Donald Trump and maga Republicans are putting U.S Navy in danger by deploying too many ships without a purpose

Editorial opinion published in the Virginian Pilot:

Donald Trump's war crimes demand Congressional investigation.

As church services marked Easter, the holiest day on the Christian calendar, Donald Trump spent the morning threatening war crimes against Iran by claiming he would order the attacking of essential infrastructure if that nation’s leadership didn’t accede to his demands. Donald Trump's latest incendiary messaging continues his reckless pattern of violating international laws, putting servicemembers in greater danger and undermining American security.

Trump’s war of choice may be delivering successful blows on the battlefield, but it looms as a generational strategic disaster, driving oil prices higher and calcifying the control extremists have on the Iranian government. As the home to thousands of men and women fighting this conflict, Hampton Roads must press its congressional delegation to demand better from the president, and to assert legislative authority over war operations to bring our people home quickly.

Last week, another carrier strike group homeported in Norfolk departed for the Middle East, the latest deployment of servicemembers from our region to the ill-defined war of choice with Iran. The USS George H.W. Bush and its roughly 5,000 sailors are expected to arrive in the region soon, adding to the estimated 50,000 personnel the United States now has positioned in the Middle East, according to New York Times reporting.

As Congress debates the White House’s 💲200 billion request for continued operations there, our men and women in uniform should be foremost in lawmakers’ minds, just as their swift and safe return dominates our thoughts in Hampton Roads. Those who volunteer to serve this country deserve clearly stated goals, achievable objectives and defined rules of engagement to ensure both their success and to confirm their mission is just and legal — none of which has been forthcoming since operations began a month ago.

Our region (in Norfolk and Hampton Roads) has seen plenty of ships depart these shores over the years, both in periods of peace and in times of war, so the scenes that played out last week at Naval Station Norfolk were quite familiar as the USS Bush headed out to sea.

But, knowing where the strike group is headed is cause for queasiness. Trump has repeatedly used the social media platform he owns to threaten the destruction of numerous targets that, if struck, would be egregious violations of the Geneva Convention. These include Iranian power stations, roads and bridges, oil wells and the desalination plants that provide drinking water to the public.

Perhaps Americans have grown calloused to the president’s saber-rattling, just as they have come to accept his other orders that constitute war crimes, 💢❗including the extrajudicial killing of people aboard boats in the Caribbean and Pacific. But, we should be keenly aware of the danger ⚠️his behavior represents.

In one egregious example, Trump said the March 4, sinking of an Iranian frigate, a strike that killed more than 100 sailors, was done because it was “more fun” than capturing the vessel. It was a comment that chilled the blood of everyone in our Navy-centric region who knows that international law requires an effort to rescue survivors, which the USS Charlotte did not make.

While Iran, thankfully,  may not have the capability to respond in kind to American ships, our nation’s enemies have surely taken note of our conduct in this war and could use it to justify similarly calloused and reprehensible behavior in future conflicts.

Trump’s unhinged and vulgar social media post this Easter weekend follows his listless address last week in which he claimed the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran has effectively closed since the U.S. and Israel attacks, is a problem for Europe and Asia. Trump claimed during his nationally televised chaotic speech that the strait “will open up naturally.”  

(OMG- Will Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves suddenly show up with the magical command to "Open-Sesame"❓ Of course not❗)

None of this inspires confidence in the leadership or direction of these operations, or that they will result in a stronger, more secure nation. Congress has been on the sidelines for too long and members, led by those who represent our region, should assert their constitutional authority to bring focus, responsibility and a swift conclusion to this illegal Trump war.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans are not telling Americans the truth about how Iranian children were victims of U.S. missile attacks

Unfortunately, we’ve seen this disturbing pattern before.

Echo opinion essay published in the Virginian Pilot and the Los Angeles Times. 

Photos of a number of Iranian children who were victims in the U.S. missile attacks.

A U.S. deadly missile strike. An initial statement emphasizing precision. Then, later, reports that civilians — including many children — were among the dead. In Afghanistan, through the early and mid-2000s, these reports came so often they formed a grim pattern. Each incident is explained as an anomaly, but over time, the pattern itself became the story.

Now, similar reports are emerging from Iran. A new investigation alleges that a Feb. 28, strike by the U.S. hit an elementary school and sports hall in the southern city of Lamerd, with children once again among the dead. U.S. Central Command has since denied carrying out any strike in or near Lamerd that day, calling the reports false.

Independent verification is difficult because Iran shut down its internet, but Americans should nevertheless be concerned, especially after at least 175 people including many children were reported killed in a U.S. strike on a different school in Minab 😢that same day. The cycle is familiar, with allegations of civilian harm followed by official denials, and no independent access to quickly verify the facts.

Sarah Yager says she was a civilian protection adviser to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs during the first Trump administration. "I worked inside the Pentagon with military professionals who took the issue of civilian harm seriously. They saw avoiding civilian casualties as a matter of military discipline and their own humanity. I know what it looks like when civilian protection works. But, obviously, this isn’t it."

Over more than two decades of armed conflict, U.S. efforts to reduce civilian harm have moved in fits and starts, with periods of progress followed by setbacks and recurring mass casualty events. Pressure often came from civil society, public outrage and negative headlines, but also from within the armed forces. Senior commanders came to see civilian casualties not just as “collateral damage,” but also as operationally counterproductive.

That recognition led to real changes including tighter rules, better intelligence practices and eventually the creation of systems within the Pentagon meant to track, investigate and learn lessons to reduce harm. By the time U.S. troops were withdrawing from Kabul in 2021, those lessons were just beginning to be institutionalized across the armed forces.

What is happening now is undoing that progress. Safeguards built over years are being torn down, and it is unclear whether senior military leaders are willing to push back.

There are warning signs that in this policy environment, the U.S. military will not be led to correct its course. 

Defense Secretary (Wiskey❗) Pete Hegseth publicly dismissed what he calls “stupid rules of engagement” and emphasized making the military “more lethal.” 💢🤢😔

At the same time, Hegseth has weakened or sidelined efforts designed to reduce civilian harm in war.

Before and since the start of the U.S. war on Iran, there has been little sustained public debate and no congressional hearings about the risks of American military action in Iran, including the inevitable civilian casualties that result from using powerful explosive weapons in populated areas. During the war in Afghanistan, each deadly strike on a wedding party or family compound did more than take civilian lives. It fueled anger at the U.S. and magnified skepticism that our military was trying to minimize civilian harm in any way.

Americans are entitled to clear answers about who and what is being targeted, what its military is doing to protect Iranian civilians and how possible violations of the laws of war are being investigated. This is basic public oversight that should accompany the use of military force. When incidents are openly disputed, as in the Lamerd strike, the need for impartial and transparent investigations becomes more, not less, important. If the U.S. military was acting lawfully, it should show it. But, if it wasn’t, the public deserves to know that too.

The United States has long claimed to fight according to international law and to benefit from doing so. 

But, that means little if the rules are mocked and actions don’t match reality. Waiting to recognize these patterns of civilian harm, and to correct them, will once again cost lives.

Sarah Yager is the Washington director of Human Rights Watch and previously served in the Department of Defense. She wrote this for the Los Angeles Times.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans failed. They communicate with disorderly incoherence

It has been clear for a long time that Donald Trump is a person with a disorganized mind and a disordered personality. 

In the conflict with Iran, the most potent antagonist has been the Trump administration’s own incoherence.

Echo opinion published in the New York Times by Jonathan Rauch and Peter Wehner

What the past few months, especially the past few weeks, have brought into focus is how Trump's pathologies have cascaded downward and outward through his corrupt administration. They have become institutionalized. The reason the administration so often does not act coherently is that it cannot. The world faces something new and baffling and frightening in Donald Trump’s second term: a tragically psychotic state.

This probably does not mean that every individual in the government is emotionally or psychologically unstable. Nor is it a clinical diagnosis of the president. The issue is that the administration as a whole lacks a consistent attachment to reality and the ability to organize its thinking coherently. Mr. Trump’s grandiosity, impulsivity, inconsistency and outright breaks with reality have become state policy.

In that respect, Donald Trump’s second term is different from his first. In 2020, he could confabulate about the election result or babble about treating Covid with injections of disinfectant. But, he could not translate his fantasies into reality — at least not usually. In the second chaotic term, by contrast, institutional psychosis has been on display since his Day 1.

It is the Iran war that has most vividly demonstrated the scope of the problem. In this conflict, the most potent antagonist has been the administration’s own incoherence.

Unbelievably, the dangerous Trump administration chose to wage a war without deciding on its aims, mapping out a strategy, planning for contingencies or even being able to explain itself. The goal was regime change — until it wasn’t. The demand was unconditional surrender — until it wasn’t. Deadlines were issued and then erased. Threats of total destruction were made and then pulled back. Iran’s nuclear program was a casus belli in February, despite the fact that we were told by Mr. Trump that it was “obliterated” last June. The president called for an international coalition to open the Strait of Hormuz, then said the United States could go it alone, then said the waterway would somehow “open itself.” He claimed that the United States had already won the war, that the war would end soon and that the war would end “when I feel it, feel it in my bones.” As a headline in The Times put it, Donald Trump's erratic position on Iran “can change by the sentence.”

Even as the bombs fell, the administration, concerned about gasoline prices, waived sanctions on some Iranian oil, “giving Iran’s war effort against the U.S. a boost,” as The Washington Post reported. Area experts were shocked when the administration proved unprepared for Iran’s partial closing of the Strait of Hormuz, a tactic experts had anticipated for decades. The administration might have been readier had it not chopped back the State Department’s Middle East desk, gotten rid of its oil and gas experts and eliminated its dedicated Iran office. The administration handicapped its own National Security Council by firing staff members, some at the behest of a conspiracy-minded internet personality, and undercutting its independence — not a good idea before starting a war. Trump’s social media posts seemed self-contradictory and borderline demented.

Incoherence is not incidental in this administration; it is the administration’s modus operandi. The so-called Department of Government Efficiency caused chaos in federal agencies by sacking, then sometimes rehiring employees without any evident rationale — and without making a serious dent in government spending. Mr. Trump flipped from “no more wars” to waging war (in Iran) and using and threatening military force (Venezuela, Greenland, Cuba), seemingly every other month. The policy toward Ukraine was simultaneously supportive and not. Tariffs went up and down and on and off, reflecting the president’s whims. In February he bragged that gas prices were low, then in March that they were high.

This is far from normal.

Normal administrations set up policy processes that assemble evidence from varied sources, collate viewpoints and priorities across multiple agencies and ensure rational deliberation before options reach the president. One of us served in three Republican administrations and participated as interagency reviews took place in a cabinet department, in an executive agency and in the White House itself. A single line in a presidential foreign policy statement might require the input of 20 or more people from the Defense Department, the State Department, (Central Intelligence Agency) aka, C.I.A., the Department of the Treasury and more.

A policy review process can be tortuous and sometimes mistaken. It can’t substitute for wise presidential judgment. But, nevertheless, it is vital❗ Hard questions are asked to assess the competing arguments. It ensures expert input in specific domains, anticipates how policies may ramify (or not) and prepares for contingencies.

In all those ways, the systematic review of policy amounts to an institutional mind: a cognitive process that organizes the government’s deliberations to keep them rational and anchored in reality. You might think of it as the government’s equivalent of the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for high-level executive functions such as impulse control and long-term planning. In Mr. Trump’s second term, those functions still exist, but they can be disrupted, circumvented or just plain abandoned at any moment on the say-so of the president and his senior officials. In that respect, the Trump administration is mindless.

Policy judgments should be made by the president, not by subordinate agencies and experts. But irrational processes produce inexplicable outcomes, and that is what we have seen, again and again. The only rhyme or reason is the principle that Mr. Trump proclaimed when explaining his policy toward Cuba: “I think I can do anything I want with it.” That is the principle by which his administration governs.

When an agency goes haywire, the administration might rush to stabilize it — for example, at the Department of Homeland Security, where chaos and brutality led to the killing of two American citizens right on the street in Minneapolis. But until a coherent policy process is restored under a chief executive who understands the need for it, we should expect geysers of mindlessness to keep erupting in unforeseeable ways and places.

Understandably, scholars, journalists and politicians have attempted to fit Trump 2.0 into any number of at least somewhat rational frameworks: populism, isolationism, unilateralism, nationalism, transactionalism, the madman theory, spheres of influence, imperialism and more. Some of those frameworks can help illuminate the president and the people around him. As one of us has argued, he is a patrimonialist — a leader who believes the state is his personal property. And both of us have said that his administration displays hallmarks of fascism. Ultimately, however, institutional psychosis defies rational categories. Predicting this administration’s behavior is impossible under any framework. And if Mr. Trump becomes more desperate as he grows more unpopular, the danger only increases.
Which leaves everyone wondering: ❓What are ❓the implications if the administration of the world’s most powerful country is chaotic in its thinking, unpredictable in its actions and not reliably in touch with reality❓ It’s impossible to know. America and its allies have dealt with a lot of presidential imperfections and failings, but there is no precedent or even category for the institutional psychosis displayed by the second Trump administration. Precisely because the psychotic state is so unpredictable, setting up systems to manage it will not work.

This puts our nation and allies in the precarious, but not hopeless, position of over relying on the rational guardrails that we need and remain. Some of these guardrails are within the executive branch: in the federal bureaucracies and the military services, where nodes of ordinary practice and process carry on as best they can. Still more important are guardrails in the other branches of government. The courts have remained independent and tethered to reality. Congress has quietly nixed some of Mr. Trump’s wildest nominees and overruled some of the administration’s destructive impulses, such as its attack on the science budget. State governments, especially in blue states, have been using the courts and their own policies to resist Mr. Trump’s agenda and demand accountable behavior from Washington.

Perhaps most important, the public supports effective and responsive government, not the wild swings of a fugue state — and it is making its feelings known.

Institutional psychosis is ultimately self-defeating and unsustainable. Reality checks will return because reality always reasserts itself. But severe damage will have been done, damage that may take a generation or more to repair.

As the Trump cult era (hopefully) winds down, the country may relearn something that never should have been forgotten. Institutions need to be reformed, but not destroyed; governing well requires skill and careful attention to detail rather than leaders acting on impulse and ignorance; and character and mental stability matter perhaps most of all.

Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth are bookend incompetents. They launched an illegal expensive war in Iran and lost.

Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth’s Warped Vision of the Iran War
The two men might wish that they lived in a world where whoever dropped the most bombs got whatever he wanted. But the war has shown that this isn’t true. Published in The New Yorker by Benjamin Wallace-Wells.

There is no good way to call off a war that you started but which hasn’t achieved what you’d hoped. 

On Wednesday night, (April 1st- but no joke❗💢) Donald Trump, in his address to the nation on the Iran war, sought to counter reality with hyperbole. “We’ve beaten and completely decimated Iran,” 🤥 Donald Trump said. “Never in the history of warfare has an enemy suffered such clear and devastating large-scale losses in a matter of weeks.” Of course, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard retains control not just of the country but of the Strait of Hormuz, and therefore of an alarmingly constricted global oil supply. A month of air strikes had killed many leaders but had not changed the regime. Even so, Trump suggested that the mission was “nearing completion,” and that the U.S. military would soon be pulling back. But if Tehran did not accept a deal, he added, “we are going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks. We’re going to bring them back to the Stone Ages, where they belong.”

Big talk. But the announcement also sounded like a concession, since two to three weeks probably isn’t enough time for Trump to follow through on some of his prior threats: an armed invasion of the oil ports of Kharg Island, or an even more ambitious raid to extract uranium likely stored in tunnels near nuclear facilities. The morning of Trump’s address, media reports had suggested that he was considering withdrawing the United States from NATO. Instead, the President taunted America’s allies, some of whom had been pleading for a settlement over Hormuz. “Build up some delayed courage,” he told them. If they want the oil to flow again, they should “go to the strait and just take it.”

It has been a central conviction of Trump’s second term that the nations of the world now operate on self-interest and brute force, rather than on principle or alliance, and the White House has been eager to spread the news. The mockery that the Administration directed at its own, less warlike allies this week (“Last time I checked, there was supposed to be a big, bad Royal Navy,” the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, said on Tuesday) recalled its jeering of Volodymyr Zelensky in February, 2025. “You’re buried there,” Trump told the Ukrainian President about his nation’s battlefield prospects.

This penchant for what Saul Bellow called reality instruction—the cynical delight taken in explaining to idealists how the rough-and-tumble world really works—extends from Trump throughout the Administration. 

But, perhaps the most eager reality instructor has been Hegseth, one of the Administration’s more politically fragile figures, who, when he’d been picked to join Trump’s Cabinet, was a co-host of “(Fake❗ Fox & Friends Weekend.” Hegseth is so committed to a vision of the world defined by winners and losers that he once wrote that Joan of Arc was a “loser” because her last battle “ended disastrously and eventually with her execution.”

Hegseth came out of his own service, in Iraq and Afghanistan, with the seeming conviction that what had stood in the way of a fuller victory in those wars had been the restraints supposedly placed on how soldiers could kill. (In 2019, he successfully lobbied Trump to pardon two soldiers charged with or convicted of alleged war crimes.) “We unleash overwhelming and punishing violence on the enemy,” Hegseth told a large gathering of senior military officials, whom he had summoned to Quantico, in September. “We also don’t fight with stupid rules of engagement . . . just common sense, maximum lethality, and authority for warfighters,” he said. “You kill people and break things for a living.”

On Iran, Hegseth has led the Administration’s periodic press briefings, at which he has called on Americans to pray to Jesus Christ for the military’s success; his slogan has been “maximum lethality.” But, even in the first hours of the war it was clear that this approach could backfire. The initial strikes, which began on February 28th, killed the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but were so indiscriminate that, as President Trump noted, they also killed many of the political figures who the White House had hoped would form a new, more amenable cadre of leaders. 

“Most of the people we had in mind are dead,” he said a few days later. The ones remaining, even if Trump didn’t want to acknowledge it, were generally described as more hard-line. One of the President’s stated aims has been to inspire a popular uprising among those Iranian citizens sick of the repression and the autocracy enforced by the Revolutionary Guard. Yet, that requires taking care to distinguish between the regime and its civilians, and to avoid collateral damage. But, according to a preliminary investigation, on the same day that U.S. forces assassinated Khamenei, they also dropped a bomb in the wrong place, inadvertently killing nearly two hundred people in an elementary school.😢

Trump and Hegseth might wish that they lived in a world where whoever dropped the most bombs got whatever he wanted. 

But, the Iran war has shown that this isn’t true. The old liberal institutions may be teetering, but that doesn’t mean that all that’s left is the law of the jungle. The fact that Donald Trump is now signaling a messy retreat has nothing to do with insufficient lethality and everything to do with politics—in particular, the alarm in the global oil markets and the American public’s widespread opposition to the war. One tragedy of Trump’s war is that, in January, the Iranian regime was under extreme pressure from protests, which it quelled by murdering thousands. The right kind of coördinated push might have toppled it. Instead, the White House offered frequently shifting rationales for its war and little outreach to the Iranian resistance. It treated the military operation as something to brag about to its political base—a way to show exactly how unrestrained it was willing to be.

The day before Donald Trump gave his chaotic speech, Hegseth gave a press conference in which he recounted a recent visit he’d made to bases in the region. “It was the American warrior, unleashed,” he said. He seemed to view the trip as a parable. “As the sun was going down and a chill was setting on the tarmac,” he encountered an airwoman and asked her what the troops needed: “She simply looked at me with a sly smile on her face and said, ‘More bombs, sir. And bigger bombs.’ ” That might have been what the airwoman asked for. But what Trump and Hegseth really owed her, the nation they lead, and the Iranians whose country they bombed was a plan—a real solution to the disaster that they have created. ♦

Published in the print edition of the April 13, 2026, issue, with the headline “Warpaths.”

Donald Trump and maga Republicans cannot win peace when they spew hate and launch weapons of war

Echo opinion letter to the editor: Such conflicting visions featured on the front page of the Los Angeles Times regarding Pope Leo XIV about peace versus Donald Trump’s manic threat (“Pope Leo issues antiwar message in his first Easter Mass,” “After daring rescue inside Iran, bellowing threats from Trump,” April 5).

As Leo blessed the world at Easter Mass with his prayer — “Let those who have weapons lay them down!” — Trump issued his threat of destruction, blaspheming Allah (❗on Easter Sunday😔) . 

Meanwhile, the Pope prayed, “Let those who have the power to unleash wars choose peace❗ Not a peace imposed by force, but through dialogue❗”

It is tragic that Trump’s strategy is to win with the illegal use of force, ignoring the viability of dialogue. Evil Trump's threats do not pave the way to peace; he knows only brutal force and killing the perceived enemy. He paves the way to war crimes and deaths of innocent victims.

This is more abuse of power. Absent the skills of dialogue and limited to winning by massive deadly weapons, Trump fails to promote peace as he wields the weapons of war.

From Lenore Navarro Dowling, in Los Angeles

Donald Trump and maga Republicans are not learned: They only read what they want to believe regardless of evidence or veracity

Thucydides

The illiteracy in the Donald Trump administration published in Drezner’s World by Donald W. Drezner.

Historically, U.S. presidents — especially the iconic commanders in chief — have been well read. The founding fathers were all learned men who read and wrote a great deal. Brilliant evidence to support the intellect we continue to appreciate are still widely read in the many documents they wrote.

Abraham Lincoln was an extremely well-read man who composed some of the greatest oratory in American history. President Harry S Truman did not attend college but was well known as a voracious reader of history. Barack Obama’s oratorical skills continue to be admired or envied by his contemporaries, and his book lists have certainly penetrated popular culture.

The hard-working staff at Drezner’s World have already commented on the Trump administration’s unfamiliarity with basic political science. But this has not stopped Trump or his acolytes from trying to claim that they too are well-read. After all, Trump is the “author” of multiple books, although his tole in actually writing them appears to have been pretty limited. And even now, in a moment when Trump prides his “gut” in making decisions, his staffers continue to insist he’s the most well-read person in the room:  Unbelievably, but consistent with her role as 3-D printer Barbie, Karoline Leavitt, the Trump propaganda diva said, "You always want to be the most well-read person in the room, and I try to be every day. But Donald Trump always is."🤥🙄

But, the weird thing about the Trump administration is that they try to have it both ways on this: belittle any well-read opponent as an out of touch egghead unfamiliar with the cold realities of the world, while at the same time claiming that MAGA and only MAGA understand the deep truths about international politics.🤢

As someone who literally teaches a course called Classics of International Relations Theory at the Fletcher School, it has been painful to watch Trump and his acolytes reduce the international relations canon into macho bromides in order to justify their bone-headed, poorly-thought-out strategic fiascoes.

Consider, for example, two classical thinkers that Trump and his acolytes like to embrace: Thucydides (An Athenian historian and general) and Machiavelli.

Back in January, Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s most loyal acolytes, tried on his best Thucydides impression when talking to CNN’s Jake Tapper:   "We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time…..

We're a superpower. And under Donald Trump, we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower."

This sounds an awful lot like the most famous line in Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War — the proclamation by the Athenians in the Melian Dialogue that, “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” Indeed, this subsequent statement by the Athenians during the Melian Dialogue sounds awfully Trump-y:

Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can. And it is not as if we were the first to make this law, or to act upon it when made: we found it existing before us, and shall leave it to exist for ever after us; all we do is to make use of it, knowing that you and everybody else, having the same power as we have, would do the same as we do.

Given that the Athenians eventually got what they wanted at Melos, is this an example of Trumpsters recognizing the same iron laws of power that the Athenians recognized 2500 years ago?

Well, no. Because anyone who possesses a familiarity with Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War beyond the aforementioned quotes will remember three important things about Athens:

• By that point in the history, war had so consumed the Athenians that their previous recognition of the virtues of honor and interest — on display in Pericles’ funeral oration and the Mytilenean Debate — had dissipated most of Athenian exceptionalism;
• Athens failed to successfully coerce Melos into submission despite their overwhelming power advantage. Athens had to kill all the grown men and sell the women and children of Melos into slavery; and
• Right after the Athenian victory at Melos, the city-state makes the ill-fated decision to invade Sicily. That ended… poorly.

The real lesson of Thucydides’ history is that while might can make right in the short term, over the long term the actors who believe in that principle overreach and hasten their nation’s downfall.

The other classical thinker that Trump and his minions love is Machiavelli. As Luke Hallam observed a year ago, “it seems natural that commentators turn to The Prince to explain the particular ruthlessness of his new administration. It’s not hard to find articles using The Prince to explain why Trump is the Machiavellian genius of our time.”

Trumpsters are particularly fond of Machiavelli’s dictum as stated in The Prince that, “it is much safer to be feared than loved.” Trump himself once told Bob Woodward, “Real power is – I don’t even want to use the word – fear.” As the Guardian’s Patrick Boucheron wrote back in 2020 about Trump’s statement, “This sentence could have been written by Niccolò Machiavelli.”

Again, however, anyone who has actually read all of The Prince knows that there additional passages that highlight the current administration’s unfamiliarity with the totality of Machiavelli’s thinking. For example, in the very same chapter that Machiavelli talked about it better to be feared than loved, he also cautioned, “a prince ought to inspire fear in such a way that, if he does not win love, he avoids hatred; because he can endure very well being feared whilst he is not hated.”

Machiavelli elaborated on that point in a subsequent chapter:

The prince must consider, as has been in part said before, how to avoid those things which will make him hated or contemptible; and as often as he shall have succeeded he will have fulfilled his part, and he need not fear any danger in other reproaches.

It makes him hated above all things, as I have said, to be rapacious, and to be a violator of the property and women of his subjects, from both of which he must abstain. And when neither their property nor their honor is touched, the majority of men live content, and he has only to contend with the ambition of a few, whom he can curb with ease in many ways.

It makes him contemptible to be considered fickle, frivolous, effeminate, mean-spirited, irresolute, from all of which a prince should guard himself as from a rock; and he should endeavor to show in his actions greatness, courage, gravity, and fortitude; and in his private dealings with his subjects let him show that his judgments are irrevocable, and maintain himself in such reputation that no one can hope either to deceive him or to get round him.

In his history of Florence, Machiavelli also offered a cautionary warning about the use of force: “Wars begin when you will, but they do not end when you please.”

As Donald Trump continues to careen from claims of negotiations to intemperate threats of, you know, war crimes, remember this: the folks running this war believe that they have pretty much figured out how the world works. But the cliches that they like to spout should remind everyone that they have no depth to their knowledge. And everyone will pay the price for their boastful ignorance.

Thanks for reading Drezner’s World! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans are wrong to depend on military might alone to subdue the Iranians. Has Iran surrendered yet?

Is it 1914, in America❓

Excellent echo essay published in the New York Times by Yonatan Touval, a foreign-policy analyst, wrote from Tel Aviv.

Wait, wait❗ ❓ Didn't Donald Trump tell us the Iranians would implode when faced with U.S. and Israeli military force❓ 

Mr. Touval writes this:  So now, both countries are well into the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, and nothing has changed even as many hundreds of Iranians have been killed.

One conclusion is already difficult to avoid. Our leaders preside over an extraordinary machinery of destruction, but they remain strikingly obtuse about human beings — about their pride, shame, convictions and historical memory.

The war’s architects appear to have assumed that killing a nation’s leaders, dominating airspace and destroying infrastructure would produce regime collapse in Tehran and strategic clarity in Washington and Jerusalem. Instead, Iran, though badly weakened, has managed to disrupt shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, drastically widen the war’s economic radius and force Washington into the old, unglamorous business of soliciting allied help after entering a war confident that it would be swift and decisive.

It is tempting to describe this as a failure of intelligence. Technically, it is not. The spycraft kind of intelligence behind the war planning and execution is extensive. Recent reporting suggests that Israeli intelligence spent years penetrating Tehran’s traffic cameras and communications networks and built what one unnamed Israeli source described to CNN as an A.I.-powered “target-production machine” capable of turning enormous volumes of visual, human and signals intelligence into precise strike coordinates. That is an extraordinary achievement of surveillance and targeting.

Yet never has so much been seen, so precisely, by so many people who understand so little of what they are seeing. A system can tell you where a man is. It cannot tell you what his death will mean for a nation. Such systems are trained on behavior, not on meaning — they can track what an adversary does but not what he fears, honors, remembers or would die for.

This is the recurring illusion of overequipped leaders: Because they can map the battle space, they think they understand the war.

But, war is never merely a technical contest. It is shaped by grievance, sacred narrative, the memory of past humiliations and the desire for revenge. Those are not atmospheric complications added to an otherwise technical enterprise. They are what the war is about.

So the familiar errors appear. The war planners imagine that a regime can be decapitated into collapse, whereas external attack often does the opposite — binding a battered state more tightly to a society newly united by injury, humiliation and rage. They imagine that destroying conventional assets would settle the matter, as if legitimacy, wounded sovereignty and collective anger were secondary rather than the war’s actual terrain. 

Planners who took their adversary’s self-understanding seriously — rather than discounting it as propaganda — might have anticipated that an attack would not weaken the regime’s narrative but instead fulfill it. They might also have foreseen the paradox that systematic decapitation does not produce negotiators. It removes them.

The military theorist Carl von Clausewitz long ago recognized the delusion of reducing war to a kind of algebra. 

War, as Carl von Clausewitz (1780- 1831) understood it (Rules on Warfare and Power), is never merely calculation. It is saturated with passion, uncertainty and political purpose. The algebra has grown more sophisticated. But, the delusion is just as dangerous today as it was in the 19th century.

What this war exposes, then, is a failure not only of strategy but of literacy. Literature and history, at their most serious, train precisely the faculties these leaders lack: the capacity to grant that other minds are not transparent to us, and are governed by purposes not our own. A mind tutored by history and literature knows that actors in the grip of a sacred cause tend to mean what they say — and that bombing a founding myth is more likely to consecrate it than to dissolve it.

Cultural knowledge, of course, rarely prevents the catastrophes of war.

Athens, at the height of its golden age sailed for Syracuse and lost an empire. Thucydides spent the rest of his life explaining why. The generals of 1914 were cultivated, well-read men, but those qualities did not save Europe. What has changed is not that culture once prevented blindness and no longer does. It is that culture has increasingly ceded authority to systems that mistake information for understanding and speed for judgment.

Shakespeare understood this blindness better than our strategists. “Macbeth” is not merely a play about ambition. It is about a man who catches sight of a possible future and mistakes that glimpse for a license to force events to conform to his interpretation — and then watches that interpretation devour him. Soon he ceases even to pretend that action should wait on understanding. There are things in his head, he tells his wife, that “must be acted ere they may be scanned” — done before they can be thought through.

Modern targeting systems promise the same fantasy in technological form: to collapse the interval between seeing and striking, to eliminate the pause in which judgment might still enter. Macbeth acts not after deliberation, but instead of it. That is the pattern one can glimpse in this new war, and it is precisely the pattern that literary and historical imagination exists to counter.

Tolstoy traced the same pattern from the other side. In “War and Peace,” he depicted Napoleon — nourished on Plutarch’s “Lives” and its portraits of greatness — who marched through Borodino to Moscow and still could not fathom a people who would let their city burn rather than submit. His error was not tactical. It was imaginative: He could not credit the Russians with a logic that was not his own. That is the mistake the architects of this campaign are repeating. In Iran, a leadership that has spent decades framing resistance to American and Israeli power as a religious obligation will experience military pressure not as a reason to capitulate but more probably as a reason to endure.

The more technologically sophisticated war becomes, the more dangerous it is to place it in the hands of people untrained in irony, contingency and the darker constants of human nature. Such leaders will speak fluently of capabilities, timelines and kill chains. They will have no language for resentment, dishonor, loyalty or grief — and they will discover, too late, that wars are made of these as much as of steel and fire. That is the illiteracy of this war. The algebra of the war makers will have been flawless. But what they cannot read, they will not have reckoned with.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans not telling American people the truth about the prolonged Iran Trump World War

Trump Has Lost Control of Events in Iran

Opinion echo published in The New York Times by Mr. Ali Vaez

the Iran project director for the International Crisis Group.

When presidents go on television in wartime, they do not merely describe events. They try to impose meaning on them. On Wednesday night (on April 1st- but it was no joke❗🃏) Donald Trump presented the war with Iran as a stern but necessary undertaking that is nearing a favorable conclusion. (It was all a lie 🤥.)

The threads of this victory narrative have been coming together since the United States launched Operation Epic Fury in late February. Only some elements of it are true: American and Israeli forces have been dominant from the air, able to penetrate the Islamic republic’s porous defenses almost at will. They have probably degraded not only Tehran’s military capabilities but also the industrial base producing its missile and drone fleets. 

The attacks have also once more exposed Iran’s substantial intelligence vulnerabilities, allowing the targeting and killing of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, among other senior military and political leaders, at the campaign’s outset.

But the central question in this war was never whether Iran could be hurt. It was whether pain would translate into submission. So far, it has not.

The notion of having achieved regime change is belied by the replacement of one Khamenei with another. Most of the senior political echelon remains intact, while power has gravitated toward more hard-line military figures. Weakening Iran’s military capacity has not stopped Tehran from being able to muster regular drone and missile salvos at Israel and Persian Gulf allies, including on Thursday, the day after Trump’s rambling speech.
Perhaps most significantly, the Iranians have managed to subdue traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, responding in the one arena where weaker nations have often found leverage against stronger ones: not by matching force with force, but by changing the terms of the contest.

If Iran cannot prevail in a conventional military exchange, it can still prolong the conflict, widen its costs, disrupt the global economy and make the exercise of American and Israeli power more expensive than its architects anticipated. In the process, it has shown that a degraded military and a severely damaged state do not need a weapon of mass destruction to hold its adversaries hostage.

This is why the three tacks Washington has taken to pressure Iran to cede control of the waterway — threatening to destroy Iran’s energy infrastructure, downplaying the disruption as a problem for others to deal with and saying the strait will open “naturally” after the war, and adding it to the long list of requirements for a potential agreement — have not yielded results. (IOW, Trump failed❗)

Between the military shortcomings Iran displayed in the 12-day war last June, and the nationwide protests it brutally suppressed this year, proponents of this war may have concluded that a regime already hollowed out by sanctions, corruption and popular anger would crack once struck with sufficient force, perhaps proving an exception to the conventional wisdom that air power alone cannot produce a more favorable political order. 

But, a regime built to endure, its leadership infused with a culture of martyrdom and resistance and bereft of mercy, can continue to repress and remain in power.

Though the war may well end up compounding the challenges the Islamic republic faces, for the moment, a tightened grip has enabled Iran’s leaders to recast themselves as guardians of a besieged nation, rather than its tormentors.

Trump now has three options. 

• He can escalate; thus the talk of sending American forces onto Iranian territory or seizing strategic positions to reopen shipping lanes. Ground intervention would not represent a simple intensification of the current war. It would transform it entirely. Iran most likely would mine waterways, target U.S. troops more directly, strike Gulf infrastructure more aggressively and draw additional regional actors into the fire.

The conflict would cease to be merely about Iran’s nuclear ambitions or even its regime. It would become a struggle over commercial arteries — a war whose consequences would radiate far beyond the battlefield.

• Trump can also just keep degrading Iran’s capabilities at a steady pace for a longer period of time and then walk away. That seems to be his plan for the near term. In his rambling speech, he promised to hit Iran “extremely hard over the next two to three weeks.” Trump has raised the prospect of “spot hits” against Iran even after the conflict ends, and said in the speech he would send missiles if Iran tried to approach nuclear sites under the rubble.

While stopping the bloodshed would be a positive development, that scenario would also be disastrous for the Gulf States and the rest of the world, which would have to deal with a wounded and belligerent Iran that has shown it can disrupt the global economy at will.

• The final option is a deal, which does not look promising now, given that the United States and Iran have widely differing conceptions of its terms. Squaring that circle requires the two sides to engage in a diplomatic effort that actually addresses underlying differences rather than merely silencing the guns.

If the past is prelude, the process will be maddening, imperfect and far less emotionally satisfying than Donald Trump's chaotic promises about victory. 

But, it remains the only path that addresses the actual stakes: in addition to the reopening of Hormuz, the questions of what happens to the stockpile of highly enriched uranium in Iran, the future of the region’s security architecture and what will happen to the Iranian people, to whom he promised help, not more harm.

Trump was right when he said on Wednesday, April 1st, that the United States won the tactical exchanges against Iran. What he did not admit to is that as commander in chief, he still managed to lose command of events.

Indeed, that is often how wars devolve from hopes of quick and decisive wins into more prolonged and uncertain endeavors: not through sudden defeat, but through a succession of so-called necessary steps, each one presented as the final push, each one making retreat more politically difficult and strategic clarity even more elusive.