island—he first talked about seizing it back in 1988. We should never forget that a lot of Trump’s psyche still lives in the Manhattan world of the 1980s and 90s, and that this war is settling old scores for him.

Trump seems to have ruled the nuclear material off the table, though that may be a ruse. I’m sure that plans have been drawn up for capturing it, but the level of troops and equipment involved along with the need to hold a significant part of Iranian territory for at least a few days make it by far the riskiest action Trump could take.

There is an incentive: capturing the uranium would enable Trump to claim a legible victory, legitimating the wreckage he would leave behind. But whether it would even work is an open question. There certainly would be casualties, and it could fail entirely, like Jimmy Carter’s ill-fated mission to rescue the hostages in 1979 but much worse.

*

Predictions are foolish but considering that Iran won’t negotiate and Trump’s only alternative is retreat and surrender, escalation seems inevitable. And there are other forces at work that make it even more likely.

One is that lashing out aggressively, even violently, is a mechanism Trump depends on for regulate his psychic distress. We should not forget that Trump incited a violent insurrection a couple of months after he was defeated by Joe Biden in 2020.

Firing people is one of the ways that Trump relieves stress, and after firing Pam Bondi this week he may be preparing for some bloodletting in his cabinet—not the first time a struggling president has taken this tack. I still remember when Jimmy Carter asked everyone to resign. The betting markets are taking odds on all manner of folks right now, from Gabbard to Lutnick.

But I don’t think that will be enough for Trump. The polls are sinking, the price of gas is rising, and a decent jobs report seems more like a blip than a sign that things are getting better than they were under Biden. Trump is under a lot of pressure.

No one is talking about it much, but if there ever is space in the news to talk about Epstein again, the story about the FBI investigation of an unnamed victim’s accusation that Trump raped her when she was in early adolescence is bound to get more play in the major media. There has been a steady stream of evidence corroborating elements of her account, and a lot of the material is still hidden.

Since last October, when Trump’s approval ratings began to turn south again, the scope of the president’s agency has been steadily curtailed—from the failure of ICE in Minnesota to the latest flurry of adverse court rulings. Foreign policy is the one area where Trump still holds the strongman power that answers to his exalted but terribly fragile sense of self.

There’s no pathway to victory for Trump. The war was a mistake, in many ways a far greater mistake that Vietnam or the forever wars after 9/11. It already has fundamentally changed the nature of global relationships, with the U.S. isolated now along with Israel and Russia—the world’s rogue nations, the gangsters inside the shopping mall. The longer it persists, the more dire the global catastrophe will be.

The best case is some sort of dirty ceasefire and retreat that leaves the Strait of Hormuz open but under some measure of Iranian control, probably negotiated by the largest stakeholders in the flow of energy from the region. That is a visible, legible defeat for Trump, at a time when he has been losing a lot.

Assuming Iran will not break, the only alternative is escalation, which in turn has only two possible outcomes: a more grievous defeat, with a casualty count, somewhere a few weeks or months down the road, or American troops patrolling the streets of Tehran, a remake of the Iraq war, only worse. That’s where we are headed.

Someday this war will end, as Lt. Col. Kilgore says in Apocalypse Now. It will already be too late for the United States.

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Trump’s war on Iran has completed its fourth week, continuing long enough now that it’s not always the lead story in the New York Times, a sign that life goes on, I suppose. Still, it’s hard to imagine writing about anything else.

The war’s impact is pervasive, and it is quite possible we are at the beginning of an almost unprecedented global crisis, different from the period from 1938-1945, but no less destructive and world changing.

Maybe not, but it’s hard to come up with any pathway that makes de-escalation seem likely, short of abject surrender on Trump’s part. Iran believes that it is winning, and there is little evidence to the contrary.

I’ve already written pretty much what I have to contribute, so I am not going to try another essay this weekend. While there is a flurry on the diplomatic front, nothing much has changed since my last piece.

Instead of repeating myself, I’ll offer a bit of summary here, along with a couple of essential sources, before going on to roam through some of the stray thoughts I have had this week while doing this work.

Two Great Sources on the War

The coming week will see Trump’s new deadline ticking while we try to get the Iranians to join in negotiations and the joint U.S.-Israeli force continues its campaign, intensified now by Israel’s desire to do as much damage as possible before any ceasefire.

Whether or not diplomacy moves forward, the U.S. military needs a week or two before ground forces are ready to be deployed, so the war front itself is likely to be more or less what we’ve already seen on a daily basis, with a lot of the tempo of coverage dictated by how successful Iran’s strikes have been, like today’s hit on a U.S. base in Saudi Arabia with 13 casualties and two damaged refueling tankers.

Beyond that, we have Trump’s unpredictability, which so far has been mainly rhetorical, apart from the initial strike, and seems to have as much to do with trying to shape the markets as it does with any military strategy.

It is belaboring the obvious to say that Trump disregarded his advisors and entered the war with an adolescent’s sense of risk and a plan that never went beyond the first step. Now he is in an impossible situation, trying to improvise his way out of it.

Instead of saying more, I will urge you to read this piece by Simon Pearce on his Substack Liminal Lens. It is a long, comprehensive take, without any evident ideological bias, covering every element salient to an understanding of the current situation and precisely outlining the probabilities of various future paths the war may take.

Pearce is particularly useful in covering the historical antecedents of the current conflict, as well as the basic structural trap of escalation in wartime, the way at each juncture going further can seem more attractive than trying to find an offramp, until war itself rides on its own internal, escalatory logic.

Pearce puts the odds for escalation at 80 percent, and that seems sound enough, though given my understanding of Trump’s psyche, I might place the odds of concessions leading to ceasefire even lower.

That’s partly because of my reading of another seminal article that I will recommend and that Pearce himself cites and makes good use of: Claire Belinsky’s “The Believers: The Islamic Republic, Khomeinism, and the End of History,” in her Substack The Cosmopolitan Globalist.

Belinski provides a deep exploration of the historical, theological and eschatological roots and structure of the belief system Khomeini brought to Iran in the 1979 revolution, and she makes clear that to the extent to which the current regime is driven by this worldview and eschatology, the current war provides an opportunity for the fulfillment of prophecy.

This paragraph caught my attention:

In Khomeneist eschatology, chaos is the sign of the Mahdi’s imminent return. This means that catastrophic losses—dead schoolgirls, destroyed cities—aren’t arguments against the project; they’re confirmation of it. Every atrocity is evidence that indeed, the world is filled with tyranny, and the worse it gets, the more certain the return is near. This is what makes this regime resistant to rational-actor analysis. Within its own logic, losing badly is not a reason to stop.

Belinski is careful to assert that we can’t know how deeply this eschatology is embedded in the motive structure of the Iranian regime—given in part that it is not entirely clear who is actually in charge now, but also the history of counter-vailing periods when pragmatic elements in the regime held some ascendency.

But most evidence is that decapitation strikes and the devastation in general have solidified the IRGC’s control of Iranian polity and is far more likely to tend toward intransigence than concession. Hope for a ceasefire probably lies in how willing Trump is to lose the war. What are the odds on that?

Israel v. Diplomacy

From the start of the Iran War it has been clear that however harmoniously the joint U.S.-Israeli forces have worked tactically, U.S. strategic interests regarding Iran are not the same as Israel’s. The nations share an interest in degrading Iran’s military and eliminating the nuclear threat, and they both want regime change, but their priorities for the end of the war are different.

The divergence is clear now: Trump’s main goal is to re-open the Strait of Hormuz, and Israel’s main goal is the complete destruction of the current state and regime.

The divergence showed up in Trump’s reaction to Israel’s strike on Iran’s South Pars natural gas field in Gulf—speaking to reporters about whether he had spoken to Netanyahu about strikes on oil and gas facilities, Trump said “Yeah I did. I did. I told him, don’t do that and he won’t do that.”

It also showed up in the way that whomever U.S. strategists might have been planning to audition for the role of Delcy Rodriquez had been killed by Israel in the first days. It’s questionable whether Trump could have found an interlocuter in any case, but Israel made sure that the ones on his list were all killed.

Wising up, the U.S. is reported to have asked the Israelis not to kill parliament speaker Mohammed-Bagher Ghalibaf and foreign minister Abbas Araghchi, with Ghalibif right now projected as the potential lead diplomat on the Iranian side, and JD Vance supplanting the Witkoff-Kushner team that brought us this far. That is, if talks mediated by Pakistani’s army chief of staff, Gen. Asim Munir ever move beyond the gestural stage.

Israel’s history of opposition to U.S. diplomatic efforts with Iran is long-standing, and they opposed the 2015 JCPOA pact that Obama had forged. I thought of this when I noticed the juxtaposition of two minor bits of news last week.

On March 24, shortly after Trump had lifted his 48-hour ultimatum and began talking about peace talks, he said that the Iranians “gave us a present, and the present arrived today, and it was a very big present, worth a tremendous amount of money.” Trump went on the repeat the word ‘present’ several times, and he mentioned that it was “oil and gas related.”

It turns out that the Iranians had allowed something like 10 Pakistani-flagged oil tankers through as a good will gesture (with Pakistan most likely to mediate any diplomatic talks). “They gave it to us, and they said they were going to give it,” Trump said. “So that meant one thing to me: We’re dealing with the right people.”

Two days later, Israel announced that it had killed Alireza Tangsiri, the Revolutionary Guards commander in charge of the blockade of the Strait. Without knowing too much about Iran’s distribution of authority or communication along chains of command, I assume that Tangsiri played a central role in the diplomatic gesture, and that killing him was hardly helpful to whatever project of negotiation Trump has in mind.

It’s something to keep an eye on, as the war plays out. Israel has strategic interests that are different from those of the U.S., and the Saudis and Gulf States have their own strategic interests as well, aligned with Israel’s in some ways, and distinct in how willing they are to tolerate an instable or failed Iranian state.

Escalation is the only way to reconcile these competing interests, and it seems like the only pathway capable of soothing Trump’s anguished psyche. It may turn out the war continues because all the players, including Iran, want it to.

Planning for Catastrophe

The present century started with a catastrophe that didn’t happen—remember Y2K?—and then devolved into a series of shocks, of which Trump’s second election and the current war is the latest. We had 9/11, then the 2008 crash, then Covid, and now this.

The difference with this catastrophe is that it snuck up on us and is now a work in process: we can see the consequences if we look ahead and project the war at different lengths and outcomes, but we’re not there yet. We don’t really know how bad things may get, and it all has to do with how long the war continues. Worst-case scenarios are grim.

Some potential scenarios are so stark—imagine the Gulf with most of its energy infrastructure destroyed and some of the desalination plants from which Gulf nations draw most of their water knocked offline, the Strait still closed as a ground war rages on the Iranian shore, and what is left of the Iranian regime still pursuing maximalist demands in any talk of negotiation. Picture there not being a regime left at all, just decentralized IRGC units still following their war plans and prepared to die rather than surrender.

I’m not going to try to elaborate on that picture, since I would either have to do a lot of research, using projected shortfalls and identifying secondary and tertiary consequences in this entirely interconnected world of ours, or else make things up. I’m not saying it will happen, either. But at that level of risk even low probabilities count, and worst-case scenariors are plausible, not scaremongering.

Awareness of these potential consequences may wind up preventing the worst from happening, as rational nations like those in the EU along with all of Asia, including China, work to sponsor some sort of accord that re-opens the Strait and lets rebuilding begin.

But if one posits that Iran, Israel, and Trump all are operating on fundamentally inimical belief systems, each encouraging war rather than peace short of absolute victory, it’s hard to know what even that would look like. The U.S. was the nation that was supposed to prevent this sort of thing. Now we are causing it.

In the current nature of reality, at least within the sociocultural surround of the United States, perception of reality is what counts, not the thing itself, and so far the American public seems fairly sanguine about the threat the war poses. The perception of risk is mild so far, registered in gas prices, not economic collapse.

Obviously, opposition to the war is strong, but Trump’s approval ratings on literally everything are low. There’s no sign yet of the kind of total breakdown of support that brought the positive ratings of presidents like George W. Bush or Jimmy Carter down into the 20s.

That’s partly because we have been presented tactical victories as strategic ones—the equivalent of the body counts in Vietnam. A lot of commentators I read who support the war seem irate about the talk that we’re losing, given how devastating our power of arms has been. It sure doesn’t look like we’re losing.

We’ve also been trained to expect quick strikes from Trump—a show of power, declaration of victory, and on to the next thing. That’s in the nature of Trump’s attention span and hardwired drive for stimulus, and I’m sure some of Trump’s signs of discomfort with the current conflict owe to his boredom and impatience to be done with it.

It makes sense that we’ve been slow to shift our perceptual paradigm from quick strike to extended war, in part because there’s still talk of it ending in April. A lot of the existing popular support for Trump’s war seems contingent on it ending soon with no boots on the ground.

I am sure that I am not alone in being surprised that Trump took the course he did, though it makes sense now that his exit plan was just the fantasy of an adolescent, unwilling to look at risks when the prize is great. Being the president who would go down in history as succeeding where every other failed is a hell of an incentive for Trump, given his deep anxiety about his legacy. We sometimes forget how irrational the president is.

We’re ill-prepared now to contemplate the potential for an extended war, and our analogies in Iraq or Vietnam are only partly useful, since these were not global conflicts. This one is, and unless Trump finds some magical offramp in the next couple of weeks, it will soon be clear that the war is a disaster.

When it happens, that shift in perception will feed into whatever is going on militarily and in terms of diplomacy, and it will also exert its force on the political calculus in an election year. I’m going to be watching for this development in the next couple of weeks. At some point the lines between approval and disapproval will be more sharply drawn in ways that could auger a political nightmare for the Republicans, most of whom know the war was an unforced error.

Mortality and Trump

Trump knows that he is dying. I’m not claiming any special insight here, just that anyone my age, and Trump has a decade on me, knows that their body is programmed to die and they are headed toward the last stop on the railroad.

It’s not something one has to think about, although you can obsess about it, too, in various ways. I don’t exactly know how Trump manages it himself, but I do know that he knows he is going to die within a timespan measured in years, not decades.

I wouldn’t be talking about this—I’m not one who hangs on each new report of bruising or awkward gait in order to say something about his health, since he doesn’t have to be senile to be insane—except there are so many signs that it’s really on his mind, and I worry that will have an effect on how he acts.

It shows up the most in Trump’s genuinely pathetic obsessions with building various edifices and monuments and with affixing his name to anything he can get away with—the first sitting president to put his name on our currency! Wow.

He talks about it sometimes, too, and he has a lot of hardcore Christians around him, but he’s never been religious so his occasional remarks about getting into heaven or not are like the ruminations of a child. Lacking any moral substance apart from his own self-interest, his musings take on a strange tone—he knows that he’s been bad, but maybe he’ll get away with it.

This is all well and good, although I could do without the building spree. At least it keeps him busy, and we all deal in our own ways with the certainty of our mortality, who am I to fault him?

The problem is that Trump is viscerally aware that the future does not include him and that his time is limited, not simply in office but in life itself, and I wander what pressure that places on his already fragile and disordered psyche.

Trump has always been careless of consequences, except as they impact him directly. Now he is in an odd situation, where no matter what he does there are no consequences for him personally. He won’t be impeached, he can’t run again, he has immunity for whatever he has done in office, and in any case he doesn’t know how much longer he has to live, so what does anything matter?

The primary regulatory mechanism in Trump’s behavior is the preservation and expansion of his sense of self. A sense of power and agency is essential to his own positive self-regard, which is quite anxious and tenuous, and his behavior is only constrained by negative feedback, something that worked in his first administration, when he had adult advisors, but is delegated entirely to the financial and commodity markets now that he is surrounded by incompetent sycophants.

The markets in oil and American stocks and bonds are about to demonstrate that they lie outside Trump’s control. At some point in the next week or two, if Iranian intransigence persists, the FOMO so-called Taco trade will vanish entirely from the markets and we will find them searching for a new support level, heading toward recession.

Once that happens, there won’t be any check left on Trump’s impulses at all. Trump may be the most candid president we have ever had, and he has told us numerous times how he makes decisions, and that sometimes doesn’t know what he is going to do until he does it.

In the coming week or two, Trump faces decisions that may mark the difference between de-escalation and stability, and an escalating war in which there will only be losers.

I am imagining Trump at that moment of decision, at the start of whatever train of consequences that will flow from whatever option he selects, thinking of how small and degrading the offramp is that Iran has offered, how much Bibi and MBS want him to keep going, and how incredibly powerful—the greatest force the world has ever known—is the military he controls.

All that matters to Trump in this moment is his own sense of power and what threatens it. He doesn’t care about the future at all. That’s why I think Pearce is being too sensible in estimating odds of escalation at 80 percent. Escalation will feel to Trump like his only choice, and he will feel a surge of power, not doubt, when he gives the order.

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In the epigraph to Howard’s End E.M. Forster wrote “Only connect,” and that’s certainly the right mantra for anyone trying to make sense of the news. It’s harder to do when the news is a flood and an entirely irrational element—the whims of a single man with nearly limitless agency—becomes the key driver of events. In this essay, I’ll try to find some connections inside the information flood and draw some conclusions—not in the manner of predictions, exactly, but what seems most probable as we look ahead.

We’re in the middle of a week right now in which everything is up in the air, a fetid garden of forking paths of which none seem to lead anywhere good. Since he took office, the entire course of Donald Trump’s presidency has been one of destruction, starting small with the federal government and civil liberties within the United States, and now ending with the possibility that he will wreck the global economy in ways that may last for years.

If sustained for a period of months, the war on Iran will accomplish that. It’s not just oil and LNG, though for Asia and particularly for middle economy and developing nations energy is the main crisis. The Philippines declared a national energy emergency this week, with less than two months of supply on hand. Many other nations, far on the periphery, face similar crises.

But the export streams that flow through the Strait of Hormuz include an astonishing range of commodities, and according to a report from the Kiel Institute last week, “six nations behind one chokepoint turn out to be the world’s leading suppliers in dozens of specific non-oil products — from saffron to steel, aluminium to ammonia — several of them critically important.”

We already know that the Strait of Hormuz accounts for about 20 percent of oil and LNG global exports. According to the Kiel report, another 50 non-mineral products representing $774 billion in value and an average of 14.9 percent of the world market are also stuck behind Iranian threats to attack tankers affiliated with its enemies.

Even if the Strait were to re-open tomorrow, the economic shock of it will persist for a while, distributed unequally and hurting poorer countries the most. Predictions for what would happen if the Strait stays closed turn increasingly dire, the longer the war drags on: ending by June causes a global recession; ending by September would force a structural change in the global economy, with the situation worsening for most nations and a handful of lucky winners—commodity-rich nations like Brazil that stand well clear of the fighting.

That’s one path Trump can take: continue his war of impulse, working jointly with Israel and the evident support of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, all of which want to see the current Iranian regime destroyed. What might replace it is another question, and here Israel’s interests diverge from those of its neighbors, who want something stable in its place. Israel does, too, but it would prefer to face a failed state, fractured by internal conflict, then see the current regime survive.

The rest of the world wants the war to stop, and maybe Trump does, too—he certainly is keenly aware of the cost of keeping the Strait closed, and while the U.S. is partly insulated from the worst effects of the shutdown, gas prices may go as high as $5.00 a gallon if the war doesn’t end before summer.

So there’s a second path—a negotiated end to the war--but it’s very murky with lots of forks in it, and it’s not clear whether it leads anywhere at all.

After Trump highlighted how insane this war is last weekend, giving the Iranians a 48-hour ultimatum, he backed off with a post about a diplomatic breakthrough, timed to precede the opening of the markets on Monday. He backed that with a 15-point peace plan, and said that Vance and Rubio would be joining potential talks with Trump’s crack amateur negotiating team, real estate investor Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner, who works for the Saudis.

Trump claims to be in peace talks with a “top” Iranian official and that Iran “wants to make a deal so badly” and has already offered a “present” related to energy flows through the Gulf. For its part, Iranian denies that it is in negotiations and said that Trump’s turnaround was “fake news” designed to lift the lift the markets, which were heading toward free-fall after Trump’s weekend threat.

The best information is that there have been indirect talks, brokered by Oman, between the Witkoff/Kushner team and someone on the Iranian side—probably Parliament Speaker Mohammed Bagher Ghalibaf, who was closely aligned with IRCG leader Qassem Soleimani, the presiding genius over the IRCG’s development of proxy armies who was assassinated by Trump in 2020.

Ghalibaf carries Soleimani’s legacy with the Republican Guards, and Pakistan’s army chief and de-facto leader, Field Marshal Asim Munir, has reportedly spoken directly with Trump, who likes Munir and has called him “my favorite field Marshal.” Pakistan’s Prime Minister, Shehbaz Sharif, has said his nation is “ready and honoured” to host “meaningful and conclusive” peace talks, and Trump’s deployment of both Vance and Rubio to the project of opening negotiations suggests that he is serious about it, so perhaps there is some reason for hope.

*

The markets have rebounded on this signal that talks might start, although the Economist suggests that wishful thinking rather than a clear accounting of risk lie behind current prices. How much credence to put in anything Trump says is a separate question, given his disdain for the truth. In actual rather than rhetorical news, Trump has now sent the 82^nd Airborne to the region, and two more Marine expeditionary forces are on their way.

When current deployments are battle ready, there will be about 7,000 troops ready to invade or strike, supported by another 50,000 in support roles in the region, while Israel continues its air assault on Iranian civilian infrastructure and its ground invasion of southern Lebanon.

Two weeks ago, the Iranian Red Crescent said that 42,914 civilian structures had been damaged in U.S.-Israeli strikes, including 36,489 residential units. Given that air attacks have not relented since then, one assumes that these numbers may have doubled by now.

Israel is using the same tactics in Iran and against Hezbollah in Lebanon that it used against Hamas in Gaza, and while the U.S. has avoided taking part directly in decapitation strikes, one assumes it is directly involved in the rest of the destruction.

Israel wants to continue the war until Iran’s regime is destroyed, and according to the English-language Times of Israel, its initial response was unfavorable: “Trump shocks, and dismays, with news of Iran talks.” Since then, Netanyahu has started to play along, saying after a phone call with Trump that he “believes there is a chance to leverage the massive achievements of the IDF and the US military in order to achieve the goals of the war through an agreement—an agreement that protects our vital interests.”

Trump seems willing to go against the wishes of his allies in the region—not just Israel but also Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states—and cut a deal with whomever is now in charge in Iran in order to get the oil flowing again. If he gets a deal he likes he won’t let anyone block it. Israel’s strategic interests are different from those of the U.S., and Trump’s close embrace of Israel is already a problem for him politically, at least among the right-wing pundit class.

The longer the war continues the more it will hurt the U.S. economically and the Republicans politically. If the war still seems open-ended in mid-summer, with no resolution in sight, one might expect that the fantasied Blue Wave, rather than just marginal gains in taking back the House, might finally wash over Trump. A Democratic win in a Florida district that includes Mar-a-Lago and that Trump actually voted in (by mail) is certainly a sign of how dire things could get for Trump’s party.

So one expects, in all of this, that Trump’s hope for a negotiated end to the war that includes re-opening the Strait is sincere—or at least as sincere as the erratic and reckless commander in chief ever is. Maybe the Economist is wrong, and those betting on current price levels in the markets holding for now and soon to bounce back to their seemingly endless upward climb will turn out not to be self-deluded.

Maybe we’re just looking at a couple more weeks of war, and a return more or less to normal by May or June—damage already done, but not cataclysmic, at least not for us. It’s harder to say that about the Philippines or Bangladesh, or any already struggling nation dependent on imported energy. One reason the U.S. is able to go to war so blithely is that the damage is always mostly felt somewhere else. But even so, maybe it will all work out—another victory for the TACO move.

*

I don’t think it will work. That “Iran gets a vote, too” has become the most well-worn phrase in describing the challenge of finding peace again does not make it any less true.

It is very difficult to imagine Iran giving up on its chokehold on the world economy—including its promise of mutually assured destruction of energy facilities in the Gulf—without concessions that are almost impossible for Trump to make politically, and that would be strongly opposed by Israel, Saudi Arabia, and other Gulf states.

Trump’s willingness to strike a deal with the regime rather than keep bombing in the hope that somehow it will be overthrown or obliterated is already a surrender of his primary motive in joining with Israel in the war.

That it was his primary motive, the impulse behind the war, seems obvious if you look at Trump’s first taped eight-minute speech announcing the war and what he was saying in the first days—that sense of how long Iran had been our foe, how evil the regime was with its wanton killing of protestors, and lurking behind it all Trump’s drive to make his mark on history as the president who did what others feared to do.

Having abandoned that, Trump and Israel can claim success with other, more limited goals—much of Iran’s military and production capacity has been degraded or destroyed, and rebuilding it is probably measured in years rather than months.

These goals were more important to Israel than the U.S., and Netanyahu is certainly at least several weeks away from where he wants to be in terms of breaking the Iranian state and ending Hezbollah’s warfighting capability. Israel will keep pounding away as long is it can, but the operation has already largely succeeded. Getting the U.S. to join in the war that Trump rejected last June was the big triumph. Anything further from here is good but not essential, in Israel’s terms.

The problem is that there’s no reason for Iran to end the war any time soon, unless it is granted concessions that go far beyond anything Trump can agree to and get away with claiming victory. Iran, with evidently limitless capacity to absorb the fury of aerial bombardment and continue, is actually winning the war right now.

*

Iran’s nuclear program may be decimated, but it still has its uranium, enriched to 60 percent, hidden in caves around Isfahan and maybe other places. Gaining control of this stockpile by force may be possible, but only through an escalation that may cause the war to on for weeks or months, and even then may not be successful. The U.S. almost certainly would suffer casualties, and the initial operation might well require further waves of troops before it is complete.

Likewise, as long as Iran possesses even a limited number of drones, missiles, mines, and delivery vessels, its threat to shipping in the Strait still stands. Likewise, its threat against energy infrastructure in the Gulf can’t be eliminated, and it seems reasonable to expect that Iran would take this step unilaterally if it felt it had nothing left to lose.

It’s worth noting that it was Israel that started the cycle of energy infrastructure attacks with its strike on Iran’s South Pars gas field, with Iran responding by taking out about 17 percent of Qatar’s LNG production before Trump called a halt to attack on energy infrastructure. As well as anything, this episode marks the divergence between Israeli and U.S. war aims—the destruction of energy production in the Middle East is worth it to Israel if it forces Iran to fold, but the economic harm is definitely not worth it to Trump.

The chokehold of the Strait and willingness to engage in mutually assured destruction of oil and LNG gas infrastructure give Iran the upper hand. Beyond that, Iran has the ability to pose an existential threat to nations in the Gulf, including Saudi Arabia, that rely on a few major desalination plants for water. Iran does, too, but not to the same extent—and its willingness to absorb any blow and continue fighting has already been well-demonstrated. Destroying these plants would create a true existential crisis for the nations affected.

The U.S. has fought and lost asymmetrical wars before—Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan—but these were wars of invasion and occupation, where victory came simply from outlasting the battlefield victories of the invading force. We never lost a battle in Vietnam, but we lost the war. The Taliban rule again in Afghanistan, and Shia militias in Iraq are attacking the U.S. embassy in Baghdad. But it didn’t really matter all that much to us—these were local wars, with largely hidden effects.

The Iranians possess the same motivation that our enemies did in those other wars—surrender for the Iranian regime is equivalent to its destruction. Outlasting the U.S. is the basic strategy, like Muhammed Ali playing rope-a-dope.

But the Iranians have something else going on for them—they have the ability to wreck the global economy, just by hanging in there long enough to cause a global recession mixed with global inflation and radical disarray in supply chains that even effect U.S. military production—already deeply compromised by the current war.

The longer the war goes on, the worse it will be for the U.S., whose strategic position in the Indo-Pacific has already been gravely harmed. That $200 billion military package is partly to cover the daily cost of the war, close to $1 billion a day, but much of it is meant to go to replace weapon systems and munitions that the U.S. has used against Iran, including during last June’s 12-day war.

It’s hard to find clear reporting on this, since numbers are largely secret, but there is no question that an extended war will produce critical shortages in armaments we would have to use anywhere else, with the Indo-Pacific and the Taiwan Strait being probable locus of conflict.

That matters more in strategic terms, but the real cost of extended war would be borne in the already fragile American economy, which already faces combined pressures of inflation and slow growth that could lead to stagflation—a word we haven’t had to use since the 1970s.

The Iranians know all of this. They know that every day that they are able to maintain the threat and keep the Strait closed, the U.S. is losing the war. I doubt very much that they have any interest in rescuing Trump from his idiocy, and if hatred of the Great Satan was already hardwired into the governing culture, it must be that much deeper now that the U.S. joined in murdering Ayatollah Khamenei and much of his family, including the new Supreme Leader’s wife.

Beyond all of that, Iran has literally no reason to trust Trump and the U.S. The U.S. has already attacked twice while negotiations in good faith were still in process—events that Trump absurdly likened to Pearl Habor in his embarrassing moment with Japan’s new prime minister.

I’m old enough that I remember when the anniversary of Pearl Harbor was still news—“December 7—a date that will live in infamy” and Trump’s not wrong in drawing the analogy. We’ve already done two sneak attacks—why wouldn’t this talk of new negotiations be prelude to a third?

*

Here’s the bottom line, I think: get ready for a long war. Iran thinks it is winning, and it knows that the longer it holds out, the worse things get for Trump. There’s no reason to make concessions—at least not of the sort usually dictated to the losing side.

Threats of escalation by Trump—including an attack on Kharg Island or some sort of military attempt to open the Strait—can be matched by targeted reminders of the weapons Iran still has in store, and provide targets on the ground for Iranian forces. Iran doubtless knows how small the appetite is in the U.S. for American casualties.

It’s not entirely clear what it would take to persuade Iran to stand down and re-open the Strait as part of a general ceasefire, but reporting suggests that the concessions required would go far beyond simply a return to the status quo ante.

Iran would undoubtedly require security guarantees that assure non-recurrence of hostilities—“binding guarantees” that Israel and the U.S. won’t attack again, with the U.S. charged with enforcing limits on the Israeli pattern of “mowing the grass” with regular local attacks. Beyond that, it is likely that Iran would seek a reordering of the regional security structure that assured its own role within it, and it would demand economic reparations and the lifting of sanctions as a basis for rebuilding.

Iran also seems to have noticed that its ability to constrain traffic in the Strait might be monetized for them within a “new legal regime” that frames some level of Iranian control of the Strait, perhaps with other nations. A similar maximalist demand has been framed as a U.S. pullback from its various military bases in the region.

At the most basic, it seems that the Iranians would insist on airtight security guarantees for the current regime, an end to further conflict, including U.S. constraints on Israel, and a level of compensation and sanction relief commensurate with the destruction caused by U.S.-Israeli forces.

No one knows what is in the 15 points that Trump has offered as an initial bargaining position, but he still seems to think that the United States is winning the war, and his phone call with Netanyahu seems to have assured the Israeli prime minister that Trump’s not about to give away the store.

Given all of this, I find it very hard to imagine a scenario in which negotiations will achieve a ceasefire and reopening of the Strait any time soon. Iran has already lost too much, and is too confident of its asymmetrical power and its ability to survive for it to make meaningful concessions without receiving most of what it is asking.

Maybe it cuts a deal on nuclear, agrees to not attack Israel and to stop funding and supporting its proxies, and agrees to reopen the Strait and stop fighting—but only with concessions on security, compensation, and an affirmation of its role in the region, including its right to possess deterrent military power, that Netanyahu would be unwilling to accept, and that would make the war seem like a failed excursion on Trump’s part.

There’s no reason for Iran to accede to anything less at this point, because their willingness to engage in mutual destruction means that they hold most of the cards in negotiation. It’s not entirely clear that Iran is even in a position to negotiate right now, since its leadership is fragmented and underground. What does seem clear is that the governing military structure is organized in such a way that it can continue fighting under highly decentralized command and control networks. Iran might require a ceasefire as a precondition to hold talks at all.

It’s also not clear that all of this talk about negotiations is credible or trustworthy on Trump’s part. He may just be jawboning the markets, keeping them from crashing for a few more weeks while he hopes further bombing will result in different outcomes, and preparing to use any Iranian intransigence in negotiations as the pretext for escalation, as the U.S. military is currently staging to do.

Maybe all of this is just meant to buy time until the troops are deployed and ready to fight. Certainly, the lead story now is the prospect of negotiations, and we’ll keep talking about that for a while, as long as Trump keeps up the pretense. The problem is that Trump can’t win this war. The best he can achieve is a sort of stalemate that looks like a loss—with the Iranian regime still in power, weaker in some ways, but stronger in the ways that count.

That’s not great, and it just demonstrates what idiocy rules the U.S. right now. But it would be a lot better than what seems most likely to happen: ongoing war with U.S, troops on the ground, the Strait still closed, and the global economy entering a crisis unprecedented in scope and depth.

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In the run-up to Trump’s war on Iran, he was warned of several serious risks: an extended war with Iran would result in drawing down a substantial part of hard-to-replace military weapons systems, weakening the U.S. strategic position in Asia; a prolonged bombing war was unlikely to result in regime change; and an all-out war with Iran could result in the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, with significant consequences to the global economy.

He may also have been warned that if joined in all-out war, Iran might attack its neighbors, causing chaos in regions that seek to present themselves as safe, welcoming harbors for tourism and investment—the record is less clear on that, though it seems likely, given the broad scatter of U.S. bases across the region.

In the end, Trump disregarded these warnings and plunged the U.S. into war based on gut feelings or instinct—the impulse of a malignant narcissist convinced of his own unequaled power to dictate the course of events.

It seems as though the actual timing may have been forced by the Israelis, who knew that they had a shot at the first Ayatollah Khamenei, who had made a habit of gathering with his family in unprotected surroundings on Saturdays, and they feared that the window might close if the Ayatollah recognized the danger and changed his routine.

That’s probably why Marco Rubio got it wrong when he tried to explain that the U.S. was forced to act because an imminent Israeli strike made it likely we would be attacked in any case. Netanyahu may well have told Trump they were taking out Khamenei whether he liked it or not, and gave the president the chance to join in a war that he was clearly itching to fight in any case. Maybe it was a joint decision. In any case, it was rushed, and probably inevitable.

Trump’s build-up of forces in the region, stripping the Indo-Pacific of its carrier force and relocating a second carrier group from the Caribbean, essentially required that he used the weapons he had put in place. Iran was never going to give him a negotiated win commensurate with that show of force. In the end, our amateur negotiators—Trump’s crony and his son-in-law—weren’t even trying.

We can’t know what Trump’s deliberative process was, since he probably doesn’t know it himself, but it seems that the chance to get Khamenei dictated the timing, and once that attack had succeeded there was really no alternative but to engage fully in the Israeli battleplan.

The commentariat, including me, has made hay out of the plethora of reasons Trump and his lackeys have offered for why we started the war, and probably all of them are accurate in some fashion.

Trump clearly had Venezuela in mind—he said as much, and he seems to have been startled by the way the Israelis killed all the officials that the U.S. had on its list for potential auditions for the role of Delcy Rodriguez. Whether intentionally or not (I suspect the former), the Israelis seem to have eliminated everyone in Trump’s potential rolodex.

The killing of Ali Larijani last week may have eliminated the last Iranian leader capable of mediating between the hardline Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp (IRGC) and more moderate political elements as the basis for talks with the U.S, though the possibility of negotiations may actually have been lost with the strike on Khamenei, coming just one day after the Omani negotiator announced major Iranian concessions on nuclear enrichment. Iran would be foolish to trust the U.S. now, and they show no signs of being foolish.

The Israelis seem to have had a more realistic notion of regime change: kill so much of the existing power structure that an opportunity for popular uprising might be created, with the worst case being a regime so battered it might devolve into factionalism and lay the conditions for internal strife in a nation with several large ethnic minorities, Kurds foremost among them. Israel may well prefer a power vacuum and ongoing civil strife to a continuation of the regime.

The main objectives of the war have largely been realized at this point: Iran’s leadership is decimated, its armory and military production facilities have been largely destroyed, its navy has been sunk, and the skies are open now, with U.S.-Israeli air forces able to fly and bomb at will.

From an Israeli perspective, a few more weeks of all-out war, including the full-scale invasion of Lebanon and destruction of what remains of Hezbollah, would be adequate to declare a tactical halt, with more destruction promised in retaliation for any renewed Iranian attack.

Re-opening the Strait of Hormuz or ending the ongoing Iranian strikes on the Gulf nations and Saudis are not strategic priorities for Israel, whose only ally in this fight is the U.S. The current war is generally supported by Israelis, and a cessation of hostilities that left Iran visibly broken and impotent would doubtless boost Netanyahu’s political appeal when he faces elections on October. If you look at the war from Israel’s perspective, it’s going pretty well.

That’s not true for the U.S., and it highlights two deep flaws in Trump’s strategic planning: he entered the war without a clear, achievable goal, and had no back-up plan for when it didn’t go his way. Trump’s war makes failures like Afghanistan, Iraq and Vietnam look like models of careful forethought and planning by comparison. He’s stuck with the war now, and there’s no good way out.

*

There’s really no concealing the disaster that Trump has created for himself and for the party of lackeys that will do whatever he says. The fact that General Caine’s warnings to Trump were leaked almost immediately says something about how the military felt about entering the conflict, and the $200 billion supplemental military bill is perhaps the purest sign of the war’s cost.

Trump’s military advisors saw what could happen, and they knew how much damage the war would cause to the military’s strategic position, especially in relation to containing Chinese territorial ambitions in the Indo-Pacific.

The military will do what Trump orders—he’s the president, and these aren’t illegal orders until Congress says they are—and we have the best military in the world. But it is very thin, and procurement and production processes are a mess, designed for peacetime and not capable of being ratcheted up quickly.

There’s no way to get a good count on how deep the shortfall in key antimissile weapons system will run, since these numbers are secret, but we’re talking in some cases about years of production being expended in just a few weeks. The overuse of Navy carrier groups, with the Ford now long past due for redeployment home for repairs, poses an equal threat to the U.S. ability to maintain its posture of containment in Asia.

I don’t know who might have warned Trump about the Strait of Hormuz or the attacks on Gulf nations, but Trump made it clear that these were a surprise to him—proof that among all of his various diagnoses, Trump is also just an idiot.

The economic disaster posed by Iran’s control of the Strait is just beginning now, felt most in Asia at this point, and mainly in rising gas prices and falling stock prices in the U.S. It’s not just oil—urea for fertilizer, helium for computer chips, sulfur for making copper and turning phosphate into fertilizer, along with tourism, banking and investment in the U.A.E. and Dubai, all portend various forms of economic pain, worsening each week the war goes on and the Strait stays closed.

Trump began the war without much popular support, and much of the support he does seem to have among Republican voters seems contingent on a quick war with no troops on the ground. The world economy needs a quick war, too, as does the U.S. military if it’s going to maintain its strategic commitments.

Last week Trump and Netanyahu both dropped hints that the war might end sooner than we think, a possibility Trump elaborated on in a Truth Social Post:

We are getting very close to meeting our objectives as we consider winding down our great Military efforts in the Middle East with respect to the Terrorist Regime of Iran: (1) Completely degrading Iranian Missile Capability, Launchers, and everything else pertaining to them. (2) Destroying Iran’s Defense Industrial Base. (3) Eliminating their Navy and Air Force, including Anti Aircraft Weaponry. (4) Never allowing Iran to get even close to Nuclear Capability, and always being in a position where the U.S.A. can quickly and powerfully react to such a situation, should it take place. (5) Protecting, at the highest level, our Middle Eastern Allies, including Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, and others. The Hormuz Strait will have to be guarded and policed, as necessary, by other Nations who use it — The United States does not! If asked, we will help these Countries in their Hormuz efforts, but it shouldn’t be necessary once Iran’s threat is eradicated. Importantly, it will be an easy Military Operation for them. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP

Oddly, this mirrors a suggestion I had made in an earlier draft of this piece—I joked that Trump could just declare victory, leave the problem of the Strait to the international community, and declare a great victory, maybe with a parade for the returning heroes.

There’s a section in the 1982 UN Charter on the Law of the Sea that says that the Strait is a vital international waterway that must be kept open—I remarked that it would be fitting if Trump decided to kick the whole business over to the lawyers. I was joking, but who knows? It would be Trump’s seventh bankruptcy, just the latest instance in a lifetime of leaving wreckage for others to clean up.

The fact that he’s considering doing this may be a sign of how desperate he’s becoming—though it might easily be the case that he’s just lying, trying to jawbone the markets and soften up the Iranians for the next surprise attack. The coordination with Netanyahu was interesting—you know that he wants to keep going.

The problem for Trump is that the alternative is escalation, with an amphibious assault on Kharg Island or an airborne attack to get the enriched uranium that is thought to be buried in Isfahan—although that’s probably impossible, or perhaps an all-out, ongoing assault designed somehow to make the Strait safe for travel again.

The air dimension of that battle has already begun, with A-10 Warthogs and Apache Helicopters focused on suppressing or destroying the weapons of asymmetrical warfare—speedboats, drones, mines—Iran is threatening to use on any ship trying the Straits. Given the unforgiven topography of the Strait, troops on the ground would face a daunting task, but would unquestionably be required to re-open it by force.

Seventeen ships have been struck already, and it’s not clear what would have to happen before the Strait was genuinely open again, in a way that satisfied insurers and shipowners. In reality, given that just one drone or missile needs to get through, it’s hard to imagine the Strait open again until the war ends.

And that’s the problem for Trump: no matter what he does, the war won’t end until Iran says it is over. It’s impossible for Trump to declare victory while Iran is still sending out drones and firing off missiles at what seem like carefully-chosen targets, aided by Russian intelligence. He can try, but it’s a bad look for him—I don’t think even Trump can pull it off, except with the benighted faithful.

So who knows what will happen next? Probably it will just be more bombing for a while, since it will take at least another week for the Marines relocating from around Japan to the Middle Est to be in place. There’s no potential breakthrough there, and eventually the bombers will run out of targets.

Beyond that, Trump’s options are limited: he can either surrender and declare victory, or he can escalate with ground assaults. There were reports last week that Trump was deploying two more naval groups with expeditionary forces and that, along with the $200 billion budget request, makes it seem like he may be planning for a long war.

*

Either this week or the next, Trump faces a choice: he can either make whatever concessions are required to get Iran to stop fighting, or he can escalate. Because Trump acts on emotion and impulse rather than reason and information, it’s impossible to predict what course he’ll choose.

There’s no one to give him advice either—think of that war cabinet, with Marco and Pete, Jared and Steve Witkoff, everyone else trying their best to keep their hands clean and all of them knowing just what a mess they’re in-- except maybe warrior Pete, fighting the last crusade. Imagine captioning a photo of that war council for a history 50 years from now.

Trump has a choice to make, but it’s not clear that it matters what he does, since Iran gets a vote, too, and right now amidst all of the destruction, two things are clear: Israeli decapitation of the leadership has left the hardline IRCG in charge, and the war itself is strengthening the regime’s support within at least part of the populace in a way that makes the likelihood of regime change far less likely than it already was.

In a March 20 article in Foreign Affairs (gift link, I think), Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar suggests that the likely course for the Iranian regime is continuing escalation externally while consolidating the regime’s standing within the populace, playing on innate nationalism and the tragedy of ongoing destruction and civilian deaths, including more than 200 schoolchildren and teachers at one school, to unite the populace behind its war against the invaders.

Iran has already escalated to attacks on oil production facilities with its tit-for-tat bombing of Oman’s LNG facilities after Israel’s raid on the field that provides much of Iran’s own energy. Other attacks have been relatively limited, but ongoing. There are still plenty of ways that the regime can escalate further, and its command-and-control systems are apparently strong enough to survive the killings of its leaders.

The regime wins the war if it survives, and surrender is tantamount to its own destruction. It is very difficult to see what incentives exist for any negotiation that does not begin with American capitulation. So perhaps a long war indeed.

*

One may still hold out hope for some sort of early resolution to the war. A coalition of nations including the EU, some Gulf nations, Japan, and the UK has held various consultations and now there is a 22-nation agreement regarding reopening the Strait, though it is hard to say it will have any impact in itself. Trump himself suggested in his Truth Social Post that he might hand over responsibility for the Strait to those affected by its closure.

Trump himself has dropped several of his earlier requirements, including his absurd demand for “unconditional surrender” by Iran, so it seems he won’t mind if the current regime stays in place. His demand regarding nuclear weapons has been fudged to make it possible for the U.S. to leave without having captured Iran’s buried enriched uranium—probably because the military explained that it would require a full-scale invasion to have a chance of success.

Perhaps America’s past allies will find a way to save Trump from himself, working out a ceasefire agreement that opens the Strait and assures Iran’s protection from further attacks, at least for a while. One expects that Israel will be forced to go along with whatever Trump decides.

It’s not clear what guarantee of safety and rebuilding would be satisfactory to the Iranians, however, and absent an agreement in the near term, it seems quite likely that Trump will chose to strike with ground troops, with Kharg Island a long-time fixation of his, going back to the 1980s, and probably the easiest quick win.

Once that happens, it is almost impossible to imagine the war ending before it has done permanent damage to the existing global economic order, and perhaps changed the general nature of alignments and alliances around the world, with China the main beneficiary.

*

Sometimes, as I’ve been reading the news since the war began, I find myself thinking that our perspectives of the past make it hard for us to reckon clearly with the unprecedented nature of what’s happening right now. We’re used to quick strikes, and we know about long wars and quagmires like Afghanistan and Iraq—but these ultimately were localized affairs, almost unnoticed after a while, mainly affecting military families and the federal deficit.

This war is different, and it comes amidst an already destabilized global context. The current war already involves about 20 nations directly, and so far it has served mainly to strengthen Russia and China, while further deranging what was left of various U.S. alliances.

A war that lasts through the summer has the potential to have the same sort of supply-chain impact that Covid did, with perhaps even greater economic consequences, given some of the pre-existing stresses in the system. The resilience of the global economic system would be tested, and it’s not certain that it would hold.

One doesn’t have to subscribe to doomsday scenarios to say that if the current war is prolonged it has the potential to become the equivalent of a new world war, our third, or fourth if you count the Cold War—like each of those prior wars, beginning in one sort of world order, and ending in a new one.

It’s tragic to think of the fate of the United States in the world abroad should the war continue, with U.S.-Israeli forces essentially deploying the same warfighting strategy that Israel did in Gaza, with the same visible results. (Already more than 1,000 have died in Lebanon, and a million people displaced. That’s our war, too, now.)

We will be a pariah state, like Russia or Israel, known for our power and lawlessness, feared perhaps, but also shunned. I wonder if Lederer’s The Ugly American is still in print. This will be worse, because the cultural cachet that once brought wide acceptance and admiration, at least of Americans, if not the nation, is faded now—all that will be left is our weapons, recklessness and concentration camps for immigrants.

And there we may find that the precedents we have set in our own hemisphere make it easy for China to take Taiwan, perhaps even peacefully, since we won’t have the wherewithal to fight a war, or the will. Xi marked 2027 as the year that the Chinese would be ready to invade. All Trump has done with this war is move up the date.

Like the Strait of Hormuz, about a fifth of the world’s trade passes through the Taiwan Strait. If Trump isn’t aware of that, I’m sure that Xi will let him know when they finally meet this year.

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Note to readers: I’m trying to get more consistent in publishing this newsletter—keeping length under control and publishing regularly on Sunday, with occasional midweek posts if something strikes me. I don’t know whether this matters to you or not, but I wanted to let you know—in psycho-jargon I’m externalizing the commitment, making it public so I am more likely to follow it. So I had this piece finished before dinner on Saturday night and held on to it, hoping no big news broke in the meantime, forcing me into a major re-write.

No big new news, thankfully, but I do want to mention that in his usual Saturday night Truth Social Post, Trump promised to devastate Iran’s energy facilities if the Strait isn’t open in 48 hours—about 6:00 PM on Monday, Eastern U.S. Time. For their part, Iran claims the Strait is open to everyone already, except for their enemies, and made it clear that they feel they have the upper hand in the war now. They threatened to unleash an all-out attack on the oil facilities of surrounding nations if Trump makes good on his 48-hour ultimatum.

Trump has now presented two versions of what he may do next—try to cut and run, or escalate (with a public 48-hour deadline.) The Iranians seem to be goading him toward escalation, on the bet that their own nation under siege can survive an energy crisis longer than the rest of the globe can. It seems like a typical problem of invading armies—the U.S. in Vietnam, both the U.S.S.R. and the U.S. in Afghanistan, the U.S. in Iraq and now Russia in Ukraine. It’s hard to defeat a nation when the stakes are existential, and maybe Trump will recognize that and find some off-ramp from this disaster before it becomes an even greater disaster.

The fact that we have to wait for a single man—an aging man whose cognitive infirmities and emotional dysregulation are plain for all to see, who cares only about himself—to make these decisions on no one’s good advice makes this period of U.S. history the darkest in my lifetime.

1. No Endgame in Iran

After two weeks of war, some things have become clear—the cause of the war was pretextual and Trump has no strategy for its ending--while the consequences, which are global in scope, have only started to unfold.

The longer the war continues, the more dire these will become, from the price of gasoline in the mid-terms to the destruction of Dubai’s image as a tourist paradise. The weakening of U.S. forces in the Indo-Pacific has a longer timeframe for trouble, while the likelihood of a stock market crash and recession grows greater each week the bombing continues.

Even were the war to end tomorrow, the economic shock of these past two weeks has already had significant negative impacts almost everywhere, with China better insulated than most nations, including the U.S., and Russia being the one real winner so far. If the Strait of Hormuz stays closed for another month or more, the consequences start to be grim in ways that may rival 2020 or even 2008.

It’s clear that none of this was anticipated by Trump, who ignored any advice his minions gave him of the risks involved in an all-out war, choosing to follow his own impulses instead. You would have to have studied the recent past to know what a chokehold the Strait could be, or read the national intelligence finding regarding the unlikelihood of regime change to understand that decapitation wouldn’t work against a system prepared for it.

Trump does not use information to make decisions. As he has told is, he relies on his feelings, and he only knows what he’s going to do when he does it. It’s Trump’s war and we’re all paying the price for his broken reason.

Now Trump is stuck inside the trap he created, and the only strategies he has are escalation or a sort of surrender. It’s almost pathetic, reading his bleats on Truth Social, asking now for other nations to join in opening the Strait of Hormuz (neva’ happen, as the Manila bargirls used to say), or promising even greater fury of aerial bombardment even as the jets start to run out of targets, with 15,000 buildings already destroyed.

Ongoing escalation, with each day promised to be even more devastating to the last, isn’t working so far, and sending troops to secure the eastern shore of the Strait almost certainly would devolve into a long and costly war on the ground, with no guarantee that the insurers would come back and the Strait re-open in any case.

Trump thought there would be an off-ramp, because he had the model of Venezuela in his mind, and his thought processes are very simple. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to him that he wouldn’t find someone with whom to cut a deal.

That’s not the only thing that doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone—the wreckage of our partners in the GCC, the damage to Saudi interests, the absence of any forethought about Americans in the region or even the idea that shortly before we attacked we had shipped out four minesweepers for retirement, with the new system only partly in place—not to mention vastly weakening our forces in Asia just weeks before a summit meeting with Xi, entirely unplanned on the U.S. side at this point by all reports.

It’s a disaster, and you can see how nervous Trump and his boys are—way in over their heads at this point. This is the point where Trump normally earns his TACO label—an inaccurate meme for what is actually a sort of animal cunning, the bully’s sense of when to dial it back, declare victory and cut and run.

But he can’t do that, because there is literally no offramp unless the new Ayatollah gives him one, and that’s never going to happen. The regime can’t surrender and survive—it is an existential question for it at this point. I don’t think there are any terms that Trump can offer, especially now that any negotiation has to seem entirely untrustworthy. And the kind of terms that Iran might accept—a non-aggression pact, lifting sanctions, helping to rebuild the devastated infrastructure—would make clear how stupid the war has been.

Whether Netanyahu induced Trump to join in the war or simply provided him the pathway for something Trump already intended—the opportunity to kill Khamanei too good to pass up—Israel is getting what it wanted from the war. I doubt they want to stop yet, but it’s a mistake, I think, to see them as driving Trump’s continuation of the conflict. If Trump could figure out a way to call a ceasefire they would almost certainly go along if he asked them to.

The problem for Trump is that the war is entirely asymmetrical and by extending it horizontally across the region, Iran is causing pain to all of America’s allies, none of which, besides Israel, wanted this war. And whatever popular support the war has in the U.S. is largely contingent on it ending soon. If it is still going on in May, with gas approaching $5.00 a gallon, Trump’s approval ratings may finally find their floor.

The war seems to be settling into its rhythm now, and it seems to me that that next week or two will see more of the same, with the main wild card being how quickly Trump moves to put troops on the ground. Yesterday news came that a Marine Expeditionary force has been relocated to the region, leaving its position in Asia, so it seems likely that we’ll see fighting on the ground this week—maybe an attempt to occupy Kharg Island, or a ground assault on the littoral along the Strait.

We’ve already bombed Kharg Island, the center of Iran’s petroleum production, “obliterating” military forces but leaving the oil alone, for “reasons of decency” Trump said. That may well be a prelude to occupying the island, following a suggestion NY Times conversative columnist Bret Stephens made last week. The enriched uranium is another, probably tougher potential target.

In the meantime, Iran is playing rope-a-dope, absorbing destruction “never seen before,” as Trump likes to say, while doing enough to make the war as costly as possible for its neighbors and for the global oil trade. There may be some good potential outcome to all of this, but you have to squint hard to see what it might be.

*

2. Cuba in the Crosshairs

I’ll come back to Iran next week, undoubtedly, and I am particularly interested in what the impact might be on the China summit, as we continue to weaken our forces in the Indo-Pacific, draining most of the munitions that we might need for a war to preserve Taiwan’s independence and U.S. interests in Asia.

But Cuba’s next—I’m using that 1980s Newsweek-style headline ironically, but it’s true. It’s hard to believe that more than 60 years of diplomatic tension and embargo might finally be coming to a head, and it’s not even a lead news story. But it is coming, and I wanted to get a few words in before the dealing starts.

I spent a month in Cuba soon after Trump was elected the first time, traveling independently under Obama’s relaxed rules soon after Trump had changed them (I already had my plane ticket, grandfathered in), so I experienced the last edge of that brief opening to American tourism. Later I spent several months researching Cuba for a project that was eventually abandoned, but not before I had had some very generous assistance from William LeoGrande, whose book Back Channel: The Hidden History of Negotiations between Washington and Havana is the authoritative text on the topic.

Cuba has been in dire economic straits for a while, and Trump’s chokehold on the island has now created a circumstance that could force positive political change in the communist nation, one of the last vestiges of Soviet-style governance. There’s no need for military action—in fact, that would be incredibly stupid. But there is a real opportunity for constructive change that would benefit Cuba’s citizens and end decades of hostility.

Cuba is not Venezuela. There is no figure like Maduro who can be easily captured and replaced, no number two waiting in the wings to cut a deal. Political power is closely held, but distributed—more like the old Soviet politburo than Venezuela’s gangster kleptocracy. In terms of governance when it comes to decapitation or open war, it is probably much more like Iran, in the sense that lines of authority are layered and distributed through a political bureaucracy that also controls all of the nation’s economic levers as well as the military.

So there’s no recipe for a lightning raid there, and bombing the nation can hardly make it much weaker. If you’ve spent any time in Havana, you know how much of its beauty lies in the ruins. But starving the nation of oil, now that Venezuela has changed sides, is working well, and Cuba’s figurehead president, Miguel Diaz-Canel, said this weekend that Cuba has begun talks with the U.S.

There’s a logical win for both sides, at least on the face of it. Using Venezuela as a precedent, there’s no need to dislodge the current government or get rid off Diaz-Canel, whose power is structural and bureaucratic, and depends on the support of the deeply embedded Communist Party apparatus, still controlled and shaped by the revolutionary generation—including Raul Castro, who is still alive.

Cuba is desperate for cash and investment, and the American requirement would be that it open its economy and diminish the mechanisms of repression, releasing political prisoners and allowing the return of those who fled the country, along with their investments in a mixed economy that still maintained its central control. Some sort of promise of an opening of political processes might have to be made.

In return, the U.S. would end the embargo and support the nation in getting back on its feet, although private investment—including diminishing military control of the cash-producing economy—might do part of the work in addressing Cuba’s dire economic straits.

One problem for the U.S. is that the embargo itself is a matter of federal law, and it requires that it not be lifted until progress toward a new political system is made. A second problem would be the political expectations of the Cuban exile community, along with their demands for recompense for property seized during the revolution.

Working their way through these details would require a staged diplomatic process, since some details would necessarily be complex, but it could certainly begin with commitments on each side—in essence, to end the hostilities between the two nations and then begin the process of normalization on each side.

The model for what Cuba could become might be Vietnam, which adopted a market-based economy system in the mid-1980s and still maintains a one-party political system and is quick to repress dissent. We don’t particularly concern ourselves with Vietnam’s politics as we trade with them, and it has become a tourist destination. Cuba could be more or less the same.

The problem is that Vietnam is far away and its exile community has never been a political force, while the Cuban exile community has always been a major force in U.S. politics—enough so that the current Secretary of State comes from that political tradition. (The Rubio family actually emigrated in 1955, when Batista was still president, although that didn’t prevent Rubio from saying that they had fled Castro—a claim that stayed in his bio until 2011)

It’s also a nation that most young people want to flee, beneficiaries of widespread access to higher education and facing no economic opportunity or political freedom at home. A trained surgeon makes $60 a month, much less than driving one of those vintage tourist taxis will bring in. Simply gaining intermittent access to the internet was a new concession made after Obama’s visit—just enough to give a taste of what you were missing, Any deal will have to thread the needle between political opening and overthrowing the government.

I’m not sure how workable it is, this scenario in which the Cuban government gives up its economic misrule, maybe cashing out in some way, but the basic political system is allowed to remain within a staged program of liberalization and movement toward democratic processes. It would require a level of nuance in thinking that Rubio may well possess—he has thought about it a long time—but his boss assuredly does not.

A free tip to Diaz-Canel—give Trump a licensing agreement for a new Grant Hotel resort. I visited the old one, an abandoned ruin that once had been the most exclusive resort on the island. It is one of the most beautiful ruins I have ever seen, and it could use an upgrade. Maybe a casino, too.

I’ll write more about Cuba when the story ripens—it’s a dense, fascinating history, a rich strand in the American mythos. The diplomatic history since the revolution is fascinating in itself, and also salutary, if one thinks of what the U.S. posture toward Cuba was in 2016 and what it is today. I’ll offer one thought on that.

During my research, reading through various histories, I ran across an anecdote from a Cuban diplomat during the Obama years about how hard it was to negotiate with the U.S. He said that over the many years that he had been part of these discussions, he had been struck that while the U.S. officials regularly changed, their interpreter never did. The opposite was true for the Cubans: their interpreters varied often, but it was always the same officials in the room.

Perhaps it takes a rightwing, hardline stance on our part to finally move to a more stable relationship. The danger is that Trump is taking scalps right now, and while Rubio knows that his plan requires patience and time, it’s not clear he can sell his boss on that. Vance sure couldn’t, when it came to Iran. Let’s hope Little Marco is more persuasive, though he might have to wear his big boy shoes instead of those Florsheims Trump made him wear.

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The War on Iran seems clearer now than it did when I wrote about it on Friday, and I’m planning to make this my last take on the subject for a while. There are other things to talk about, and the war is serving at least one purpose for Trump by making it hard to find space to talk about revelations in the Epstein files or the question of whether there are any limits to how AI may be used by the U.S. military or Trump’s security forces.

The basic story of the war is clear now, while the question of what will happen next is entirely uncertain. Maybe the war ends quickly and becomes just another episode in Trump’s savage presidency, like Venezuela or “Liberation Day,” but that seems less likely every day. Maybe it will bring global economic disaster and a new level of instability and regional conflict from the Kyber Pass to Gaza. Afghanistan and Pakistan are about to go to war, right on Iran’s border.

So far, the news out of Mar-a-Lago and Tel Aviv is that it will go on for a while, heightening the likelihood of disastrous outcomes. No one is talking about a limited strike anymore. That ship sailed a week ago.

What is clear is that the war-fighting strategy was defined by Israel as the senior partner with the deepest knowledge of the battlefield, and the purpose of that strategy aligns with Israel’s broader national security strategy under Netanyahu in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack. Israel is waging the same all-out war against Iran and its proxy, Hezbollah, that it did against Hamas in Gaza.

Humanitarian concerns are not part of the playbook, as Gaza’s devastation and the deaths of more than 70,000 Palestinians demonstrate. At present, Israel’s plan is to destroy as much as it can of the Iranian state, with its raids extending beyond military targets to include civilian buildings and infrastructure, including an airport in Tehran and the nation’s energy infrastructure, along with an intensive focus on internal security forces.

Israel appears committed to decapitate any leadership that emerges, having already eliminated most of the officials that strategists in the White House thought might be willing to cut a Delcy Rodriguez kind of deal. Whether one agrees with it or not, Israel’s purpose is clear: it wants to eliminate Iran’s ability to threaten it, which includes not simply destroying Iran’s current war-fighting capacity but also eliminating the nation’s ability to rebuild and re-arm.

Israel is not interested in a brokered peace, or in preserving any element of the current regime in Iran. It would prefer a broken or disordered state only capable of waging occasional terror attacks to any sort of stable regime in Iran.

Almost certainly this war has been a long-time goal of Netanyahu’s, one that couples an absolutist strategy for Israeli power in the region to his own political needs, including deferring any sort of reckoning for the colossal blunders that led to the October 7 attack, as well as his own criminal case for corruption.

The United States has joined entirely in Israel’s strategy and plan. Our purposes and rationale now echo Israel’s precisely. We may be funding the war and providing much of the destruction, but it’s Trump’s war, and he’s hitched himself to Netanyahu’s horse.

There’s no way Trump can declare victory, the way he did last June, and force Israel to a ceasefire it didn’t want at the time. Israel won’t let him negotiate a peace with any remnant of the current regime.

*

War against Iran has never been part of U.S. national security strategy. Containing Iran’s nuclear ambitions has been our primary strategic interest when it comes to the theocracy, and working together with the Israelis we have been able to achieve that without going to war.

At the point the war began, Iran was apparently ready to make major concessions, beyond those contained in the 2015 Obama agreement that Trump abandoned out of spite in his first term. That may be one reason the Israelis hurried Trump to act when he did.

The United States has joined fully in Israel’s war, which would not be possible without our involvement. The Trump and his administration workshopped a wide variety of reasons and purposes for the war, some of them contradictory, before Trump finally joined entirely in Irael’s project: “unconditional surrender.”

As for rationale, we have settled on the one that Israel used from the start: to destroy Iran’s war-fighting capacity and eliminate its leadership. The idea of maybe providing a path for the opposition to emerge and take control is an afterthought in this plan—lip service, it seems, since to effect the latter appears entirely unplanned. We are waging this war on behalf of Israel’s national security interests, not our own.

*

It’s useless to speculate about what Trump was thinking, when he decided to accept Netanyahu’s invitation and join in the killing spree. To assign rational motives—even the motives of burying the Epstein story and trying for a “rally around the flag” shift in Republican electoral prospects—is to sane wash a man whose reasoning is entirely subject to his Id.

Trump felt like going to war, so he did. That’s really all you can say. Anything else is a post-facto rationalization of an irrational act. Trump requires the constant exercise of power to maintain his sense of self, which doesn’t exist without external scaffolding. The heady victories of his initial blitzkrieg have given way to all manner of roadblocks and defeats over time, as his approval ratings have plummeted.

Now that tariffs have been taken from him, war is really the last domain in which Trump is still able to exercise unchecked power. He discovered he liked it with the pictures of the first bombing and the smash and grab of Maduro, and even mulled the hostile capture of Greenland, which he wants “for psychological reasons,” so when Netanyahu gave him the opportunity to join in the killing of Khamanei, he leapt at the chance.

One of the most interesting features of the war is how well-planned it was militarily and how completely absent of planning it was in any other way. That shows up most obviously in the administration’s complete indifference, even after the fact, to the plight of U.S. citizens in the region, who number somewhere between 500,000 and 1 million.

It shows up as well in the seeming indifference to the economic consequences of the war, which seemed to take Trump by surprise, and in the absence of any sense that the U.S. had any plan for an endgame. That all the people we thought we might be able to talk to were killed at the same time as Khamenei was may demonstrate how little interest the Israeli’s have in any outcome short of the regime’s utter destruction.

*

So we went to war based on one man’s impulse, and now we’re joined to Israeli’s strategy for waging it. It appears that it was American bombs that slaughtered more than a hundred schoolgirls last week. On Saturday, Hegseth said “the only ones that need to be worried right now are Iranians that think they’re going to live.” This is the war that we all own now, as U.S. citizens.

There is no discernible off-ramp for the war right now, and over the week Trump has seemed to move from what might have been defined as a U.S. position on the war—the sort of thing that hopeful pundits have drafted about how things might work out OK—to an all-out embrace of Israel’s goals.

Two sidebars last week underscore the ineptness or stupidity of Trump and his servile courtiers. One was the report of an intelligence analysis that made clear that an air campaign alone was unlikely to achieve regime change, because of the entrenched nature of the existing power structure. The absence of a discernable pathway to regime change without boots on the ground was known before we went to war.

The second was the White House decision to prevent the release of an official joint FBI, DHS and National Terrorism Center bulletin to state and local police officials about Iran-linked threats to the U.S. homeland because of the war. At the same time, the National Terrorism Advisory System, that once maintained a color-coded system of threat levels, and now issues time-specific bulletins and alerts has gone dark, ostensibly because of a lack of funding.

The White House is concealing terror threat data for political reasons. Think about that for a moment.

Trump himself has been noticeably reticent to talk directly to the American people about why we are fighting this war with Israel and what he hopes to accomplish by it when the bombing ends. Instead, he has just offered hints of his thinking in individual interviews, responses to press corps questions, and the occasional Truth Social screed, while Hegseth himself has alternated between stupid belligerence and castigations of the press for reporting on the war dead.

It is almost as if the White House doesn’t want people to pay too much attention, now that the war is moving into a second stage and looks like it will last for a while. There’s no real sense that we’re winning, giving how stalwart Iranian intransigence has been, and the immediate economic consequences of the war—gas prices up, markets down—will only get worse the longer the war continues.

*

Trump’s presidency has proceeded as a series of self-laid traps, with each fresh iteration partly erasing the one that came before, and the accumulated effect resulting in a presidency increasingly seen as failing in every significant domain.

He has already lost on most fronts: DOGE was a failure, tariffs backfired and failed, ICE destroyed his polling on immigration and was forced to retreat a bit, he lost on occupying cities with federalized troops, and the economy was already the source of widespread disapproval. The mid-terms presage a blue wave.

Now, he’s laid the biggest trap of all for himself—the same one George W. Bush did, and LBJ before him. There’s no path to victory in Iran—what would it even look like? But the war does have the potential to let Trump do something even Vietnam and Iraq did not do: conduct a pointless war without even trying to offer the American people a rationale. No president has ever started a war with so little popular support.

Trump is already talking about boots on the ground—not an invasion force, but maybe commando raids to capture enriched uranium or take out Kharg Island—and one expects that at some point the U.S. and Israel will run out of bombing targets, though that could take a long time in a nation of 90 million that stretches from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Turkey. We have told to expect casualties. As Trump said, “Sometimes in a war people die.”

Given that the U.S. has no war aims independent of Israel’s it seems likely that the war will keep going as long as Trump lets it. The Israelis have no intention of stopping.

*

In the end, I’m not sure the posture of war-fighting president actually suits Trump. It’s a constraining role—he can’t just go to some town in Ohio and ramble on about the things he rambles on about, and he has to know that anything he says about the war will be a headline.

Keeping the story straight has never been a strength for Trump, and it’s hard to lie about the war the way he lies about immigrant crime and dystopian blue cities. Maybe he can work some applause lines with the MAGA crowd, but no one else is buying what he’s selling.

As vainglorious as he is, one might think Trump would take advantage of the war, maybe the way George W. did with his flak jacket on the deck of the Abraham Lincoln. But he must know it won’t work—that it’s hard to brag about bombing strikes when you can’t explain why they’re happening. Iran has been a real but distant enemy longer than many Americans have lived and we are inured to it. Invoking the U.S.S. Cole terror attack as part of the rationale won’t make much a meme.

The fact that we’re all in with Israel on this war presents a political challenge for both parties, with AIPAC money becoming toxic for Democrats, and MAGA with its antisemitic, “America First” intellectual and podcast faction accusing Trump of being duped by Netanyahu. But apart from the third of the country still devoted to Trump, no one else likes it. Republican officeholders are in a much worse bind than most Democrats.

The price of gas is already up 50 cents in a week, and according to prediction markets there’s a good chance it may spike to more than $5.00 by mid-spring. Unprecedented gas prices—and jet fuel, for that matter—may come just as the summer travel season starts in the U.S. There’s no good political news for Trump and the Republicans in that.

The only quick end to the war is to do what Trump has ruled out and accept some sort of negotiated surrender with whomever manages to still be alive and in power. Right now, it seems that even if Trump wanted to deal, the hardliners control the regime, and there’s no reason to trust the U.S. in negotiations in any case. Both sides are trapped, and the only winner is Israel.

Maybe I am wrong—maybe there’s some deus ex machina in this script that I can’t read—but it looks to me like we’re in for a long war with accompanying pressure on both inflation and employment, both at a time when warnings about the fragility of various components of the global financial system have grown louder. The stock market is due for a correction, and the uncertainty caused by a war with no defined purpose or endpoint won’t help.

It may turn out that the real question wasn’t whether American democracy could survive Trump, but instead how much of the nation’s wealth and standing in the world will be destroyed before Trump is done.

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There’s plenty to write about in what might happen next with Trump’s war and its global consequences, and every news source and commentator I follow is doing some of that, with many prognostications of economic disaster and the potential for civil war or a failed state in a nation of 90 million people in the center of the most volatile region in the world.

Of course, things could work out just fine, too—maybe Iran comes up with a leader acceptable to Trump, the psychotic president tells Ntanyahu to stop, and we get at least some temporary version of the Venezuela deal so Trump can declare victory before the war entirely craters Republican hopes in the mid-terms.

Any speculation on the future has to account for the reality that Trump chose to go to based on impulse, not advice, and he never had any idea of what the endgame would look like or what the consequences might be. Any predictions have to account for the fact that the ultimate decision-maker doesn’t know what he is going to do until he does it.

Trump still clearly doesn’t know where any of this is leading, for the U.S. at least. His public utterances, along with those of the feral Pete Hegseth, make clear the enormous willfulness involved in this war, at the tune of $1 billion per day, but say nothing of what the war’s purpose is or how it fits with any rational national security strategy.

Israel could not fight this war without the full partnership and close coordination of the U.S. military in a joint operation different from any the U.S. has fought since WWII. But the strategy, purpose, and intentions are entirely Israel’s. We are only along for the ride because Trump felt a visceral need to drop bombs and kill people.

Even the more sordid versions of the rationale behind the war—deflecting attention to Epstein, prefiguring an attempt to steal or cancel the mid-terms, or a quid-pro-quo in family dealings with the Gulf oligarchs—don’t do it for me. This is Marlowe’s judgment of Kurtz: not unsound methods but no method at all. Just madness.

*

The war makes perfect sense for Israel, which has been a garrison state throughout its existence, surrounded by nations that seek to destroy it. Since the Carter administration, which brought both the Camp David accords and the Iranian revolution, Iran and its allies and proxy armies have been Israel’s main enemy.

The October 7, 2023 Hamas terrorist attack caused Israel to change its strategic posture from one of managing periodic attacks through proportionate responses in ongoing low intensity warfare, to an existential battle for survival.

When that attack came I happened to be staying at a hostel in Porto, and there was a group of young Israelis staying there, traveling in that year of freedom most young Israelis experience between military duty and further education. They were in anguish after the Hamas attack—almost all of them knew someone who had died. It’s a small nation, and these were the sort of young people who would be likely to have friends or relatives at the show that Hamas targeted.

They were also fearful, desperate to get back to Israel and safety, afraid (perhaps unnecessarily) to be seen on the streets of Porto. One of them asked me if I would mind making a store run to pick up cigarettes and some beverages, and I was happy to oblige. Afterwards, he and I fell into a long conversation, and he explained something to me about Israel that seemed true to me, though I have no way of checking his accuracy.

He was a sincere and thoughtful young man, trying to explain Israel to an American, and he told me that Israel had two strategies for dealing with its enemies, two levels for how they approached defense. The first level, he said, the one that we generally see, is about managing low-level threats—the posture of military and intelligence readiness, the whole nation’s dedication to self-defense, where only the most orthodox are excused from military duty, the focus on striking back in proportional ways while preserving a normal sense of day to day life.

He told me that simply to focus on that ongoing, lower level of conflict, often conducted through covert means and assassinations, meant that people like me didn’t really understand—didn’t see—a second level, in which Israel is prepared to do whatever is required in order to preserve its existence, “never again” as a national military strategy—including the option of using nuclear weapons.

We’re seeing that second level now, in Israel’s approach to the war. Even before the bombing, Iran was far weaker than it has ever been in the most couple of decades. By playing on Trump’s inchoate rage and lust for violence, Netanyahu—who relies himself on permanent war as a way to postpone any political or judicial reckoning—was able to complete the necessary step of enlisting the U.S. on Israel’s behalf.

Maybe Trump actually believes that he was the one who pushed Israel into the war, not the reverse, as Rubio had said earlier. Maybe that’s even true—maybe feigning some reluctance was part of Netanyahu’s game with Trump, so the psychotic president could feel like it was his own idea. But it is Israel’s war, and we’re just along for the ride until Trump decides he’s tired of it and wants to try something new.

*

The war makes perfect sense from Israel’s standpoint, and if Israel’s continued existence matters to you, as it does to me, it is even possible to justify the war, or at least to see why Israel may feel that the war is a just one.

Israel’s strategic goal is to render its foremost enemy incapable of causing harm to it again. This is a legitimate strategic concern for a nation that endured the horror of the October 7 attack, a national wound much greater in scope and impact than 9/11 was in the United States, with proportionally ten times as many casualties.

What Israel did in Gaza is an unspeakable wrong from a humanitarian perspective, and we will probably be able to say the same about Iran by the time the bombers are done a few weeks from now, if the war indeed lasts that long. At this level of existential warfare, there are no brakes. Israel intends to destroy the Iranian state and leave whatever remains incapable of anything more than low-level terrorist attacks.

At the same time, destruction of the “Zionist state” has been an espoused goal of the Iranian theocracy throughout its history, an intention enacted through the provision of material support to proxy armies that include Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in the Palestine territories, Houthis in Yemen, militias in Iraq, and the Assad government in Syria. One doesn’t have to agree with what Israel is trying to do to say that at least the nation has a coherent rationale for war.

The Trump administration’s ineffectual scrambling to justify the war in terms of U.S. national security falls apart quickly because so much of it is untrue—there was no imminent threat, Iran only has short-range and medium-range ballistic missiles and poses no threat to the U.S. “homeland,” and Iranian negotiators were ready to give up on nuclear enrichment, according to the Omani mediator the day before the bombing started.

Discussions of regime change on behalf of the oppressed Iranian people provide a sort of fig leaf for the conduct of the war, but Trump himself has made it clear that he doesn’t really care about that—he’ll be happy to cut a deal with an anti-democratic Iranian strongman as long as he gets the deal that lets him declare victory.

The current reality is the Israeli one, where they will kill any new Iranian leadership that emerges. If the dead Ayatollah Khamenei’s son becomes the new supreme leader, he will be the next dead supreme leader. The goal isn’t regime change but regime destruction.

Israel seems prepared to keep on bombing until all of its enemies are defeated, and it has already brought the war to Hezbollah in Lebanon. There seems no calculus for Israel in which a failed state or civil war in Iran is worse than what existed before, as long as all the missiles are destroyed and the nuclear program is permanently stopped.

So there’s a rationale for Israel’s war, and the only part of the various justifications for the U.S. involvement that rings true is when they parrot Israel’s goal of destroying Iran’s war-fighting capacity once and for all. That goal is not a response to an imminent threat to Israel, and is better seen as a continuation of Israeli national strategy first forced by Hamas two and a half years ago.

Trump can’t say that we’re fighting Israel’s war for them, but that’s what we’re doing. The fact that no one in Trump’s administration can tell us what the goal is and what victory will look like is because they simply don’t know. That was never really part of the plan, except in some vague notions unfounded in any analysis or preparation for the war itself.

The fact that Trump said publicly that there were people the U.S. had been thinking they could work with, like Delcy Rodriguez, but that they were already dead, tells you all you need to know about how prepared we were to go into this war. The U.S. military is designed to fight wars, and it is really good at that. Forging the peace is not part of its mission.

*

It’s not hard to detect sometimes, in some of the pages of the opposition press, a sort of wish-fulfillment element when it comes to predicting negative outcomes of Trump’s actions. It’s not that these predictions are necessarily flawed, so much as they understate Trump’s animal cunning at getting out of danger, and maybe even his luck.

Despite his incompetence and stupidity, with tariffs and the like, Trump hasn’t managed yet to tank the economy, which may be poised for growth in the short-term, as Bessent has predicted (because of the tax cuts and so on.) The Iran bombing last June looked like prelude to a disastrous engagement, but it wasn’t (until now), and the smash and grab in Venezuela worked out as well for him as could be imagined. He even managed to cool the heat under ICE by flipping the script a bit and moving some bodies around, with Noem finally taking a fall.

So any predictions of looming disaster because of Trump’s war have to take into account the possibility that he finds a way to settle things down before they unravel completely—before we get to boots on the ground and the Strait of Hormuz closed indefinitely. Economic news breaks through for Trump, and the longer the world sits in uncertainty, the worse that news will get. The stock market will bounce the moment peace seems near, as gamblers come in to buy the dip.

The war has made clear how interdependent the global economy is, so that prices will rise in the United States even though we have “energy independence,” because the global price of oil is set more by scarcity in Asia than a surplus in the American shale fields. And who knew that closing the Strait of Hormuz would have a devastating effect on the price of fertilizer?

The markets reflect uncertainty and price in various risks, and it may not be very long before Trump’s “the Dow is at 50,000!” becomes a depression-era joke. If the gulf is essentially closed to commerce for several weeks, we can’t really predict the outcome, because so many elements in the global economy seem fragile right now.

It’s worth pointing out that the financial world is already on edge, when a stray essay by a relative unknown can send software firm stock prices into a spiral. There has already been so much churn and upheaval in such a short period, and this is the worst yet. Crashes always come as surprises, no matter how obvious they may seem in retrospect.

*

It is also clear that Trump and his minions are anxious about what the war is doing to stocks of anti-missile defenses—talking about having “all the munitions we need” just means we won’t run out of bombs. It’s probably the case that Iran’s offensive strike abilities will erode quickly enough that we won’t run out of anti-missile defenses in the region before some sort of ceasefire, but that’s not really the issue.

We already know the problem from Ukraine’s war against the Russian invasion: anti-missile defenses are much more expensive than drones and ballistic missiles, and their production rate is slow—hundreds a year at best with Patriot batteries, and less than a hundred with THAAD defenses. The war in Iran represents a massive draw-down of those systems, leaving strategic vulnerabilities in other regions, particularly vis-à-vis China and the Indo-Pacific.

If China were to invade or blockade Taiwan today, the U.S. would have no carrier group in the region, just land-based air power and the navies of allies like Australia, the Philippines, and Japan. War-gaming an extended conflict with China already had the U.S. facing crippling shortages of some key defensive elements, including anti-missile defenses, and the current war only worsens that scenario.

The war has relegated U.S.-China relations to the sidelines, even as a date for a summit meeting between Trump and Xi has been tentatively scheduled for early spring. That meeting is still likely to happen: China is not particularly invested in Iran, and there has been no saber-rattling on its part, just strongly worded diplomatic statements.

Most analysts theorize that Xi’s broad, deep purge of the military leadership actually lengthens out the timeframe for military readiness to invade Taiwan—which Xi intends to achieve by 2027. One can point out that the U.S. has never been weaker in the Indo-Pacific, and that the Chinese military is already on par with ours in many ways. But a surprise attack of some sort seems unlikely, given the patience of China’s technocratic system.

Still, the U.S. position with China already has an essential weakness, China’s choke-hold on rare earths and strategic minerals, and one wonders how Xi may want to factor in U.S. military weakness as part of his negotiating position. What will Trump do if Xi offers the same sort of choice that Trump himself might offer to a weaker nation: give us political control of Taiwan, similar to Hong Kong, and we’ll guarantee continued access to TSMC’s chips; otherwise, we will invade Taiwan and capture TSMC for our own purposes. Do you want to do this the easy way, or the hard way?

That’s probably not going to happen, at least not yet, and maybe the stock market won’t crash. Maybe Trump will figure out how badly the war is likely to play for him politically, the longer it drags on. Smart money might bet on Trump folding early, as he has always done in the past.

But what if Israel doesn’t want to fold? It certainly appears that in the division of operational responsibilities, they are the ones targeting and killing all of the leaders, and nothing says that they have to stop just because Trump is worried about the price of gas. An ongoing war that leaves ships that might navigate the Straits of Hormuz uninsurable for weeks or even months to come would wreck the global economy.

That may not matter, in terms of Israel’s goals for this war. And I guess it really doesn’t matter in terms of Trump’s goals, either, since he has none. But it won’t help him in November.

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I was hardly surprised when I woke Saturday to the news that the war had started, since everything was pointed in that direction, and Trump’s pattern is to push the button on weekends, maybe to dampen market effects—the June attack and the Maduro event were both weekend events. I had said as much the night before, in a a response to a friend who had emailed a read-out of the Omani negotiators statement that Iran had made significant concessions on nuclear enrichment.

I wrote back that it only increased the pressure on Trump to act, mentioned the weekend thing, and made a joke about the prediction markets. No real joke—I noticed reports that someone had made a lot of money, calling the attack. I didn’t have insider trading with acts of war on my list for 2026, but there you are.

My regular “feed”—all the publications I subscribe to or follow—is surfeited with cognitive dissonance, for me at least. Khamenei is dead, and there were video clips of people in Tehran cheering the news, while the Times produced a second article on the falsehood of Trump’s three main claims about why he had chosen this moment to wage an all-out attack.

Besides the prevarication, a main line of attack against Trump focuses on the “illegality” of his action, but given the precedent of American warfighting since the end of World War II, it’s actually hard to make that case, except in an abstract sort of way.

The amount of power invested in the “Commander in Chief” is a consequence of the Constitution’s design of American governance, just the latest addition to what happens in the U.S. when a president has reckless disregard for anything that came before him—what looked like guardrails turned out to just be suggestions, based on easily violated social norms.

Not arguing here that Congress shouldn’t assert its authority, but even Democrats are divided on how hard to push. Most Americans were against going to war in recent polls, but if one judges Americans by polls and surveys we are generally a poorly informed populace, prone to emotional response rather than reasoning, so perhaps Trump will get the surge of popular support that he is hoping for.

In any case, it doesn’t matter so much what anyone says or does right now. The war is on, and it’s going to continue, basically until Trump is ready to declare victory. A few days ago, it was impossible to know what victory would look like for him, since the reasons for going to war were so vague and contradictory, if not downright false. Now he has told us: the goal is regime change.

*

This is where a writer like me, who loathes Trump and everything he does, but aspires to a sort of clear-eyed rationalism in my analysis, feels a bit of caution. I could easily write a column in which I focus entirely on everything wrong with what Trump is doing right now, from the terrible cost to Iranian civilians to the way he has hollowed out U.S. strategic defenses in the South China Sea, but that doesn’t seem like the whole story.

The problem with war, as has been the truism since at least 1914, is that once it starts there’s no way to know what will happen. Venezuela made it clear that the U.S. military is good at defining military plans and objectives when given clear strategic goals—in that case, simply to capture Maduro with as few casualties as possible. The mission still could have failed, but at least the goal of it was limited and clear. We weren’t trying to occupy the oil fields.

During the weeks that led up to Saturday’s attack, it had seemed to me that the great weakness in Trump’s impulse to war was the flimsiness of the rationale, or rather the complete absence of any discernable rationale.

Neither the nuclear enrichment program nor Iran’s production of short-range and intermediate-range missiles justified an attack, and while the popular uprising against the regime might have justified some sort of action, it had been violently suppressed weeks ago. And of all possible rationales, regime change seemed the most implausible, given how disorganized and underground the opposition is in the security state.

But in the end, regime change was the only way to justify the scope of conflict that Trump wanted, clearly driven at least in part by Netanyahu’s urging, but also by the violence of his own impulse to assert power in the face of stress and defeat.

The military had prepared a range of options for Trump, and it was clear that Caine’s advice had included a sober analysis of the short-term and long-term risks involved at each level of escalation—a news leak that pissed Trump off and demonstrated the Pentagon’s concern about unintended consequences. Trump chose the biggest one, as he is wont to do.

Given the focus on killing Khamenei and the rest of Iran’s leadership along with Trump’s promise that the war may go on indefinitely, it is hard to imagine a broader attack, except maybe an on the ground invasion or a nuclear strike. If nothing else, the U.S. and Israel are forcing a change in regime because the leaders are mostly all dead now, including the most significant one.

It’s impossible to know what will happen next, and that’s where a sort of caution comes in for me. I’ve tried to project different scenarios, just from what I have read about Iran lately and over the years, and there’s one in which some faction of the Revolutionary Guard decides to join forces with more technocratic, reform-minded politicians within the existing leadership and cuts a deal with Trump in a way that wins popular support.

Here’s the sort of deal, along the lines of the one Venezuela cut with Trump: Iran ends its sponsorship of its various proxy armies like Hezbollah and Hamas, formally abandons its nuclear program in exchange for participating in international agreements on nuclear enrichment, and agrees to limits on ballistic missiles, including forgoing development of a long-range missile able to hit the U.S., in exchange for the lifting of Western sanctions and an agreement to do some business with Trump, an infusion of economic support that helps Iran’s new leadership address the economic woes that led to the most recent uprising.

I’m not saying that this sort of scenario has much likelihood, but I do have to believe that there must be some idea within the Trump administration of what they mean when they talk about regime change, and it would have to look something like this. And my caution, before I launch into a more critical analysis, is that one’s odium toward Trump can sometimes obscure whatever small good may have come from his actions.

I’ve seen a lot of conclusions drawn about Trump’s war being a disaster, as it probably will turn out to be. I think it is worth remembering that Iran’s regime really has been an evil in the world and to its own people, and we don’t know yet how all of this will end.

*

Notice that I didn’t say anything about democratic reforms. Realistically, a plan like the one above only works if the most powerful faction in the government—in this case, the 200,000 member Revolutionary Guard—is behind it. It is working so far in Venezuela, where we swapped democracy for oil, leaving the security apparatus intact, apart from a few symbolic gestures. It makes sense to me that the strategists in the White House, such as they may be, are hoping for something like this to emerge.

Or maybe not. Maybe there’s no real plan at all, just the idea of killing the leadership and degrading the military and security apparatus to the point where central control is compromised and some sort of new, more amenable leadership emerges, or else the war continues until some sort of complete surrender—one that might look as much like civil war as anything else.

It may be a mistake to think of Trump as having any concrete purposes at all, apart from being able someday to declare some sort of victory, however much spin that may take. His own purposes, which are worth exploring, may amount to nothing more than an impulse to strike as a show of his power at a time when he is demonstrably weakened across several domestic fronts.

Indeed, it seems possible, even likely, that the contours and extent of the joint Israeli-U.S. attack were shaped by Netanyahu’s strategic calculus rather than any sort of rationale U.S. strategic thinking.

Unlike Trump, who has now placed regime change at the heart of his strategy, Israel has spoken mainly of simply creating a context in which a change of regime might take place. Their primary, articulated focus is on degrading or destroying Iran’s military capabilities, with a particular focus on the ballistic missile capacity that is capable of striking Iran, as well as the Revolutionary Guard and what remains of Iran’s nuclear program.

In particular, the killing of Ayatollah Khamenei and wholesale attack on Iran’s leadership seems like a long-held goal for Israel, which executed that part of the overall strike, in part guided by CIA intelligence. Getting Trump to sign on to this radical step was probably a goal of Netanyahu’s visit to Trump last month, and if Trump had any hesitance in following that lead, it probably had more to do with the warnings of adverse consequences he received from some of his own people, including his military advisors.

Decapitating the Iranian leadership leaves no real downside for the Israeli’s, who have been on a permanent war footing since the Hamas terrorist attack on October 7, 2023, buttressed by about $30 billion in U.S. military aid, including about $6 billion for missile-defense program. From a strategic standpoint, Israel has no more to fear from any successor regime—or a broken state—than it did from the existing regime under Khamenei, particularly given the continuing degradation of Iran’s military capacity.

That can’t be said for the U.S. From a strategic standpoint, none of Trump’s claims about the imminent danger posed by Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs were true, as the New York Times points out. It was a war of choice for Trump, who basically told the nation that Iran had been our enemy and a bad actor since 1979, and he was finally the president to do something about it.

The question of what will follow in Iran now that Khamenei is gone won’t be settled for at least a few days, though right now it is apparent that plans for continuity and succession are in place, and while the regime will have new faces, it probably can withstand any efforts to overthrow it and replace it with the sort of leadership that Trump might have in mind.

Iran’s ability to put down any popular uprising through the wanton slaughter of protestors has been demonstrated, and one assumes that the equivalent of a civil war between factions within the Revolutionary Guard, or between the IRG and the military, would have to take place, with who knows what kind of outcome. The potential for a failed or fragmented state that might be incapable of formal military operations and turns to a program of widespread terrorist attacks instead can’t be underestimated—something like what happened in Iraq during the height of the ISIS state.

While this sort of outcome would leave things no worse for Israel, and perhaps better, it actually places the U.S. in greater danger than it faced under the old regime, given that Iran does not represent a military threat to the U.S. From the strategic standpoint of U.S. interests in the Middle East, there’s no way to say that we would be better off with Iran as a failed state, and the hope for some better regime arising from the ashes seems slim at best.

But the question of whether the U.S. war on Iran is a strategic success or failure in itself is beside the point. Whatever tactical success these days or weeks of war may turn out to be, the decision to go to war was already a grave strategic mistake, one that greatly diminishes U.S. military capacity to counter its actual enemies, Russia and China.

*

It’s far too early in the war to know what the endgame will be, except that it will include some declaration of victory on Trump’s part. That much is certain, and the evidence will be there in the form of how much the bombing and missile strikes reduced Iran’s capacity to attack its neighbors, and how long it will take before whatever new regime emerges to rebuild. Trump already “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program. Now it will be doubly obliterated, if such is possible.

And these claims of Trump’s, whatever they may turn out to be, may largely or even entirely be true. But the war will still have been a strategic disaster for the U.S., even by the terms of the new 2026 National Defense Strategy, which reorients U.S. strategy to focus primarily on defending the American “homeland,” maintaining hemispheric security (the “Donroe doctrine”) and on deterring China in the Indo-Pacific through strength but not confrontation.

We can’t know what the Pentagon’s advisement of risk was to Trump, and it certainly must have included the potential for casualties and expanded war and instability in the Middle East. But it probably focused on the way in which the war would weaken the ability of the U.S. to counter China around Taiwan and the island chains that mark points of ongoing tensions between China and neighbors like Japan, the Philippines, and Australia.

Furthermore, the U.S. already faces a crisis in terms of industrial production of weapons systems and munitions, particularly in terms of anti-missile systems, which are being drawn down at a rapid rate in both the Ukraine and Israel. Operation Midnight Hammer and the 12-day Israel-Iran war last June, significantly depleted U.S. stockpiles of weapons systems like THAAD interceptors, which are produced largely by hand at a rate of about 15 per year, Patriot and standard missile interceptors, and the nearly irreplaceable GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrators, of which 14 were used, as much as half of the existing stockpile.

Trump has already complained about the sluggish production capacity of the U.S. military industry, singling out Raytheon by name, but the reality is that the industry is tooled for peacetime right now, and can’t quickly ratchet up its production of key systems and munitions.

Most war-gaming in recent years has the U.S. running out of stocks of key armaments within weeks, even days, in case of a large-scale war with China. The capacity to fight an extended war against an equivalent military power was already at risk. If this current war drags on, the situation will only grow more dire.

Beyond that, and more important, the U.S. ability to counter China through strength in the Pacific is gravely impaired, at least in the near term, by the repositioning of carrier battlegroups and other war-fighting assets out of Asia and into the Caribbean and now the Middle East, while troop and equipment rotations have been strained to their limit.

At present, there are only three active U.S. carrier groups, the two in the Iran war and the U.S.S. George H.W. Bush, which has left Norfolk and is steaming in the Atlantic toward the Middle East or the Mediterranean, possibly to replace the U.S.S. Gerald R. Ford, which is almost three months overdue for rotation and experiencing widely reported sewage problems. There is no carrier group in the region around Taiwan, leaving defense of the island nation to land-based air forces and naval allies.

China is already effectively in a permanent war preparation and rehearsal posture with Taiwan, conducting military exercises on an almost daily basis. While most military experts still see a gap between current preparedness and what would be required to execute a full-scale amphibious invasion against Taiwan, Trump’s deployment of the military changes that calculus.

There’s no sign that China is considering taking advantage of the absence of U.S. forces from the Pacific region, and the two nations are still engaged in ongoing talks. Trump has toed a conciliatory line for the most part, after his tariff saber-rattling was checked by Xi’s reminder of America’s rare earths problem. He expects to visit China at the end of March, but the Chinese have yet to agree on a date.

China already has an upper hand in negotiations about trade, partly because of its chokehold on strategic minerals, and partly because it has been nimble in adapting to the new global trade environment created by Trump’s tariff war, a circumstance made only more complicated for Trump by the recent Supreme Court decision. The relative military weakness of the U.S. in the region may not encourage a sudden strike by China, which plays the long game in a way that Trump cannot, but it certainly strengthens Xi’s hand if and when he does meet with Trump.

From the strategic standpoint of U.S. military readiness, Trump’s war on Iran is a disaster. Whatever benefit the war may bring to Israel, and perhaps to other U.S. allies like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, it brings none to the U.S., while the corollary consequence of degrading U.S. military capability continues the overall theme of Trump’s presidency of weakening America’s standing in the world.

*

Since the war started I’ve been reading through the flood of news and controversy, and I’m just adding my own little bucket to it here, churning through the obvious and speculating on the unknown just like everyone else. Why is it happening? What does this all mean? What happens next?

Ultimately, I think that the most important answers to those questions lie outside the Middle East, and even outside America’s strategic position in the world. Instead, they all center in the White House. China is not going to invade Taiwan, and when the war ends, the Middle East will be different, but no more relevant to the U.S. than it has ever been. Unless Trump goes entirely insane and puts troops on the ground, we probably won’t be talking much about Iran six months from now.

Part of my point there is that, despite the gravity of it, the war on Iran is a spectacle designed to capture attention away from the increasingly bad news Trump has been facing on other fronts. It’s something presidents do, sometimes. Reagan was a master of it. And, as Timothy Snyder points out, it’s part of the dictator playbook, to start a war in order to unite a nation and use it to cancel elections. I imagine that Stephen Miller has dreamed out the whole scenario, though I doubt that Trump has, since he can’t hold a sequence of things in mind anymore.

The Epstein news is edging closer and closer to Trump, still a bit on the fringes with plenty of other big names taking the fall, but enough so that it is obvious there’s plenty more. Trump’s DOJ is running what Watergate co-conspirator John Erlichman called “a modified limited hangout,” a strategy of mixing partial admissions with omissions and misdirection, and there is clear evidence that material that might damage Trump has been purposely withheld.

According to a January 2026 CNN/SSRS poll, just six percent of Americans are satisfied with the disclosures so far, while about half are not, with the remainder not caring one way or another. The pressure is coming from all sides, and the only strategy Trump has left is to try to run out the clock and hope that the topic finally dies before it jeopardizes his presidency.

So you can say that the answer to why this is happening right now is that Trump needed the distraction, and an open-ended war with Iran was about as good as it gets in that regard. I noticed how beside the point every non-Iran article I glanced at seemed, compared to the sheer weight of the material on Iran. It doesn’t matter how purposeless the war is or how clearly it was intended to distract us—we still have to focus on it.

If you just look at it in those political terms, it’s hard to know how much it will help Trump. He laid no groundwork for it, and he seems to be depending on our age-old, almost ancestral memory of Iran as our own great Satan. Certainly the litany of harms Trump cited in his taped 8-minute announcement sought to evoke that latent anger, running all the way back to the 1979 hostages and through every highlight since then.

We’ll see how that works. Most people didn’t think it was a good idea to go to war, according to pre-war polling, and the mainstream media hasn’t been shy about questioning Trump’s lack of rationale and what the unintended consequences may be. It’s an easy war to call into question, particularly with the lessons of 2003 in mind, as they surely must be at the Times, which virtually sponsored that war.

At the same time, Khamenei’s regime was abhorrent, and the scale of slaughter of protestors in January appears unprecedented—perhaps as many as 30,000 dead. Regime change in Iran is something all Americans would support—assuming that it looked like what the protestors were asking for, and not simply a more vicious version of what existed under Khamenei. So far, politicians have been cautious in their criticism, focused more on legality and Congress’s role than the action itself.

We won’t know about the political fallout for a while, and the distraction itself may not last until spring. Any longer than that, and folks will be asking “why are we in Iran?” In those terms, this will probably turn out to be an episode, not a lasting storyline in the runup to November. One hopes that some good of it may come, but that seems doubtful. Whatever victory Trump claims will probably last as long as the win in Venezuela did. We will be talking again about AI and the economy, Epstein and ICE, soon enough.

*

That’s not the most important point, I think. On February 22, after Trump tariff defeat, I published a piece with this headline: “A Sick and Dangerous Presidency.” This was the subhead: “After his defeat on tariffs, Trump’s psychic needs dictate a strike on Iran.” The piece goes on to tentatively predict a strike this weekend, based on Trump’s use of the phrase “ten days” and a Middle East trip of Marco Rubio’s scheduled for the end of the month, which seemed like a ruse to me, as it turned out to have been.

My main argument in that piece, as it has been from the very start with Trump, is that assigning rational motives to Trump’s actions is a form of sane-washing. Trump suffers from a psychiatric disorder, or disorders, that make focus and concentration difficult for him, while causing him to act in reckless and impulsive ways based on internal states. He’s prey to his moods and has a good deal of difficulty controlling his displays of anger. Whatever rationales come up in various decision-making processes, in the end, he is governed by his instincts, which are driven by his emotions rather than reason.

Under stress, and in the face of losses, individuals with these sorts of personality disorders tend to decompensate, often lashing out in ways that escalate the situation and the stress, rather than de-escalating. The ability to see things clearly and reason may be interrupted by intermittent, transient psychotic states, in which the irrational seems plausible or desirable.

It was clear to me when the Supreme Court said no to Trump’s tariffs that he had suffered a grievous psychic wound, on top of an ongoing series of setbacks across the whole range of his presidency. Reminders of the limits to his power make Trump crazy—something one sees in part in his childish fascination with gold medals and naming things and building huge edifices.

Part of the craziness involves exerting his power in order to feel it inside. The all-out attack on Iran, choosing the most dire option among the several available to him in what was, after all, entirely a war of choice, was a psychic rebalancing for Trump. No one around him—no one rational at least—thought it was a good idea. The risks are high, and the action itself is a stark betrayal of Trump’s ant-war campaign promises, while the purposes and prospective benefits are nearly invisible.

Trump wanted this war—like Greenland, he needed it “for psychological reasons.” So he got what he wanted, because there is no way to stop Trump from doing what he wants when it comes to the military. He is the Commander in Chief. And he is not a rational man. Trapped inside his own fragile, prodigiously inflated sense of self, it seems that only violence can satisfy him now.

I guess the question I have is how much more dangerous the psychotic president will become, as his defeats accumulate and the pressure increases. This is a very dangerous year. So far in Trump’s presidency, every crisis has been self-created. It frightens me to think of what will happen when we face a real crisis, as we inevitably will someday.

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