Malian rebel forces opened a coordinated offensive this weekend with decapitation strikes that killed the Minister of Defense, General Sadio Camara, and forced Russian mercenaries to abandon a base at Kidal. Camara was the Malian leader who replaced French troops with Africa Corps, the retitled Wagner Group, in 2023.

The two rebel groups are Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), an Al Aeda offshoot, and the Azawad Liberation Front (FLA), which consists of Tuareg tribesmen. The Islamic State also has a presence in the east of the country and will likely benefit from a collapse of the central government.

Kidal is the first city to fall to rebel forces since 2013, when French troops arrived to shore up the government in Operation Serval. They left in August 2022 at the request of Camara, presumably because Russian mercenaries were willing to participate in atrocities alongside FAMa forces. Russian and Malian troops retook Kidal in 2023, making its recapture a heavy blow to the prestige of both.

Share

Recent government infighting has weakened the state. Camara was at odds with Gen. Assimi Goïta, the president of Mali, but Camara survived purges of officers loyal to him and was restored to his office during a February cabinet shakeup. Goïta apparently survived the attempt on his life this weekend and is reportedly surrounded by special forces troops now.

Africa Corps has approximately 2,000 mercenary contract soldiers in Mali and says they were outnumbered 6 to 1. Mali pays the former Wagner Group $10 million a month for security. The withdrawal from Kidal was negotiated under heavy pressure. As the Russian column departed for Tessalit, they left their local FAMa (Forces Armées Maliennes) allies behind.

Rebels reportedly used drones as well as vehicle-borne improvised explosive device (VBIEDs) in their attacks. JNIM was repelled from the capital Bamako, but not until after wreaking destruction and capturing equipment. FAMa and Africa Corps repelled attacks in the center and south of the country after hard fighting and an assist from Turkish-made drones. Airbases at Gao, Sévaré, Kati, and Bamako remain in government hands.

Africa Corps has been surprised in Mali before. A group called the Permanent Strategic Framework for Peace, Security and Development (CSP-PSD) ambushed Wagner mercenaries in the July 2024 Battle of Tinzaouaten, killing dozens of Russians and downing a helicopter. Another Wagner/Africa Corps helicopter was reportedly shot down and its aircrew killed near Goa this weekend.

Mali formed an Alliance of Sahel States (AES) with Burkina Faso and Niger in 2023. All three nations left the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the African Union to form a united bloc. Niger also forced the United States to leave a drone base in that country.

American sanctions against Mali have crushed the local economy. Sanctions against Camara and two other senior officials linked to Africa Corps were lifted in March as part of a rapprochement with the Malian government. However, the coordinated attacks this weekend are likely going to devastate trade as the deteriorated security situation will deter investment. Gold, cotton, and livestock are the chief exports. Access to the gold mines is a key part of the Africa Corps contract.

It remains to be seen whether JNIM and FLA can sustain their cooperation, but their weekend success is a bad sign for Russian involvement. Moscow appears to be repeating the errors of Afghanistan, where eight different groups of mujahideen fighters managed to coordinate their battlefield movements and international contacts in a successful bid to drive out the Soviet Union.

Also like Afghanistan, Russian engagement has failed to deal with any of the grievances that sustain insurgency. Participation in massacres has instead inflamed ethnic tensions and exacerbated political divisions. Carving out AES from ECOWAS has also left Mali cut off from regional support and intelligence partnerships that could give warning of Islamist intentions. Africa Corps has clearly underestimated the strength and capabilities of insurgent groups.

Most telling of all, Africa Corps has not even tried to control the territory of Mali. Their numbers are far too small, only enough to defend the regime itself. As Zineb Riboua notes, Wagner had greater success with “sustained disinformation operations to delegitimize France as a credible counterterrorism partner” than the defense of the regime in Bamako through propaganda.

Russian information operations this weekend focused on “paper[ing] over this de facto withdrawal by manufacturing the perception of Malian junta competence and military momentum”, Riboua writes. If the jihadis smell blood, they may very well escalate their attacks, threatening the system with breakdown. Afghanistan proved that no matter how systematic and sophisticated Russia’s information warfare gets to be, military victory cannot be worded into existence.

Africa Corps will either have to reinforce its remaining bases, drawing resources away from Ukraine, or else watch as another foreign ally goes under. Vladimir Putin has survived the loss of Syria and Venezuela; he now faces the loss of Iran and Cuba. To lose Mali as well would be catastrophic, perhaps even too much failure for the siloviki to tolerate.

Nor should we be too quick to celebrate Russia’s loss. A runaway Islamic State in the Sahel region would be a disaster for humanity, expose the southern flank of Europe to Islamist aggression, and likely make the Mediterranean refugee problem worse. Mali seems unimportant, but has probably never mattered this much before.

Probably the biggest difference between Mali and Afghanistan is how fast desert warfare can be compared to the hill-fighting that drained the Red Army. There are reports today that Africa Corps has lost more bases and the government is in crisis, so the situation could go downhill very quickly.

Subscribe now

Four years ago, I wrote an essay about the constellation of emerging technologies that are transforming the soldier in the 21st Century into something a bit like fantasy science fiction. This change is not restricted to a single branch of arms, e.g. an ‘infantry revolution’ or ‘artillery revolution’, because it affects all military activity.

Future basic training classes will have to integrate technologies such as small drones and anti-drone technologies into the standard skills package of every soldier, with knock-on effects for everyone in uniform. This is a military revolution in our time, and now it is time to check up on progress in all the domains I discussed back then.

1 - Jetpacks

We start by acknowledging what I got slightly wrong. In 2022, I did not think that jetpacks were ever going to have real military applications. However, the Royal Marines have developed a specialized use for boarding parties. In a successful 2021 experiment with a turbine-powered “Jet Suit” made by Gravity Industries, a pilot launched from an inflatable boat, landed on the HMS Tamar, and dropped an assault ladder.

The product is now in service, but will probably not be used for deep penetration missions because it burns a very limited fuel supply very quickly. An average infantry squad will still not find the Jet Suit useful. However, this particular sci-fi trope is now showing up at NATO exercises, so it has become real enough. Whether or not the United Kingdom still has Royal Marines in a decade is a different matter, however.

Elite soldiers of the Special Air Service are reportedly “leaving in substantial numbers” because the Labour government has decided to send human rights lawyers after them. They have good reason to distrust Downing Street. Australia recently arrested SAS veteran Ben Roberts-Smith, the most decorated soldier in the entire country, on war crimes charges from Afghanistan that critics denounce as specious and fabricated.

Insiders are calling this development a “threat to national security” and Jet Suit underlines this reality. As you can see in the video embedded above, flying in a Jet Suit requires both experience and strength. It is inherently dangerous under the best conditions, which rarely obtain during combat. No technology can replace humans, nor is the most advance technology any use at all if no one is willing to fight with it. The more sophisticated the tech becomes, the more vital retention will be.

Read more

Emmanuel Macron is adorable. He wants to open the Strait of Hormuz with European naval power “after the fighting ends” and cut the US Navy out of the deal. He is holding a meeting today, and “China and India were invited, but it’s unclear if they will attend, a French official said.” France operates the only nuclear-powered aircraft carrier in the world that is not American. Charles de Gaulle carries between 20 and 30 fixed-wing aircraft, mainly Rafale M fighters, with some helicopters and E-2 Hawkeye airborne early warning aircraft. This is less than half the air power on the USS Abraham Lincoln.

Keir Starmer is also adorable. Dispatched to the region after three weeks of fighting that saw Iran fire missiles at a British base, HMS Dragon got to Cyprus and immediately developed a “minor technical issue” in the onboard water system that has kept her in port ever since. Thanks to decades of budget cuts, the Royal Navy operates just 13 destroyers and frigates with two aircraft carriers. The US Navy currently has that many many vessels in the Hormuz theater today.

Share

HMS Queen Elizabeth is currently undergoing maintenance, while the Prince of Wales carries roughly equivalent combat power to the Charles de Gaulle. The rest of NATO put together is not much stronger than France and Britain put together. Italy’s flagship is the ITS Cavour, a light carrier that shows up to NATO exercises on a regular basis with equivalent firepower to either peer country. The ITS Trieste is a newer amphibious assault ship configured to function as a light carrier, operating 30-34 aircraft.

That completes the entire list of fixed-wing-capable carriers in NATO. Spain operates the ESPS Juan Carlos I, and Turkey has the TCG Anadolu, which are both amphibious assault ships. Spain can launch Harrier jump jets, but not F-35s, at least not yet. Turkey’s carrier primarily operates helicopters and fixed-wing UAVs, such as the Bayraktar TB3, but it does not have any capability to launch fighter jets. So Europeans are adorable when they talk about cutting the Americans out and re-forming NATO without the United States. Just simply adorable, like angry infants raging at the unfairness of the world because it is bedtime.

Read more

America’s first president had a gift for surprises. “With me it has always been a maxim rather to let my designs appear from my works than by my expressions”, George Washington wrote in 1797.1 At sunrise on 5 March 1776, the British occupiers of Boston woke up to discover that overnight, without raising any alarms, Washington had turned the Dorchester Heights into a fortress that massed his artillery against the city and the harbor.

Washington was not even supposed to have so many guns. The cannons had traveled a very great distance overland to reach Boston. “My God, these fellows have done more work in one night than I could make my army do in three months”, Gen. William Howe reportedly exclaimed.2 In fact, months of work had culminated in this ending to the Siege of Boston.

Howe made a valiant attempt to organize a complex plan of attack on the heights. It would have been another Bunker Hill, but to the relief of his officers who advised against it, a storm prevented Howe from executing the plan. Instead, during the evening of 9 March Howe ordered his own cannonade against the Dorchester Heights, expending more than 700 cannonballs in a vain attempt to cover the noise of his army abandoning the city for Halifax. They had bled enough for Boston. He was leaving.

Share

Howe need not have bothered with the cannonade. Washington did not press the issue and let his enemy withdraw without a fight. Howe’s army was unable to leave Boston in a single night, anyway. Altogether, 120 vessels stretched nine miles out to sea when the British finally finished their evacuation on 17 March. “A fine, quiet night”, Abigail Adams wrote. “No alarms—no cannon.”3 Her own warlike spirit gathered in the silence.

The more I think of our enemies quitting Boston, the more amazed I am that they should leave such a harbor, such fortifications, such intrenchments, and that we should be in peaceable possession of a town which we expected would cost us a river of blood, without one drop shed. Surely it is the Lord’s doings, and it is marvelous in our eyes. Every foot of ground which they obtain now they must fight for, and may they purchase it at a Bunker Hill price.

The Continental Congress struck its first medal to celebrate the victory. Aware of history, they also commissioned Charles Willson Peale to paint a new portrait of Washington. In his updated image, the Father of the Country “displays none of the swagger of a triumphant general”, Ron Chernow writes in his biography of Washington.4 “The look in his eyes is sad, anxious, even slightly unfocused, as if his thoughts had already turned to his upcoming troubles in New York.”

“His shoulders appear narrow, and his body widens down to a small but visible paunch. It was way too soon for a full-fledged cry of triumph, Peale seemed to suggest, and events would prove him absolutely right.” Like most patriots of the new nation, Washington had hoped for a quick resolution in 1775, but the invasion of New York the next May changed his mind.

In a September 1776 letter to John Hancock, the president of the Continental Congress whose enormous signature adorns the Declaration of Independence, Washington warned that “this contest is not likely to be the Work of a day”.5 He saw “no other possible means to obtain [recruits] but by establishing your army upon a permanent footing”. He warned that “nothing but a good bounty can obtain [new soldiers] upon a permanent establishment; and for no shorter time than the continuance of the War, ought they to be engaged.”

The glow of victory after Boston did not last long, only weeks. Still, Washington’s first victory over the British Army was his most important, for he had to prove it was possible. Moreover, the victory was earned through Herculean efforts, a monumental work of planning and logistics. The talents of his staff would come to define the ultimate victory of the fledgling United States in Washington’s hands. As a practical matter, the Dorchester Heights were a genuine milestone in the American Revolution.

The seizure of Fort Ticonderoga on the southern end of Lake Champlain had been the first significant action by colonials after the ‘battles’ of Lexington and Concord in April 1775. Organized by Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold, a force of volunteers overran the British garrison in a nearly bloodless storming operation on 10 May, capturing dozens of cannons of various calibers with just one bayonet wound inflicted.

Delegates in Philadelphia were not altogether pleased to learn that the most important British base in northern New York had fallen into their hands. The seizure advanced their cause, but also invited retribution, so Congress vowed to return the fort upon “the restoration of the former harmony” they “so ardently wished for”, in the words of Gouverneur Morris.6 A peaceful handover would never come to pass.

Washington needed the guns from Fort Ticonderoga. Without cannons, he could never hope to force the British out of Boston. Henry Knox offered to fetch the “noble train of artillery”, as he referred to it, and Washington accepted his offer in November 1775. This task was far easier said than done. Upper New York being frontier, still, the roads were nonexistent or terrible. Knox had to bring 60 tons of mortars and cannons over mountain ranges and through forests using oxen, horses, and humans.

Arriving at Fort Ticonderoga, Knox immediately began moving the guns on 6 December using a flat-bottomed scow. Knox sailed ahead of the scow in a two-sailed pirogue built for the lake. His brother William was in charge of the scow when it foundered in shallow water at Sabbath Day Point and had to be bailed out. Writing to Washington on 17 December, Knox predicted he would arrive overland with the guns in “16 or 17 days”.7 It took him almost 40 days and nights. Knox had planned for $1,000 in costs and ended up billing the Continental Congress for $2,500, which they took their time paying back to him.

Some communities responded to Knox when he entreated their committees of safety to assist along the way with fresh animals and food. Not all of them did. Yet the train made it across the frozen Hudson River, even recovered a cannon that had fallen through the ice when it was cut loose to save the horses, and then the convoy survived a snowbound week in the mountains near Albany between Christmas and New Year’s Day. A second cannon went through the ice re-crossing the Hudson at Albany, requiring another dangerous recovery.

The terrain froze and then thawed, bogging the sleds down in mud. Knox observed that it was “almost a miracle that people with such heavy loads should be able to get up and down such hills as are here”. But the biggest obstacle proved to be the townsfolk of Westfield, Massachusetts, who turned out to see the great artillery train with whiskey and cider to share. The men of the train were soon in no fit state to continue. Surrendering to the moment, Knox had one of the largest cannons loaded and fired to entertain the people.

The Knox was obliged to send the New York teamsters home, for they did not want to work in Massachusetts. After hiring new animals and men, he pushed on to Washington’s headquarters at Cambridge, arriving on 25 or 27 January (sources differ). At long last, Washington could begin to plan the liberation of Boston.

Washington did not outnumber Howe, nor could he afford to move the guns into position, over time, in full view of the enemy, who might spoil his preparations. “The ingenious solution was to haul the guns into position under cover of darkness during a single night”, Chernow writes. “Noise from the operation would be muffled by firing steady salvos from Roxbury, Cobble Hill, and Lechmere Point and by wrapping wagon wheels with straw to deaden their sound.” Movements were screened by walls made of hay bales. Prefabricated fortifications were carried onto the heights and installed in the darkness.

Washington entrusted these preparations to Gen. Artemas Ward, along with two more generals and his Quartermaster-General, when they informed him that they had been considering the matter for some time, and in fact they had already laid up materials. “First came the covering party of eight hundred men; then carts with intrenching tools; then the working-body of twelve hundred men, under Gen. Thomas; then a train of more than three hundred carts loaded with fascines, hay, &c., in martial procession”.8 Carts made as many as four trips in support of the movement. Two forts were raised on hilltops by 10 PM on 4 March, the works being ready by 3 AM, so that dawn revealed a completed fait accompli.

Washington’s men had come up with an ingenious weapon to make the heights even more formidable. The Dorchester works were fronted by “rows of barrels filled with earth, placed round the works”. Chained together and weighted with stones, the barrels could be pushed down the steep hillside if the British tried to advance up the slope, as they had at Bunker Hill, inflicting casualties and breaking up the line of infantry. Howe looked upon this improvisation with dismay, then resignation.

The British withdrawal was anything but gentle. Between the 9th and the 16th, Howe’s evacuating troops indulged in “pillage, robbery, and destruction, almost without restraint, from officers, soldiers, marines, and sailors; and the utmost confusion and hurry prevailed throughout the town.” Howe issued orders against theft and looting, but to no avail. When the soldiers embarked, the sailors took their turn.

Nor was Howe able to effect a scorched-earth strategy. “The official robbery was performed by a notorious and pretentious New York Tory, Crean Brush, at the head of a gang of soldiers of Tories, who acted under Gen. Howe’s orders in seizing large quantities of goods” that the rebels might use for their war. “Crean Brush obeyed his orders thoroughly and maliciously, entering and robbing the stores or houses indiscriminately, under the broadest possible interpretation of his orders.”

Still, somehow Brush managed to leave behind thirty thousand pounds’ worth of “warlike supplies and stores”, in Washington’s estimation. Adding injury to insult, Crean Brush was later captured on board the brig Elizabeth with all the goods he had seized. None of it ever served the British Army.

Beginning on the morning 14th of March, Gen. Howe sent a crier through the town to warn the residents of a curfew until nightfall, “lest they should annoy the troops in their intended embarkations.” The next day, he summoned the city fathers and threatened to burn the town if they interfered. Winds proved unfavorable on the 15th. Finally, the British Army left, some buildings still smoldering from deliberate fires they had set to deny their use to the rebels.

Conscious of the danger that Boston would be in, Washington ensured the first five hundred men to enter the city were already immune to smallpox. “In a beautiful symbolic act, he returned a horse given to him after learning that it had been swiped from a departed Tory who had been ‘an avow[e]d enemy to the American cause’”, Chernow writes. “Once again, by opposing vindictive actions, Washington shaped the tone and character of the American army.” Whatever terrors the British had inflicted, or were still to inflict, Washington would continue to resist replying in kind.

“Both John and Samuel Adams regarded Washington’s appointment as the political linchpin needed to bind the colonies together”, Chernow says. Washington’s presidency served the same end, later. However fleeting his first victory at Boston was, the rest of the story of the Father of the Country would not have been possible without it. The character of that victory, won through sweat rather than blood, speaks to the character of the men who won it, and explains why America is an exceptional nation. Patient, principled leadership won the war and defined the republic.

I am making these premium essays on the American Revolution FREE in 2026. If you are a free subscriber, please consider upgrading to support this work.

Subscribe now

Vice President J.D. Vance left Pakistan without a deal. This was predictable, for he is the grinder, whereas Marco Rubio is the closer in the Trump administration. Vladimir Putin similarly uses Vladimir Medinsky, his minister of culture, for 21-hour diplomatic haggling sessions, then sends Sergey Lavrov to close a deal when the other side is serious about his terms. The act is not original.

Like the classic ‘good cop/bad cop’ routine, this hostile negotiating tactic takes place in stages. Similarly, military campaigns unfold in stages. The two sequences can coincide. While the negotiations were happening, Adm. Bradley Cooper, head of CENTCOM, announced that the US Navy had cleared a navigation channel through the Strait of Hormuz. Two destroyers transited the strait and subsea drones (USVs) began looking for any remaining mines laid by Iranian forces.

While the regime has claimed they cannot find some of their own mines, this may in fact be yet another propaganda success by Tehran using western press to amplify their narratives. They wish the world would fear their mines. In fact, it is unclear that Iran has left any mines in the strait at all. I suspect this story is fake. True or false, it is a desperate bid for attention. Iran simply has less power to threaten commerce in the strait right now than American forces, which have total air and sea supremacy.

“Effective immediately, the United States Navy, the Finest in the World, will begin the process of BLOCKADING any and all Ships trying to enter, or leave, the Strait of Hormuz”, President Trump announced on Sunday. For once, he has spoken in the legalistic language of the international law experts. The word ‘blockade’ has a precise meaning they can now quibble over.

“The blockade will be enforced impartially against vessels of all nations entering or departing Iranian ports and coastal areas, including all Iranian ports on the Arabian Gulf and Gulf of Oman” reads an announcement from CENTCOM. Iran is sole subject of the blockade, as “forces will not impede freedom of navigation for vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz to and from non-Iranian ports.”

Ceasefire negotiations began at the same moment the Iranian side was losing their single biggest point of leverage, so that the IRGC ended the negotiations weaker than they have ever been. When the talks ended without a deal — which was predictable, if we are honest — Trump imposed a blockade that Iran has no means to break. The US Navy now controls all movement through the strait and the IRGC is trying to pretend the strait is open to “harmless passage of civilian vessels”.

The shoe is on the other foot.

Iran has lost their single greatest source of strategic leverage. Iran will not be allowed to collect tolls on traffic, Trump says: “No one who pays an illegal toll will have safe passage on the high seas.” The Emiratis too say they will punish French and British vessels that have paid a toll to Iranians for passage, and thanks to this crisis, no one seriously believes any threats that Emmanuel Macron or Keir Starmer might make against the UAE. They have exposed themselves to the Arabs in this exchange. Consequences shall ensue.

Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf was afraid to even take pictures with J.D. Vance in Pakistan for fear his own radicals will kill him. Ghalibaf enjoys the weakest bargaining position imaginable, right now, standing between the Great Satan and the deep blue IRGC. Yet it is this militant core of the regime, the Republican Guard, who must face reality, now, because their ‘shadow economy’ is at supreme risk under blockade. Ghalibaf returns to Tehran with increasing leverage over the IRGC, and that is a sea change in the internal power dynamics of Iran.

Share

Securing the strait under fire, let alone enforcing a blockade under fire, would have carried tremendous risks for the US Navy. Instead of forcing their way through like Churchill in the Dardanelles, or conducting a close blockade in range of the shores, the Trump administration made their most dangerous move at the precise moment when the risk to sailors, ships, and mission success was as low as possible.

This phase was preceded by intense, higher-risk phases of action against Iran’s material means to close the strait. Trump and Pete Hegseth are not just beating their chests when they repeatedly announce that Iran has no navy or air force left. Hegseth is describing his actual accomplishments as Secretary of War, and Trump is leveraging the negotiation for a successful conclusion of that war.

Iran was never able to entirely close the strait, anyway. On Saturday alone, at least 16 vessels passed through, an uptick from the daily average of 10 during the 38-day campaign. Americans secured the strait, and the possibility of peace, through superior firepower. Now comes the part where they strangle the Republican Guard. I have told premium subscribers to expect this moment since January. I have also been saying that Iran is part of a larger plan.

Economic war at the end of effective kinetic action produces different effects than the opposite sequence. The IRGC built an entire underground antiship missile manufacturing facility near Dezful to threaten traffic in the strait in the event of war. The complex is now closed for business by GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs dropped from B-2 bombers. Iranians might dig the tunnels out again, but the IRGC will have to pay someone money to do the digging, and that will be much harder without their ‘resistance economy’ paying the bills.

The net effect of this sequence is a far more expensive rebuilding process. Starving the economy of Iran through sanctions first made it more expensive to build in the first place, but did not stop it from being built. Now the IRGC must weigh their costs and priorities for an overstretched construction budget.

US and Israeli power systematically stripped the IRGC of the means to intervene in the strait. Both the IRIS Shahid Mahdavi and her sister “drone carrier,” Shahid Bagheri, are destroyed. All of the boats that IRGC might use to lay mines are destroyed. These were capital projects that would have to be rebuilt with resources the Republican Guard no longer has, through maritime trade that is now blocked.

Think of all the oil infrastructure that cannot be repaired without imports, now, and the true depth of risk for the IRGC becomes a little easier to imagine. Who needs to invade Kharg Island, or blow it up, when you can just stop any tankers that leave Kharg Island from ever reaching their destinations?

Over 90 percent of Iran’s seaborne trade transits the strait. By importing fuel precursors for missiles, electronics for drones, as well as half the black market consumer goods that reach Iran, the IRGC remained dependent on seaborne supply chains for military and economic sustainment. It was always a militarily weak force, unable to project power except through proxies, which is why IRGC built up its long-range strike capabilities to compensate.

Overland smuggling is certainly possible, indeed it already happens, but it is far more expensive than shipping containers at sea. This strategic vulnerability has always existed and been understood, just like the vulnerability of the strait to Iranian closure has always been an element of war planning for the Gulf. Miad Maleki, a self-described “sanctions nerd” at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, writes that a “naval blockade imposes ~$435M/day in combined economic damage” on Iran.

The IRGC war plan assumed the Arab street would rise up and force the Gulf states to stop the Americans once missiles and drones began to explode. Instead, the IRGC has managed to make every single regional neighbor despise them, and the Arab street is quietly relieved that Iranian colonization of their politics, societies, and economies seems to be ending. Jihad has exhausted its political potency before our eyes.

Meanwhile, markets have shifted. The Saudis have restored the Red Sea pipeline to full capacity and the tanker trackers all report a stream of vessels inbound for the US Gulf coast. Call it cunning, if you must characterize it, but admit the administration thought their way through the problem. Everyone who said it couldn’t and wouldn’t be done is wrong. Everyone who said there was no plan, then said the plan would not work, then said the plan had already failed, is wrong. Everyone who took Trump literally instead of seriously is wrong.

The Strait of Hormuz is both opened and less relevant than it was before. Cui bono? Iran’s ‘closure’ of the strait was never real and never complete, more a crisis of convenience than a real emergency. It did not occur to altogether too many people with too high a platform that Donald Trump found the closure of Hormuz convenient, too. (“No one could have seen it coming”, he said, and then the usual suspects took him literally instead of seriously again.)

Who has felt the heat? Closure has been inconvenient to Paris, London, and Beijing, mariners, and refineries throughout the Asian littoral, South, Southeast, and Far East. Gasoline prices have spiked in the USA, a sacrifice Trump was willing to make months before the midterm, so that markets have time to correct.

Now watch the commentariat chew their sour grapes in astonishment. Goodbye, IRGC. Goodbye, regional proxies. Goodbye, revolutionary regime, and goodbye to all the Arab relationships that sustained the tensions of the Middle East. Demining the strait is in fact a terrific synecdoche of the current operational phase, a metaphor in which one part symbolizes the whole, like referring to ships as “sails” or “hulls”. The Trump administration is effectively demining the Middle East. If the end result is a more peaceful region, he is going to be insufferable about Nobel prizes.

This is economic war without sanctions, a policy option which Trump sees as part of the ‘frozen conflict’ problem that he is resolving through action. He is departing from more than a century of western security policy wisdom in which economic warfare through sanction regimes has been a substitute for military action. This formula leads to frozen conflict, in Trump’s view. Instead, he threatens to issue sanctions against countries that sell weapons to Iran.

The ‘gray zones’ are disappearing from the map. Venezuela went first. After Iran, Havana. After Havana, Russia and China will no longer have the means to tie down American power and policy in a strategic confrontation with the United States. A maritime energy blockade would then put absolute limits on Chinese aggression in the Taiwan Strait. Trump could very well find himself meeting new Russian leadership, after Havana, and then we can all laugh at everyone who told us that he was a Kremlin agent in a sinister plan to conquer Ukraine.

None of his enemies, foreign or domestic, can seem to predict Trump’s actions correctly. His words confuse and alarm them. They call him all sorts of things, some of which may even be true, but it does not stop Trump from succeeding after his war has been pronounced a failure eleven times.

Who could have foreseen America’s Gulf coast refineries nearly maxed out to meet the surge of market demand for Hormuz-free petroleum products? Maybe Trump, who has consistently promoted American energy exports at the expense of Russia and now Iran. His detractors will tell us this is a complete accident, that Donald Trump is just the luckiest man alive, so that things keep working out the way he wanted.

If that is true, then it makes no sense to bet against him, and yet they always do. Some enemy of Trump should try an experiment in which they refuse to underestimate him, and see what happens. Really — someone do this for science. Be the control group.

Vice President Vance has delivered the message: this is a leveraged buyout, not a haggling session at the bazaar over each individual carpet Trump wants. When Ghalibaf and his associates are serious about a deal, one that comes to terms with Iran’s military defeat, Rubio will come to meet them, and not in Pakistan.

Transformation of the regime will continue in the meanwhile. IRGC leadership and personnel, ‘shadow/resistance economy’ infrastructure, and Basij checkpoints have all been targeted before, and this campaign may return. Iraqi militias now deployed in service of the regime are also subject to destruction whenever the United States wants to target them. This tracking video of American military air traffic en route to the Middle East overnight suggests the hour of resumed hostilities is close at hand at the time I am publishing.

We should note that the ‘failed’ ceasefire also resets the 60-day window of constitutional authority for Trump and Hegseth to act without Congress. A fly on the wall might tell us that J.D. Vance explained all this to the speaker of the majlis, Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, in Islamabad.

Hegseth’s Pentagon is the most lethal ever seen, and allied to the IDF. Their combined precision is capable of finding and killing the top three layers of IRGC command while leaving the civilian leadership, as well as the regular armed forces leadership, alone. The coalition treats the IRGC correctly as the actual cancer in the constitutional system of Iran. Its destruction always would have required some amount of destabilizing action.

Sometimes, a little instability is a good thing. It leads to overdue changes and accelerates the arbitrage of decline. Iran lasted just 38 days before the ceasefire. I do not think the IRGC can last another 60 days under fire. Chaos unfroze the frozen conflict, and many things were clarified.

We saw that the clerics are not really in charge of Iran. We saw that Iran, in truth a militarily weak state, could not keep the strait closed in word or in fact, even though the IRGC paramilitary has been allowed to run rampant in the country. Arabs got mad at Iran instead of exploding in rage at Israel and America. Energy markets adjusted to the crisis by rerouting infrastructure or purchasing American products. We were promised World War III, a draft, and a beach invasion. Instead, we have seen the entire strategy of Iran, as well as its defenders in the West, collapse.

Subscribe now

Despite some pain involved in the shift to a corps-based system, the Ukrainian Armed Forces are the side making the slow advances, now, whereas Russian troops are virtually unable to make any headway through the grinding style of attritional warfare that defined Russian doctrine in 2024 and 2025.

The UAF have achieved this effect through the ‘deep battle’ use of drones along operational axes of advance. Small UAVs carried forward and launched by ground drones, or from mother ships, with signal repeater drones, extend the tactical range of drone ‘swarming’ effects. Drone attacks now occur regularly beyond the ‘front line’ across the ‘gray zone’, within the middle zone of Russian logistics and communications. Even getting to the ‘last mile’, where losses can reach 90 percent, is a gamble.

Share

Meanwhile, Ukrainian long-range strike drones and missiles are crippling key infrastructure, including nearly half of Russia’s oil and gas export capacity, according to some reports. I am old enough to remember when the Biden White House tried to halt Ukrainian attacks on Russian oil infrastructure out of fear that it would raise gas prices in an election year, but then gasoline prices actually fell.

It is therefore noticeable that Donald Trump seems to pay no mind, now. The Ukrainians can blow up as much Russian oil and gas export capacity as they want without raising his eyebrow. Trump responded to the Hormuz crisis with sanctions relief for Russian fossil fuels, but he issues not a single tsk or cluck at the sight of Novorossiysk in flames. He doesn’t seem to care, which has its own virtue, for Ukraine.

Millions of drones

American weapons figure less and less in their victory equation all the time because the battlefields of Ukraine are dominated by drones that European partners help them produce in mass quantities. Whereas the 155mm howitzer shell was the most urgent shortage of 2023, in 2026 tube artillery is virtually absent, withdrawn beyond its range of fire, because drones will close in and destroy a working battery in minutes. The classic artillery duel is absent, obsolete.

Drones now account for more than 80 percent of battlefield losses inflicted by the UAF, while the UAF have proven to be far better at adapting to the drone-centric battlefield than the Russian Ministry of Defense. Taking the MoD away from Sergei Shoigu and handing it over to Andrey Belousov in 2024 amounted to handing over the corruption scheme from one set of hands to another in exchange for a promise to grift less. Russian generals are now arrested for corruption more frequently than they are lost on the battlefield.

At Chasiv Yar, Stepnohirs’k, and eastern Zaporizhzhia, Ukrainians keep cutting off Russian positions from resupply using drones. They clear paths through minefields and destroy or disable Russian drones waiting in ambush along axes of advance, using drones. They advance in stages, taking minimal casualties against Russians that are weak and hungry and thirsty.

Russian advances are fewer and slower. In Kupyansk, Russians no longer advance at all. The tactic of sending two men forward with a drone to give them coverage has met the ‘drone wall’. Ukrainian drone teams hunt for them at night with thermal cameras, find them in their hiding places, even use four or five drones to kill one Russian. Russian casualties are astronomical now, with more than 34,000 estimated in the last month alone, quite outstripping Russian recruitment, which has fallen. Ukraine is now reducing Russian formations faster than they can be filled.

Russia has no solutions

Military bloggers are complaining about the situation on Telegram, which is increasingly difficult to access in Russia. In Ukraine, Russians have so far found no real replacement for Starlink. They can provide some signal with 5G repeaters held aloft by balloons, however I have also seen too many Ukrainian drone videos of Russians caught in their final moments, installing the routers on poles, towers, or trees.

Rather than adaptation, the Kremlin response is communication crackdown. The ‘Max’ super-app is now becoming mandatory in Moscow. Designed by the security services for maximum social control of online media, Max is a totalitarian’s wet dream and likely optimized for conscription drives.

Russian defeat history shows that secrecy and information clampdowns always accompany battlefield collapse. ‘Flaming debris’ from drones that had supposedly been intercepted famously used to do most of the damage to Russian oil infrastructure, according to Russian officials who could not dare describe a successful strike by the enemy.

At this point, the UAF have used their drone range to attack so many Russian air defense systems that the excuse no longer holds. Russia is simply too big to defend against Ukrainian long-range strikes. MoD lacks the equipment. Corporate entities that were supposed to build their own defenses either constructed protective drone netting that was clearly insufficient — in fact, it was another probable source of the ‘falling debris’ excuse — or else they spent funds on (mostly Chinese) counter-drone technologies that simply do not work.

Ukraine has quite simply come to dominate every phase and level of drone warfare even while Russian soldiers in the ‘gray zone’ lack basic comms, let alone resupply of drones, or food, or water. On this new battlefield, the UAF are able to advance one objective at a time, while the Russians make little progress even with increased attritional grind.

None of the objectives that Russia played up in years past has broken Ukraine. Pokrovsk has not proven decisive. Huliaipole has not proven decisive. Kupyansk is a disaster. All this prior Russian ‘progress’ avails them nothing, now. Talk of the Donbas in negotiated settlements is entirely premature when Russia is unlikely to ever control it all through military force.

Trump is not helping Russia

American aid has reduced to a trickle, but that has not given Russians any advantages. On the contrary, Elon Musk cooperatively cut them off from their best means of battlefield command and control, while nothing Trump does now actually helps Russia. Instead, Trump seems intent on reducing the regimes of Venezuela, Iran, and Cuba — strategic bastions that Russia and China had counted on to complicate and tie down American power in the event of a broader strategic clash.

The difference between Trump and Joe Biden, then, is not about hatred or love for Ukraine. The actual difference is their willingness to accept frozen conflicts. For Team Biden, supplying ATACMS while geofencing their use was clearly a strategy to manage the escalation instead of resolving the conflict. Team Biden was happy to have another frozen standoff producing ranks of experts in the foreign policy and intelligence trades.

Team Trump is happy to let Ukraine win as much as they want on their own. He gives them nothing for free, but also draws no limits. This has become the most common complaint about Trump from Ukraine-stans lately. The United States reportedly supplies intelligence to Ukraine in exchange for … well, they just don’t get it for free. The US taxpayer is not being asked to supply hundreds of billions of dollars in what seems like free aid to Kyiv, either.

I do not think Europeans or Ukrainians understand how this image of begging for free money has hurt them with American voters. Nor was it ever necessary. Instead, Trump was right that Europeans needed to step up for Ukraine.

Since the re-election of Trump, Europeans have in fact found ways to turn on funding taps for Ukraine. Ukrainians have built a military-industrial drone warfare complex in Europe. In the process, Ukrainians have become a far more powerful warfighting nation than they were even last year, and now they are advancing while Russia stalls. They did it all themselves, and from the American perspective, this is great news. We are glad to see Ukraine winning.

Russians are not happy about it

From the Russian perspective, this is all terrible news. Ukrainians are supposed to be western puppets, their resistance to peaceful brotherhood under Russkiy Mir made possible only by American and British intervention. The less actual help Americans give Ukrainians in victory, the less power this stupid canard will have, and the more powerfully true the Ukrainian national story will be.

A rational affection for Ukraine does not require much thinking about Donald Trump. I have been forced to unsubscribe and unfollow some commentators I used to respect because of their constant harping on the one politician who matters least for ultimate victory. Myths that ought to have vanished long ago persist in their deranged analyses. They cannot see past the evil orange man to recognize Ukrainian success or admit that this is their war to win, not his.

The war in Ukraine is yet another blow to ‘the experts’. People for whom the frozen conflict was a source of expertise and authority, who ostensibly support Ukraine and oppose Trump for love of Ukraine, are not so eager to see Ukrainians win without American help.

Europeans who insist that the US must resolutely stay in NATO and continue to pay all the bills on behalf of Europe are missing the vibe shift. That is visible in their affections for Cuba and Venezuela, as well as Spain and France seeking a separate peace with Iran.

The real sources of discontent

Europe is allowed to do what they want because they are Europeans. America is supposed to do what Europe wants because they are Europe. American taxpayers are supposed to foot the bill without complaint. Once you see this plain hypocrisy, it is impossible to unsee. Trump sees it.

The ‘rules-based order’ was a convenient world for ‘the experts’ to live in. Trump is too transactional, too gauche, too uninterested in frozen conflicts or gray zones and all the wonderful nuance that experts can put on display in pursuit of social power using them. This is why they hate him to the point of obsession.

The ‘experts’ who told you that Trump would be bad for Ukraine are objectively wrong. Forced to cooperate and adapt together, Europe and Ukraine are winning their macroeconomic war with Russia. Any ‘expert’ who claims that Trump is actually helping Vladimir Putin against Ukraine right now in real, material terms is not worth listening to.

Here is a simple test. Ask that sort of expert why the Europeans have not stopped buying Russian fossil fuels — because if they did, the war would end quickly — and watch nine out of ten such ‘experts’ sputter incoherently. If an ‘expert’ answers the question with Trump derangement, stop listening to that ‘expert’ anymore, and do not mistake them as pro-Ukraine.

Their priorities are not necessarily aligned with Ukrainian victory. Those ‘experts’ have another agenda that is more important to them than Ukraine. The virtue of Donald Trump’s view of Ukraine is that he doesn’t care if they win, so he won’t tell them how hard they are allowed to win.

Subscribe now

Anyone who says they already know what comes next is lying and you can safely ignore them. Everyone who said that Donald Trump was doing too much, then said that he was not doing enough, then said he was doing too much again, and is once again saying he has not done enough, can be safely ignored as well.

The people who told you that words are violence not so long ago were telling you that Trump’s words were literal genocide yesterday, and today they are calling him weak. People who think that bridge strikes are war crimes are not worth listening to, thereafter. Ukraine conducts bridge strikes every day. This is basic to the laws of land warfare.

American and Israeli forces have destroyed every significant IRGC military target and most of their key economic targets that support strategic aggression. This weekend, there was “a widespread disruption in the computer network of Bank Sepah”, the state-owned IRGC bank. “Informed sources told Iran International the disruption on Sunday left the bank unable to pay the salaries of the Revolutionary Guard’s personnel and military officials.”

What I had told premium subscribers to expect has come to pass. I do not claim to be an Iran expert, just a person with reading comprehension and an interest in Iran. We are now watching a bargaining phase unfold. Denial gave way to anger and now a process of acceptance in Tehran.

Of course, someone in Iran immediately broke the ceasefire by shooting at the neighbors. Seventeen ballistic missiles and 35 drones were reportedly launched at the Emirates alone after the ceasefire was supposedly in effect. It is unclear that a unified command actually exists in Iran and IRGC factions may be emerging. This morning, the Emiratis began pummeling refineries and storage tanks on the islands of Siri and Lavan. Infrastructure that took decades for the regime to build will not be replaced overnight.

The Emirates have had enough of the regime in Tehran. Last week, “UAE authorities detained dozens of money changers tied to financial entities linked to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, shut down associated companies and closed their offices.” Dubai is described by experts as “an economic lung for the Iranian regime” and “the single most critical jurisdiction in the Iranian regime’s sanctions-evasion architecture”. The critical sarraf (money changers) were banished, cutting off their informal networks. This human infrastructure is as difficult to replace as the physical plant.

Pakistan’s involvement in the “very fragile” ceasefire (J.D. Vance’s words) points to the new alignment of Iran’s Sunni neighbors against Tehran. Islamabad cannot afford a regional war. Not only do they have their old conflict with India, Pakistan has a new, active conflict with the Afghan Taliban. The Baloch region shared between Pakistan and Iran is already restive.

This is not Iran being victorious, this is Iran being contained and reduced. “Your choice is not between survival and collapse; it is about how you collapse”, Reza Pahlavi told the IRGC on Sunday. “The end of the current path is the delivery of a scorched earth to the Iranian nation following your inevitable downfall.” I do not think he is wrong. As I have maintained since the shooting started, the IRGC must decide how it wants to die.

Details are still fuzzy. Israel says Hezbollah is not included, Iran says they are. History may record that a ceasefire began at 8:00 PM Eastern Time on 7 April 2026, that it seemed to teeter, and finally held. Or, history may record that the ceasefire collapsed immediately and never recovered. Either way, it is impossible to pretend that the IRGC has enjoyed a military victory.

Regular readers will recall me harping on the difference between the IRGC and Artesh, the actual armed forces of Iran. US and IDF strikes have very clearly concentrated on the former to the exclusion of the latter. Put another way, the biggest rival military force that the Revolutionary Guard has right now is already in Iran, because it is the Army of Iran, and its command is practically untouched.

Did your commentators ever mention this nuance? If not, then why are you listening to their nuanced opinions on anything else about Iran? I am not asking because I claim expertise. I am asking because this war has been a complete disaster for the professional class of American experts. Their reputation is deservedly taking a beating every day as they embarrass themselves with Trump-deranged moodswings disguised as opinions.

They said it would be World War III. They said there would be a draft. They said there would be an invasion. They concern-trolled about Trump using nuclear weapons and called him a war criminal in advance. According to one conspiracy theory that I encountered on Monday, Pete Hegseth fired the head of the Army chaplain corps to get rid of someone who would not follow illegal orders to use nuclear weapons. This deranged tweet had been shared by thousands of idiots.

There was not supposed to be any plan, and then the plan was not supposed to work, and now the plan has failed before the first meeting. Trump refuses to put up with frozen conflicts. This confuses and bewilders professional experts on frozen conflicts. The last thing such people want is drastic change to the subject of their expertise.

Some of us are old enough to remember Stephen Cohen, Jerry Hough, and Seweryn Bialer, prominent academics who resisted admitting the Soviet Union was collapsing until it was gone. All three tried to prop up the dying regime with hopes, insisting it was durable and strong and capable of change. But they were not alone, indeed there were too many prominent intelligence analysts, journalists, and officials in Washington, DC who shared the assumption that the USSR was a permanent fixture on the world map — and then called its collapse a “mystery”.

Share

Something definitely broke the will to fight of Trump’s negotiating partners in Iran. I suspect it was the Easter weekend battle to rescue an American pilot. American units that had been created in the wake of the disaster at Desert One during the abortive embassy rescue mission in 1980 constructed a base inside Iranian territory and fought off the best fighters the regime could send with the aid of plentiful close air support. CIA operations reportedly delayed Iran’s ground response with a crowd response by Iranians.

I look forward to a more complete timeline and primary sources on this intense battle, since it was clearly a history-making event and a perfect bookend to America’s 47-year conflict with the Islamic Republic. I am hardly the first to note that many people who clearly wanted the pilot to be captured were bitterly disappointed on Sunday, and then began circulating conspiracy theories to deny the event had even happened on Monday.

But consider this: Ghost Murmur, a quantum sensor system, was reportedly used to track down the pilot. Your humble correspondent told you about the existence of these technologies last November. Quantum sensing has already altered warfare. Again, I am no expert. My point is that if the report turns out to be true, which is likely, then most of the professional experts did not see this coming. They are completely surprised by the qualitative edge of American arms in the 21st century.

Now, there are experts who do understand what has really happened. “If you're at Central Command, you've got to be reasonably satisfied with where you are right now”, retired Gen. Frank McKenzie said on Sunday. “In fact … when I was the CENTCOM Commander, if you had given me this situation at plus-30 days, I would have rejected it as being too optimistic by far.” McKenzie spoke of “effects” achieved through mass, how the US and the IDF continue to create such effects, and how Iran steadily declines at creating them. This is the language of combined arms in the quantum age.

“This operation for the first pilot and the second pilot is a remarkable exercise, demonstration of U.S. military courage, technology, power”, former Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson said. “I would encourage the president and the secretary of defense, consistent with operational security, share as much of that with the American public so that the American public can appreciate what goes into … this kind of operation was more complicated than the Bin Laden operation, for example.” It is to his credit that he admits this was spectacular.

Which is fascinating, because Trump shut down the White House on Saturday to personally oversee the operation. Conspiracy peddler Ed Krassenstein saw it as an opportunity to start a rumor that Trump was at Walter Reed, but Trump was in fact taking charge of the situation, the White House says.

This would suggest that Trump is similarly in charge of his own war with Iran, and that he is capable of planning and acting strategically. For example, Trump can use ‘madman theory’ to bully Iran’s remaining leadership into negotiations on a broad peace with words like “civilization” and “Stone Age” that make the political classes of the West get all up in their feels. He speaks the language that his enemies understand, the language that the experts find too gauche to learn.

Trump demands all the uranium and nuclear facilities, intrusive inspections, an end to Iran’s missile programs and drone transfers, the cutoff of IRGC proxies, the reopening of Hormuz, and regionwide de-escalation. He is demanding to buy all the carpets, not just the nuclear one, whereas JCPOA pursued temporary limits to Iran’s nuclear ambitions without demanding any of the other things.

Trump wants to buy out the carpet store. He does not want to buy one carpet at a time, which has been the advice of too many experts for too long. His Iranian partners, on the other hand, want guarantees that they will be left alone forever. They demand all sanctions be lifted, insist that their proxies be protected, and they want a $2 million transit fee for every ship that passes through the Strait of Hormuz.

Today, the experts whose cheese has been moved are pretending that Trump has already agreed to all of these demands, while Iran has agreed to none of his. They never imagined a leveraged buyout of the carpet store in Tehran would ever be negotiated at all, so they do not comprehend what is happening. It is another mystery to the experts who were supposed to know the most.

Ben Rhodes, who wanted the death cult in Qom to keep enriching uranium and also help them build a conventional weapons arsenal to threaten neighbors, said that Trump was losing the war, and now maintains that Trump has already been defeated in negotiations that have yet to take place, because he cannot imagine using lethal force to make Iranians honest.

Can Ben Rhodes articulate what winning a war with Iran would look like? I suspect he would rant about World War III and a draft and Vietnam and impeachment. His scenario would probably resemble Stanley McChrystal’s counterinsurgency blather weaponized against action in the frozen conflict. For that matter, no one ever articulates what military victory for Iran would look like, anymore. Talk of hypersonic missiles sinking aircraft carriers has been quite muted of late.

Iran keeps striking out at Qatar and Oman and the UAE this week, as if to aggravate their displeasure with Emmanuel Macron for pursuing a separate peace with the IRGC. Controversial denials of overflight rights suddenly have staunchly pro-NATO Americans questioning the value of NATO in ways that a decade of Putinian propaganda had failed to achieve. Spain in particular is failing the stress test that Trump could not have better designed to illustrate the reasoning behind his desire for Greenland that gives Denmark the vapors.

China got involved in the Pakistani initiative because they have had enough of Hormuz closures. To be clear, the strait was never really closed — Greek captains began to transit weeks ago, followed by ships with flags (or transponder codes) of Chinese convenience. About ten vessels a day have been passing through the strait while Iran was unable to make good on its announced closure. However, Xi Jinping has seen enough. He wants the energy threat to his economy ended.

For those of you keeping score at home: an incomplete cutoff of fossil fuels from the Persian Gulf to China for 38 days was enough to make Beijing intervene and end Iranian resistance(?) to negotiations. The strategic vulnerability of the CCP to any fuel blockade resulting from aggression against Taiwan has just been laid bare. Anyone who calls China the strategic winner in Iran is a fool. Anyone who believes them is twice the fool that person is.

Iranians have used their nuclear program transactionally before, so Trump might just get this carpet, after all. It is widely believed that Iran put all their uranium eggs in one basket at Isfahan, while the US and Israel have the technical capabilities to monitor activity at the site. International inspections and transportation out of the country can be arranged in exchange for sanctions relief, for example.

The alternative was to let Iran build a conventional arms shield that would protect its nuclear ‘breakout’ capability, a revised version of the “Seoul hostage” problem that led past presidents to inaction against North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, most notably when Jimmy Carter finagled Bill Clinton into a terrible deal with Kim Jong Il. The Ben Rhodeses of the world were happy to let history rhyme in Iran. Now their plans might be in ruins, so of course they believe they have been vindicated by history. Of course they do.

As far as regime change goes: if Trump gets what he wants from Iran, the IRGC will simply not exist anymore. Ending foreign proxy support, and regional de-escalation, would eliminate their mission. Trump’s negotiating demand is that the IRGC chooses to die peacefully. Rather than a whopping ship toll that the IRGC splits with Oman, Trump describes a Hormuz toll system that would benefit all the regional parties involved.

Americans are by and large confused by this war, in no small part because the people who are supposed to explain it to them cannot, or will not, do so honestly, because Trump is the president. That so many former neocons-turned-Bulwark-of-democracy types who wanted to invade Iran five minutes ago are among this caste of experts is proof that politicized expertise is the worst kind. Personally, I suspect that the war will become more popular when it is over, pending the outcome of negotiations.

One final note. Long after the war is over, when the truth is finally free, we will perhaps reckon with the ridiculous outcries about murdered schoolgirls, and reach acceptance of the reality that Iran built unreliable rockets. In the meantime, here is yet another video of a ballistic missile that launched into the ground, with a Farsi commentary that has been altered to protect the identity of the witness. One of the biggest losers in this war has been the phrase ‘war crime’, now stripped of all meaning, along with the word ‘genocide’. Either term in conjunction with the word ‘expert’ can be taken as a reliable indicator of jello-brain.

No one has suffered a greater defeat in Iran than ‘the experts’. All too often, their alleged expertise is actually a political nest of some kind. Degrees and elite access and media platforms give them an inflated sense of self-importance. We have watched too many of them surrender principles, reinvent the meanings of words, and cheer against Americans who were in harm’s way now to unsee what we have seen. I do not think we are ever going to see our ‘national security experts’ in quite the same way.

They keep saying Donald Trump is an idiot, a fool, a disaster, and they may even be right, but somehow they always end up looking worse than him, in the end. I will not bet against that happening again. It has happened too many times, now.

Subscribe now

Premium subscribers have access to this essay series on one of the most consequential generals of the 20th century

“He was a welcome friend, a true Communist”, Gen. Georgi Zhukov recalls of an acquaintance in his memoir.1 For Zhukov, it was the same thing to be a good friend as it was to be a good Communist. He credits ideology for victory, names the kommissars who indoctrinated his formations, recalls their noble careers and glorious deaths. “The heroic actions of our soldiers were inspired by the Communist Party and the army’s Party organization”, he writes of Khalkin Gol, the battle that started the Second World War.

“Politically naive” in 1917, Zhukov sided with the Bolsheviks immediately and deepened his faith with readings into Marx, Engels, and Lenin only later, during the 1920s. In the same decade, he also read the foundational works of operational art in the age of the tank. “Stormy discussions erupted around the book of V. K. Triandafillov, Deputy Chief of Staff of the Red Army, entitled Nature of Operations of Modern Armies, which immediately won broad popularity” among the officers leading interwar experiments in military science.

Whereas Triandafillov died in a plane crash, Mikhail Tukhachevsky was purged in 1938, and his ideas very nearly died with him. Tukhachevsky “came out with many far-sighted ideas on the nature of the future war, produced a profound study of the new tenets governing theory, tactics and strategy, and the operational art, and showed the indissoluble link between military principles and practices, on the one hand, and the social system and the country’s production potential, on the other”, Zhukov writes. He does not report on how Tukhachevsky died.

A humble, pious Communist in his writing, Zhukov was also a cavalry sergeant who understood the importance of morale and a personal touch. “When on the initiative of the political instructors of the 40th Regiment the worst disciplined men were gathered to find out in a frank talk the reason for their misdemeanors”, Zhukov had a ‘learning experience’. While he credits this success to socialist principles, this writer has experienced the same phenomenon in a ‘sensing session’ without any ideological principles involved.

It turned out that many offences were committed not so much through the fault of the soldiers but because their commanders and political instructors did not know their character and individual problems, and were often unfair in judging their behavior. This was detrimental to their own prestige. The men often committed offences merely to annoy these superiors.

“These friendly talks were of much benefit both for the men and their commanders.” This much is easy to believe without believing in ideological communism. In the manner of the best generals, Zhukov is eager to give credit to soldiers and officers. He does his best to recall the name of every significant person who helped along the way, and apologizes when he forgets a first name. Mongolian allies at Khalkin Gol receive his highest praise.

He was very capable of criticism, however. Upon arriving at Khalkin Gol in the emergency of the Japanese surprise attack, Zhukov’s first recommendation to Moscow was to sack the commander, whom he replaced. Eight months after the battle, Zhukov flew back to Moscow to meet Stalin, Kalinin, Molotov, and select politburo members. Stalin lit his pipe to ask: “What do you think of the Japanese Army?” Zhukov delivered a single-paragraph brief on strengths and weaknesses.

“Stalin had listened very attentively” throughout. Then he asked: “How did our troops fight?” In his answer, Zhukov praised his subordinate generals who had impressed him at Khalkin Gol and named one who had not. Because Russians had done most of the attacking in the biggest battles of the brief 1939 border war with Japan, Zhukov’s aggressive tactics had resulted in the loss of more men and tanks than the Japanese had lost. He had still beaten them, so that did not matter, to Stalin.

Good leaders know their subordinates as people, not just names, and this was true for Stalin and Zhukov. Both commander and unit must be capable and reliable. “A commander who has mastered the system of controlling a regiment and can keep it in constant combat readiness, will always be an advanced military leader at all other levels of command, both in peacetime and in war”, Zhukov writes. Regimental commanders — colonels, classically — are the talent pool from which generals are promoted to command many regiments at once.

By 1939, Gen. Georgi Zhukov had the broadest possible vision of battle. From grand strategy to squad tactics, nothing could be left to chance. Yet the Battle of Khalkin Gol, which the Japanese euphemistically referred to as the Nomohan incident, was defined by its limits. “Lasting four months, with thirty to fifty thousand killed or wounded, the Nomonhan conflict was a small undeclared war — the first instance in the modern age of limited war between great powers”, Stuart Goldman writes.2 Political reliability made limited war possible. Indeed, the war happened at all because the Japanese side was not so disciplined.

The Japanese had underestimated the fighting potential of Russian soldiers and paid a high price for their contempt. The Kwantung Army had poor intelligence, no experience against an enemy with artillery and air superiority, and an officer corps where gekokujo was rampant. Literally meaning ‘rule from below’, this insubordination prioritized honor over obedience to the emperor, with catastrophic consequences for grand strategy. This is how Japanese aggression in Asia during the 1930s had brought on the confrontation with Russia.

“The advent of Manchukuo and the Third Reich near the eastern and western frontiers of the USSR posed threats that Stalin could not ignore”, but then the Soviets won this limited war, so the Japanese agreed to a nonaggression pact with Stalin and sought a confrontation with the Americans instead. World history turned on the result of the Khalkin Gol battles.

“The Nomonhan conflict is directly linked to the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact and the outbreak of the war in Europe”, Goldman explains. The Molotov-Togo agreement was concluded on 15 September 1939 and the ceasefire went into effect the next day, 16 September. Germans were two weeks into their invasion of Poland, wondering just when their putative Russian allies would observe the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact to invade a helpless Poland from the east, when the Red Army finally attacked on 17 September 1939. This timing was not accidental.

Stalin’s “paramount objective was to prevent the formation of a grand capitalist alliance directed against the Soviet Union.” He had no illusions about the intentions of Adolf Hitler, but be also knew the distrust of Neville Chamberlain and Édouard Daladier for Hitler would keep his western enemies divided. This was the context when Zhukov, who rose when original thinkers had been purged, did not hesitate to ask Stalin for guidance on grand strategy during the 1940 job interview. “How should one understand the extremely passive nature of the war in the West, and what turn might one expect the further events to take?”

Stalin chuckled, and said:

“The French Government headed by Daladier and the Chamberlain Government in Britain have no intention of getting seriously involved in the war with Hitler. They still hope to be able to persuade Hitler to start a war against the Soviet Union. They refused to form an anti-Hitler bloc with us in 1939, because they did not want to hamper Hitler in his aggression against the Soviet Union. But nothing will come of it. They will have to pay a high price for their short-sighted policy.”

Georgi Zhukov credits Triandafillov and Tukhachevsky’s ideas for his own success at operational art. Khalkin Gol was his first application of those principles. Western military theorists would develop their own language of operational art from the study of Russians, Zhukov foremost, during the 1970s. Many terms that became popular in military affairs during the 1990s, such as ‘combined arms’ and ‘AirLand Battle’ and ‘maneuver warfare’, derive from this line of study.3

Put another way, Gen. Georgi Zhukov was the first commander to perform the operational art of mechanized warfare at Khalkin Gol in 1939 and the entirety of modern military theory has grown from this beginning. It was also the first battle of the biggest war the world has ever seen, and it shaped that conflict in a historically determinative way right from the beginning. Communist or not, Zhukov was the most consequential general of the 20th century.

This essay series tells that story. It is exclusively available for premium subscribers.

Read more

Donald Trump presents flamboyant deal-making as his true “art form”— an instinct-driven, theatrical performance that is focused on winning big rather than playing it safe. I have just summarized Art of the Deal, which is a book based on Trump’s ideas about business.

Trump seeks to make use of distressed properties (Gaza; Hormuz) through a zero-sum game of leverage and risk, optimized for persistence and cunning logic. He has been to the Middle East, so he knew about the Saudis and their pipeline to Yanbu on the Red Sea when a tiny number of Americans did. Able to anticipate the worst-case scenario, he did not gamble blindly.

The proof is that multiple elements of victory continue to fall into place where Trump had already maximized his options. What seems like a vague deal with sketchy partners is in fact a flexible deal, and also more easily broken, or revised through leverage, with the partners who have decided to make a deal.

Put another way, Trump did the market research. He had the connections and intelligence to know who stood where with Iran. Trump knew what Iran would do once the explosions started. Trump also knows what the regime needs, right now: money and access to global markets. He is willing to trade both for a new relationship on American terms.

Meanwhile, the United States Marine Corps has not even arrived in the theater yet. Trump continues to create and exert leverage while offering the transaction. He is fundamentally transactional. American presidents have pursued peace with the Islamic Republic without success, through back-channel and formal diplomatic means, only to get screwed every time.

Trump is not looking for the kind of transaction that Iran is used to extorting and haggling out of Americans who wanted a greater deal in the future, who bought the used rug in hopes of buying the better rug later. The Iran-Contra scandal derived from rug-buyers trying to win the release of hostages held by Islamist thugs. The JCPOA derived from Ben Rhodes buying a bad rug in hopes of buying more rugs later.

Trump is demanding the whole carpet bazaar.

Share

This is a leveraged buyout. Real estate matters. Delivering on promises matters, so the promises are vague. Trump is unyielding and unrelenting in pursuit of deliverables. He has contained the costs by pre-empting Iranian conventional missile superiority and letting his highly lethal military alliance, Israel and the United States, change the regime by removing three whole layers of command.

“It is not for any Prophet to have prisoners until he make wide slaughter in the land” -Quran 8:67

There is reason to hope President Trump might not buy a used carpet in the transaction. The regime leadership he has destroyed were all used carpet salesmen, the same gang of thugs who took Oliver North and Barack Obama to the cleaners.

In this context, a reported demand to have J.D. Vance negotiate for the American side is not actually weird. They likely see him as the American most likely to buy a used carpet. I don’t think they are fans of Hillbilly Elegy who want his autograph.

Right now, everyone who said last week that Trump would never get the regime to make a deal is predicting that this deal will be terrible. Iran is not Venezuela, they say, to which the obvious retort now is that yes, leveraging a victory over Iran needed weeks instead of an hour.

Many people are absurdly claiming that Iran was no threat to the United States. What they mean is that they were afraid to act on the threat Iran represented to American interests for decades. They think of themselves as ‘good people’ and the smartest guys in the room. Some of them knew better before 28 February 2026. They are hypocrites, all of them.

They are madder than ever now, too, because the plan they said did not exist is working. “The possibility of Trump imposing his personal whims on another nation is even more frightening than U.S. failure”, Howard French wrote in a Foreign Policy subheadline. He is saying the quiet part out loud: westerners are only allowed to buy one carpet at a time, it’s the rule!

“They are negotiating, by the way, and they want to make a deal so badly, but they're afraid to say it because they figure they'll be killed by their own people”, Trump told the National Republican Congressional Committee yesterday. “They're also afraid they'll be killed by us!”

Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi reportedly called US envoy Steve Witkoff to offer to negotiate a deal. Araghchi and Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of the majlis, have reportedly been removed from the target list so they can participate in said negotiations. Ghalibaf’s name had floated on Monday. Seldom do bargaining positions begin from such a strong position as the one Trump enjoys, right now.

“There's never been a head of a country that wanted that job less than being the head of Iran,” Trump quipped. He acknowledged signal intercepts of Iranians offering the supreme leadership, only to be turned down. “No thank you, I don’t want it!” It is easy to believe him. The more subtle point is that Trump is telling his negotiating partners that they cannot keep secrets from him. Honesty will be their best policy for staying alive.

Over 200 Basij members were reportedly killed in a strike on Imam Sajjad Mosque in Mashhad. Apparently, the bombardment of Basij forces in the area had inspired them all to gather inside one convenient building. Trump is still reducing Iran’s missile capacity, still crushing its street forces, still creating leverage.

Murmurs of boots on ground grow stronger by the day. So does the probability that they will receive no incoming fire from a capitulating Iran. If anything, the sudden burst of insane regime claims about driving Americans from their bases, the sketchy videos of American planes apparently being attacked but not shot down, and the vows of revenge are evidence that the humiliation of defeat is at hand.

Share

The identity of the carpet seller does matter. At the Jerusalem Post, Yosef Yair Collins writes that in the event of a deal, “waiving sanctions would augment the opposition by providing a vast war chest” to a civilian who must reckon with the remnants of the old regime.

At current prices, the sanctioned oil is worth $10-$14 billion. This would go a long way toward leveling the economic capabilities gap between the regime and the opposition, and can be used to support independent, large operations by the opposition, allowing it to be more effective in its internal campaign against the Islamic regime.

Crucially, this can solve the historical woe of the Iranian opposition – disunity. Providing this economic boost to a centralized body forces disparate ethnic and ideological groups to coordinate under a single, economically dominant entity.

By transferring the stewardship of Iran’s natural resources to a legitimate provisional body under Pahlavi, the West can do more than just lower gas prices; it can provide the Iranian people with the tools to reclaim their nation.

With more than 10,000 strikes already, it is easy to lose sight of key targets, for example the Caspian Sea port of Bandar Anzali. This site has not only become a key transshipment point for weapons going in and out of Iran, it is very likely the northern maritime nexus of Iran’s sanctions-evasion infrastructure. Destroying it, and the ships used to move weapons and other goods, is exactly what I have told premium subscribers to expect since January.

I do not think there will be a fight for Kharg Island. Instead, the Marines and the 82nd Airborne and 10th Mountain brigade elements are leverage in the transaction now being negotiated. Kharg Island will figure in the transaction — along with Hormuz, the missile program, the nuclear program, and all the other carpets that Trump intends to buy.

Bret Stephens writes that “if past generations could see how well this war has gone compared with the ones they were compelled to fight at a frightening cost, they would marvel at their posterity’s comparative good fortune. They would marvel, too, at our inability to appreciate the advantages we now possess.” Chief among these is supreme command of the skies over Iran.

Donald Trump perceives his advantages and does not care whether we do, right now. Eventually, everyone will see the advantages he possesses. Even the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, currently in a state of denial, will have to acknowledge his advantages, eventually: this is the plan, which was not supposed to exist, and now is not supposed to work, but somehow seems to be working better than it has any right to.

Pay attention to things as they are, not as they are forecast to be. Trump’s domestic enemies are bracing themselves for success, right now. Watch as the #NoKings people turn on a dime to declare that Trump is trying to be the world-emperor. Which, fine. If there is an American embassy in Iran again, and the political prisoners are free, then fine. Let him be the emperor until 2028, if that happens. He will have earned it, as far as I’m concerned, as long as he succeeds in buying out the carpet salesmen.

Subscribe now

Preparing for War: The Making of the 1949 Geneva Conventions by Boyd van Dijk. Oxford University Press, 2022. 376 pages.

Dispelling what he calls the “foundation myth” that the atrocities of the Second World War motivated the postwar powers to a rare show of unity in 1949, Boyd van Dijk argues that the Third Geneva Convention was in fact a fraught process of disagreement and furious debate between countries trying to shape the laws of future wars to their own liking.

“The drafting process resembled less an ivory tower, in which blueprints are conceived in splendid isolation, than a political arena, in which actors contemplate and struggle over different proposals and the stakes are often impossibly high,” van Dijk writes.

Rather than a moment of international solidarity, the negotiations were “a series of political struggles among the drafters, many of whom were not liberals and whose ideas changed radically over time.” In order to magnify their achievement, after the Conventions were signed, the Swiss diplomatic corps created a “powerful memory regime” framing the process as a harmonious affair.

Share

Yet from the beginning, leftists and pacifists have criticized the Geneva Conventions for not going far enough to protect civilians. Common Article 3 has been called “a major breakthrough, a disappointment — or even both” for its inconsistencies. Weaponized hunger, city bombing, and atomic warfare were all left out of the 1949 Convention. The full rights of prisoners of war were not extended to insurgents.

World powers were all happy to negotiate new laws of war to protect civilians for the first time in history, but not at the expense of their own ability to win the wars they expected to wage. The Cold War and decolonization politics were the barriers to better compromise.

The Soviets wanted to extend law of war protection to their own resistance fighters, and to the communist insurgents they expected to rise up all across the capitalist west some day. Britain, the Netherlands, and France wanted a free hand in their own Southeast Asian colonies, as well as protection for their own civilians living in them. The United States wanted to protect downed bomber crews from summary execution. Everyone had the next war in mind.

“In many different ways, they tried to define the contours of future battlefields by deciding who deserved protection, what counted as a legitimate target, whose lives mattered, whose did not, and who had the right to enforce them,” writes van Dijk. The results were “hybrid constructs, shaped by different drafters with contrasting political aims.” This process was so difficult that the final version could only be approved by secret ballot.

However, the Third Geneva Convention did manage to ban collective penalties and hostage taking in reprisal for guerilla activity, finally ending a European legal debate that had begun with the 1871 Franco-Prussian War and continued through two world wars.

World War II had seen the normal ratio of dead soldier to dead civilian flip, so that societies generally suffered more than their armies. Brutal suppression of resistance movements was one factor in the change. As van Dijk demonstrates, however, these wartime death tolls were not what brought the parties together in Geneva. Common Article 3 was in fact the culmination of decades of work by legal theorists responding to the challenges of the wars in their time.

Van Dijk leans to the political left in his analysis. He is especially keen to emphasize the role of Stalin’s diplomats in making the Conventions happen at all just by showing up, and to be fair, he does have a point here. Swiss diplomat Claude Pilloud said afterwards that he “hardly dared to think what would have become of the Civilian Convention without the [Soviet] presence.”

Yet the Soviet push for a ban on atomic bombings of cities looks a bit less magnanimous when we recall, as van Dijk fails to do, that the Soviets tested their own atomic bomb just ten days after signing the Conventions. Nor was their presence always a positive influence, as van Dijk admits. He takes his title from the Soviet accusation that western powers were “preparing for war” in their negotiations. That may have been true, but it was also true of the Soviets themselves.

Even the International Committee of the Red Cross deserves clear-eyed examination. The Third Geneva Convention happened in the first place because the ICRC keenly felt its own humanitarian failures, such as Soviet criticism of the organization’s silence about German mistreatment of POWs, and feared becoming irrelevant. As van Dijk notes, the ICRC was as concerned for its own agenda as any power involved in the negotiations.

Written for a college freshman, this book is a valuable addition to 20th Century diplomatic and military historiography of the most important international treaty of the modern world.

Subscribe now

Located at the Saint Louis Art Museum is a scene of binge-drinking by the men who made America great in the first place. They are abroad in South America as trading sailors. Esek Hopkins is sitting at the table in the hat with red facings on his coat, talking to his fellow Rhode Island shipmaster Nicholas Cooke, who is smoking a pipe. It is the only known portrait of Hopkins.

The painting is a comical panorama. The man passed out at the table is a future governor of Rhode Island, Joseph Wanton. Esek’s brother Stephen, who later signed the Declaration of Independence, is pouring water on Wanton’s head in a vain attempt to rouse him. Captain Ambrose Page is vomiting in Wanton’s pocket. John Greenwood, the Boston-born artist, recorded that he is the man in the doorway being sick at top right.

The carousers drink from great bowls that are probably filled with cassava beer. Esek Hopkins seems to remain more sober than the rest, for his drinking cup is small, and he is engaged with Cooke in conversation. Soon enough, every man here will be at sea again. Some of them cope with numbness, others learn as much as they can, Hopkins is regaling his interlocutor Cooke, who seems to take an interest in his sea story.

“An aggressive, outspoken man with a hot temper, [Hopkins] was described by General Henry Knox, George Washington’s chief of artillery, as ‘an antiquated figure’ who might have been mistaken for an angel, ‘only he swore now and then’”, Nathan Miller writes in his authoritative work on the history of the US Navy.1 Hopkins was a pirate with a heart of gold. One cast from melted doubloons, perhaps, but still.

Esek Hopkins was by all accounts a very good captain. His one and only foray into slave trading, on the Sally in 1764-65, was a disaster at the shore. Much of his human cargo was sickly when he arrived in Africa to take them onboard. Some of the slaves tried to mutiny and were killed. Most of them died during the voyage, while the survivors at the end were too few and frail to make the voyage profitable. From the website Providence Eye:

Four Africans died in the first week at sea, and the survivors staged an uprising. Hopkins noted in his log “Slaves Rose on us was obliged to fire on them and Destroyed 8 and Several more wounded badly.” He told the Browns that the slaves became “so Desperited” that “Some Drowned them Selves Some Starved and Others Sickened & Dyed.” By the time he reached Antigua after 57 days at sea, sixty-eight Africans had perished and twenty more died before they could be sold. Altogether, 60 slaves died, or 39%. (The average mortality for the Middle Passage was 15%).

The debacle was a stain on his record. Still a capable captain who had distinguished himself as a privateer in the Seven Years’ War, Hopkins was rebuked by William Pitt and returned to sea with other duties as a captain for the Browns. Moses Brown, future co-founder of Brown University, was so offended by the incident that he turned against the slave trade altogether. Three more Brown brothers left the slave business in ensuing years.

A decade later, as the colonies were dividing themselves from England, they were already dividing from one another over slavery, too. The new American nation was born in a state of dispute between imperfect people. The founding fathers were men, not gods, and they went to sea for profit, just like everybody else, and agonized over the immorality of their new fortunes, like humans do.

Share

In the musical 1776, which portrays the tortured decision-making of the Continental Congress before the Declaration of Independence, South Carolina delegate Edward Rutledge calls out the hypocrisy of the New England delegates condemning his state for slavery. After all, the captains of the ships bringing the slaves across the Atlantic were New England men. Good, Puritan souls with great moral virtues to signal. Many frontier Americans found men like the Browns insufferable, when they became abolitionists.

Composer Sherman Edwards placed “Molasses To Rum” at the crucial moment of crisis in the show to foreshadow how the issue would divide the new nation. Performed by John Cullum in the cinematic version, it is a powerful scene featuring lighting, cinematography, and visual storytelling skills that current-day Hollywood has forgotten.

Southerners were leery of building a Continental Navy. “The opposition . . . was very loud and Vehement,” according to the recollection of John Adams. “It was . . . represented as the most wild, visionary, mad project that had ever been imagined. It was an Infant, taking a mad Bull by his horns.”2

The southerners changed their minds when Lord Dunmore began raiding the shores of the lower Chesapeake, however. Someone had to stop him, they demanded. Esek Hopkins was supposed to be that man.

Aside from the Sally disaster, his career as a captain was otherwise successful before he went ashore in 1771 after 25 years at sea. He was 53 then, and quite ready to retire. With hindsight, we might say it would have been best. Nobody knew this at the time, however. They all just needed someone who knew how to lead a fleet.

Hopkins, like most New England shipmasters of the time, would have been used to operating in squadrons as a privateer. Appointed a general in October 1775 in the wake of Concord and Lexington, Hopkins was commissioned in the fledgling United States Navy on 5 November and received command of the country’s first flotilla the next month.

As 1776 dawned, Hopkins was fitting out eight vessels of “varying tonnage”, all merchant ships converted to gunnery with “pierced sides”, at Philadelphia. The former Black Prince became his flagship Alfred, named for Alfred the Great, the king who became famous for defending England from Vikings.

Philadelphia had already identified what would become the objective of his first mission: a ready supply of gunpowder with a reasonably light guard. Edward Field records in his 1898 biography of Esek Hopkins that Congress first considered Great Abaco, also called North Providence Island, on November 29 when “information was laid before a secret session”.

According to this intelligence, “there was ‘a large quantity of powder in the island of Providence,’ and it was forthwith ordered that the foregoing committee ‘take measures for securing and bringing away the said powder’”.3 The would-be nation was critically short of saltpeter, the primary ingredient in all black powder mixes.

When the fleet sailed, they had orders to head south and confront the British flotilla under Lord Dunmore in the Chesapeake Bay. This proved unfeasible with the seasonal winds and storm patterns.

In accordance with the options in his instructions, Hopkins altered course for Nassau and the Bahamas. One ship was damaged in a storm during this voyage, lost sight of the rest, and returned to port. The second became separated from the flotilla until after the mission. Things were off to a poor start, but the force could still be effective.

Fields writes that the remaining six ships “arrived at Abacco on the first of March, and on Saturday evening the second day of March, two hundred marines, under the command of Captain Samuel Nicholas, and fifty sailors, under the command of Lieutenant Thomas Weaver, of the Cabot, who was well acquainted with the island, were embarked on some small vessels that had been captured”.

North Providence Island seemed unaware of their approach. “The men on board were ordered to keep below deck until the boats got in close to the island, it being Hopkins’ intention that they should land instantly and take possession by an assault from the rear, before the inhabitants could be alarmed”, Fields writes. “This, however, was rendered abortive, as the forts fired an alarm on the approach of the fleet.”

Running in his sails, Hopkins “anchored at a small key three leagues to windward of the town of Nassau, and from thence Hopkins dispatched the marines, with the sloop Providence and the schooner Wasp to cover their landing” at the east end of the island, where the assembled force moved immediately on the smaller of two forts.

“Fort Montague, situated halfway between the place of landing and the town of Nassau”, was likely undermanned. “Only a slight resistance was made by the force within the fort, five guns being fired at the attacking party, but without doing any damage. The garrison then withdrew to the larger fort, and the marines and sailors took possession of the abandoned work, where they remained and rested that night.”

Hopkins learned that only about two hundred men, inhabitants of the town unlikely to shed their blood without a good reason, formed the militia defending Fort Nassau. A negotiated surrender ensued. They were all Englishmen, after all, so there were social expectations to meet.

“Two weeks were occupied in transferring the captured property to the vessels, and it was not until the seventeenth that the fleet got under way for the homeward voyage” with their loot, Fields writes. “Eighty-eight cannon, fifteen mortars, and other military equipment of immense value to George Washington’s army were captured”, Miller adds.

Hopkins also got away with enormous stores of naval goods and military supplies, but alas, no gunpowder. For upon hearing the alarm signal of the flotilla’s approach, the governor of the island — now a prisoner in Hopkins’s ship — had ordered the 150 casks of gunpowder stored at Fort Nassau loaded onto a sloop and sent away.

Despite this, “the expedition was undoubtedly the most successful Continental Navy operation of the war”, Miller writes. “Early on the morning of April 6, 1776,” however, “the remaining ships encountered the 20-gun British frigate Glasgow off Block Island.”

A “four-hour melee and chase” ensued. “She should have been easy prey for the Americans but escaped after badly cutting up her opponents.”

Miller is critical of Hopkins in this battle, for he “did not issue a single order except to recall his ships.” His inexperienced crews were afflicted with smallpox and other sickness, but “this inept action made it all too clear that patriotism was not enough to create a navy. Experience, training, and a heritage of victory were all required.”

Neither Fields nor Miller analyzes that Hopkins may have attacked a Royal Navy vessel with the expectation that its captain would react in the same way that merchant prizes react to the appearance of an overwhelming privateer fleet.

He likely expected a parley and surrender on the same terms that he had received the same from Fort Nassau. Instead of the social connection Hopkins sought, HMS Glasgow resisted violently until she got away. Hopkins had feared confronting the British without a trained fleet, and now fulfilled how own fears, for he had no tradition of hard-fought victory behind him.

“Away we all went Helter, Skelter, one flying here, another there,” wrote Nicholas Biddle, captain of Andrew Doria, one of the five vessels that engaged the Glasgow, to one of his brothers. “A more ill conducted Affair never happened”, he wrote to a second brother.4 Like the Browns, their shipping trades were a family affair.

Biddle would continue as a Revolutionary War captain. So would John Paul Jones, another officer on the expedition who took command of the Alfred after Hopkins.

But Esek had failed to drive Lord Dunsmore away and also failed to capture the gunpowder at North Providence Island, which infuriated the southern men at Philadelphia.

In selecting Esek Hopkins, the Congress had “unfortunately followed the principles of patronage and nepotism traditional in the Royal Navy”, Miller explains. Esek was the brother of Stephen Hopkins, a member of the Naval Committee, a man respected by his peers with at least some sort of naval-ish experience, who rose to the occasion when his country called.

Esek Hopkins did not lead another squadron. He was suspended in 1777 and dismissed in 1778. The new US Navy needed aggressive commanders who dared to attempt the impossible. Their enemy was the most powerful military force on the world’s seas. ‘Good enough’ was not good enough.

The US Navy was indeed a “wild, visionary, mad project”, but that is also the story of America itself. Next month: America’s first victory on land.

Subscribe now

The latest report on national security issues by the Director of National Intelligence assesses that “Chinese leaders do not currently plan to execute an invasion of Taiwan in 2027, nor do they have a fixed timeline for achieving unification”, according to The Wall Street Journal. Whereas the Pentagon was racing to prepare for war in the Taiwan Strait, now “Beijing views an amphibious assault on Taiwan as risky and likely to fail, particularly if the U.S. intervenes”.

The Journal suggests that the shift has resulted from a more conciliatory relationship to the Trump administration. This is of course nonsense. Xi Jinping has simply observed the performance of Chinese equipment against American weapons in both Venezuela and Iran, with another substantial test of Chinese fighter jets and air defense weaponry during the brief 2025 war between India and Pakistan. Seeing is believing, and Xi no longer believes that China can win a war for the strait.

Share

With precision timing, the Chinese Academy of Sciences has just scrubbed the name and bio of the Chinese scientist who designed the J-20 stealth fighter from their website. Yang Wei had not been seen in public since the Indo-Pak dustup, and there is a rumor that Xi gave orders to have him shot after a deadly test accident killed a female pilot. The Chinese Academy of Engineering has likewise purged nuclear weapons experts, radar specialists, and missile designers from their website recently.

This all seems to be related to the latest corruption purge set in motion by Xi Jinping, who has hollowed out his strategic commands as they failed to meet his expectations. Every time his grip on China has tightened, corruption purges have followed. The result is that Xi has none of the right people in place to fight a war and no confidence in any of the weapons they built for his military adventures. Deterrence has been achieved through the demonstration of American hard power capabilities that China simply cannot match: peace through superior firepower.

Subscribe now

“Hours ago, U.S. forces successfully employed multiple 5,000-pound deep penetrator munitions on hardened Iranian missile sites along Iran’s coastline near the Strait of Hormuz” CENTCOM announced Tuesday evening. “The Iranian anti-ship cruise missiles in these sites posed a risk to international shipping in the strait.” Posed, past tense, because the former threat to the world economy is gone, now.

The people who said there was no plan were not involved in the planning. “When you look at what has actually happened to Iran’s principal instruments of power — its ballistic missile arsenal, its nuclear infrastructure, its air defences, its navy and its proxy command architecture — the picture is not one of US failure”, Muhanad Seloom writes for Al Jazeera(!).

“It is one of systematic, phased degradation of a threat that previous administrations allowed to grow for four decades.” How is an op-ed in an infamous Middle Eastern news outlet getting right what so many American pundits are getting wrong? How are so many Americans with so much alleged expertise so blinkered?

The people who say there was no plan were not involved in this planning, so they do not know what they are talking about. Stop listening to them. The instant someone yammers about Israel and the war plan in the Strait of Hormuz, shut your ears. Close your eyes. They have nothing intelligent to say.

This war plan is taking a heavy toll on the regime’s foot soldiers with impunity. The people who tell you the Islamic Republic is winning are clearly not in on this plan. The ones who call themselves ‘experts’ should try demonstrating their expertise as a hunted member of a hated regime, right now.

Rumors are rampant because the regime lacks control, since so many of the people that controlled the repression apparatus of the regime are dead, now. The effects are already visible as control deteriorates. However, we can, and should, draw one very solid early conclusion: everyone who says Iran is about to enter some new phase of genuine fighting, that the masters of Iran have held back until just now, is exposing themselves as a member of the cult of holy defense — what leftists call “resistance”.

Share

Overnight Wednesday local time, Iranians took to the streets and celebrated Chaharshanbe Suri, the Persian fire festival. This is a foretaste of the explosion of Persian nationalism and cultural expression that is sure to burst forth in the wake of a regime implosion.

The clerics have repressed the festival repeatedly because Persian identity is the greatest and most direct threat to the state power of the mosque in Iran. The son of Pahlavi called for the people to turn out, effectively challenging the Islamic Republic itself by their showing up.

All conflicts being fundamentally macroeconomic affairs, Trump’s war is crippling the regime’s ability to threaten any neighbors in the near-future, let alone Israel. “The Iranian mullahs weren’t exactly known as economic savants before the shooting started”, Jim Geraghty writes in an op-ed. “Even if they retain power after the war, they’re going to be broke.” Thus the urgency of Israeli actions in Lebanon to destroy Hezbollah as much as possible, so that Iran will have to rebuild from scratch, no matter who is in charge.

Iranians seem to be enthusiastic for their liberation. They keep reporting the locations of regime roadblocks and command tents and motorcycle assembly areas for destruction by the Israeli-US coalition. The reckoning comes at the end of this week as the shadow economy that finances the regime is targeted for destruction in detail.

Premium subscribers already know about this situation that no one else is discussing, yet. The rest of this update is also exclusively for the readers who pay the bills around here.

Read more

The United States armed forces and their Israeli partners intensified the campaign against Iran’s domestic fuel infrastructure over the weekend. Now Trump is trying to restrain the Israelis from doing even more damage. Strategic goals always differ between allies, so this is nothing new. Moreover, the Trump administration must now use capacities that Israel does not have if the war is to end on favorable terms for either ally. Benjamin Netanyahu is no fool. He will know his limitations with Trump by now.

This week, Trump administration intends to pick up the reinsurance business from Lloyd’s of London, an announcement they should have made on 28 February. Pentagon planners are working on an escort system to encourage the ship owners, another measure that should have been in place beforehand. These efforts may be late, and have the character of muddling through events, but they are potentially decisive.

When traffic eventually resumes through the Strait of Hormuz, Iran cannot be allowed to import gasoline and fuel oil to replace what has been destroyed. Global oil markets can adjust while Iran’s domestic markets collapse. Europeans are screaming, but irrelevant. In the long run, the winner is the United States — and the loser is the United Kingdom, which has just lost their control of the shipping insurance cornerstone to the global economy.

Iran cannot close the strait themselves. They can certainly try, can even inflict damage, but they cannot defeat the power of war risk insurance policy subsidies. Their means to close the strait is greatly reduced: Iran’s navy has no ships left, only small boats that are supremely vulnerable to US surveillance and aerial dominance; Iranian shore radars are easily blinded or destroyed; Iran has their own ships at sea. In fact, two ships laden with rocket fuel precursors set sail for home from China this weekend. They will never make it to port.

Forget doomsday. Forget landing on Kharg Island, which would put Americans in artillery range of mainland Iran. Forget the Kurdish invasion force idea. A weekend of speculation and the AI propaganda slop hangover has passed, here is your cup of strong coffee: There is an ‘easy button’ at sea, one that the United States Navy and Marine Corps are well-equipped to push. Simply rolling up Iran’s shadow fleet will cut off most of the revenue stream to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. This time, the Americans take the hostages. No invasion necessary.

The suppression campaign against Iran’s missile capabilities will likely last through the end of March. Meanwhile, the security services of Iran have a payday coming up on Friday 20 March, which is also the Persian new year (Nawruz). The armies of Islam have historically balked over nonpayment of salaries as often as the armies of any other religion: no income, no payroll, no army.

The Basij will likely be the first regime security force to crack under the pressure of runaway inflation. If they go, IRGC will be completely isolated within the country. It all starts with cutting the flow of money into Iran — and cutting off the regime from its own fuel supply. The rest is exclusively for premium subscribers.

Read more

“I was in the middle of saying ‘as a born and raised New Yorker, we welcome everyone into this city’ when he threw that over my head”, Walter Masterson says, referring to the nail bomb that Emir Balat, 18, used to attack anti-Islam protesters. No scene or sentence could better capture the suicidal stupidity of the pacifist city mouse. It is a Platonic archetype of civilizational decline and collapse at the metropolitan core.

Unable to recognize a mortal threat in the phrase “Allahu Akbar” being shouted by a bomb-thrower, or appreciate that he was being been used as a human shield, or that he was in danger at all, Masterson was pleased with himself. “I’m the guy who didn’t run when a bomb was thrown over his head, I also didn’t become a xenophobic bigot”, he tweeted. “What’s your excuse?” To Masterson, running away from a bomb is xenophobia.

Mr. Masterson, allegedly a comedian, is the fat, happy urbanite who was repeatedly conquered by rural tribesmen fired with faith in Ibn Khaldoun’s North Africa. Balat is comfortably middle class himself, not oppressed at all, but Masterson would insist the foreign-born man’s ‘identity’ is marginalized. Together, the two men are suicidal empathy in one image. A picture worth a million words describing everything that is wrong with the liberal West right now.

Share

Pacifism is a lie. Pacifism says that you have no enemies, and if you do have enemies, then it is your own fault for making enemies in the first place. Pacifism rejects violence as a means of settling violent disputes. Pacifism rejects individual responsibility for the defense of the state or group, shifting the burden of that defense to other individuals.

In economics, this is called a ‘free rider’ problem. In its most patriotic political application, pacifism is a virtue signal. The expenses of any wars that do occur, as measured in blood and treasure, are the measure of the supposed virtue that patriotic pacifism awards itself for having tried peace. It is a bloody, expensive, insufferable self-regard. An egotism of civilians.

However, this form of pacifism does have deep American roots. Consider the classic western. A cowboy rides into town. Someone does something to the cowboy, or to some innocent party, so now the cowboy has to set the injustice straight. In one form or another, I just described every classic western film ever made: a cowboy is too virtuous for war until the war is forced upon him.

This is the essential postwar self-image of America, which had seen itself as a pacifistic nation for most of our history. World War II left the United States the most powerful nation on the planet, a position that has never been truly comfortable for us. As the classic western faded, the western antihero arrived: villains with hearts of gold, flawed heroes, outsider narratives.

This was also the moment when Howard Zinn and Michel Foucault and Jean-Paul Sartre produced the postmodern left with its new pacifist mythology: all the wars that ever happen are the fault of capitalism. Smash capitalism, and world peace will break out in a world-historical wave of harmonious human vibrations as the full potential of every unique and wonderful individual person is unlocked.

The promised New Age never materialized. The way this plan actually works out in practice is immigrant children from wealthy neighborhoods throwing nail bombs in Manhattan over the shoulders of latter-day Marxists mewling about the immorality of someone’s bad opinion. This is not a patriotic pacifism. It is useful idiots being used by terrorists with radical foreign ideologies and loyalties.

The cognitive war against our reason, good sense, and survival instincts always makes use of our natural impulse to abhor violence as a solvent, weakening the foundations of peaceful society, so that people with the will to do violence can impose their own program. What leftist street activists call ‘diversity of tactics’ finds its fullest expression here.

Spare me your complaints about Jake Lang. He is a performance artist who brought a goat to the event: a troll. A few of his insipid stunts, such as playing Vanilla Ice “Ice, Ice, Baby” from an ice truck while rolling past ICE protesters, are actually funny. He has never thrown a bomb. He did nothing violent on J6.

Ibrahim Kayumi and Emir Balat, on the other hand, brought bombs to a protest. They are ISIS-inspired terrorists. Like Walter Masterson, Mayor Mamdani is strangely unable to name either of the actual terrorists, but he is happy to pretend that Jake Lang is terrorism personified because he has a bad opinion. New York Democrats are falling all over themselves to condemn bad opinions as terrorism and unable to condemn Muslims with bombs as terrorists for fear of seeming to have a bad opinion themselves.

They pose as good people, these office-holders preening their moral feathers: they are interested only in peace. What they actually want, though, is a war on their own terms, one that empowers them over their domestic political enemies and just happens to erase Judaism from the Middle East. It is a pure coincidence that smashing capitalism requires murdering Jews. You are not supposed to notice how fascist, how very Nazi-like, that is.

If you had wondered how the unholy alliance of leftist radicalism and Islamic fundamentalism happened — if you were confused about Queers for Palestine — look no further. They actually hate us. They want regular, normal Americans dead. They are willing to lie to our faces, to die for their own lies, to watch us get killed and then lie over our dead bodies because the people who killed us found our words disagreeable.

When ‘empathy’ is in fact suicidal stupidity, pacifism finds its fullest, most useful expression in the world: extinction. Pacifism is a desire for the extinction of oneself and their own group. A pacifist can never acknowledge the existence of enemies, must always excuse and forgive the enemy, because the pacifists are fighting the most important war: for equality, an end to racism, an end to war. Our lives are a sacrifice they are willing to make in that endeavor.

Subscribe now

Ismail Qaani kept missing out on Israeli decapitation strikes that killed his colleagues in batches. After one coincidence too many, the Quds Force commander was reportedly detained by the regime and his fate remains unknown. Adding to suspicions, Qaani was left off the list of targets the IDF said they had wanted to eliminate from the IRGC leadership. Either Qaani really has been working for the Israelis this whole time, and his luck has run out, or the Israelis keep letting him live to mess with their heads. Either way, what an incredible story.

Reacting to stories about Israel hacking the entire Tehran traffic camera network, Nico DeMattia muses at Jalopnik that “it seems a bit fishy that any intelligence agency would tip their hat and reveal the tactics used to assassinate a world leader. I’m no expert in spy craft, but I’m not sure they typically engage in show and tell.” Until they do, and when they do, they always have a reason. In this example, Israel wants the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to know that Tehran is unsafe for them. Powerful internal enemies and omniscient external enemies, foes within and foes without: this is psychological pressure, and it is working.

This week, the United States hit the building where clerics were supposed to vote on a replacement for the supreme leader. Then reports came out of Iran that Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had been selected, though it was not clear who had selected him, or when. Israel made it clear they would remove the son like the father, and then Mojtaba reportedly turned the offer down. This kabuki theatre scene ended with today’s announcement that the selection of a new supreme leader has been postponed indefinitely. Donald Trump is already exercising a veto over the supreme leadership. Anyone who tells you that Iran is winning this war is simply not paying attention, or just lying.

Share

Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam banned Hezbollah’s military activities and the Lebanese Army began confiscating weaponry this week. The IDF killed the commander of the Quds Force Lebanon Corps, and appears poised to enter southern Lebanon and put an end to the remaining rocket forces there. Iran’s proxy is being systematically dismantled while the commander of IRGC proxy forces remains hidden like the 12th Imam under suspicion of being an Israeli spy. Israeli filmmaker Evyatar Rosenberg created this satirical AI video of Ismail Qaani setting up the supreme leader for his decapitation strike. Another satirical meme going around today reports Qaani arriving safe in Israel, and congratulates him for his brilliant success.

At the end of one week, missile and drone launches are in single digits. Airports are already reopening in the Persian Gulf. Insurers say that Hormuz transits will resume this weekend. It has been made possible by IDF and American jets loitering in Iran’s skies to strike IRGC launchers wherever they appear. A missile is a precision instrument that requires a precision launching platform, so attacking them has drastically reduced the volume of Iran’s salvoes. B-2 bunker buster strikes on the underground launcher facility at Damavand have crushed the IRGC’s launch rates. Iran is no longer able to strike out at everyone, everywhere, all at once, according to the prewar plan.

Now comes the part where the IRCC must improvise and adapt to overcome the challenges to their survival as an organization. I do not think they can achieve this. Iran’s war plan was conceived as regionwide revenge rather than Death to Israel. Trump appears to have pulled the trigger anticipating that if Iran was allowed to act first, the regional damage would have been far greater than it is now. China was the key enabler in this ambition, providing missile components and technology to build up Iran’s arsenal as a deterrent.

Now that the IRGC’s war plan has culminated, that deterrent is neutralized. Iran’s neighbors have received only just enough damage to bring them off the sidelines into the war, and nowhere near enough damage to stop them from resuming business as usual with a war risk premium. A new phase of the conflict is at hand today. The Trump administration is reportedly arming thousands of Kurdish fighters to challenge the regime in western Iran and preparing to seize the oil hub at Kharg Island and deprive the IRGC of revenue.

“I’m once again calling on all members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, the military, and the police to lay down their arms,” Trump said at the White House yesterday. “Now is the time to stand up for the Iranian people and help take back your country.” Those who surrender will be “perfectly safe with total immunity”, while those who resist will “face absolutely guaranteed death”. Calling on Iran’s diplomats to defect, it was a clear communication to the IRGC that they have no control over the situation, anymore.

The navy that Iran had rebuilt after the inglorious 48-hour defeat of Operation Praying Mantis in 1988 was destroyed again in 48 hours. Indeed, nothing seems to have stung Iran’s allies on social media as badly as the destruction of the IRIS Dena, an Iranian corvette, 19 miles off the coast of Sri Lanka, by an American submarine using a Mk-48 torpedo. According to the paroxysms of rage on the internet, this was a war crime that took place in the middle of the ocean. Turns out that, contrary to the complaints of the chattering classes, the American submarine did in fact contact Sri Lankan authorities to conduct search and rescue.

This, along with low-quality Iranian rockets that misfire, is why I give stories about supposed stray bombs hitting girls’ schools zero credibility until they are proven true through a deliberate, forensic, postwar examination. Propaganda is the first resort of losers. The insane reaction to this torpedo sinking is the same bog-standard rationalization of defeat that sycophants of the Islamic Republic always display in defeat: It was an inside job, like with Ismail Qaani. It was treachery by the Americans for not announcing their intentions to torpedo an armed warship at sea. Iran has not really even begun to fight, yet, and this was only a taste of what will come, just you wait. It is all cope, and it is how organizations like the IRGC always repeat their failures by never examining them.

On another level, the insane reaction of some westerners to the torpedoing of a warship can be explained by the incredible damage Trump is inflicting on the credibility of “the NGO-administrative complex”, as Jennica Pounds terms it. The war has revealed that “those backing the so-called ‘rules-based liberal international order’ actually wanted Ali Khamenei’s regime to remain in place. Actions speak louder than words. For an order that defines itself by the spread of democracy, this is a striking paradox.”

To these establishment voices, “the relevant organizing principle of global foreign policy is not which civilizational bloc you belong to. It is whether you believe the United States should maintain a sovereign military presence and bilateral relationships in the world—or whether American power must be subordinated to multilateral frameworks and institutional consensus.” The people screeching about ‘international law’ right now have been the problem all along. They are watching the IRGC break, and it is breaking them.

Subscribe now

Yesterday, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi signaled that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is acting on its own, now. “What happened in Oman was not our choice”, he told Al Jazeera, referring to overnight missile strikes on that country. “We have already told our Armed Forces to be careful about the targets they choose.” We are supposed to infer from this that the IRGC is not listening to their civilian leaders, which is really not a surprise at all, since the only civil authority the IRGC ever recognized was the supreme leader.

Acknowledging the obvious, Araghchi made it clear that no centralized command and control exists in Iran at present. “Our military units are now, in fact, independent and somewhat isolated, and they are acting based on general instructions given to them in advance.” War plans in Iran have always aimed at decentralized infrastructure, for example scattering missile storage bunkers and command centers around the country. According to Araghchi, the IRGC is still following their pre-war plan. The one that has failed, so far, at stopping the Americans or the Israelis.

That plan, which was presumably approved by some sort of rational thought-process, is to strike Gulf neighbors who had carefully maintained their neutrality in hopes of forcing them to make the United States stop. It means hitting any ship they see attempting to transit the Strait of Hormuz, even if it is their own shadow fleet tanker. This is a bad plan for military victory, but a good plan for spazzing out like a speared lizard in a reflexive act of institutional death.

IRGC has nowhere to run or hide. Communications are necessarily as slow as the word of mouth of a single messenger because no electronic device is safe. Command paralysis was evident on Day One. On Day Two, the IRGC was still struggling to adapt. They said they launched missiles at the USS Abraham Lincoln, but in fact they simply launched missiles at the body of water where the ship was sailing and called it a day. This morning, video of yet another failed Iranian rocket launch appeared on social media. It was not enough yesterday that the IRGC admitted it was their missile that struck a school on Day One; the inevitable denials and gnostic invocations of magical Zionist powers continue. So if you won’t take their word for it, watch for yourself just how reliable Iran’s rockets really are.

Meanwhile, the American strikes have destroyed nine ships, “some of them relatively large and important” according to President Trump, who says “we largely destroyed their Naval Headquarters” as well. The Pentagon has announced that three US servicemembers were killed and five wounded yesterday, releasing no details. For those of you keeping score at home, exactly three US servicemembers were also killed by Iran in Jordan in 2024, whereupon the Biden team did exactly nothing in response. Kuwaiti air defense shot down three F-15 fighters last night, apparently a friendly fire incident that might have been avoidable with more pre-war planning and cooperation from that government. All six pilots ejected safely, which means they were injured. This is a lesson in the wages of weakness, moral cowardice, and unpreparedness.

In addition to the supreme leader, the first-day strikes eliminated the Minister of Defense, the equivalent of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Head of Security and Intelligence to the Leadership Council, the commanders of the IRGC as well as the IRGC Navy, the Intelligence Directorate, and others at the top of the chains of command. President Masoud Pezeshkian, who was initially reported as among the dead, is still alive, and still powerless. The IRGC and Basij have all the hard power in Iran, right now. This is changing as the air campaign changes. Day Two saw a discernible shift as total air supremacy allowed aircraft to loiter over Iran, targeting any missile or drone launcher that opened fire.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was killed by an initial Israeli airstrike, removing the one such figure in Iran who might have formed a new, even more reactionary government very easily. Conveniently, Ahmadinejad was under house arrest for already having plotted to overthrow the current elected government headed by Pezeshkian, who is a ‘moderate’, at least as that word has been understood in Iran for the last 47 years. Here we see a distinct effort by the US-IDF coalition to veto future antagonistic Iranian leadership in advance, while the ones who might make a deal are left standing. Trump is being misunderstood today in the usual manner, taken literally but not seriously, for saying that the initial strike was more successful than planned, removing many of the men (they are all men) who would have taken over for the targets.

The new supreme leader, Alireza Arafi, is closely affiliated with the IRGC and also Hezbollah. He is seen as a conservative hardliner in the mold of his predecessor, who put him in charge of imposing the regime’s ideology across Iranian society and its export abroad. The fact that Arafi travels freely to Europe says a lot about why Europeans are so opposed to American action against Iran. Arafi is also a temporary fill. First, because the Constitution of Iran says that he must select a new permanent supreme leader as a triumvirate with Pezeshkian and Chief Justice Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei, the former intelligence minister. Second, because there are already reports that he was killed in an airstrike.

While unconfirmed, this should surprise no one. Whereas a ‘civilian moderate’ might be a partner for peace as president, the position of velayat-i-faqih will never, indeed can never, be filled by an actual peace partner for Israel or the United States. The position has total authority, as implied by the word “supreme”), and only an ayatollah can fill the office, as the term actually translates to supreme jurist, meaning a Shia clergyman dispensing ‘justice’ from the Qur’an. This is what makes the Islamic Republic Islamic. While I have seen and heard many concerns about the future of Iran, this point seems to escape the entire commentariat, so far. Both the supreme jurist and the IRGC are constitutional organs that have to die in order for Iran to live as a mere Republic.

The IRGC has adapted the strategy of Hamas in Gaza by removing political prisoners and regime enemies from the jails to IRGC sites, where they will serve as human shields, to be reported as civilian casualties if America strikes. Meanwhile, the IRGC has activated their foreign influence networks in hopes of spurring massive protests and terrorist acts in the West. The resulting demonstrations contrast sharply with the enthusiastic celebrations of the Iranian diaspora and only serve to isolate Iran’s western allies. In Austin, Texas, a Senegalese immigrant named Ndiaga Diagne wearing “Property of Allah” on his clothing killed three and wounded 14 at a bar. Hezbollah has apparently decided to draw some Israeli fire. Crowds of men, some armed, attempted to storm the US embassies in Karachi and Baghdad, being repulsed with casualties by United States Marines.

This is the most scattershot response possible, but it is evidently the IRGC’s prearranged plan: initiate regional violence, kill as many Iranians as they can, and pray to Allah.

As of today, the IRGC has struck eleven Muslim countries during the holy month of Ramadan, if you count ‘Palestine’ as a country. Iran has now attacked more Muslim countries than Israelis have in the entire history of their state, and during the supposedly holy month when such things are supposedly forbidden. This strategy has been counterproductive: threats to British installations in the region have forced Prime Minister Keir Starmer to grudgingly authorize the United States to use them, at least a little bit, sort of. France and Italy are also demanding to know why their bases have been hit. An IRGC war plan that was supposed to stop the Americans and Israelis has instead pushed everyone towards their enemies.

However, Turkey, which hosts American forces, has not been subject to bombardment. Ankara is denying a report of a strike on their territory. Neither has Pakistan been hit. The reader is free to speculate as to why the two immediate neighbors of Iran with the most powerful land armies are both exempt from this pre-planned vengeance when they were equally opposed to the war as, say, Oman or Kuwait. Furthermore, the reader is free to wonder why the ‘neocons’ who wanted to invade Iran are so upset about Operation Epic Fury right now.

Share

As we have seen with Delcy Rodríguez in Venezuela, President Trump is happy to work with any individual who works with him. Regime change in Iran has been compared to threading a needle, however, because fewer potential partners exist in Iran’s constitutional system. Trump and Netanyahu have very limited means of controlling the outcome. The country could descend into civil war if competing factions emerge: so goes the argument from the pessimists, right now. Anarchy would indeed be the worst possible outcome — but it would only happen if the rest of the constitutional regime also collapsed with the IRGC.

What the coalition can do is attack the system of oppression. Tharallah Headquarters, which “functions as the regime’s operational brain during moments of unrest” and “coordinates intelligence, policing, Basij militia, IRGC units, and psychological operations, ensuring that repression is not improvised but calibrated”, was destroyed yesterday, one of 2,000 targets reportedly struck. Tonight, there are fresh airstrikes on targets in Tehran. This is spectacle, an intentional display of power that communicates the powerlessness of the IRGC.

Right now, the new Gulf partners to the coalition are activating their own assets inside Iran, and these will likely be more useful in the dismantling of the regime than their military hardware. The thing that Iran’s neighbors now fear most of all is an IRGC that is wounded but alive, still able to attack their cities and infrastructure. They will want the regime dead, now.

Wars being fundamentally macroeconomic affairs, on Day Three the coalition has shifted to include economic targets. Strikes last night on the Tabriz refinery, and the effective blockade of Iran’s oil traffic, are cutting off revenue that was supposed to pay all the bills for what is left of the regime, including the salaries of IRGC and Basij forces. Religious fundamentalism does not pay bills, and Muslim armies that go unpaid are exactly as restive and fickle as Christian armies that go unpaid. Time is not on the side of the Iranians who would carry on with the Islamic Republic in its present form. Change is already forced upon them. Now it is just a matter of how much blood they wish to shed on the way out.

“To those who would test our resolve or threaten the United States, our allies, or our interests, understand this clearly: we can reach you”, Gen. Dan Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a press conference this morning. “We can sustain the fight, we can scale the fight, and we will prevail.” Iran was always a hollow military power, unable to sustain a conventional war. Now President Trump is saying the campaign will likely last for a few weeks, which is probably longer than the IRGC can last. This is not over, but it is only going in one direction, anymore.

Subscribe now

An Israeli strike at 8:15 AM local time appears to have possibly ended the career of Ayatollah Ali Hosseini Khamenei. Reuters is reporting that Supreme Leader Khamenei and President Masoud Pezeshkian were present at the meeting, while Israeli Channel 12 is reporting that Khamenei “was likely killed” and “hurt at the very least”.

By my count, this is the fifth time that the IDF has struck a meeting where top-level leaders of an aggressor power had gathered: they have done this to Hezbollah twice, the Houthis once, and Iran twice. For some reason — perhaps the fatalism of fundamentalists, or a false sense of superiority over the ‘dirty Jew’ — Israel is blessed with stupid enemies that keep holding convenient gatherings where they can be killed in a single decapitating strike.

Iranian news outlet Mehr reported that Israeli-US airstrikes had killed 57 students at a school in southern Iran. While this is hard to credit, much less confirm, CNN ran with the story, anyway. “Another Iranian news agency posted video purporting to show extensive damage to the school, with smoke rising from the building, as well as cranes lifting debris”, CNN regurgitates breathlessly.

Really? They got cranes to the scene that quickly? In Iran? Really? No, not really. The putative “school” turns out to be part of an IRGC Navy base. The missile that hit it was a failed launch by the IRGC and the story is simply propaganda slop. Actual Iranian high school students are posting videos of themselves giddily watching the Supreme Leader’s compound go up in smoke. The lies will continue to intensify as the regime dies, becoming ever more delusional.

Share

Iran retaliated by striking five neighbor countries that had been sitting out the war. Strangely, they did not attack Israel at all. The American base in Bahrain was hit by a Shahed drone, while a ballistic missile struck a civilian complex nearby; an apartment building was struck by a drone tonight. Neutral Kuwait says they “dealt with” missiles aimed at them; so does Jordan. Qatar says they intercepted one missile, and one citizen of the Emirates was killed by falling debris from an Iranian missile. The most powerful of the countries targeted, the Saudi kingdom, has now become a co-belligerent against Iran. Tehran has managed to unite the region against them.

Not only was this missile fire counterproductive, it was puny. Both US and IDF forces have targeted Iran’s missile infrastructure: factories, bases, launchers and launch sites. Because Iranian communications are clearly compromised — how else would the Israelis know where and when Khamenei was meeting Pezeshkian? — command paralysis is likely a factor, too. Orders to launch that never arrive are also never followed. Cyber and EW capabilities further complicate the command and control necessary for an effective missile salvo that might saturate and overwhelm someone’s defenses.

Israel and the US have also put most of Iran’s state media organizations out of action. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which is the military arm of the regime, is clearly flailing now. Gen. Ebrahim Jabbari, who likely will not survive another 48 hours, went on one of the remaining channels to declare that the missiles they had sent already were “from the back of the stockpile”, while Iran has weapons that the world has “never seen before”. Watch his body language. Jabbari is puffing up to seem dangerous. This is instinctive, not something he has thought about a lot.

So far, the strikes do not appear to target the personnel of Artesh, Iran’s regular armed forces. Prayer apps have been hacked, issuing messages urging the security forces, and especially Artesh, to stand down. As I have repeatedly pointed out for readers, Artesh exists to defend Iran from invasion, which is not happening, and it is distrusted by the clerics because they sat out the 1979 Revolution, which is why the IRGC exists. This parallel military force is an added economic inefficiency that has helped to make regime collapse inevitable, even without American or Israeli actions.

Were sanctions entirely lifted today, the collapse of the Iranian state would still happen because there are multiple internal crises of the regime’s own making, problems that the IRGC has created and compounded. Drought, plus overconsumption of water resources, plus irrational dam-building, plus mismanagement and corruption, equals crisis. Half the economy is gray or black, while the rest is dominated by bonyads, holding companies that are ostensibly charities, but are actually Iran’s mode of state capitalism dominated by the IRGC and the clerics. Regime collapse will also collapse these economic structures. Put simply, no matter what happens now, Iranians must expect a tough road to economic recovery.

The next 48 hours will be determinative. Critics of American action will say that regime change through air power alone is impossible, and they are right, but the Iranians themselves are the allied ‘land army’ in Iran. If the masses take to the streets and seize the major cities, the IRGC may fight, but they will almost certainly fall. The clerics will fall with them, too, because there is very little actual popular support for the regime. In order to survive, the regime remnants must organize a civil war against their own people, now — and in all the ways listed above, the US and Israel are making that very, very hard for them.

Donald Trump’s domestic enemies are circling like vultures this weekend hoping that the IRGC will resist the Iranian people long enough to impeach him over it. In order to justify this position, they pretend that the 1973 War Powers resolution does not exist, and that the United States Constitution gives the minority party in Congress some sort of imaginary veto power over decisions by the commander-in-chief. The one scenario in which this can possibly work out well for them is if the regime still stands on Monday. If it is gone, or on the way out, Trump’s political enemies are going to look like foolish people chewing on sour grapes.

Confusion over weapons of mass destruction has certainly fed into these niggling doubts. Ask anyone opposed to the war, who supports the regime that massacres Iranians by tens of thousands to stay in place, and they will express this supposed confusion. Did the president not say Iran’s nuclear program was totally destroyed? Yes he did. Was it? Yes. Was Iran then able to reconstitute a nuclear weapon program very quickly? Also yes, because that is not a difficult thing to do.

Ali Akbar Salehi, former chief of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, told an Iranian state TV program in February 2024 that "we have all the [pieces] of nuclear science and technology” to build a nuclear bomb. He compared a nuclear weapon to a car, which consists of “a chassis, it needs an engine, it needs a steering wheel, it needs a gearbox. Have you made a gearbox? I say yes. An engine? But each one is for its own purpose.” In other words, Iran has been working on each part of a nuclear weapon in isolation, building the capacity for rapid nuclear breakout.

Iran has ballistic missiles. If they have a nuclear detonator already designed and built, then all they need to weaponize it is some enriched uranium. They had plenty of that before, though of course it got buried in the Fordow facility when that collapsed under the bombardment of American B-2s with bunker-busters specifically designed for the mission. So while the regime is unable to restart the enrichment process there, it is also possible for them to recover some uranium and build a basic bomb, or a handful of them.

Trump clearly hoped to force Iran into giving up this program forever — it was the cornerstone of his diplomatic efforts leading up to this action. It was the regime that chose this course, that deserves 100 percent of historical blame for what is happening to them, right now. Neither of Tehran’s putative allies, China or Russia, is coming to save them. The regime is on their own, reportedly leaderless, facing a population of 90 million people who want them dead. Anything is possible, but I do not rate their chances of survival very high. We appear to have reached the point where the IRGC must decide how it wants to die.

Subscribe now

The renewed invasion caught the world off guard. It caught me off guard. I did not think Vladimir Putin was dumb enough to really do it. Turned out that the CIA and MI6 were right, he really was that dumb. As I plumbed sources of information, it became clear to me over the first 24 hours that something had gone catastrophically wrong for Russia. Huge columns of armor were stuck on the way to Kyiv and Ukrainian counterattacks were gathering in strength. The fight for Hostomel Airport was a very near thing, but a combination of early warning, preparation, and prompt response cut the airborne bridgehead that Russian special forces were supposed to secure for the mighty columns on the highways.

As Day 4 dawned, a belated reflexive withdrawal was evident north of Kyiv. Ukrainian fighters were inflicting huge losses on Russian units, the objectives were out of reach, and most annoying of all to Russians, the Ukrainian Air Force had failed to stand down and Ukrainian air defenses were resilient, so that Russian pilot and plane losses were unacceptably high. Some of the best units in the Russian ground forces were virtually wiped out. The invasion was already a fiasco. Over the next few weeks, before the Russian pincers all recoiled and redeployed to the east of Ukraine, one could discern major errors of military planning as the fog of war cleared.

Share

Many Russian commanders were issued decades old, Soviet-era maps of Ukraine. Basic land navigation errors were inevitable and frequent. To resolve this command-and-control confusion, Russian officers used their radios. Most often, these were cheap Chinese-made sets, usually Baofeng brand, intended for civilian use and therefore unencrypted, single-channel devices. Even amateur Ukrainian radio operators were able to intercept and jam and exploit these conversations. Thus two failures compounded, with effects throughout the force. Those mighty columns seemed enfeebled because the Russian system of command and control was in fact very feeble.

Now the Starlink whitelist in Ukraine has exposed the fundamental lack of Russian independent adaptation in this domain because those intercepted and recorded conversations are once again abundant. “As far as I know, that Gazprom thing is f**king shit”, one Russian has now been intercepted saying. “The neighbors have a ‘Gazprom’ terminal. It works on those ‘Gazproms,’ yeah, sure — when it actually connects,” another Russian says in another intercepted conversation. Gazprom’s Yamal satellite constellation is simply no match for the stability of Elon Musk’s. It lacks the bandwidth for video uploads, and worst of all, does not support drone control like Starlink does.

Russia has a space program. They had four years to come up with their own Starlink, launch it into space, and avoid the trap of dependency on a technology that could be taken away so easily. This is one example of a broader Russian failure of adaptation. Centralization, even re-Sovietization, of the economy for war has succeeded where it favors specific war industries — for example, ramping up production of fiber optic wire for drones — at the expense of the civilian economy, especially the banks. Forced loans to favored state contractors have filled balance sheets with high-risk debt and it is just a matter of time before the crisis requires a federal bailout from a depleted sovereign wealth fund.

The result is that Russia spends more to get less. Likewise, the culture of command in Russia promotes corruption instead of confidence. This has not changed, and it is still resulting in occasional purges of generals and officials. Bad news is punished in this system, which rewards lies, creating the battlefield ‘gray zones’ that Ukraine has learned to crush. Rather than promote competence and reward innovation, Putin has systematically punished his most successful people. The survivors are the ones who told him what he wanted to hear and then did not get caught lying, yet.

Resource management has been a key question. How much real economic damage does Russia inflict on Ukraine by using an advanced missile against an apartment building? If memory serves, this happened the first time on Day 4, 27 February 2022, right as the attack on Kyiv was being canceled. It has always been a form of punishment for successful resistance. Ukraine’s Air Force was intact largely because Russia had failed to overwhelm it with missiles, and then it was too late. Strikes on power generation facilities have more obvious economic effects, but Ukraine now manufactures far more war material then it did four years ago, and Russia has failed to put a dent in production through long-range strikes. Instead, every flurry of Iskanders seems to be aimed at apartment blocks.

Setting humanitarian concerns aside, this is highly inefficient warfighting, just like the ‘meat wave’ assaults. It is a form of war that has been optimized for control at the center instead of achieving decisive strategic results. The reason we see so many stories about Russian commanders killing their own troops as they retreat, or try to surrender, is that results on the battlefield do not matter in the Russian chain of command. All that matters is the perception of results in the Kremlin. Sergei Shoigu did not go all at once; he went slowly, fading into the hedge like Homer Simpson, as he failed to produce results. His loyalty was absolute, however, and this keeps him alive, free from prison. Valery Gerasimov has likewise faded, fails to produce results, but stays alive, outlasting Shoigu, through even more doglike loyalty.

Of all the factors that I identified in Russian defeat four years ago that have gotten worse, dependency on fossil fuel exports — so-called Dutch disease — has become the most spectacular Ukrainian campaign of all: the drone war against Russian oil infrastructure. Conducted with increasing intensity, ferocity, and success, this campaign struck a new high point on Sunday. “The Kalyeykino station is described as a key node for transporting Russian oil. It receives crude from Western Siberia and the Volga region, blends it and feeds it into the Druzhba pipeline, a major artery for Russian oil exports”, Ukrainian Pravda reports. The target is more than 700 miles (1,200 km) from Ukraine, which had no such capabilities in February 2022.

So much for the ‘de-militarization’ objective of the special military operation. Now in its fifth year, the war is finally reaching a predictable, and long-predicted, moment when the economic fundamentals of Putinism simply fail. There was no significant tax base in Russia four years ago. Income taxes were flat, now they are progressive by income. During 2025, corporate tax rates went up along with VAT (value added tax) on everything. The Russian Ministry of Finance sees this as a harvest, but it is effectively punishing average Russians with every loaf of bread and bag of cucumbers.

The immiseration of Russia is now well underway. The price of defeat grows all the time, and the further it is delayed by stopgap measures, the deeper the reckoning will be. None of the fundamentals has changed because Russia has not changed, except for the worse. But that is true of Russian history in general.

Subscribe now

Donald Trump has signaled repeatedly that he wants to do regime change peacefully in Iran. He positioned powerful forces (“a massive armada”) in the region, which took time while the regime suppressed the uprising with 38,000 murders. “We have a lot of very big, very powerful ships sailing to Iran right now, and it would be great if we didn’t have to use them”, Trump told reporters two weeks ago. Now it appears this patience is running out.

Regional allies are leery of war with Iran, which can do them significant retaliatory damage and would deplete interceptor missile stockpiles that may not been refilled since the 12-Day War. By last Friday, “over 120 U.S. military logistics flights [had] arrived [in] the region, including C-17s, C-5s, C-130s, KC-135s, and KC-46s” carrying air defense material and other equipment. The supply streams have not let up. Every available refueler was surged to the region by Wednesday while F-22s deployed to forward areas. At the time of this writing, over 220 fighter aircraft are reportedly in the Gulf. It is the biggest redistribution of American combat power since 2003 — and the culmination of a war that has been waged almost exclusively against the United States since 1979.

Subscribe now

Trump clearly preferred coercion without a shooting war. He wanted “to exploit Iran’s weakened position to coerce strategic concessions — not only on the nuclear and missile programs, but also on Tehran’s regional proxy activity.” Tariff threats against countries doing business with Iran underline the macroeconomic bias in his national security policy. He has raised leverage in order to force a deal while Tehran is at their weakest. The approach comes with risks. Trump has made a threat, and he must follow through to maintain his own credibility. While it is impossible for the regime to call upon the hearts and minds of the masses right now, the elites are themselves fractured, and could unite against foreign aggression, making a negotiated outcome harder — or so goes the argument against action.

Trump asked Israel for help, and in the Spartan tradition of sending one man instead of an army, the Israelis sent their intelligence chief to Washington. Meanwhile, talks continued, though without any breakthrough. Iran made it clear they are very far from a deal this week. Benjamin Netanyahu visited the White House last Tuesday evening. Afterwards, Trump made it very clear Iran was the center of discussion. This week, the IDF struck Hezbollah command and control as well as rocket sites to pre-empt IRGC counterattacks on Israel from the north. The time for negotiations has clearly passed and the opening salvoes of the war have already been fired.

Regime change “could be the best thing” for Iran, Trump said, ordering a second aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, to the Middle East, doubling the strike power of the Abraham Lincoln battle group now in the Arabian Sea. The Gerald R. Ford was involved in the lightning operation to seize Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. But Iran is not Venezuela, and some doubt a regime change is even possible with any number of airstrikes. Resistance to war from Democrats associated with the National Iranian American Council has increased in proportion to military preparations. Let us be blunt: Iran was always the happy foil to Israel in their project to destroy the Middle East with kindness, and the CCP does not want to lose access to Iranian oil, so their ideological diaspora opposes intervention.

It has become commonplace by now to observe that the same people who scream loudest about human rights in other times have emerged as open supporters of the regime which just killed nearly 30-40,000 Iranians, often in ways and circumstances as horrific as the atrocities of 7 October 2023. Whereas Trump and Iran both stalled the march to war for a while in order to prepare for battle, this process has also given Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a chance to show us why she stumbles over questions about defending Taiwan. She fundamentally does not believe in the efficacy of force. In her mind, the Pentagon exists to create social equity. A person with those values will of course treat the IRGC and Basij as poor, defenseless innocents being bullied.

While some number of added troops are necessary in the region, no invasion of Iran appears to be on the horizon. Nor is that even necessary. Yesterday, students demonstrated again at the universities in Tehran and Mashhad, chanting “Death to Khamenei” and “Freedom” and vowing to “finish the job” when the United States strikes the regime. Occupation will be unnecessary because Iranians are a people who feel occupied by their regime, right now. After so much slaughter, there will be no ‘rally around the flag’ effect. The masses are quite prepared to bleed again if they think the regime is weak enough.

This is of course why US Special Forces have been smuggling Starlink equipment into Iran for weeks now. When I first identified one easy set of IRGC economic targets in January, the regime had still not committed its bloody crackdown, yet. Now the circumstances have changed, and a much more fulsome campaign will be required to dislodge the regime. Clashes have reportedly broken out this morning between students at the Khajeh Nasir Toosi university and security forces in Tehran. Organizers are undoubtedly signaling their willingness to take over the streets again, and risk another bloodbath, hoping to speed up American action. Irony of ironies, the culture of martyrdom is now inverted against the mullahs. A great deal of military work must now be done to support a new uprising.

One set of new target sets will suffice to illustrate. The IRGC has 11 regional military bases across the country. These act as major operational commands, coordinating security, defense, and internal stability efforts, and can be considered key national security bases. The most prominent of these will be Sarallah Headquarters, which covers Tehran. In addition, there are 31 provincial command headquarters, plus one specifically for Tehran. Around the country, there are over 3,000 local substations from which the IRGC and Basij militia control Iran’s cities.

Reader, we have just identified no less than 3,042 potential targets. You would need 25 missile cruisers of the USS Ticonderoga class to fire that many Tomahawk cruise missiles — but there are just seven of those sailing in the US Navy.

Planners will therefore stress the prioritization of high-value targets and spread the combat load. For example, Sec. Hegseth might recommend hitting every IRGC base around Tehran and Qom so that Iranians can seize control of the two most important cities, then ‘chase’ the regime from city to city, wherever security forces attempt to resist the crowd. Coordination with local insurgents via Starlink will improve the chances of success and reduce the number of flights and salvoes needed to do the job. The model here, ironically, is Libya, but I expect the outcome will be radically different.

Share

Since the disaster of Desert One, the botched mission to rescue American hostages held at the US embassy in Tehran, the Pentagon has addressed the issues that caused the accident by changing the way it fights wars. Delta Force and other ‘tactical operators’ with special, silenced helicopters and ‘discombobulators’ are one example of this robust and systematic development of the US forces. Another is the AWACS aircraft that will coordinate joint operations between the branches, so that Air Force and Navy jets combine to produce greater effects than they could achieve on their own. American armed forces are very, very good at this form of warfare.

Iran’s regular forces, known as the Artesh, are the opposite. They have hardly improved since the Revolution — and that is because they sat out the events of 1979, earning the distrust of the clerics, who then created the IRGC. One ‘known unknown’ is whether Artesh will sortie in force against Americans, primarily at sea, since the air forces are almost nonexistent at this point. A campaign against the regime will also require total air supremacy, necessitating SEAD (suppression of enemy air defense) missions to make the skies safe for loitering planes. Iranian missile launch sites and transporter-erector-launch vehicles will of course be priority targets, since they are the best weapons Iran has to strike at Israel, but these are IRGC targets. I will pay attention to this question after strike reports come in.

The intended audience of this display will be China. Powerful new ‘Angry Kitten’ jamming pods have been rushed onto the American F-16s that will perform the ‘Wild Weasel’ mission of dismantling Iranian air defense so that China can see them do it. The EA-47B Compass Call will fly above 55,000 feet jamming the Chinese and Russian-made radars that Iran uses for air defense so that China can see it work. The revolutionary regime is fragile and militarily weak, a perfect testbed for technologies that have been held in reserve, that the United States would have to put on display anyway if escalations began in the Strait of Taiwan. After the mission is complete, American diplomats can quietly warn Beijing: ‘We have more where that came from.’

Strategic deterrence of China has become one subtle, yet vitally important, aspect of Pentagon planning for the war against Iran. Yet the most telling aspect of all this is that the United States armed forces, which are the world’s very best at joint operations planning, had no such plans ready at the actual moment when the regime killed tens of thousands of Iranians. Iran has been at war with the United States since 1979 — not in the Westphalian, Queensbury Rules kind of way that involves formal declaration by a legislative body after rigorous debate and speeches, but the passive-aggressive ‘Death to America’ campaign of provocations and murder supposedly justified by the existence of the ‘Great Satan’. Yet the Americans were not ready.

The Iranians did it this way, and not by the formal, constitutionally-sound, liberal-democratic of war, precisely because they could never hope to win that kind of war. Iran is too dysfunctional for a sustained conventional conflict: too inefficient, too corrupt, too fatalistic in its fundamentalism. The bluff always depended on the West to cooperate in the illusion of Iranian military strength.

Now we have Miss AoC herself mewling about the evils of war and moaning that her opinion has not been consulted. While we cannot be sure just when the balloon will go up, for the president himself seems purposefully unsure, it is hardly unreasonable to imagine a new Iran on 20 March, the Nawruz holiday. Year 1395 of the Yazdegerdi era would then be a genuine fresh start for everyone in the Persian world. Persian nationalism has always been a volcanic force underneath the regime that the clerics sought to contain. When they lose containment, Miss Ocasio-Cortez will one of the people most surprised by the eruption, for the global left has never been right about Iran even once.

The failure of Operation Eagle Claw in 1980 created the 21st century American military. In time, that military became capable of utterly crushing the decrepit clerical regime whenever American politicians had the will to do so. It turns out that we did not have to submit to a ‘gray zone’, that we do not actually have to let the ayatollah have a nuclear program, that we actually can do things if we want to. Everybody is worried about the dangers that are regional and global and maritime and diplomatic. They worry whether aircraft carriers are vulnerable to drone swarms. They worry that whatever replaces the old regime will be worse. It is all cope.

I am genuinely excited. My generation has always known Iran as a bitter and malevolent enemy. They have been getting away with too much for too long. Turns out we can actually just face down a bully and break them to bits and go home if we want. We don’t have to stick around, dust him off, and build his nation for him afterwards. We can take low-risk, high-reward options with our incredible capacities and just ignore the people who whine that it’s so unfair of us to win. A world in which America’s enemies are terrified of American military power might be … good actually? Turns out that we can ignore the worries and just make our enemies worry.

Subscribe now