Yesterday, I wrote that President Trump was moonwalking out of his war in Iran. Then later that afternoon and last night he made a series of highly bellicose and bombastic statements that the war is only getting started, and he may destroy Iran altogether as a people, as a nation.
Today, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth I think told us the story because now he’s bringing his daily briefing in line with Trump‘s idea that this war is pretty much over. A couple more hard-core days and it’s gonna be done. So which is happening here? I think we can really see by the oil futures. Oil went up dramatically over the weekend. I believe it briefly got up to over $110 a barrel and then it fell yesterday when Trump made these statements that the war is pretty much over we’re gonna be wrapping it up, and in anticipation of G7 nations releasing oil reserves. Now today it’s continuing that and it’s fallen significantly below $80, so investors think that Trump is going full taco here i.e. Trump always chickens out.
What does clearly mean though? Is it that regime change, Trump‘s demand for unconditional surrender, is done? Iran is clearly taking a huge beating to its civilian and military infrastructure, but the clerical regime in Iran has made very clear that they’re not even close to giving up. The selection of Khameni’s son is, if anything, a statement of defiance, and given that they have held on as long as they have, it seems basically impossible to imagine that they are going to give up or make major concessions now that Trump is signaling that he’s tired of this, not even two weeks into the war.
There’s another question I wanted to address that one of our readers asked. This reader said, For all the specific policy that commentators are debating, they’re doing so on the basis of the idea that Iran, even if it didn’t pose an eminent threat, posed some big threat to the United States and/or to Israel. Am I missing something? The answer is I don’t think you’re missing anything at all. The reason this is happening is not because Iran is strong or is posing some imminent threat to anybody. Iran is incredibly weak. If anything, their deterrence is shattered between the damage to their missile program and their military infrastructure, and especially to their proxies around the Middle East. They are down. They are on their back. So this is happening not because Iran is strong, but because they are weak. And it seems to the people who made the decision to go to war that they may be so weak that the regime might actually be overthrown, and even if it’s not overthrown, they are so weak that they really can’t retaliate in any meaningful way. Everything we’ve seen backs up that assumption. Yes, they’re firing missiles and drones into the neighboring states, but they’re not really able to do major damage anywhere, and I mean major damage that is gonna knock someone out of the war.
It’s Trump so obviously anything could change but I think right now it’s clear that Trump does not have the stomach for a true regime change war, and he’s going to try to get out of this as quickly as he can. The question is can he actually do so fast enough, not look completely stupid and still preserve some idea that the U.S. succeeded at whatever it was we were trying to do?