America’s ailing one-trick pony
Trump’s excessive faith in military power is squarely within the US tradition

Epic Fury is no departure from American tradition. When Trump was a young man pulling strings to escape military service in Vietnam — a privilege he shared with other future US presidents, including George W Bush — the Pentagon announced regular “kill ratios” of the number of enemy dead versus American. The Tet Offensive in early 1968 was heralded as a major US victory since so many Vietcong insurgents had been killed. In reality, Tet delivered a crushing political defeat to America since it conveyed the enemy’s iron will.

The Pentagon did not see it that way. Pete Hegseth, the US “secretary of war”, is a very different figure to Robert McNamara, the then secretary of defence. But his playbook is similar. In crude terms, success is judged by how many things and people America can blow up. Hegseth’s favourite words are “precision” and “lethality”. The similarity between Lyndon B Johnson’s Operation Rolling Thunder and Trump’s Epic Fury is almost exact. Just as LBJ used carpet-bombing of North Vietnam to prod elusive concessions in negotiations, Trump’s missile threats are wasted on Iran. As the Taliban used to say during the two-decade US military operation in Afghanistan: “America has the watches, we have the time.” The Taliban regained power five years ago.

Trump seemed to grasp the limits of America’s one-trick ponies better than most US presidents. His denouncement of Bush’s Iraq war was a key propellant of his 2016 hostile takeover of the Republican Party. The irony is that he is now riding that pony into the same old quicksand. Trump can run the gamut of America’s greatest hits in the same interview. One moment he is proclaiming mission accomplished as Bush did at an early stage of the Iraq war. The next he is dangling peace with honour, as Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger branded America’s retreat from Vietnam. When his blood is really up he demands second world war-style unconditional surrender.

But his only way out is via sustained diplomacy on multiple fronts. On Monday he called off the next wave of strikes on Iran scheduled for Tuesday. He wanted to give the Pakistan-mediated talks another chance. At the forefront of Trump’s mind is that he must do better than Barack Obama did with his 2015 Iran nuclear deal. Nowhere in his mind, apparently, is the recollection that it took Obama’s negotiators 20 months to nail it down. The idea that much less knowledgeable US officials could do better in a few days is delusional. That Obama could have pulled off a serious agreement without once threatening to bomb Iran is inconceivable to him.

The lesson from Epic Fury is the same one that Obama drew from Iraq. Diplomacy should always be the first resort. There is no need even to mention US military power, still less to brag about it daily. To paraphrase a maxim, the military that fights best is that which fights least. The comforting take is to blame Epic Fury on Trump’s unique recklessness. But he is no aberration. Once you screen out his uniquely self-defeating verbal incontinence, you discern a Washington traditionalist. His approach is the reductio ad absurdum of one lost US war after another preceded by strings of victories on the battlefield.

As the world googles Thucydides and digests the emerging G2 China-US reality, the question is whether Washington is capable of reinventing itself. Better informed US figures than Trump are calling on him to “finish the job” in Iran. Had they learnt from the recent or distant past, they would be revising their advice. But that would require thinking. Good strategy is the product of intellectual humility. Trump’s lack of it puts him in plentiful company. 

Establishment NYT leads the charge (for 'the world') with the next round of sinophobia/anti-communism

 ColdMiser wrote:
Trump will claim "victory" no matter what happens. The greatest victory of all time. The biggliest!

 rgio wrote:
I fully expect China to be the main player in the end of Operation Epic Trifle. They will emerge as the grown up in the room and be the ones that get the strait opened and will be the biggest beneficiary of that. They win big in this debacle without firing a single missel. Question is whether or not they allow Trump to slink away with something he can hang a Victory sign on. 

 R_P wrote:
Made America weaker, alienated allies, gave Russia and China leverage, and proved to Iran they have more control than they would have ever believed possible.

A historically stupid war with no plan to achieve any goals. 

The war on Iran will likely end in American retreat
The American empire cannot win the war against Iran at acceptable financial, military, and political costs.
By Jeffrey Sachs and Sybil Fares

The war against Iran that the United States and Israel launched on February 28, 2026, will likely end in an American retreat. The United States cannot continue the war without producing disastrous consequences. A renewed escalation would likely lead to the destruction of the region’s oil, gas, and desalination infrastructure, causing a prolonged global catastrophe. Iran can credibly impose costs that the United States cannot bear and that the world should not suffer.

The US – Israel war plan was a decapitation strike, sold to President Donald Trump by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and David Barnea, the director of the Mossad. The premise was that an aggressive joint US–Israeli bombing campaign would so degrade the Iranian regime’s command structure, nuclear programme, and IRGC senior leadership that the regime would fracture. The United States and Israel would then impose a pliable government in Tehran.

Trump seems to have been convinced that Iran would follow the same course as had occurred in Venezuela. The US operation in Venezuela in January 2026 removed Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in what appears to have been a coordinated operation between the CIA and elements inside the Venezuelan state. The US won a more pliant regime, while most of the Venezuelan power structure remained in place. Trump seems to have believed naively that the same outcome would occur in Iran.

The Iran operation, however, failed to produce a pliant regime in Tehran. Iran is not Venezuela, historically, technologically, culturally, geographically, militarily, demographically, or geopolitically. Whatever happened in Caracas had little relation to what would take place in Tehran.

The Iranian government did not fracture. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), far from being decapitated, emerged with a tightened internal command and an expanded role in the national-security architecture. The supreme leader’s office held; the religious establishment closed ranks behind it; and the population rallied against external attack.

Two months on, Trump and Netanyahu have no Iranian successor government under their control, no Iranian surrender to close the war, and no military pathway whatsoever to victory. The only path, and the one the US seems to be taking, is a retreat, with Iran in charge of the Strait of Hormuz and with none of the other issues between the US and Iran settled.

Several reasons explain America’s disastrous miscalculations and Iran’s successes. (...)

Rubio's Red Scare Redux

NextGen Rambos/Death Squads

The American-Israeli attack on Iran was more than a bad idea; it has turned into a watershed in the decline of the American empire. Some might prefer the word “hegemony” to describe the world order the United States leads, since its flag does not generally fly over the lands it protects or exploits. But the rules are the same: Imperial systems, whatever you call them, last only as long as their means are adequate to their ends. And with the Iran war, President Trump has overextended the empire dangerously.

A Middle Eastern military misadventure is one of the last ways a casual observer would have expected Mr. Trump’s presidency to go wrong. The problems he alluded to in all three of his presidential campaigns had mostly resulted from our leaders’ governing beyond their means. At home, proponents of wokeness underestimated the costs and difficulties of micromanaging interactions between groups. Abroad, the mighty American armed forces proved to have no particular talent for democracy promotion, and there was the recent debacle in Iraq to prove it. Overextension was a danger that President Joe Biden contemptuously dismissed. “We’re the United States of America,” he used to say, “and there’s nothing we can’t do.”

Mr. Trump, people thought, would be different. For all the grandiosity of the expression “Make America great again,” Trump voters did not expect him to take on new problems. The greatness would be mostly atmospheric — braggadocio, not adventurism. The United States could become greater even if it withdrew to a less expansive sphere of influence. When he proclaimed an updated Monroe Doctrine, refocusing American attention on the Western Hemisphere, retrenchment was what most people thought they were getting. In last November’s National Security Strategy, he added, “The days in which the Middle East dominated American foreign policy in both long-term planning and day-to-day execution are thankfully over.”

This was a logical, even an admirable, foreign policy plan. Just as important, history showed it to be workable. Britain had to surrender its far-flung system of colonies and protectorates after World War II. Letting go was often awkward and sometimes left violence in its wake. But except for its ill-fated attempt to join France and Israel in seizing the Suez Canal from Egypt in 1956, Britain did not try to hold territories it could no longer afford. It wound up on reasonably good terms with its former colonial possessions. Its disengagement was a success, though this can be hard to see because what was being managed was decline. Mr. Trump had a chance of pulling off something similar.

The assumption in Washington over the past decade has been that the world is engaged in a game of geostrategic musical chairs and the music is about to stop. China may soon overmatch us not just in military-industrial capacity but also in information technology. The world will harden into a new, less favorable geostrategic configuration. This is the last moment to reshape it in America’s favor. (...)

🤡🤡

ICC for thee...

"You're not supposed to hit back!"

Platforming perfidious sociopaths on TV.  Normalized violence/terrorism.

"We got to move away from negotiations and get back to what we started to do from very beginning ... so weaken this regime that it becomes vulnerable to rising up inside the country. We can't do that, that's something the Iranian people have to do. Can Mossad and the CIA work to help that a little bit? I think so, and I assume they're already doing things."

Fox host: "Well, the intelligence from Mossad has been nothing short of spectacular"

CIA Ran MK-ULTRA Experiments on Prisoners of War in U.S. Custody, Declassified Docs Confirm

 R_P wrote:

Well, I caught the 57 headline.