The country is beginning to wake up to the sheer level of strategic failure of Trump’s impulsive and unilateral war on Iran. Let me start with an extended quote from a weekend article in the New York Times …

It’s no great insight to say Trump’s impulsive Iran War has been a big political loser for him. Even some of his and the war’s supporters would concede that point. “Katrinas” are also wildly overdetermined and over-diagnosed in political talk. How many “Obama’s Katrinas” were there? How many did Joe Biden allegedly have? But it did occur to me this morning that it is something like that for Trump but for a specifically Trumpian reason. Donald Trump’s great super power is changing the subject. He never sticks to one racket or con until its rung out of all its juice. He’s always on to some new thing because — long before we lived in the broken world of social media — Trump has always lived in the attention economy. Attention is the great commodity. It’s even more powerful for Trump as a defensive weapon. When something isn’t going great he’s always creating some new drama, some new thing to change the subject to. But what we’re seeing now is that Trump simply cannot change the subject. The whole Iran War story is devastatingly bad for him. And he simply has no way to stop it from being the big, dominating story. He can’t make any shiny object take its place. He’s stuck, not just militarily but politically as well.

It’s not hard to look around America today and see signs of decay, corruption and decline. I thought of this yesterday when I saw this Semafor article on Egypt’s ambitious push to transition its electrical grid to renewables. The gist is that Egypt is trying to move from getting 10% to 45% of it electricity from renewables in two years. That’s a mind-bogglingly ambitious goal. But it’s not based on ideology or high-minded goals about limiting climate change or the situation you have in the U.S. where renewables — wind and solar — are somehow considered “woke.” Egypt doesn’t have that luxury, notwithstanding being geo-politically aligned with the major fossil fuel exporters. Fossil fuels are not only pricey, they make especially developing economies vulnerable to constant price shocks, whether it’s the Ukraine War, Iran War or the inflation spike coming out of COVID. Egypt is focused on wind power. And there’s no way to hit that ambitious two-year schedule without China, building China’s soft power and economic reach at the same time the U.S. seems determined to throw ours away.

I wanted to share a few more thoughts on the current ceasefire and negotiations between the United States and Iran. As I noted earlier, there’s something so rich about sending JD Vance to lead the negotiations since the vice president has bent over backwards to signal to everyone who will listen (or write stories) that he was absolutely, positively against the war in the first place. President Trump has sent Vance to conduct and really own negotiations that almost certainly wouldn’t go well for the United States.

This cannot be an accident.

I started this post before the news broke that the first attempt at negotiations had broken down or, at least for now, had failed. That news just tightened the box into which Trump placed Vance. If the war resumes, Vance owns that continuation because he walked away from the negotiating table. It’s almost as though he gave the original order. If the negotiations fail, that’s on Vance too.

So where are we now?

Here are a few additional thoughts about the state of the war between the U.S. (and Israel) and Iran.

First, we had news from Reuters over the weekend that the U.S. and Iran might be on the brink of a ceasefire agreement, maybe as soon as Monday. It now seems like that was yet another example of a mix of over-optimism from broker countries trying to bring the sides together and, even more, the White House trying yet again to force a quick-to-fade market bounce. Yesterday afternoon I saw this piece in Haaretz which says that Pakistan (a lead country trying to broker a deal between the two sides) believes that Iran is now under the effective control of the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, that this commander thinks Iran is winning and that he’s not willing to compromise on Iran’s key demands or accede to the United States’. It also notes that Pakistan thinks the U.S. is more eager for a deal than Iran.

I don’t think you need to be Pakistan to see that last point. Everything President Trump does sends that message. Now, in the wake of the Trump’s threat to “end” Iranian civilization tonight, Iran has reportedly cut off participation in ceasefire talks with the U.S..

A few moments ago I saw this snippet in the Times: