Khamenei, One of Most Evil People in History, is Dead
POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Wednesday, September 16, 2026 18:15
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Quote:I read this before the Iraq Invasion:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I see we cross posted and, shockingly, we agree.
But I have the strange suspicion that the only reason you object to war with Iran is bc TRUMP started it, and if some Dem had done the same you'd be for it.
The Fifty-First State?
Going to war with Iraq would mean shouldering all the responsibilities of an occupying power the moment victory was achieved. These would include running the economy, keeping domestic peace, and protecting Iraq's borders—and doing it all for years, or perhaps decades. Are we ready for this long-term relationship?
By James Fallows
November 2002 Issue
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/11/the-fifty-first-s
tate/302612/
Signym, the article suggested the cost for Iraq would be many $billions. Actual costs were many $trillions with a T.
The True Cost of the Iraq War: $3 Trillion and Beyond
https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/true-cost-iraq-war-3-trillion
-and-beyond
Signym, I strongly disapprove of the government starting projects like the very optional wars on Iran, Vietnam, and Iraq unless the cost is known. WWII? That was not optional for the US government. At the time, the Republicans in Congress started investigating President FDR, convinced the war was optional because FDR had tricked the Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbor. https://www.senate.gov/about/powers-procedures/investigations/pearl-ha
rbor.htm
Ukraine War? That was not optional for the Ukrainian government. If the US government did NOT want Russia to eventually invade the rest of Eastern Europe, that war wasn't optional for the US, regardless of the cost.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Good luck, Shit Golem.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I see we cross posted and, shockingly, we agree.
But I have the strange suspicion that the only reason you object to war with Iran is bc TRUMP started it, and if some Dem had done the same you'd be for it.
SECOND I read this before the Iraq Invasion:
The Fifty-First State?
Going to war with Iraq would mean shouldering all the responsibilities of an occupying power the moment victory was achieved. These would include running the economy, keeping domestic peace, and protecting Iraq's borders—and doing it all for years, or perhaps decades. Are we ready for this long-term relationship?
By James Fallows
November 2002 Issue
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/11/the-fifty-first-s
tate/302612/
Signym, the article suggested the cost for Iraq would be many $billions. Actual costs were many $trillions with a T.
The True Cost of the Iraq War: $3 Trillion and Beyond
https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/true-cost-iraq-war-3-trillion
-and-beyond
Signym, I strongly disapprove of the government starting projects like the very optional wars on Iran, Vietnam, and Iraq unless the cost is known.
I strongly object to optional wars no matter what the cost.
Considering that we actually provoked Russia by breaking our "not one inch eastward" promise and threatening Russia's security, after we had pillaged it for 10 years, and breaking SEVERAL peace agreements about Ukraine, the war in Ukraine is 100% optional.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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Quote:You are joking, right? Because Poland joins NATO, Russia has to attack Ukraine? That makes zero sense for Russia. This makes sense: Because Poland joins NATO, Russia has to attack Poland. Instead of doing the sensible thing, Russia attacked Ukraine because Putin believed he'd win in a day, but years later he is in the same position Trump is in for attacking Iran with the solid conviction he'd win in a day or two.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I strongly object to optional wars no matter what the cost.
Considering that we actually provoked Russia by breaking our "not one inch eastward" promise and threatening Russia's security, after we had pillaged it for 10 years, and breaking SEVERAL peace agreements about Ukraine, the war in Ukraine is 100% optional.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Iran's parliament is considering an agreement with Oman to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. The proposal would ban ships connected to the U.S., Israel and other "hostile countries" from the key waterway until Iran receives compensation for war damages. Commercial vessels passing through the strait would be subject to fees of up to 7% of cargo value and a 20% fine for noncompliance. On Wednesday, Iran said it was finalizing a shipping route agreement with Oman, a U.S. ally. The Trump administration disputes Iran's characterization of the agreement, maintaining that the U.S. currently controls the strait through its naval blockade of Iran. Oman has not commented.
Trump's public statements about progress in negotiations between the U.S. and Iran don't seem to align with the reality of what is understood by Iranians. Trump is facing significant pressure to end the war, but Iran remains unyielding despite military pressure from the U.S., and it's making its own demands regarding the Strait. The stalemate has raised concerns from observers that the U.S. may have to accept terms worse than the previous status quo, which was free movement through the Strait. Current negotiations are also focused on the waterway reopening rather than issues like uranium enrichment, which Trump originally cited as justification for the war.
https://www.npr.org/2026/08/07/g-s1-137730/up-first-newsletter-trump-b
irthright-citizenship-iran-oman-strait-of-hormuz-anthony-fauci-mitch-mcconnell
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Iran plots to deal Trump a blow in midterms by keeping him entangled in war
By dragging out talks, Tehran aims to damage the US president politically in the hope of inflicting the same ruinous blow on his presidency as Jimmy Carter suffered over the 1979-81 US embassy hostage crisis.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/aug/07/iran-war-trump-midterm-b
allot
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:You are joking, right? Because Poland joins NATO, Russia has to attack Ukraine? That makes zero sense for Russia. This makes sense: Because Poland joins NATO, Russia has to attack Poland. Instead of doing the sensible thing, Russia attacked Ukraine because Putin believed he'd win in a day, but years later he is in the same position Trump is in for attacking Iran with the solid conviction he'd win in a day or two.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I strongly object to optional wars no matter what the cost.
Considering that we actually provoked Russia by breaking our "not one inch eastward" promise and threatening Russia's security, after we had pillaged it for 10 years, and breaking SEVERAL peace agreements about Ukraine, the war in Ukraine is 100% optional.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
You're evil and, worse, stupid.
Because POLAND HAS A US MISSILE BASE on Russia's border. You think they want more US missile bases in Ukraine? Would we want Russian missile bases in Mexico?
Seriously, STUPID, your brain is fucked.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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Shit Golems don't have brains.
Just more shit.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Trump says he wants the Strait of Hormuz to be a U.S. territory
By Amin Khodadadi | Aug. 15, 2026, 5:47 AM CDT
https://www.nbcnews.com/world/iran/iran-rejects-delusions-trump-strait
-hormuz-us-territory-rcna592666
Iran called on the U.S. to “accept the reality of defeat and stop indulging in delusions” after President Donald Trump suggested that he would soon declare the Strait of Hormuz as a “territory of the United States.”
The crucial waterway that handled one-fifth of the world’s oil before the war “cannot be seized with a tweet, nor with an aircraft carrier, nor by issuing an order, nor through an election speech,” Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi said in a post on X early Saturday.
“This strait will only be opened and closed under Iran’s command, and as long as you do not accept the reality of defeat and stop indulging in delusions, Iran will continue to enforce the blockade,” he added.
With oil tanker traffic through the strategic strait at a trickle and peace talks between the U.S. and Iran at an impasse, there are few signs that the war, launched on Feb. 28, is close to being over.
A 60-day negotiating period intended to hammer out a deal to end the conflict, set when Trump and Tehran signed a memorandum of understanding in mid-June, ends on Monday with few direct negotiations having taken place.
Speaking Friday at a police academy in Nassau County, New York, Trump said Iran was being “very badly defeated,” and once victory was secured, “pretty soon, I’ll be declaring the Hormuz Strait a territory of the United States.”
. . .
Vice President JD Vance, who has been tasked with leading negotiations to end the war, told Fox News on Thursday that the number one goal was to “keep oil and gas cheap for Americans all over our country.” He added that “obviously goal No. 2 is ensure that Iran never gets a nuclear weapon.” Tehran has repeatedly insisted it has no desire to develop one.
Trump and his team have offered various reasons for conflict, initially saying they wanted to support mass anti-government protests, before prioritizing a desire to end Iran’s nuclear program and topple the hardline Islamic regime.
In an interview with Iran’s Shahrara News published Friday, the country’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said there were “no negotiations currently taking place between Tehran and Washington.”
Qatar and Pakistan, as mediators, were exchanging messages and remained in contact with Iran, “but this does not at all constitute negotiations,” he said. “No decision has yet been taken to resume talks with America.”
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The Misery Will Continue Until Morale Improves
Why Trump is eviscerating the military
Paul Krugman
Aug 17, 2026
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-misery-will-continue-until-mora
le
According to an old military maxim, amateurs talk about strategy, professionals talk about logistics. But these days we need a third category: Immature, insecure guys think that war is about acting tough and looking cool.
Hi, Paul Krugman with a podcast update for today. I want to weigh in on the incredible rash of stories about how Trump and company are eviscerating the military. It is truly remarkable. If there’s one thing that we thought that the United States was still kind of number one at, it was that we had the world’s premier military. Now, of course, we managed to rather quickly effectively lose the war with Iran, although current management will never admit it.
But also just a series of stories, some of them related to that war, some of them going beyond and to other areas that just are truly shocking, even for somebody like me, who had no expectation that this administration would be doing any good for the nation.
Just to remember the story: So first we had the big warning that the U.S. military was basically running out of ammunition. That the precision missiles that are so essential to waging war were largely gone, expended unproductively against Iran. And clearly the cost benefit calculus was a disaster because the Iranians were sending cheap drones and we were using multi-million dollar weapons in an attempt to counter them.
After that, we got the story about the horrific conditions on board the USS Lincoln, the aircraft carrier that’s been stationed for a very long time without, it appears, adequate resupply and with toilets flooding. Apparently just horrific conditions, which turn out to be not unique to that ship: Other ships are having problems. There’s the USS Boxer, an amphibious assault ship, which apparently has run out of feminine hygiene products, among other things.
Okay, so we have those horrific stories. And then we have the stories about Trump intervening. Demanding, first, that the Navy construct a whole new class of ships, Trump-class battleships, which are useless and would be sitting ducks. Then demanding that the Navy replace modern catapults with steam catapults, which he thinks are cooler. And then demanding that they relocate the command tower on aircraft carriers because he wants them to look more like the way they looked during World War II.
Is this America? I mean, think about the American way of war. We are not a warrior nation, which is fine. We are a lot of other things.
We were a nation that was supreme in the arts of peace. We were a nation of know-how. America won its wars by doing the arts of peace right, by building better and more stuff than other countries. By getting our act together in ways that didn’t necessarily involve fighting.
Of course, you always need courageous warriors. You always need people able and willing to risk death in the service of their nation. But what America was supreme at was logistics. If you ask how did America and its allies pull off D-Day, well, a lot of it was being able to deliver supplies to the beaches of Normandy in a way that the Germans never thought was possible.
America was always the place, the country that was really good at logistics. For us to be not feeding our sailors, not able to keep ships that are not, after all, under fire all the time, to keep the plumbing working, that is incredible.
The idea that the president is imposing his personal aesthetic preferences to undo design decisions that were made by military professionals is also basically incredible.
Okay, what is this all about? And what happened? Some of it is specifically military, but mostly it’s not. I think these military failings should be put in the same context as the frantic and disastrous destruction and redesign of Washington, D.C. The demolition of the East Wing. The disastrous attempt to refurbish the reflecting pool to reflect T
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The Incoherence of Trump’s Past Week of Foreign Policy
As the war with Iran drags on, the president is in disagreement with the vice president, military leaders, and long-standing American allies.
By David A. Graham | August 17, 2026, 5:36 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/2026/08/trump-foreign-policy-i
ncoherence-iran/688312/
A memorandum of understanding between Iran and the United States, reached in June and intended to provide breathing room to end the conflict between the two countries, expired today. The agreement will be little missed: A cease-fire had effectively ended within about three weeks of its signing, and the MOU had failed to produce fruitful negotiations or a real opening of the Strait of Hormuz.
The president’s actions in the days leading up to the deadline demonstrate that his approach to the world, always contingent and improvisational, has lost its last shred of coherence. The White House cannot agree on the goals of the Iran war, much less on how to achieve them. The president is clashing with long-standing allies, in conflict with his vice president on the aims of the war, and publicly at odds with uniformed commanders over conditions for American troops stationed abroad.
Trump on Friday called on Americans to accept higher gasoline prices as the cost of preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. He posted this morning that the “number one Goal is, and always will be, that Iran cannot have, in any way, shape, or form, a Nuclear Weapon”—even though his administration assessed before the war that Iran was not actively building weapons, even though the White House hasn’t offered any explanation for how the war will prevent the regime from restarting its weapons program, and even though the war may make Iran’s desire for a nuclear arsenal only more urgent. Meanwhile, Vice President Vance says that lowering fuel prices is actually now “goal No. 1” of the war.
In practice, the real aim of any diplomatic or military action now is resuming ship traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran seized early in the conflict—a risk foreseen by many analysts but not by Trump. For weeks now, Trump’s basic choice has been clear: Either launch a much larger military operation, including ground troops, or else surrender de facto control of the strait permanently.
The president refuses to accept this. He continues to complain that the Iranians are bad-faith negotiators, which is surely true but was well known before the war. During a speech on Friday, Trump said that “pretty soon, I’ll be declaring the Hormuz Strait a territory of the United States.” This is dishonest, delusional, or both. Such a declaration would contradict Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s insistence on the neutrality of the strait as well as Trump’s repeated statements that the U.S. should not act as a global policeman. But it’s also beside the point, because the United States has no means to control the strait.
The conditions for those U.S. troops already in the region are reportedly awful. Aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, which has been at sea for nearly nine months, sailors report shortages of basic supplies, malfunctioning systems, and faltering mental health. When Trump was asked Friday about service members’ families who have publicly voiced their worries, he insisted that they were not concerned: “No, they’re not,” he said, adding that the ship’s deployment had not gone on “nearly long enough” yet. In a sign that military brass takes these worries seriously, the admiral overseeing the war visited the carrier this weekend and acknowledged mental-health issues.
With the U.S. unwilling or unable to break the Hormuz deadlock, Oman has embarked on negotiations with Iran to create a toll system for ships. This morning, Trump threatened to expand the war with strikes against that country. “If Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the shit out of them,” he told Fox News. Trump’s frustration with Oman is understandable, yet a threat to attack a venerable regional ally
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‘There is no breaking point’: The problem with Trump’s plan to economically strangle Iran
As the administration promises unprecedented economic isolation, former US officials and Iran experts warn Tehran may be willing to absorb far more pain than Washington anticipates.
By Megan Messerly and Sam Sutton | August 18, 2026 04:06 PM EDT
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/08/18/there-no-breaking-point-probl
em-with-trumps-plan-teconomically-strangle-iran-01040781
President Donald Trump is waiting for Iran to cave to his economic pressure. Tehran may be willing to wait even longer.
Even as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent promises a level of economic isolation “never seen before,” former Trump administration officials, U.S. ambassadors and other Middle East experts are skeptical that tightening the economic vise will force Iran to relinquish its desire to toll ships passing through the State of Hormuz and make the other concessions Trump is demanding to bring an end to the war.
“It’s an attrition campaign, and I am sure Treasury tweaks this or that to fill gaps or expand coverage of sanctions,” said James Jeffrey, a former ambassador who served in the Middle East during three presidential administrations, including Trump’s first term. “But, it’s hard to believe [there will be] something decisive after 20 years of U.S. sanctions and Iranian experience of going around them.”
It’s an acknowledgement that underscores the asymmetry of the situation. The Trump administration is staring down a consequential midterm election amid an unpopular war that has sent oil prices back up to roughly $90 a barrel and helped push long-term borrowing costs to their highest level in nearly two decades as hope dims that a peace deal is near.
Iran’s leaders, meanwhile, see the conflict as existential, giving Tehran reason to absorb the extraordinary economic pain rather than accept terms it believes could imperil the regime — especially as U.S. inflation remains elevated and treasuries sell off.
The yield on 30-year U.S. government bonds, a figure Trump has in the past been attuned to, jumped on Tuesday to its highest level since just before the global financial crisis.
The increase in the yield to its highest level in nearly two decades isn’t solely because of the six-month war; global fuel shortages and broader instability have kept energy prices higher for longer, increasing the threat of persistent inflation. And that’s heaped even more risk on global bond markets that have repeatedly blanched at Trump-related shocks.
“We are in a situation where we’re spending more and more to finance more and more,” said Julia Coronado, founder of MacroPolicy Perspectives. And the war has created “a riskier world full of more frictions, full of more supply shocks.”
Iran’s outsized incentive to muscle through the pain is partly why some former administration officials doubt that the naval blockade, while unprecedented in its scale in the modern era or whatever new strategies Bessent may unveil, will change Iran’s calculus.
“I think the economic pressure would need to hit them in new ways we haven’t seen so far to change the mindset of the regime,” said one former Trump administration official, granted anonymity to candidly assess the impact of the U.S.’s economic pressure campaign.
The administration has yet to indicate what further action it plans to take, but options include going after major Chinese banks that facilitate Iran’s oil trade, expand secondary sanctions on countries doing business with Iran and confiscating Iranian assets under U.S. jurisdiction instead of just freezing them.
Iranian leaders publicly mocked U.S. efforts to sanction them into submission.
“Americans think squeezing Iran harder will win concessions that were never part of the agreement,” Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of Iran’s parliament, posted on X Tuesday.
“Bessent and [Defense Secretary Pete] Hegseth are way out of their league,” he wrote. “Stop waiting for the clown crew to pull a rabbit out of their hat and clean up the
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Midweek Update #24: The USA Is Not A Serious Country
In Strategy And Planning The USA Is A Self-Destructive Mess: Here Is A Short-Term Way To Stop The Bleeding
By Phillips P. OBrien
Aug 19, 2026
https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/midweek-update-24-the-usa-is-no
t
The USA in many ways has not been a serious country during this entire Iran War. It started it without a strategy, with no match between ways, ends and means, and it has been going downhill since then. It is now fighting this war simply because it has no idea what else to do, and does not have the courage to admit that it has failed.
And this week stories came out that indicated that things are heading in the wrong direction. The President is shaping the military in his own image, which means corrupt, gaudy and heading towards bankruptcy. What we are seeing is not just weakening the USA now, it will weaken the USA for years, maybe decades going forward. The only way to keep it from spiraling out of control is for drastic action now, which is to put much of the military in cold storage until a new administration takes power. More on that below.
Also, a quick note. I often say the “USA” instead of the “Trump Administration”, and that can make some people upset. They say, and I understand the emotion behind this, that what we are seeing is Trump in action, not the USA. However, as I think I have said before, blaming Trump and absolving the country seems to me at least to be dangerous and wrong. The American people chose Trump as their leader by solid majorities in the electoral college and a clear plurality in the popular vote. And they did this almost four years after he tried to block a free and fair election from being finalized on January 6, 2021. The American people have also voted for the Congress that approved his Cabinet members and is allowing him to do what he is doing.
This is the US government, chosen willingly by the American people, in action. Not acknowledging that is dodging the reality that the American people are ultimately responsible for this. So, I will keep referring to the action of the administration as that of the USA—because it is the truth and it is important to ultimately remember why this came about. America chose to do this to itself.
And that means the American people ultimately chose to make the USA not a serious country. Understanding that is maybe the key step to changing the situation.
The USA Is Engaged In A War With No Purpose
The USA is still engaged in a war (a blockade is an act of war) which has not the slightest purpose beyond the ego of the commander in chief. The war has already weakened the country and the longer it goes on, the weaker the country will become.
Over the last week, the pointlessness and lack of direction of the war was once again made brutally clear. First it was said that in Trump’s desire to get out of the war with something, he was willing to give up any nuclear demands and focus on reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Here was what the White House was leaking on the question to the Wall Street Journal just over a week ago.
Quote:Then two days ago he came out with this.
1. Trump thought opening the Strait of Hormuz was imminent. Iran had other plans.
President Trump had been laying the groundwork to declare victory in the Iran war if Tehran fully reopened the Strait of Hormuz—even privately floating to senior aides that he’s willing to walk away without a nuclear deal. But Iran’s recent demand for billions in reparations and a total U.S. troop withdrawal has thrown those plans into chaos. The recent hardline shift shows how Tehran is narrowing the White House’s options to wrap up the conflict ahead of the midterms.
Quote:Of course, Trump cannot even get the Strait open (in
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
The number one Goal is, and always will be, that Iran cannot have, in any way, shape, or form, a Nuclear Weapon. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP
6.84k ReTruths 32.5k Likes
Aug 17, 2026,11:18 AM
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Actually, the interesting thing is that Iran is doing its best to provoke the USA into a shooting war, AGAIN, bc Iran knows that it can win a short, sharp war. That would demonstrate our military impotence in the ME and cause our Mideast allies petrodollar vassals to rethink their dependence on us and the USD. It would also once again remind Iranians that the USA is not their friend.
Meanwhile, other than volleys of Trump Truth Social threats, the USA refuses to actively reengage. Smart move.
Now it's a question of who will outlast who, financially and economically.
The USA seems to be applying financial pressure on Iran. The UAE broke financial services to Iran (UAE was Iran's unofficial conduit to western banks. Supposedly the IRGC and its officers and politicians stashed their wealth there). In addition the USA is attempting to help ships thru the Omani route.
Iran needs to maintain tight control of the Straits of Hormuz. That's really the only leverage they have. The collective West lasted thru the oil/diesel shortage far longer than anyone expected, except for Japan and S Korea. For USD financial markets, Japan's yen weakness can translate to weakness here. That's the nearest term risk the USD faces.
Politically, economically, and financially, Iran intends to last until our November election.
Kind of a horse race to see who gets to the finish line first.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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Donald Trump Effectively Just Told Iran to Get a Nuclear Weapon
He may also have blurted out classified information about North Korea.
By Tom Nichols | August 20, 2026, 12:54 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/08/trump-north-korean-iran-nucl
ear-weapons/688339/
Anyone can get distracted now and then, and say things out loud he or she probably shouldn’t say. Perhaps an excited friend lets on about a surprise party, or a co-worker dishes up some unseemly office gossip. Or, if you’re the president of the United States, you might reveal some numbers about an adversary’s nuclear arsenal and then admit that those weapons, even a relatively small number of them, are pretty darn useful.
Donald Trump made this impromptu foray into nuclear-deterrence issues yesterday when he was inspecting the destruction he’s inflicted on the White House East Wing. A reporter asked whether he was again exchanging letters with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, a reference to the president’s earlier epistolary bromance with Pyongyang’s dictator. “I can’t tell you that,” Trump responded. “But I get along with him. And you know what? The fact that I get along with him, that’s a good thing. Not a bad thing.”
It’s not always a “good thing” to “get along with” a murderous autocrat who runs a country that is functionally a prison camp, especially one with a nuclear arsenal. The size of that arsenal is a tightly held secret in Pyongyang, but it is not inconsequential: Experts working from open sources have made various guesses, usually in the range of roughly 60 thermonuclear weapons.
Trump, however, blurted out an exact tally. “He has 57 very powerful nuclear weapons,” the president said. That’s a pretty specific number; the intelligence community almost never issues such precise figures, instead offering ranges of plausible guesses. Trump may be making it up out of nowhere, or perhaps talking about some subset of Pyongyang’s arsenal, as the arms-control expert Jeffrey Lewis suggested, or he’s garbling something he saw in a classified setting and didn’t understand. In the end, Lewis mused in a series of posts on social media, “Trump is trying to tell us a secret he heard, but for the life of me I can’t figure out what it means.”
Clearly, Trump has been getting briefed on developments about the North Korean nuclear inventory. And yet, he seems strangely unconcerned. The stockpile might be small, but it is in the hands of a dangerous regime. Even at its current estimated size, the Hermit Kingdom’s arsenal can kill tens of millions of people in Asia; soon enough, the North Koreans may be able to reach the United States with nuclear-armed long-range missiles.
The president, however, seemed more concerned with blaming other chief executives for the situation, and he assured everyone that all was well.
Quote:“Smart” and “dumb” need a bit of unpacking here, of course. When Trump says “smart,” he means me, and when he says “dumb” he means not me. What he seems to be implying is that although North Korea’s nuclear arsenal is very dangerous, he has no intention of messing with either the bombs or the regime and that future presidents would be fools to do otherwise.
Should have never allowed it to happen. They should have never allowed it. If I were president, I wouldn’t have allowed it. But he’s got ’em. I get along with him very well. I can't let Iran have a nuclear weapon. And I know Kim Jong Un very well, and he's gonna be fine. As long as we have a smart president, he’s going to be fine. If we have a dumb president, then he’s probably not gonna be so fine.
Trump never says how he would have stopped North Korea’s nuclear program, and despite his current equanimity about North Korea’s nukes, he has emphasized that Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon, because … well, his reasoning on this double standard isn’t clear. Is it because the North Koreans—fighting alongside Russia in the middle of Europe, sharing missile technology with U.S. enemies, and running giant crypto scams—are som
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Quote:
Who Really Drives Global Terrorism? Internal US Govt Data Offers A Surprising Answer
Friday, Aug 21, 2026 - 08:25 PM
Authored by Larry Johnson via Sonar21.com
Every administration reaches for the same line. Iran, we are told, is the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism — a claim now central to the case for war. It carries the weight of an official designation: Iran has sat on the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism since January 19, 1984, the longest-running designation currently on the books, alongside Cuba, North Korea, and Syria. The supporting figures get repeated as settled fact — more than a billion dollars a year in terror financing, and somewhere between 140,000 and 185,000 IRGC-Quds Force partner fighters spread across Afghanistan, Gaza, Lebanon, Pakistan, Syria, and Yemen.
The problem is that the government's own record doesn't back the headline. The place to test the claim is the data the State Department itself publishes — the statistical annex to Country Reports on Terrorism, and before it Patterns of Global Terrorism, the congressionally mandated series that has catalogued international terrorist incidents year by year since 1990. When you actually read those tables, a different picture emerges from the one sold on cable news.
Who commits the attacks
The annex doesn’t sort attacks by sect, but it doesn’t need to. The identity of the top perpetrator groups tells the story on its own. Year after year across 2004–2023, the most active and lethal groups are Sunni: the Taliban, ISIS, Boko Haram, al-Qaeda and its affiliates, al-Shabaab, the TTP. On the order of nine in ten attacks in the reporting trace back to Sunni extremist actors operating out of the Salafi-jihadist tradition. None of them answer to Tehran. Most regard Shia Muslims — Iran very much included — as heretics, and target them accordingly. ISIS has spent years at open war with Iran and its allies.
A separate French dataset, compiled by FONDAPOL over a longer 1979–April 2024 window, lands in the same place. The five deadliest Islamist groups over that period account for better than 80 percent of all victims of Islamist terrorism — and every one of the five is Sunni: the Taliban, ISIS, Boko Haram, al-Shabaab, and al-Qaeda.
Where are the Iran-linked groups in all this? Largely absent from the top of the tables. Hezbollah and the Iran-aligned militias tend not to appear, in part because their operations are directed mainly at military forces rather than civilians, which places them outside the working definition of terrorism the reports use. The Houthis are the main Shia-linked group to surface in recent editions, and only as a small share of the total.
It is only in 2023 that three groups in Iran’s orbit — the Houthis, Hamas, and Hezbollah — break into the top ten at all. They do so because of their attacks on Israel, and those attacks were aimed primarily at military targets. Before 2023, neither Hamas nor Hezbollah ranked among the groups responsible for the most attacks worldwide. That is a remarkable fact for two organizations routinely described as among the planet’s most prolific terrorists.
The Israeli numbers
Take the definition of terrorism that Benjamin Netanyahu himself uses — violence against civilians for political ends — and apply it to Israel’s own government data, drawn from the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s record of victims of Palestinian violence covering 2000 through April 2024. (That dataset predates and excludes the October 7, 2023 attack.)
Two things stand out. First, Palestinian attacks have trended downward since 2003. The peak sits in the 2000–2005 window — the Second Intifada. Across the full 24 years, 1,552 Israelis were killed and 5,595 wounded, and the violence is heavily concentrated in that early-2000s spike: roughly 76 percent of the deaths and 92 percent of the wounded fall within the Second Intifada years. Second, Hamas is not the terrorist engine the public imagination ma
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Quote:Donald Trump has made the world go nuclear
Originally posted by second:
Donald Trump Effectively Just Told Iran to Get a Nuclear Weapon
The president's behavior toward Iran and North Korea has incentivized other countries to develop nuclear weapons
By Heather Digby Parton | August 23, 2026 6:45AM (EDT)
https://www.salon.com/2026/08/23/donald-trump-has-made-the-world-go-nu
clear/
Donald Trump has always believed himself to be an expert at what he calls “nuclear,” due to the fact that his uncle, John Trump, was a physicist who taught at MIT. The president has made it clear on numerous occasions that his uncle’s expertise transferred to him due to the Trump family’s superior genes.
It’s too bad Dr. Trump died in 1985, because the president could use a refresher course on the subject. He certainly hasn’t learned anything new by virtue of the Oval Office.
We may never fully know what led Trump to start his war with Iran, which has been going on for nearly six months. Whether he was feeling his oats after the successful kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro or by Israel’s assurances that the Iranian regime was so weak it would crumble quickly under American bombardment, Trump decided to make the move on impulse without having a specific goal or strategy other than “winning.”
As the war has dragged on, Trump’s stated motives for the offensive have also changed. First, the administration claimed he wanted to liberate the Iranian people. Then it became regime change, then removing Iran’s capability to threaten its neighbors and finally, almost as an afterthought, the president said it was to prevent them from developing a nuclear weapon. Understandably, the administration was reluctant to use that rationale at first since Trump had already declared that along with Israel, he had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program following joint airstrikes in 2025. But as the war has progressed into a standoff over the Strait of Hormuz, through which oil was flowing freely before it began, the issue of nuclear weapons is all they have left to explain the debacle.
Trump and administration officials have taken to declaring that the economic sacrifices Americans are making for his war are patriotic gestures to ensure that Iran will never have a nuclear weapon — a pledge that had already been successfully obtained through the 2015 Iran nuclear deal negotiated under President Barack Obama, which Trump tore up upon taking office the first time, and then supposedly obtained again through the force of several bunker-buster bombs in 2025. According to the polls, most Americans aren’t buying that claim.
At the same time, still sulking that U.S. allies didn’t rush to jump into his Iran quagmire, Trump has decided to pick up where he left off in 2020 with his alleged good pal Kim Jong Un and punish America’s longtime ally South Korea by canceling some military exercises after the country, in his words, “refus[ed] to join us in the Denuclearization of the Islamic Republic of Iran.” Anyone else would have seen how insensitive such a comment would be to a country that has been forced to stand by as the unhinged, totalitarian dictatorship to its north built up a nuclear arsenal aimed at them and their allies, all while the U.S. brayed about “denuclearization.”
In 2006 it was confirmed that North Korea had successfully conducted an underground nuclear test and was on its way to building a bomb. By the time Trump took office in 2017, according to estimates, the country had enough fissile material for 60 weapons and they were rapidly developing a ballistic missile program. At first Trump did his usual insult-and-threat routine, and he then hit upon the idea that he could personally talk Kim out of the program. The famous bromance began.
When Trump held his first summit with the North Korean leader, giving him the international prestige he had always wanted while getting nothing in return, the president was asked how long he thought it would take for North Korea to denuclearize. “Well
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Iran Unleashed
The dominant power in the Middle East from now on will not be the U.S. or Israel but Iran.
By Robert Kagan | August 23, 2026, 7 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/2026/08/iran-middle-east-pow
er/688374/
For years, Iran confronted a balance of power in the Middle East that tilted against it. The region was dominated by a hostile American superpower, a nuclear-armed and militarily superior Israel, and significant local actors—Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates—that were strategically and economically aligned with the United States.
Today finds Iran in entirely new circumstances. It has gone head-to-head with the superpower and Israel, withstood a pounding from their most advanced weapons, and more than survived. As a result, Iran has, with American help, completely reconfigured the power structure of the Middle East and the Persian Gulf. The dominant power in the region going forward will be Iran, not the U.S. or Israel. Neighboring countries are already making their adjustments to this new reality. More distant powers will too. For years, the world has been dealing with an Iran constrained. It will now discover what Iran unleashed looks like.
Iran doesn’t need a deal with the United States. The common assumption that a weak and impoverished Iran would eventually have to make some accommodation to American power, open the Strait of Hormuz, and set about tending to its badly damaged economy has proved mistaken. The Islamic Republic has rarely appeared weaker or more vulnerable than it has over the past two years. Last February, President Trump renewed his “maximum pressure” campaign of international sanctions, which severely damaged Iran’s already-weak economy and cut billions of dollars in state revenues. Israel and the United States then launched the 12-day war that June to destroy Iranian nuclear facilities. The war significantly damaged Iran’s program and revealed just how vulnerable the country was to Israeli and American strikes. Then, in February, the United States and Israel launched the most recent war with the killing of the regime’s supreme leader and the great majority of its senior officials, followed by more than five weeks of unremitting attacks on Iranian military capabilities.
Yet through all of this, the regime has survived and made no concessions. On the contrary, Iran exposed America’s Achilles’ heel: the vulnerability of Iran’s neighbors. A major turning point came in mid-March, when Israel attacked Iran’s South Pars gas field, and Iran retaliated against Qatar’s Ras Laffan complex, the world’s largest liquefied-natural-gas facility. The attack showed that although Iran obviously could not defeat the United States in an air war, Iranian missiles and drones could inflict enough damage on the oil-and-gas infrastructure of the Gulf to plunge the world into a prolonged economic crisis. The Gulf States understood this immediately, and so did Trump. He halted attacks on Iranian energy targets, ordered a reluctant Israel to do the same, and soon brought the larger campaign to a stop without extracting a single Iranian concession. Ever since, and despite many threats, Trump has not once ordered another strike against Iranian energy infrastructure.
This alone was enough to alter the balance of leverage between Iran and the United States. From April through last month, Trump repeatedly threatened to launch another massive attack against Iran. Each time, Iran threatened retaliation, Gulf States warned of the consequences, and Trump backed off. By his third or fourth bluff, Tehran had reason to conclude that the United States was no longer prepared to follow Iran up the ladder of escalation. Trump made this clear when he noted in mid-June that continuing the war would lead to “economic catastrophe,” possibly even a “depression,” and that he did not want to become President Herbert Hoover. Ever since, Trump has been trying, with notable desperation, to end the conflict.
The memorandum of understanding that the U.S. and Iran adopted in June reflected t
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Losing the Iran War: The Economic Front
The D in Bessent’s “D-Day” stands for Dud
By Paul Krugman | Aug 25, 2026
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/losing-the-iran-war-the-economic
Now it’s true that the U.S. Navy has mostly blocked Iranian oil exports. This means that Iran is losing its main source of export revenue. In 2025, that revenue amounted to about $45 billion.
That is a lot of money from Iran’s point of view — around 7 percent of the country’s 2025 GDP. It is, however, only about 0.2 percent of China’s GDP.
Why is China relevant? Well, because the Chinese are obviously enjoying great geopolitical benefits from Trump’s self-inflicted quagmire in Iran. And it would cost them very little, from their point of view, to keep us stuck in the quagmire by supplying the Iranian regime with enough money to finance purchases of essential imports.
Can’t the U.S. blockade Iranian imports too? No. Lucian Truscott has a very good article explaining how fundamentally impossible it would be for the US to close the many, many routes through which goods can get into Iran. https://luciantruscott.substack.com/p/trump-vs-the-smugglers-his-threa
t
In his remarks yesterday, Bessent made grandiose claims to the effect that we can isolate Iran by imposing sanctions on countries and companies that deal with the Iranian regime. But the Trump administration has already imposed tariffs and other sanctions on so many countries, for so many alleged purposes, and backtracked so many times, that its credibility is exhausted. Moreover, Iran can get much of what it needs from China. So do you really believe that a weakened U.S. can coerce China into helping it defeat Iran? And against China’s own strategic interests?
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The Latest Empty Threat Against Iran
The Trump administration gave its own explanation for why sanctions against Tehran won’t work.
By Vivian Salama | August 25, 2026, 11:46 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/08/treasury-bessent
-sanctions-iran-trump/688401/
No sooner had Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced the latest tool for achieving what he said would be the “economic asphyxiation” of Iran than he revealed the reason he was reluctant to use it.
Secondary sanctions—penalties on countries, individuals, or entities that do business with Iran—are ready to go, Bessent announced to reporters in the Treasury’s ornate Cash Room yesterday. But he went out of his way not to name the chief offenders that help Tehran: China and Russia. So, Bessent was asked, why threaten rather than just do it, particularly after President Trump last week warned of economic warfare “on an unprecedented scale” if Iran doesn’t surrender to U.S. demands?
“Why would I want to blow up the global financial system?” Bessent responded, explaining that the administration is offering a bureaucratic grace period before the hammer falls. Secondary sanctions, he insisted, “are a very powerful tool.” Which is true. But the administration has repeatedly offered vivid explanations of what its powerful weapons can do, be they military or financial, and then declined to use them. Remember when Trump threatened to erase Iran as a civilization? The warnings may be intended to intimidate, but the lack of follow-through instead exposes just how narrow the administration’s options in Iran have become.
The possibilities for ending the war have been steadily closed off. The list of useful military targets is diminishing, and munitions stockpiles are perilously depleted, while the tools that were supposed to do what missiles could not—sanctions, blockades, financial pressure—have failed to produce the Iranian capitulation Washington promised. Iran has absorbed enormous damage, both military and economic, without surrendering its capacity to fight. And the countries that matter most to the financial-pressure campaign, including China and Russia, have shown little inclination to help Washington finish the job.
Soon after Trump took office last year, he announced that he was “restoring maximum pressure” on Iran, directing his administration to tighten sanctions and drive down Iranian oil exports. Eighteen months later, Bessent is promising what he describes as the “toughest sanctions in history.” Maximum pressure, it appears, has a sequel, much as Trump’s contention last June that Iran’s nuclear facilities had been obliterated was followed in February by a war to destroy Iran’s nuclear capabilities.
Trump, in a Truth Social post last week, hinted at what that sequel to maximum pressure would look like. “ANY country that allows its financial institutions, businesses, airports, or government entities to provide any type of lifeline to Iran will itself face TREMENDOUS Economic Consequences,” he wrote, before listing oil smuggling, financial swap lines, cash transfers, exchange houses, ship registries, and front companies that “all” need to stop “NOW.” It was the kind of warning designed to make the entire global financial system sit up straight. Then Bessent arrived at the Cash Room making equally stark threats, before pointing to a major reason why he shouldn’t follow through, assuming countries don’t voluntarily comply.
That leaves the administration in an uncomfortable position. The war has lasted far longer than Trump suggested it would, and its economic consequences are now a central issue in the midterm elections. Sanctions have inflicted economic pain on Iran for years without producing the result Washington wants. Yet China continues to buy Iranian oil, while Russia and other oil-producing countries stand to benefit from the drain of prolonged U.S. military action in Iran and from disruptions to energy exported from the Persian Gulf. “No one is above the reach of U.S. sanction
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Cognitive Dissonance Dominates Hormuz
Ships can’t navigate a reality that exists only in Trump’s head.
By Elisabeth Braw | September 1, 2026, 11:56 AM
https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/09/01/hormuz-trump-iran-oil-greenland-r
eality/
“I have just been informed by the United States Navy that all mines have been removed and/or detonated from within the International Waters of the Strait of Hormuz,” U.S. President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social on Aug. 25. At the beginning of the war, Iran had mined the Strait of Hormuz’s Traffic Separation Scheme (TSS), the official shipping lane that runs through the middle of the strait. Mines, of course, make it extremely risky for ships to sail through. And now, Trump has said that the mines are gone.
It is fantastic news because removing mines is painstaking and dangerous work, particularly during an ongoing conflict. “Now that the mines have been cleared, ships will be able to move simultaneously in both directions through the strait with protection from the U.S. Air Force, allowing the export of more oil to global energy markets,” Axios reported.
The shipping community, alas, didn’t believe the announcement. Despite the news from Washington, ship traffic remained steady at around 30 transits each day, compared to a daily average of 129 before the war—and most of them opted for the routes along the Iranian and Omani coasts, respectively, not the supposedly safe TSS.
Indeed, cognitive dissonance now dominates the Strait of Hormuz: There’s what Trump, the President of the United States, says, and there’s what shipowners see on the ground (or rather, on the water). Indeed, cognitive dissonance now seems to dominate Trump’s relations with the world.
“That sucker is open,” Trump insisted on Aug. 27, two days after his first announcement. The following day, U.S. Central Command leader Brad Cooper delivered a similar message on social media. “We have successfully cleared sea mines in the strait’s international shipping lanes,” he said, adding that “internationally recognized transit routes are free of Iranian sea mines thanks to the incredible work of the U.S. military.” Bravo Zulu to the U.S. Navy divers and SEALs who, with great skill and bravery, managed to clear the mines. Unlike Trump, however, Cooper didn’t say that all the mines had been cleared, because it’s impossible to know how many mines have been laid and where they are.
Trump’s messages, and even that of Cooper, appeared to have been intended to mollify global oil markets. But traffic in the strait still did not increase; the shipping community had deduced that not all mines had been cleared. What’s more, mines are not the only peril facing ships in the strait these days. On Aug. 30, the United States fired missiles and rockets at Iran once again, after Centcom discovered that Iran was planning to lay more mines in the Strait of Hormuz. The following day, Trump posted an artificial intelligence video of Iran’s Kharg Island “being blown to smithereens.” Oil prices promptly rose.
The cognitive dissonance in the White House extends far beyond a narrow maritime passage in the Middle East. In January of this year, when Trump was entertaining taking Greenland from Denmark, he let it be known that the Greenlanders “want to be with us.” But in an opinion last year, 85 percent of Greenlanders said that they didn’t want the island to be annexed by the United States, and the island’s leaders have repeatedly told the world as much.
A few weeks after weighing in on the wishes of Greenlanders, Trump attacked Iran. In his speech to the nation, he also turned to the people of Iran, promising that “the hour of your freedom is at hand. Stay sheltered. Don’t leave your home. It’s very dangerous outside. Bombs will be dropping everywhere. When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take.”
U.S. intelligence agencies, though, had no information indicating that the Iranian regime would collapse or fold in case of a U.S. attack. Once again, cognitive dissonance had led Trum
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Military Leadership is Concerned
By Heather Cox Richardson | Sept 1, 2026
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/military-leadership-is-con
cerned
Alex Horton and Tara Kopp of The Washington Post reported on Sunday, August 30, that military leaders are warning Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that a plan to continue large-scale operations in Iran is unsustainable and is weakening their ability to protect U.S. interests in other places, including at home.
The warning is in the classified Secretary of Defense Orders book of August 14th and is laid out by the heads of the Army, Navy, and Air Force and the four-star commanders who oversee U.S. operations in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Trump's insistence that he must keep all options open, including the ability to launch major attacks, has forced more than 50,000 troops to be kept on alert for months. Plans to extend that alert made the Navy's top admiral, along with leaders of the U.S. European Command, the U.S. Pacific Command, and the U.S. Southern Command, register that they did not concur with those plans, although their disagreement does not mean they will not execute the order.
Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Darrell Cottle warned that the Navy, which has borne the brunt of operations against Iran, cannot sustain its current level of support for the war. Barely a quarter of the Navy's destroyer fleet is currently able to deploy, while delays in maintenance are threatening the readiness of other ships.
Leaders of the Army and Air Force concurred with the plan to extend forced deployments, but warned that there would be significant risk to such an extension. Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell took to social media to push back against the story, saying, Publishing highly classified assessments from the Secretary's orders book is a crime. It's a betrayal of the force. We are in great shape around the world. This story isn't about readiness. It's Trump derangement syndrome and Pete derangement syndrome. They hate President Trump and Secretary Hegseth more than they love America.
Charlotte Clymer of Charlotte's Web Thoughts pointed out that Hegseth has either fired or forced into early retirement several admirals and generals whom he considered insufficiently loyal in what appears to be an ongoing blatant campaign of intimidation to keep senior brass in the Pentagon toeing the line and not pushing back against administration officials. And yet, a broad range of military leaders are speaking out against the administration's plans in Iran. If any of the defense secretaries under Presidents Biden, Obama, or Bush had gotten this degree and range of pushback from top-uniformed personnel, there would be immediate congressional hearings, calls for resignations, and talks of impeachment, Clymer writes. Moreover, she notes, someone had to leak the information contained in this classified briefing and did so knowing that it would further confirm the extraordinary weakness the Trump administration has exhibited in its apparently dead-on-arrival negotiations with the Iranian regime to end the war.
National security scholar Tom Nichols commented, This is a good time to note that Hegseth is terrible at his job, that the Pentagon is a mess, that he should never have been confirmed, and that he should be fired first thing in the morning. But in this administration, sycophancy is more important than competence.
At 10.18 last night, Trump posted an AI video of military strikes and fires on what appears to be Iran's Karg Island, a major storage facility for Iran's oil and the seaport for about 90% of its oil exports. The caption read, Karg Island being blown to smithereens, President DJT. The Defense Department this morning clarified that the U.S. had not attacked Karg Island. The U.S. did claim to have launched attacks on two Iranian rocket launchers yesterday as they attempted to mine the Strait of Hormuz.
Iran claimed to retaliate with strikes against Jordan, which the Jordanian military said were all interce
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The American Age Is Over
A period of global dominance has ended in plain sight.
By Phillips Payson O’Brien | September 16, 2026, 6:50 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/09/trump-iran-superpower-declin
e/688639/
The American age that followed World War II was bound to end eventually. What’s shocking is how suddenly that moment has arrived. In the past six months, America’s power—long exemplified by the world’s best warfighting equipment and most highly trained military personnel, a global network of bases and logistics systems, and military and diplomatic partnerships with all corners of the world—has proved insufficient to defeat Iran, a repressive, economically stagnant regime armed with cheap missiles and drones.
For years, virtually everyone thought that, in a crisis, Washington could draw on deeper reserves of money, troops, munitions, and diplomatic support than any other nation. Even when U.S. forces faced setbacks in conflicts such as Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, a widespread assumption about America’s fundamental strength reassured allies and deterred foes. Yet that assumption also promoted a complacency that has left the U.S. military exposed now that even inexpensive, mass-produced weaponry can be guided with deadly accuracy.
President Trump did not erode U.S. capabilities on his own. But Trump’s war with Iran has revealed just how the underlying dynamics of global power have shifted—and just how much American might has decayed.
Since Britain’s postwar retreat from the Middle East, the United States has been the most important military power in that volatile region. In 1980, the Carter administration asserted that America would guarantee the free flow of oil and other commodities out of the Persian Gulf to the wider world. The success of the Carter doctrine required hostile governments, which then included the Soviet Union as well as the new theocracy in Iran, to believe that the United States could and would take decisive military action against anyone who dared to close the Strait of Hormuz, through which much of the world’s petroleum and other vital commodities have long passed.
Until recently, the array of American bases surrounding Iran gave that country’s leaders every reason to fear being overwhelmed militarily if they moved to control the strait. Yet the regime remains intact, even after attacks by the United States and Israel succeeded in killing top Iranian leaders, and its long-range missile and drone attacks managed to elude American air defenses and incapacitated many U.S. facilities. In March, fewer than two weeks into the fighting, The New York Times identified 17 American bases, air-defense installations, and diplomatic facilities that had been hit. Among them were some of the U.S. military’s important staging points: the Fifth Fleet’s headquarters in Bahrain as well as the Ali Al Salem Air Base, Camp Arifjan, and Camp Buehring in Kuwait.
The effect of these losses on U.S. operations was nearly instantaneous. A key reason the Trump administration did not militarily escalate with Iran over the summer, despite all of its threats to do so, was the loss of the base in Bahrain—which the Navy had relied on for decades to resupply ships in the Middle East. Instead, the so-called logistical tail for U.S. naval operations had to stretch all the way to Diego Garcia, a British-controlled island in the Indian Ocean more than 2,000 miles from the Strait of Hormuz.
Complications to resupply efforts raise costs, reduce operational efficiency, and add to the strain on military personnel. Disrupted logistics contributed to the long deployment of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, which led in turn to low morale. According to Stars and Stripes, families of crew members on the Lincoln feared that the many months at sea were causing serious mental-health problems.
For the moment—and likely for longer—the bases taken out of commission by Iranian attacks have been largely abandoned as operational facilities because of the continuing threat to U.S. personnel and equipment. At a recent town-hall meeting, Navy Times has reported that a service member asked Admiral Daryl Caudle about retrieving personal items from the Bahrain base. “We’re not getting back in there anytime soon,” Caudle responded. “I just want to be completely honest with that.”
The vulnerability of U.S facilities near Iran is so great and the prospective cost of repair is so large that, as The Washington Post reported last month, administration officials might not want to rebuild them at all. One way to spin the situation is as a “once-in-a-generation chance for the Pentagon to reconsider its presence” in the Persian Gulf region, as the Post put it. But the basic fact is that defending key facilities against even a less technologically advanced foe such as Iran is not something that the U.S. military can currently do.
The diminution of U.S. strength has a cascading effect. To maintain its military effort against Iran, the United States has had to strip the western Pacific of vital equipment. The Trump administration finally relieved the Abraham Lincoln last month; taking its place in the Arabian Sea was USS George Washington, which is normally based in Japan. Its normal task is to discourage military action by China—a deterrence that is now greatly weakened.
This desperate move only underscores that American military resources, however enormous relative to most other countries’, are not infinite. The war with Iran has depleted stockpiles of some of the Pentagon’s most important and advanced weaponry. By the end of April, cautious studies were estimating that the United States had already run dangerously low in THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) munitions, Patriot interceptors, and Tomahawk cruise missiles. Shortages have worsened since then.
For years, the United States has focused on building so-called exquisite systems—advanced weaponry that is produced in limited quantities at a high per-unit cost. This approach was in part an adaptation to the post-9/11 War on Terror, in which U.S. forces focused on counterinsurgency and fought enemies that lacked the capacity to mount and sustain serious attacks on American logistics. Under those circumstances, the Pentagon built up a broad array of munitions but not deep stockpiles of them. At current production rates, the United States will need several years to build supplies back to where they were when Trump went to war in February—and even those levels in hindsight look far too weak to maintain America’s long-standing global position amid a shift toward mass-produced precision-guided drones.
The erosion of American manufacturing superiority is an old story, but it is a key element for understanding the end of the American age. The U.S. could once outbuild other powers by tapping into civilian production. During World War II, Americans retooled the automotive industry to build aircraft. Today, relative to the rest of the world, the United States does almost no civilian shipbuilding. China, in comparison, makes about 50 percent of the ships in the world and controls about 80 percent of the world’s drone manufacturing. Having built its military to prevail in a burst of high-intensity fighting, the United States simply lacks the equipment, stockpiles, and rested forces to engage China for any extended period of time.
In the past, the United States could rely on allies to amplify its own power. Nations that shared values or at least interests with Washington have hosted bases, provided diplomatic support for American initiatives, shared intelligence, and sent troops and equipment to support American-led military operations. Today, traditional allies have capabilities that the U.S. sorely needs. For example, Japan and South Korea are the second- and third-largest shipbuilding powers in the world.
Rather than recognizing that it needs allies more than ever, the current U.S. administration perceives governments that have followed American leadership for decades as free riders, annoyances, even hindrances. Recently, President Trump has been critical of South Korea and praised his supposedly great relationship with North Korea’s dictator, Kim Jong Un. Never mind that South Korea and North Korea are still technically in a state of war, and North Korea has nuclear weapons that could devastate its neighbor to the south and potentially other U.S. allies farther afield.
Meanwhile in Europe, the U.S. government has distanced itself from long-standing democracies and moved closer to the Russian dictatorship of Vladimir Putin. Since returning to the White House, Trump has scaled back the American provision of security to Europe. Earlier this year, the Pentagon announced plans to withdraw 5,000 troops from Germany, and the administration has launched a defense-posture review that heralds further cuts. The U.S. is making no secret of its goal of turning over more and more of the responsibility of defending Europe to the Europeans. Leaders in Europe are taking these moves seriously and are making plans to rely less on the United States. Germany is considering whether to help the U.K. modernize its nuclear weapons so that Europe has a nuclear deterrent if the United States pulls out.
The United States has even begun to alienate Canada. Trump has regularly talked about his desire to incorporate Canada as the 51st state. He has also launched a trade war that, by his own account, will be “devastating” to the Canadian economy. Americans have now twice elected a president who overtly seeks to reframe traditional alliances as zero-sum relationships in which the United States needs to do less and its former partners, more. Leaders and voters in those countries might reasonably conclude that Americans do not know or do not care what they are giving up.
Americans have long benefited from peaceful integration with Canada. The U.S. could go to war with Iran in part because of its large base network in Europe. The disruption of long-standing alliances will be devastating to America’s global position. Other countries are already adjusting to newly revealed American weaknesses. Pakistan, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia—all long-term U.S. partners—recently signed their own defense pact. Now that Iran is exercising control over the Strait of Hormuz, Oman, on the waterway’s opposite shore, is inching toward closer cooperation with Tehran. Other Gulf States are reaching out to Iran as well. Even Saudi Arabia, which for decades based its security on massive purchases of U.S. weapons and the hosting of U.S. forces, must reassess its choices after Trump told its de facto ruler that the U.S. will not assist the country in its war with the Houthis.
Meanwhile, South Korea is improving relations with China, and European states are thinking more and more of a European-wide defense association. These are all strong signs that the countries around the world are losing confidence in America’s capabilities—and its intent.
Unfortunately for the United States, the administration seems more intent on hiding problems than correcting them. The Defense Department has forced out key staffers at Stars and Stripes and demanded, in an investigation of leaks about munitions shortages and other matters, that certain Pentagon employees take polygraph tests.
Even if the United States tries to revert to more of its earlier way of doing business, recent events suggest that its global reach will decrease. How the rest of the world will adapt to that change is hard to say. The American age may not give way to dominance by China, because that country has problems of its own, and other states in Asia, such as India, are growing to balance it. Democratic nations that look after their own defense more diligently, rather than relying on American protection, might conceivably benefit. The world might also experience a very chaotic period of wars and competitions.
All of history’s previous superpowers have eventually declined. The emergence of East Asia as the center of the world’s economic output was always going to reduce American influence. The transition from one global age to the next is seldom evident in the moment. When Russia invaded Ukraine four and a half years ago, the potential of mass-produced drones had not yet become clear. As recently as February, few experts would have predicted that the United States—a global colossus for more than 80 years—would end up so hamstrung by Iran. But the conflict reveals something important: The American age has come to an end. U.S. global dominance cannot continue without the power sources that brought it about.
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