I haven’t written about the Iran War before now because the whole thing just infuriates me, but now I stew in bafflement at its pointless, brutal, stupidity. The most concise way that it can be summed up for future historians is this classic tweet from 2014:
But the topic of “future historians” is part of the trouble, here, because what kind of historians are we talking about? The Trump administration is a Gish gallop writ large onto the pages of history itself. How are people going to reliably document the absolute relentless assault of evil and incompetence that assails our media landscape each hour of every cursed, cursed day?
Our present history dilutes and spoils our understanding of our past history and wrecks our ability to teach its lessons. How can the youth of today possibly take the Cuban Missile Crisis seriously when, just the other week, the President of the United States vowed to eliminate the entire population of Iran in an escalating series of angrier, more unhinged, profanity-laced social media rants?
It’s just an observable fact that Donald Trump has been growing less lucid and coherent as time goes on, so it wasn’t a stretch for people to worry that, by threatening to kill Iran’s “whole civilization” he meant he was going to launch nukes. In fact, I think a huge chunk of us were in a really uncomfortable superposition of panic and exhaustion, knowing that the man is prone to extreme hyperbole some of the time when he’s kidding, and deadly serious violent overreaction some of the time when he’s angry, and there’s no way of knowing which it is because you can’t measure both his mood and his sanity at the same time. It’s the Quantum Uncertainty Principle of President Bugshit.
The Cuban Missile Crisis is recorded as the closest the world ever came to nuclear war, and that confrontation was between two extremely level-headed, though ideologically opposed, adults: Kennedy and Khrushchev. They hated everything each other represented but they talked it out. How can history possibly rank Tuesday, April 7th, 2026, alongside that crisis? This one played out between, on one side, probably the most fanatic and powerful fundamentalist theocracy on Earth, and on the other side, the Republic of Iran.
Iran was nowhere near creating a nuclear weapon, if it even intended to get one. It is mindblowing that anyone fell for the “we need to invade the gulf because they have WMDs” trick again. They didn’t even come up with a different excuse! If I can quote George W. Bush’s recitation of the famous Tennessee (Texas but probably Tennessee) saying: “Fool me once, shame on, shame on you, you fool me, you can’t get fooled again.” But apparently you can get fooled again, after all.
Iran doesn’t have nukes, but they do have friends with nukes, and that’s the problem. They have at least an on-the-books alliance with every nuclear adversary that America has. Who knows how badly China or Russia would react if America used a nuke? Hell, what might North Korea or Pakistan do?
Look I’m not a fan of the Iranian government, to say the least: The Iranian regime is a monstrous and violent autocracy that regularly kills its own citizens for slights as minor as peaceful protest or even wearing the wrong clothing. It funds militant groups all over west Asia; Hezbollah, the Houthis, the Islamic Jihad. It is the bully of the Islamic world. There are many ways of dealing with bullies, but you know what you can’t do? Bully them.
That’s literally all that Trump knows how to do. He’s never done a deal in his life. He bullies people. Now, he thinks he can bully nations. There’s a reason we usually hire politicians to run countries rather than middle-child nepo babies born into New York real estate empires run by abusive patriarchs: Even politicians who are bullies know that there are people who you can’t bully. Trump has been so insulated all of his life that he’s never encountered anyone he couldn’t bully.
Now that he’s the president of the biggest bully country in the world, he’s running into this problem all the time and he just can’t figure it out. Minutes before his threatened obliteration of a large portion of the Asian continent, when it became clear that Iran wasn’t blinking, he backed down, announced a ceasefire, and declared himself the winner—acquiescing, it seems, to most of Iran’s demands.
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I don’t even know how he’s remained this immune from lessons up until now because he’s had such an embarrassing track history, Back in his first term he tried to bully Kim Jong-Un, who I guess he figured was a really easy mark, but Kim actually just wound up humoring him and then making fun of him a whole bunch. Like, Kim is a nepo baby himself if there has ever been one, but he was born into monarchy, whereas Trump was born a slumlord, which I guess is a type of lord.
Trump launched his second term with an attempt to bully Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and this time he brought the whole mean girls crew to surround the man and shout in his face on live television. If there was a locker in the room they would have tried to shove him into it. That didn’t work, either. Trump has stopped even pretending to try to end that war because he ran out of ideas after the bullying didn’t work.
By the way, it’s worth watching this disgraceful attempt at a shaming ritual just to gasp at the irony of JD Vance and Trump’s condescending lectures about how you end wars via diplomacy and not threats.
Trump thinks that world leaders are intimidated by yelling. He thinks this because his secretary and his employees and his wife and the Apprentice contestants and his son Eric are intimidated by yelling. Presidents, particularly those who rose through politics in war ravaged regions of the world, aren’t intimidated by some fat old white American asshole businessman shouting at them.
What about that bizarre episode where he tried to bully Denmark into handing over the entire territory of Greenland? He actually sent some thugs up there to try to intimidate Greenland’s government like a mob shakedown, threatening them with a military strike. They were rattled, but nobody seriously thought he would attack Europe, even as unhinged as he is.
I think he didn’t learn any lessons from these interactions because he has no self-awareness and gets a lot more positive reinforcement from successes than negative reinforcement from failures, and that’s true even when the same exact thing fails more often than it succeeds. In recent months he successfully bullied Venezuela into subservience and seems to be making headway with Cuba. That was all he needed to know when he turned his sights on Iran.
But Iran is not Venezuela or Cuba. Those countries were struggling in the first place, partly due to America’s treatment of them before Trump even came on the scene. Iran is a regional power, that’s how it gets to be the bully of the Islamic world. That’s how it gets to steal Iraq’s lunch money, shove Yemen into a locker and station its troops on the Red Sea. It even makes Saudi Arabia flinch and Saudi Arabia is the school quarterback.
I don’t know what the hell was going through Trump’s mind when he thought attacking Iran would be the same as attacking Venezuela, particularly when he’s sure as shit not willing to raise his voice at Russia or China. I think no small part of it comes down to his belief that Muslim countries are “shithole countries” and he could just do to any of them what Israel did to Gaza.
And what in God’s name was the point of it in the first place? Putting aside the ludicrous argument that they were close to having a nuke, which nobody believes, including the experts, the rest of us, and the people saying it. Don’t tell me it’s a distraction from Epstein; I know that’s tempting but I don’t buy the “distract them with something even less popular” tactic. I don’t want to believe this is entirely at the behest of Israel, or at least I don’t want to fly that close to the Jewish puppetmasters trope, but I do think Netanyahu would be pretty happy if Trump did exterminate the entire Iranian civilization. That’s probably why Bibi seems to be working so hard to end the supposed ceasefire they apparently have going on at the moment.
What’s clear is that Trump lost this war, decisively. That’s not something to celebrate, because it’s made Iran stronger, and the Iranian regime sucks. There was never any possibility of a direct conflict with Iran that would have had a positive outcome. Iran has an incredibly powerful geographical situation, especially when it comes to the Strait of Hormuz, which is why America and Britain, in 1953, should have allowed it to retain its moderate, secular, democratically elected government, instead of sending the CIA in to overthrow him and install a far-right lunatic who was friendlier with BP.
Let’s look at what the Iran war has accomplished at this point, which the Trump administration is of course calling a victory for himself:
The new Iranian regime is more extreme than the last one
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was 86 years old, he was probably going to fucking die in his sleep before the end of Trump’s term. After his reign of terror, the Iranian people may have had an opportunity to replace him with someone who wasn’t a bloodthirsty maniac. Instead, Trump decided to drop a bomb on his head and also wipe out the entire upper echelon of the government. This permitted the Iran Revolutionary Guard to seize control, and they make the previous regime look like boy scouts.
Not just that, but they elected Khamenei’s son as the new Supreme Leader, which is something they would not have ever done if not for this war. It turns out they have strict rules against hereditary succession, and would likely have picked someone more moderate in any other situation. They only waived this rule in order to maintain defiance and project a message of regime continuation. So now the Supreme Leader is basically the same guy again, except he’s 30 years younger now, and also, America and Israel murdered his entire family. Great job.
Iran now knows and will utilize the full extent of its power over the Hormuz Strait
The worst result of the Iran war was… well, it was probably the fact that they bombed a primary school and killed over 100 little girls, but to be grim, the worst result that the bulk of the world mostly cares about is the closure of the Hormuz Strait, the narrow bottleneck at the southern tip of Iran through which ships need to travel to bring the majority of the Middle East’s oil to the rest of the world. That is a shit ton of oil, and I know nobody reading this needs it explained to them because you are all feeling it economically: This is the biggest fuel crisis in, uh, maybe ever.
Now that Iran has seen the full power to inflict global chaos that it wields at this chokepoint, a hypothesis it never would have been able to test had it not been for this war. So now they have decided that, hey, maybe they can charge a toll for ships passing through this chokepoint. A toll of millions of dollars per ship.
Since this was proposed a few days ago, Donald Trump has, variously, voiced support for it, then condemned it, but also suggested he could collect those tolls instead. In any case it looks like we’re getting oil tolls.
Russia is also now more powerful and the Ukraine war has been extended
Oh yeah Russia, remember them? Our old buddy Putin, who’s waging an exhausting meatgrinder of a war on the north of the European continent for no clear reason? A war that Trump said he would end on day one of his presidency, but then just yelled at Ukraine’s president and gave up when that did nothing?
Putin might have been on the brink of saying uncle on that whole thing due to a lack of financial sustainability, but the Iran war just gave them a hot money injection due to America lifting sanctions on Russian oil to alleviate the oil crisis at the Hormuz strait.
Basically, Donald Trump, who “won” the inaugural and probably also final FIFA Peace Prize, in retaliation for him losing the Nobel Peace Prize even though the Nobel winner also donated it to him for some reason, just prior to Mike Johnson presenting Trump with the inaugural and probably also final America First Peace Prize, not only started and lost a war with Iran that made Iran more powerful, but also strengthened and rejuvenated Russia’s war against Ukraine, which had, until this shitshow, shown signs of winding down.
There’s a popular meme on social media among the ineffectual “resistance liberal” crowd of AI slop enthusiasts that nicknames Donald Trump “TACO,” which stands for “Trump Always Chickens Out.” They’re going nuts over this ceasefire thing.
I think this is misguided for two main reasons: One, do we really want to be jeering at Trump as a coward for not doing a genocide? Is that really the message that we want to be sending to him, and to his potential successors? Because this kinda sounds, to him, like you’re disappointed that he didn’t do the genocide. Stop it.
More importantly, what happened here isn’t that he “chickened out.” It’s that he was defeated. He did an idiotic thing that cost him and everybody else a lot, and people need to remember that. You can’t bully a bully—you can’t win by calling them a chicken or a coward, or calling them gay or whatever else Gavin Newsom’s team is trying now. They can’t be bullied, but they can be defeated and humiliated.
That’s the message that Trump’s people need to take away from all of this: That he has failed, his project has failed, his entire ideology is a disastrous failure. There are many failures and mistakes in history, let’s recognize this one for what it is, and this man for what he is.
I'm writing a whole book about how the internet corroded our liberal culture into a reactionary populist nightmare within a single generation. The working title is How Geeks Ate the World and if you like this newsletter then you'll probably like my book. If you're unsure, the good news is I’m going to be dropping parts of the draft into this very newsletter as the project comes along—but only for paid subscribers. So if you want to read along in real time, please consider subscribing. Otherwise I’ll be keeping you in the loop. Check it out here!
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I hear what you're saying re: Israel/the "Jewish puppetmasters" meme, but then there's this - "[T]he United States is engaged in this conflict at the request of and in the collective self-defense of its Israeli ally, as well as in the exercise of the United States’ own inherent right of self-defense."
Source - https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-legal-adviser/2026/04/operation-epic-fury-and-international-law/
So...they basically said the thing. But the antisemitic angle isn't really the right framing anyway. They do this because much of the admin is fanatically pro-zionist because of their own religious-held insanity. Much of the rest of the admin, as much as they may hate Jewish people, are deeply envious of the relative success of the Israeli ethnonationalist project. This unholy alliance leads to things like attacking Iran even when there was no clear rationale re: American interests and has (predictably) become a miserable failure, as you've pointed out.
Hey, thanks for at least acknowledging the possibility that the dead little girls might matter more than the price of oil.