“[T]here was in the town a [siege engine] built by a carpenter and dragged with its platform from St. Sernin”, writes the anonymous author of Chanson de la Croisade Albigeoise, or Song of the Cathar Wars.1 “This was worked by noblewomen, by little girls and men’s wives, and now a stone arrived just where it was needed and struck Count Simon on his steel helmet, shattering his eyes, brains, back teeth, forehead and jaw. Bleeding and black, the count dropped dead on the ground.”

The stone arrived just as the brother of the unfortunate Count, Sir Guy, “was speaking and beginning to shout and yell” because of the danger to the “cat”, a siege tower so large that Simon de Montfort intended it to house 400 horsemen and 150 archers. The career of the cat had already been cartoonish.

During the first attempted assault with the siege engine, a stone from a trebuchet inside Toulouse struck the upper part of the tower and knocked the protective hide armor loose. Now vulnerable to attack with fire, the siege engine had to be wheeled away again in ignominious retreat — and was struck again in the back by a second stone, destroying part of the machinery and killing several men inside it.

All the men outside the cat who were helping to push it ran away, ignoring Montfort, who shouted for them to return. The episode had symbolized the decline of his command during the ill-advised siege. Unable to ever actually invest the city, for he never had enough troops to fully surround it, Montfort had turned to an engineering solution that became a liability.

It was during the second attempt with the cat, now improved with reinforced hide shielding and wicker shields (cledis) to protect the men outside it, that Simon de Montfort fell. Once again, trebuchet stones damaged the cat as it approached. ‘‘By God, Dame Traitress Cat, you will never catch rats!” the Toulousains joked, according to Anonymous. They had increased the defensive obstacles in front of their walls, hindering the advance of the crusaders and their cat.

Montfort’s knights endured a barrage of stones and crossbow bolts from within the walls. The horse of Guy de Montfort, the brother of Simon, reared up when it was struck in the head by a bolt, whereupon a second crossbow bolt struck his groin. Guy was struggling to rally support from the dwindling knights as they continued to take hits. Montfort received multiple crossbow wounds before the great stone smashed his head, ending his misery.

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The death of Count Simon de Montfort on 25 June 1218 is certain. All the sources agree he was killed by a stone from a pre-gunpowder siege artillery weapon. Everything else is a contested detail. Peter of les Vaux-de-Cernay, who wrote the Historia Albigensis from his perspective as a Cistercian monk closely aligned with the crusaders and an admirer of Montfort, presents the death in hagiographic terms: it is a scene of martyrdom.

“Suddenly a stone from an enemy mangonel struck Christ’s knight on the head. The blow was lethal. Twice beating his breast he commended his soul to God and the Blessed Virgin”, Peter writes.2 The detail seems dubious, as death from a crushed skull would be instant.

Peter emphasizes five prior wounds from crossbows and compares Montfort to St. Stephen, the first martyr of Christianity, who was stoned to death. Peter also uses the Latin word mangonellus for the machine that threw the killing stone. He does not mention women operating the mangonel.

Anonymous tells us the death of Montfort was instantaneous. The Chronicle of William of Puylaurens, who wrote a history of the siege decades later, says Montfort “died at once” from being struck by the stone.3 He says that Montfort was actually inside the cat when he was struck, and that a mangonel threw the stone.

William also reports that the Count had begun “to pray to God to give him peace by the remedy of death” during the siege, for he “was worn out by his labours, despondent and weakened and exhausted by the drain on his resources; nor did he easily bear the prick of constant accusations by the legate that he was unthinking and remiss.”

Pope Innocent III had declared the Albigensian Crusade, but then failed to finance it. His legate had pressed Montfort to continue the siege against the advice of the Count’s military advisers, then turned on Montfort when the first attempt with the cat had failed so badly. Pressures of leadership under the failing conditions of the crusader army likely did contribute to Montfort’s fate. He took one too many risks, and lost his life.

For modern military historiography, the more interesting divergence in the primary sources is the identification of the machine that killed Montfort as well as the composition of the crew that operated it. Writing in Occitan rather than French, Anonymous uses the word peireira, from the Latin word petraria, which is a more general term than mangonel. Literally translated, it means ‘stone-thrower’. This is not an esoteric engineering point, either. The distinction actually does make a difference.

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Ukraine has surpassed Russia in the scale of their long-range strike capabilities. Successive, overlapping campaigns have created gas lines in Russia, swept the Sea of Azov clear of Russian ships, hammered logistics, and in recent days has expanded to Wildberries warehouses.

Wildberries is frequently compared to Amazon as a business, but this does not quite explain what is happening, here. Imagine American soldiers ordering their body armor, radios, combat gear, fiber-optic spools, and sundry needs for battle from Amazon.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy calls the Wildberries locations “major logistics facilities” that are/were “involved in supplying the Russian military with drone components, navigation equipment, and other gear”. Order fulfilment centers and warehouses are therefore considered ‘dual use’ locations, subject to attack.

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Russia has of course condemned these attacks on poor, innocent civilian businesses. For once, this is almost not hyperbole. Wildberries is the rare example of a successful non-silovik business in Russia. Founder and CEO Tatyana Kim is Russia’s richest self-made woman billionaire.

However, a bitter divorce and corporate power struggle between Kim and her estranged husband Vladislav Bakalchuk erupted in gunfire during 2024. Talk about your bad breakups.

Bakalchuk showed up at the company’s offices near the Kremlin. He brought armed men in a brazen attempt to seize the premises. Two Wildberries security guards were killed and several police were reportedly wounded. Bakalchuk’s Chechen mob muscle was later convicted. It is dangerous to do honest business in Russia, even on a good day.

Strikes on Wildberries locations in the Moscow and St. Petersburg regions have secondary, cascading effects on the most important economic centers in Russia. Small businesses that depend on the online retailer for stock are already teetering on the edge from lack of demand. Between absent supply and absent demand is zero trade.

Wildberries had also been one important way for residents of the urban core of St. Petersburg and Moscow to alleviate the gas crisis by driving less. Now Russian consumers are forced to go somewhere themselves if they want anything, compounding the gasoline crisis. Business and consumer are both being squeezed.

The Wildberries option communicates the price of continued war to Russians in the metropolitan center of the country, the regions that have so far avoided the worst impacts of the war.

This does not guarantee the end of the war will come anytime soon. On the contrary, Russians face a bleak winter of limited heating oil supplies and Christmas without Wildberries delivery because Putin never responds to price signals.

I keep comparing him to a gambling addict because he predictably doubles-down on every high-stakes geopolitical bet. Putin treats armies and treasuries like inexhaustible credit lines at the casino of war.

It is compulsive behavior by a man who is unable to walk away from the table. However, even the world’s richest man has material limits. The Wildberries option aims to strike Russia against hard, material limits, imposing long-term costs for long-term war.

Fewer businesses, paying less tax, is less revenue for war against Ukraine. Treating a Wildberries just like any other Russian military logistics hub has broad effects on Russia’s wartime economy. The stated rationale is peace. The material effect is a more expensive war for every Russian, however long it lasts.

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Early on the morning of 3 January 2026, at least 32 Cuban guards around Nicolás Maduro were reportedly incapacitated by a weapon that American forces were using for the very first time.

According to an alleged surviving Venezuelan security guard, there was an “intense sound wave” or energy pulse that cause an internal head-exploding sensation, nosebleeds, vomiting of blood, disorientation, and collapse, leaving the guards unable to resist the Americans.

In interviews, President Trump called it “the discombobulator” and a “sonic weapon”. “I’m not allowed to talk about it”, he said, though he added that it was critical to mission success. “Nobody else has it. We have weapons no one knows about... we have some incredible weapons.”

The account of the alleged security guard originated on TikTok and was promoted on X by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt. Venezuela’s defense minister accused the US of using Venezuela as a “weapons laboratory” for advanced AI-linked technology.

In fact, the “discombobulator” is decades old. So is the debate over it. American electronic warfare firms have produced a new generation of these weapons, yes, but the technology has Cold War roots.

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One historical lens of understanding the capture of Maduru, and the ensuing dominance of American refineries in processing Venezuelan crude oil, is typical military imperialism of the capitalist variety (yawn).

Another, far more interesting lens is the secret history of microwave weapons, their effects on the human body, and their use by Russians against Americans. It is a contentious history, always denied in whole by some who say the discombobulator does not exist, or else its effects are imaginary. Those people are very, very wrong.

I must be frank: it is an actual crime against my intelligence to deny the existence of microwave weapons. High-power microwave (HPM) weapons are already a billion-dollar trade on the global counter-drone market and anti-personnel versions have existed in the open for decades.

Before leaving the office of Director of National Intelligence to care for a cancer-stricken husband, Tulsi Gabbard criticized two Biden administration reports on so-called anomalous health incidents (AHS) linked to a ‘sonic’ microwave weapon. She also promised a full review of ‘Havana Syndrome’. Pending a declassified history, here is a brief on the secret history of the discombobulator.

Its use against the Cuban guards can be seen as American revenge on Russia for decades of deniable attacks on Americans. The secret history of payback for decades of passive-aggressive violence against Americans, by Russians, deserves to be fully told, one day.

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The Chabahar maritime watchtower was 78 meters tall. It was constructed during the 2010s upgrades to the Shahid Beheshti terminal of Chabahar Port. Chabahar is the only deep water seaport Iran has on the Indian Ocean and it has become a regional trading hub. It allows the regime to bypass the Strait of Hormuz.

Overlooking the mouth of the strait, the maritime traffic control tower was also the cornerstone to Iran’s efforts to control navigation, safety, and coordination for commercial shipping in the region. Now, after a series of strikes over five days, it is a pile of rubble — along with Teheran’s ambition to control the strait.

This week, Trump got people excited by proclaiming US control of the strait and a 20 percent tariff on traffic, then changing his mind the next day, citing “investments” by Gulf Arab countries. Some see this as madness. I see it as Trump trolling his enemies in Iran who keep claiming control of the strait. As the week ends, CENTCOM is contrarily closing the strait to Iran. Tehran has no control.

Tankers are still moving through the ‘Omani route’ despite threats from the IRGC, if at a reduced rate. It is not always visible, since many captains now turn off their AIS transponders while transiting the strait. The leverage is simply gone. Markets have already priced the conflict. Iran isn’t going to spike oil prices like they wish, and now the blockade of their own oil is back in place.

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Trump has been given three policy choices to put further military pressure on the regime, according to The Wall Street Journal. He can put ‘boots on the ground’ to seize coastal real estate, such as the oil terminal on Kharg Island. Or he can expand airstrikes beyond the bridges, piers, railroads, electric utilities, and other infrastructure now getting pounded every day.

Or he can do something about Pickaxe Mountain, “a heavily fortified underground site consisting of tunnels built into granite some 300 feet to 475 feet beneath the surface of a mountain peak—far deeper than Iran’s nuclear enrichment sites at Natanz and Fordow, which the U.S. and Israel bombed last summer.”

Construction at the site appears to be incomplete. Analysts say there are two shafts, 100 meters and 145 meters deep, that might have 53,000 square feet (5,000 square meters) of floor space. Activity at the site in the last year suggests the regime has plans to restart their nuclear program at Pickaxe Mountain.

“The depth of the Pickaxe tunnels means they may not be vulnerable to direct hits from the Massive Ordnance Penetrators — 30,000-pound ‘bunker buster’ bombs — dropped on Natanz and Fordow”, Laurence Norman reports. “Iranian officials have said the site is designed to make it less vulnerable to that sort of attack.”

“We have eyes on it and Pickaxe Mountain is a possible target for a nice big fat shot,” Trump said in an appearance with conservative broadcaster Hugh Hewitt this week. “Tell the Iranians to be ready.” Take him seriously, if not literally. This is telegraphing. Trump seems to like the idea of taking out Pickaxe Mountain. He cannot do that with bunker busters in the current US inventory.

That leaves boots on the ground as the only option. American troops will have to enter Iran, take control of the site, and use demolitions to destroy it while defending themselves from a siege by Iranian forces, and then extract safely. In military terms, this would be a coup de main, an audacious operation with a simple goal and rapid execution. A raid, not a conquest.

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On July 13, 2026, Ukraine’s 123rd Separate Territorial Defense Brigade conducted what it described as the world’s first known combat operation combining an unmanned surface vehicle (USV) to land an armed unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) and engage targets on the Russian-occupied shore of the Kinburn Spit.

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Here is what I wrote in September of 2025, less than one year ago, forecasting this exact scenario: an all-drone assault on a contested shoreline, sparing Ukrainian lives. I specifically mentioned the Kinburn spit because it is a narrow, exposed shoreline, the perfect terrain for a technological testbed.

In 2026, Ukraine will be fighting Drone War 3.0 with a combination of s-UAVs and armed UGVs. Conceptually, the amphibious invasion of Crimea becomes tenable when the beaches are to be stormed by robots: some shooting at anything that moves, others laying mines on roadways, all disembarking from sea drones in place of men, some of them driving inland to launch waves of tiny, buzzing drones for close air support in place of fighter jets. We are more likely to see Ukraine try that out on the Kinburn Spit instead of Crimea, first, but we will eventually see it, at this rate.

Here is a 57-second video released by the 123rd. After the usual music and graphics with the B-roll of the Ukrainian operator, we get about 20 seconds of actual video showing the drone land and fight. The Roboneers vehicle was equipped with a 7.62mm PKT machine gun — more or less equivalent to the US M-60 — to shoot at what appears to be a rectangular defensive structure, likely a concrete shelter. The spit is said to be riddled with them.

When Ukraine is able to do this at scale, landing many UGVs while also covering the beach with aerial drones (FPVs, fiber optic, Vampire bombers, etc), the Kinburn Spit will be nigh indefensible by humans alone. Russian defenders have minimal logistics, while the Crimean peninsula is increasingly untenable under constant Ukrainian drone attack. The spit is one of the decisive strategic terrain features of the war, so a robotic offensive could very well develop into an historic offensive.

When might this happen? I don’t know. A year, or two years. My scenario became a real experiment in 10 months. Drone warfare changes in the Ukraine theater every six months and no technological edge seems to last more than 18 months. Ukraine has built up a development lead in UGVs and USVs, however, and given the state of the Russian war machinery, it seems unlikely to me that they will catch up. This is a broad divergence between the combatants that may shape the end of the war.

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The lids on large petroleum tanks like this one are not fixed into place. They float on the surface of the oil, sealed to the wall of the tank, so that pressure changes do not damage the structure. This one was reportedly struck by a Russian surface-to-air missile that failed to intercept a Ukrainian drone that reached Moscow. Iconic now, the images of this explosion have become a visual shorthand for Ukraine’s long-range campaign against Russian economic and military targets and the ineptitude of Russian responses.

Monday’s strike on the Omsk Oil Refinery, Gazprom Neft-ONPZ, using FP-1 drones to reach more than 1,550 miles (2,500 km) into Russia, resulted in fire damage to a crude and distillation unit (DCU) and the shutdown of a second unit. The facility stopped producing gasoline and diesel on the St. Petersburg exchange and local fuel shortages were reported.

Ukrainians hailed the strike as a new achievement, the “deepest long-range strike on enemy territory during the entire full-scale invasion” and the first hit on this previously “unreachable giant.” Ukraine has now hit every Russian facility that produces gasoline. In some parts of the country, Russians already spend days in line waiting for gas, camping out in the summer weather. Their vacation season is spent in the gas line rather than Crimea.

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The logic of targeting logistics

It is worth noting that Ukraine sends hundreds of drones into Russia almost every other night. There is something to be said for the virtue of scale, here.

Ukrainian drones have swarmed the Sea of Azov for the fourth night in a row this week, damaging or destroying dozens of Russian shadow fleet tankers, dry cargo ships, tugs, and a ferry. All these vessels were responding to the logistical emergency that Ukrainian ‘middle strike’ tactics have created on the Crimean peninsula. I noted this Ukrainian strategy to make Crimea unsustainable through long-range fires very early.

Since then, a package of technologies and tactics has extended the range of small UAVs over the peninsula as well as the ‘land bridge’ on the north bank of the Azov. Whether or not Ukraine has the means to retake Crimea, they now have the means to make the decisive terrain of the war untenable for Russia by imposing intolerable costs for continued military occupation.

The tankers destroyed or damaged this week are relatively small, for they are designed to operate on the Russian river network, which makes them uncommon on the global market and difficult to replace. Their normal function is to distribute fuel for the Russian harvest season, which is about to begin. The tugs, cargo barges, and other ‘brown water’ vessels being destroyed in the Sea of Azov would ordinarily support a small, but critical part of Russian industrial and agricultural production that uses bulk transport over water.

Economic risks are meanwhile growing exponentially in Russia. Business investment is nonexistent. All the banks are giving forced loans to military contractors who often fail to pay them back. While the war has produced GDP, it has not produced wealth in Russia. Political demand for a strong ruble has reduced revenues from oil and gas exports that are denominated in dollars. The result is a Potemkin economy in which government costs have soared while real growth has halted under high interest rates.

One part of the Ukrainian middle strike campaign has focused on trains, fuel trucks, and other Russian vehicles in occupied Ukraine. This is already showing results in reduced Russian operations. While this does not herald the end of the war, this shift in momentum is happening right as Vladimir Putin’s Russia achieves a new level of unsustainability. From high finance to the physical logistics of the economy, the damage is everywhere, and it is deep.

Almost one in five airliners is out of service because western-made parts are unavailable due to sanctions. Moscow airports experience near-weekly shutdowns from drone attacks on the Russian capital. Passenger delays, flight diversions, and flight cancelations have a vital economic impact in a country that stretches across 11 time zones without a connecting highway system.

Only the railroads connect most of Russia on the ground. The state monopoly, RZD, is unable to replenish their locomotive stocks due to international sanctions. Rails and rolling stocks deteriorate while the lack of international connections hurts their export trade. Locomotives, oil cars, bridges, and key railroad infrastructure are predominant targets. By land, sea, or air, the logistical apparatus of the Russian economy is being degraded and delayed as it deteriorates.

Raising risks and cost ratios

This all has the effect of making the war more costly for Russia to fight. Making matters worse, Russian strategic culture only knows one answer to adaptation challenges. Inefficiencies have become policies under the ‘command-push’ model of military authority, further re-Sovietizing the war effort.

The Commander of the Unmanned Systems Forces (Войска беспилотных систем), Yuri Vaganov, is a vital case in point. He came to the drone warfare industry through his success as a plumbing oligarch. Known as “Yura the Toilet” to Russian military bloggers, he is despised for his “restrictive procurement system”.

The mechanism for these procurements allegedly requires all prospective drone models to undergo testing by operators at the “Rubikon” center for unmanned technologies. Following these field tests, operators are tasked with issuing a formal resolution regarding whether the equipment meets the declared technical specifications.

Yura the Toilet personally oversees the allocation of drones to the front, creating “hunger” in some units to the advantage of others. This top-down approach can pour drones and operators into one area, for example, but the priorities at the top are not necessarily in the best interest of the Russian forces on the receiving end of Ukrainian counterattacks.

Russian centralization of these resources is also problematic. Ukraine targets the Rubikon training sites and production points. Ukrainian ballistic and/or cruise missiles recently visited the Voronezh Semiconductor Devices Plant-Assembly (VZPP-S / Sborka), doing significant damage to production facilities and killing or injuring 5 workers.

VZPP-S produces the transistors, microchips, diode and transistor assemblies, and other electronic components for Kh-101 cruise missiles, Iskander-K systems, Pantsir-S1 air defense, and other Russian weapons systems that rely on semiconductors.

Last week, the Kremniy EL Group microelectronics plant in Bryansk, another of Russia’s leading producers of integrated circuits, power semiconductors, and electronic components for command/control systems, EW, communications, and weapons platforms, got a similar visit. Nearby, the Bryansky Chemical Plant, which makes propellants and explosives, was also set ablaze by Ukrainian long-range fires.

These strikes do not stop Russia from building new missiles to target apartment blocks in Ukrainian cities. Instead, these strikes make it much more expensive for Russia to launch high-value missiles at low-value revenge targets.

Fire Point weapons are developing quickly. FP-5 has a much-improved accuracy and enough explosive power to do serious damage to a building. In a June 26 strike on the Titan-Barrikady plant in Volgograd, a key facility for missile and artillery components including Iskander launchers, 3 out of 5 FP-5s succeeded in striking the target. Repeated strikes recently on the VNIIR-Progress plant in Cheboksary, which produces anti-jamming antennas for Russian drones and missiles, used FP-5. The weapon has likely done as much or more material damage to the Russian war economy now as it cost to develop.

Smaller attack drones have become the daily workhorse for long-range strikes. Fire Point reported at Eurosatory 2026, a defense conference in Paris, that FP-1 and FP-2 drones are used in strikes inside Russia on a near-daily basis, with 5–20 launches per day across the systems. Together, FP-1 and 2 account for about 60 percent of Ukraine’s deep strikes.

The more salient point is that the production of these weapons is distributed across hundreds of sites in Ukraine: concealed workshops, duplicated facilities, redundant sites that can be used if any one site is damaged or destroyed. Engines and some other complex parts are produced overseas. Ukrainian manufacturers can access a global market of microchips and electronics. There is no central node or point of failure for Russia to attack.

International partners are key to the success of Ukraine’s ability to scale up production. The allocation of resources has largely followed a points system on the battlefield. Destroyed Russian air defense systems are worth more points to a Ukrainian drone unit than a Russian tank or soldier. Resources flow towards success rather than access.

Ukraine’s single most important partner has been the United States. Not only has American intelligence continued to aid Ukraine in targeting and avoiding Russian air defense, American manufacturing has helped scale up the Ukrainian drone war machine, with positive results at every level of military operations for Ukraine: from the ‘drone wall’ that holds the frontal ‘gray zone’, through the depth of occupied territory, across European Russia, all the way to Siberia, now. In fact, the security relationship between Kyiv and Washington has never been so close.

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The United States Treasury Department revoked its waiver of sanctions on Iranian oil yesterday. CENTCOM reported strikes on “Iranian air defense systems, command and control networks, coastal radar sites, anti-ship missile capabilities, and more than 60 Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps small boats in and near the strait to degrade Iran’s ability to continue attacking international commerce flowing through the international trade corridor.” Altogether, more than 80 targets were hit.

Iran was only just getting new interest in their oil when the IRGC renewed attacks on neutral shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. A Qatari LNG tanker was struck by a missile while using the ‘Omani route’. Traffic has nevertheless continued to transit the strait through Omani waters, often in pulses, with many ships turning off their AIS transponders during the transit.

As I have advised readers for weeks now, Iran lacks the military means to actually close down the strait. The IRGC do not have it in them to stop the US Navy and Air Force from doing whatever President Trump wants to do them. America can respond to provocations with disproportionate force. This dynamic is not changing.

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The regime held a funeral for their supreme leader over the weekend. On Monday, Hamas dissolved their governing authority in Gaza, transferring their powers to something called the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG), also known as the Technocrats Committee.

Hamas has not disarmed, nor should we confuse this with peacemaking. It is however a political capitulation in the war that Hamas began on 7 October 2023. Iran’s proxy is unable to govern the Gaza Strip and giving up on the project of administration altogether. Hamas is trading its political aims to better focus on being terrorists, which is what they do best.

For the IRGC, the diminution of one proxy is a calamity. Israel and Lebanon seem to have a tenuous agreement on disarming and demilitarizing Hezbollah, reducing a second IRGC proxy: catastrophe. Hamas would not have made this move without the blessings of the IRGC, however, so we can see this as a managed decline.

Understood as a rational actor, Iran’s leadership are steadily losing the ability to project power across the Middle East, making choices in the process, using the very public mourning event of Ayatollah Khamenei’s funeral procession as cover for a humiliating strategic retreat. The shooting last night is likewise a symptom of the regime’s inability to lose with grace.

To admit defeat is to admit that Allah is not on their side, which is impossible. From the outside, this can seem like a cultural strength that makes Iran impossible to defeat without a ground invasion on a historic scale. As evidenced by the political infighting over peacemaking authority in Iran, however, the impossibility of shaking hands with the Great Satan actually splits the regime into factionalism. Restricted resources under American blockade only increase internal tensions.

Time is not on the side of Iran’s resistance fantasy hardliners. They also cannot agree to a humiliating peace. They thought the MOU was their escape, but it turned out to be a trap. Americans have held hard lines, refusing to give over anything without performance from the Iranian side.

Put simply, the IRGC is not getting what they wanted, nor is the civilian triumvirate government getting what they promised their hardline opposition. Instead, the IRGC has lost power to close the strait, lost regional proxy power, lost leverage as negotiations continue.

They are losing, and they are mad about it.

When the protests flared up at the end of 2025, I suggested that the regime had reached a tipping point. Of ~90 million Iranians, perhaps 20 million are regime supporters. A water crisis, an inflation crisis, and a crisis of authority were all happening at once. The protests had a character that reminded me of 1979, and I said so.

After the first few days, I noted that the protests were centered in the bazaar, the ancient urban indoor malls of the country. This retail business community accounts for maybe 10 percent of the total national economy, but it has been on the winning side of every political upheaval in the history of Iran. At this point, I suggested the regime would be cooked unless it started slaughtering Iranians.

That is exactly what the regime did, of course. Sources vary, but tens of thousands of Iranians were reportedly killed in the gruesome violence that suppressed the street protests. In the meantime, I noted the emerging strategy of maritime dominance that had begun in Venezuela and would spread to Iran.

Donald Trump differs from recent past presidents in his unwillingness to endure frozen conflicts. Six days before the first Tomahawk strikes, it was obvious that he was on a warpath.

From the very first decapitation strikes to the deep penetrating bomb strikes on underground facilities, Iran’s air defense was immediately and entirely broken. They could not defend any point in the country throughout the kinetic phases of the conflict.

During Operation Epic Fury, the US and Israel had total air supremacy over Iran. This allowed the systematic destruction of key economic and military targets that had taken the regime many years, and many billions of dollars, to build. Damage to US real estate was limited to regional military bases that Trump was not keen to maintain forever, anyway.

As the supreme leadership went underground, rumors began to circulate about efforts to arm the Iranian Kurds. While the White House apparently nixed this idea, a series of attacks on the IRGC (and very convenient ‘accidents’) within Iran suggests that a low-key war has also been happening inside the country.

As OP Epic Fury began to affect payroll services for Iran’s regime, the Assembly of Experts dragged out a cardboard Mojtaba Khamenei and made it their supreme leader. Regime credibility hung by a thread. That situation has not improved.

By the middle of March, regime personnel were being targeted by individual strikes in the streets of the cities. Basij were observed hiding under overpasses. This ‘retail’ air campaign forced the regime to pursue a ceasefire. Operation Economic Fury began thereafter.

Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of the majlis, and his Foreign Minister, Abbas Araghchi, began negotiating with the Trump administration under this intense military pressure. Each side pursued an omnibus arrangement with opposing policy goals. This was to be a contest of wills in which time and pressure were against Iran.

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. A legion of ‘experts’ on frozen conflicts was very upset at Trump for unfreezing this one. Their credibility has suffered most in the wake of events since the ceasefire.

The United States still enjoys total military supremacy over the strait. Iran is talking tough today, writing verbal checks the IRGC is unable to cash. This keeps happening because it would be humiliating to admit their military capabilities have been greatly reduced.

The Europeans were of course buzzing mad the whole time. While the US Navy crushed Iran’s economy under a blockade, however, the naval weakness of European powers was on full display. American hegemony was not being diminished, it was being demonstrated.

As the blockade continued, the situation at the wellhead continued to deteriorate. Iran was running out of storage space for oil, and wellhead pressures were already being reduced, threatening decades-old wells with potentially permanent shutdown. Long-term economic damage to the regime was looming larger all the time.

Of course, there were still complaints about a lack of prior planning, as if the Pentagon can script a war in advance. All wars are extemporaneous. Good plans anticipate friction and leave room for adaptation to changed circumstances, for battle is chaos. A hyper-professional American force handed the chaos very well.

After Trump visited China in May, the writing was on the wall in Tehran. No help or intervention was coming from Beijing or Moscow. This is also when Trump began indicating the Iranian side had become serious about a settlement. Disbelief gave way to acceptance when it turned out he was right. During this period, Arab economic pressure on the regime proved decisive.

Then began a new phase in which Iran lashed out in frustration on a weekly basis while simultaneously negotiating the Memorandum of Understanding. This frenetic behavior derives from the factional nature of the regime in Iran. The IRGC does not want to admit defeat or surrender anything, but they lack the hard power to impose their will on anyone but random defenseless merchant ships.

By early June, when forecasts of permanent damage were supposed to be realized, the regime was clearly looking for a diplomatic alternative to the war it could not hope to win. Their potential leverage, including Hormuz, was declining all the time while the American blockade remained in effect.

The MoU did not end the controversy, of course. Its loose language fooled many people into expecting the Trump administration would capitulate, unfreeze assets, and restore capital flows without cooperation in return. The opposite has happened. Kinetic action has resumed without Iran getting any real benefits from the pause.

As I explained right after the MoU became public, any misunderstandings between the two sides would end up decided by hard power. The American side has the power to withhold assets until the Iranian side performs. The American side has the power to coerce the Iranian side with military force, whereas Tehran is struggling to make random Greek ship captains do what they want.

As I keep stressing, there are sure to be more episodes of violence. Iran will make announcements, strike civilian shipping, and put their ‘resistance’ on global display, if necessary through absurd propaganda devices, throughout their intermittent rounds of diplomacy. They do it this way because surrender is not an option, even when it is the only option.

Iran responded to the airstrikes with attacks on Bahrain and Kuwait. “For me? The ceasefire is over” Trump declared at the NATO Summit in Ankara last night. “I don’t want to deal with them anymore. They’re scum. They’re sick people. They’re led by sick people. And they’re vicious, violent people.”

“It’s just a waste of time dealing with them. They’re liars”, Trump said, comparing the regime in Tehran to cancer. “And you know what you do with cancer? You cut this cancer out early.” The Pentagon says the blockade will now be restored, and made even tighter than before, with daily airstrikes just to drive the point home that Iran will never win. Continued resistance is just a different way to lose.

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Iran is still in crisis. The economy remains devastated. Millions are unemployed. Oil prices have collapsed below pre-war levels, creating a market glut, and nobody is lining up to buy their oil. Because who wants to trade with a lunatic pirate kingdom that attacks commercial shipping in the modern world?

Iran formally buried the Ayatollah Khamenei today. His son Mojtaba, putatively the new Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic, did not attend the funeral processions. The regime says they were afraid for his life, but the absence has fed speculation that Mojtaba is not in fact alive at all. Is the hidden imam just a front? The question is more than academic, because the supreme leader is the source of authority in Iran’s constitutional system.

Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of the majlis, has authority to negotiate (he says) because the velayat-e-faqih has supposedly blessed the proceedings. As I observed at the beginning of the week, this claim is increasingly contested inside Iranian regime politics.

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As I also observed, Iran’s ability to close the Strait of Hormuz keeps deteriorating under the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU). The IRGC simply lacks the means to close the strait, whatever they announce otherwise.

As the next round of talks is set to begin in Qatar, the US Navy has two aircraft carrier battle groups keeping the Omani route through the strait open. The USS Boxer, an amphibious assault ship, has entered the theater this week carrying Marines. American military hard power leverage increases even as IRGC weakness is exposed.

Israel telegraphed plans to strike Iran this week, with Ghalibaf and the foreign minister on the reported target list. It is rare to see the IDF announce their intentions in advance like that. Israelis emphasize they are independent of Donald Trump here, and in fact the whole story smells like a pressure campaign on the regime.

Trump says they can have 60 days. Of course, his timelines are always flexible, but Benjamin Netanyahu’s patience is limited. By exquisite coincidence, a car overturned on Monday, killing Mohammad Akbarzadeh, the Political Deputy of the Office of the Supreme Leader’s Representative in the IRGC Navy. What a happy accident to remind the hardline resistance to the MoU that it is in fact the moderate outcome.

The American side keeps offering Iran economic relief — after cooperation. Iran cannot cooperate with the Great Satan. Tehran resists normalcy among nations. Trump has briefs on his hard power options, just like Netanyahu. He is giving Iran an opportunity to make a deal. The regime of the hidden imam keeps resisting that deal.

The Saudis too have offered normalization to Tehran this week. This is being cast by some as suspicious. Saudi Arabia has to live in the same neighborhood as Iran, shares the same sea as Iran, and has Arab neighbors with restive Shia populations. For a variety of understandable reasons, they would like to see a diplomatic outcome rather than a military one. Moreover, their economic pressure on Iran — measured in wellhead oil pressure — is proving decisive in the dispute.

Trump has been content to play the heel and let the Arabs put economic pressure on Iran. Tanker flows through the strait are still not back to prewar levels, but dozens of tankers are going through the strait every day, now, and Americans drive into the July 4th weekend with gasoline prices plummeting. Iran has lost their economic political leverage in the strait altogether, and they are not getting it back.

President Trump has all the leverage in the strait and it keeps growing. So far, J.D. Vance has not surrendered an inch, or a dollar, to the regime in advance of performance. Foreign Minister Abbas Aragchi can talk about an “inalienable right” to uranium enrichment all he wants, but the American side holds all the power to withhold frozen assets until IAEA inspectors are allowed to access nuclear sites in Iran.

Iran’s hard power capabilities are greatly diminished. A tentative deal is developing between Israel and Lebanon precisely because Iran cannot summon a hard power response to their implementation. It has become possible for the Lebanese Armed Forces to take control of Lebanon again and disarm Hezbollah because Iran’s missile and drone salvoes cannot overwhelm Israeli defenses, anymore.

Likewise, this week the Iraqi government arrested dozens of high-profile officials, lawmakers, and former government figures with alleged Iran ties. Senior officials in the Oil Ministry were arrested in the Green Zone. Iran has been documented blending or disguising its oil with Iraqi crude oil to circumvent the market discounts of US and international sanctions. IRGC proxies are being reduced while negotiations continue.

The ‘bull market’ in oil is gone. The strait is opening. The imam is hidden. The proxies are shrinking. Ghalibaf and Aragchi have a choice: be normal, or be over. So far, they have lost their diplomatic contest of will with the Americans — because the Americans have all the hard power, as well as the larger economic alliance.

For the regime, this is of course not the end. Resistance and defiance can never end. They want to drag out the inevitable forever. Trump and Netanyahu are not giving them forever. Trump, Vance, and the Arabs are offering Iran a normal place in the world if they just act normally. But they do not have forever.

I cannot say how this will end. I can only say that it is not what I was told would happen. I was repeatedly told that the war with Iran would never lead anywhere, least of all here. With every phase — the bombing, then the blockade, then the negotiations — there was anguish and despair about the outcome. The optimist case has yet to pan out, but the pessimists have been wrong, so far.

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The dictator of the proletariat puffed at his pipe. Stalin was ready to take questions.

Gen. Georgi Konstantinivich Zhukov sat before the Politburo. His victory over Japan at Khalkhin Gol in 1939 had allowed Stalin to enter the war on Soviet terms. The Red Army had entered Poland the day after the ceasefire with Tokyo.

Now it was May 1940. When the current negotiations for a nonaggression pact were concluded, the Soviet Union would have no eastern flank to defend. Stalin would be free to intervene in the European war.

Gen. Georgi Zhukov was blunt, even if his phrasing was careful. “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?” Zhukov asked, according to his memoir.1

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.”

The next day, Zhukov was elected to the Central Committee, an elevation to elite status in the Soviet system. He received a house near the Kremlin and lived in it for the next 20 years.

In the first essay of this series, I told the story of Gen. Zhukov’s victory against the Japanese on the Mongolian frontier in 1939 and explained how he became the most consequential general of the 20th century. This is the story of Zhukov’s actions during the defense of Moscow in 1941, the problems he encountered in organizing offensives in 1942, and how he became Stalin’s most trusted general.

This is also the story of how two styles of command, Russian and German, clashed along with their armies. These two doctrinal modes of command still shape our 21st century understanding of operational art, combined arms, and ‘deep battle’. Zhukov remains consequential. This essay series is EXCLUSIVELY for premium subscribers.

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Monmouth was not a particularly large battle. In his dispatches to Congress, Gen. George Washington reported 69 dead, 161 wounded, and 140 missing from his army, most of the latter from heat exhaustion. He also reported that 249 enemy officers and men lay dead on the field. Sir Henry Clinton, the British commander, reported just 65 killed, but the loyalist New York Gazette later published a list of 110 British troops either killed in action or by heat stroke.

While the continentals held the field after their fight with the British rearguard, it had not been a decisive encounter. “If ever a battle was a drawn struggle, Monmouth was it”, the late historian Willard Wallace said. British Brig. Gen. Sir William Erskine, on the other hand, called it “a handsome flogging” by the rebels.1 Monmouth became the battle of legend on purpose, in both the immediate aftermath as well as the early decades of America’s history of nationhood. The events at Monmouth Courthouse were magnified into importance by time, politics, and patriotism.

Washington intended as much when he began the pursuit of Clinton’s force during their withdrawal from Philadelphia to New York. He was looking for a short, sharp fight that would cement his position as commander in chief against his enemies in both the Continental Army and the Continental Congress. Washington had labored to rebuild his army into a competent force capable of just such a battle, and he got the very battle he had wanted, with the men he wanted.

The biggest loser

There were exceptions, of course. Maj. Gen. Charles Lee thought that Washington was not “fit to command a sergeant’s guard.” He first turned down the command of Washington’s vanguard at Monmouth when it was offered, only to plead for the command again when he learned that its size had grown enough to merit his magnificent presence. Washington met Lee in the early afternoon with the battle underway, the vanguard in retreat to more defensible terrain amid the muddy, morass-filled topography of Monmouth Courthouse.

“When I arrived first in [Washington’s] presence, conscious of having done nothing that could draw on the least censure, but rather flattering myself with his congratulation and applause, I confess I was disconcerted, astonished and confounded by the words and manner in which his Excellency accosted me”, Lee wrote later. “The terms, I think, were these—’I desire to know, sir, what is the reason—whence arises this disorder and confusion?’”

Lee did not understand at the time that two of his unit commanders had repositioned their units without communicating their intentions. The Continental Army lacked signal flags and troops, requiring staff officers to ride with orders. During the morning, Lee had run out of capable aides to carry orders and return with reports. Washington surely knew the miserable state of his army’s communications, since he had arrived to the battlefield uninformed of events.

Moreover, the “disorder and confusion” Washington found as he arrived with the main body of the army was not unusual or hard to understand. Temperatures had soared to over 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38C), causing many men to drop out of the march from heat exhaustion. Both armies wore stifling wool uniforms.

Washington’s words did not bother Lee. It was his tone that rankled. “The manner in which he expressed them was much stronger and more severe than the expressions themselves”, he wrote.

When I recovered myself sufficiently, I answered, that I saw or knew of no confusion but what naturally arose from disobedience of orders, contradictory intelligence, and the impertinence and presumption of individuals, who were vested with no authority, intruding themselves in matters above them and out of their sphere. That the retreat… was contrary to my intentions, contrary to my orders, and contrary to my wishes … . To which he replied, “All may be very true, sir, but you ought not to have undertaken it unless you intended to go through with it.”

According to Lee’s aide, Capt. John Mercer, Washington then “passed him by” and continued on his way to victory. Accounts of this encounter between generals on horseback were embellished later with very un-Washington behavior: he supposedly swore “until the leaves shook on trees” and denounced Lee as a “damned poltroon”, according to the Marquis de Lafayette and Gen. Charles Scott. Neither man was present at the encounter. They were creating the legend of Washington and Lee at Monmouth.

In Fatal Sunday, the definitive modern history of the Monmouth Campaign, Mark Lender and Garry Stone write that “careful scholarship has conclusively demonstrated that Washington was angry but not profane at Monmouth, and he never ordered Lee off of the field.”2

Emanuel Leutze, the painter who gave us the famous scene of Washington crossing the Delaware, also painted the encounter at Monmouth. His Lee is a dejected failure, bent-backed, his sword lowered in symbolic shame. Even the wine bottle holder seems flaccid. No such emasculation took place at Monmouth Courthouse.

In fact, Washington put Lee back in charge of his exhausted troops until they were able to withdraw and rest. Only days later, after the battle, did Lee make his fatal mistake of writing his grievances down and sending them to Washington. Lee “solicited” a court martial in hopes of clearing his name, so Washington brought “him to tryal at his own request”, as he later put it.

Meanwhile, in the painting, Washington is absurdly galloping with his saber out. As Lee recalls, Washington did not pause to rally the troops when they ran into one another. Washington did in fact take risks to be seen by his troops during the battle, causing his officers to cringe at times, but he wasted no further time on Lee after this exchange, nor did he hang about to crush the ego of a rival for command.

The legend of their encounter at Monmouth was constructed later, through the public relations work of his men. Alexander Hamilton, John Laurens, and Marquis de Lafayette wanted Monmouth Courthouse remembered as Washington’s finest hour. They needed a big win, something that could erase the recent hard times and end the questions about the army’s leadership, so Monmouth became a greater victory in retrospect than it was in the moment. Heroes and villains emerged from this creative patriotism, but they were projections on the past.

The real George Washington had about fifteen minutes to sort out the mess before the British struck first. There was no time for scenes.

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An army in adaptation

Washington had been unable to prevent the capture of Philadelphia by a superior British force on 26 September 1777. Seizing the capital of the nascent nation did not end revolutionary resistance. The Continental Congress simply moved to York, while Washington conducted a “forage war” against the British garrison in Philadelphia.

The captured city had become a logistical trap for the British. Small detachments of patriots harassed British and Hessian troops as they scouted for food and supplies in the countryside around the city. Withdrawing to the city meant relying on overseas shipments of everything the force ate or used, raising the costs of occupation to unacceptable levels. Indeed, there were not enough ships to withdraw by sea. Clinton decided to march overland to New York instead, risking a battle with Washington, who would doubtless hear about the evacuation.

Washington did not know the exact route Clinton would take. Nevertheless, he decided to “proceed towards Jersey & govern ourselves according to circumstances” in a bid to catch the British rearguard. It was the confidence of a man waging war on friendly terrain, for Washington still lacked a cavalry corps to conduct reconnaissance or screen his movements. New Jersey was held by well-organized patriots who had the local loyalists under their heels.

Washington’s army had been transformed. During 1777, enlistments were extended to three years to enlarge the Continental Army. While it would never reach its unrealistic goal of 75,000 men under arms, the policy shift from short-term enlistments did create a larger, standing army for a longer conflict.

Recruitment improved in 1778. “In March the main army at Valley Forge counted fewer than 7,500 men of all arms fit for duty”, according to Fatal Sunday, but “by May this figure had climbed to slightly over 15,000. In June (after the Battle of Monmouth), the roster of the main army showed 15,336 men actually on duty.”

Another important change had arrived at Valley Forge in late February 1778. Friedrich Wilhelm Ludolf Gerhard Augustin von Steuben was not a real Prussian nobleman, but he had served on the staff of Frederick the Great. Ron Chernow writes that “Benjamin Franklin probably was responsible for inflating Steuben’s European record — which included a story that he had been a Prussian lieutenant general — in order to smooth his way with Congress.”3 Despite the embellishments of his CV, Steuben proved to be a very capable inspector general.

Steuben did not introduce a new drill system wholesale. He adapted the drill systems that were already in use by the Continental Army into a single, simplified system. He later complied his notes on these drills and procedures into his famous ‘Blue Book’, which remained the standard reference text until the War of 1812. At Valley Forge, he picked 100 men to learn the new drill, then had them teach the system to their home units. “He left matters of a permanent post and rank for later discussion with the understanding that if he proved himself, appropriate emoluments would follow”, Chernow writes.

Steuben’s most important reforms however lay in castrametation, the science of laying out a military camp. “Orderly streets and drill fields were established, trash and debris were removed, and the latrines were placed far from the tents, away from both the men and their water supply”, write the authors of Fatal Sunday. “This had an almost immediate effect on the health of the army.” Quartermaster services improved under Maj. Gen. Nathaniel Greene, so that men no longer wore rags or went hungry.

The guns of Monmouth

If morale had improved across the board, then “esprit among the artillerists was among the highest in the army.” Brig. Gen. Henry Knox had learned the science of cannons from reading books and then earned his technical competence the hard way, leading the exhausting relocation of artillery from Fort Ticonderoga to Boston. This maneuver had forced the British out of that city. Knox had not been idle, establishing a technically competent artillery arm with armories and repair shops and trained gunners.

It all paid off when the Americans won a counter-battery duel and then overwhelmed the British cavalry and infantry at Monmouth, forcing them to withdraw and ending the battle. The big guns carried the day. Leutze painted the limbered guns advancing in the background, behind Washington’s sword, a marginal element of the scene. On the day of the battle, however, they were the center of everyone’s attention.

When the rebels encountered the British, the Royal Artillery claimed the most casualties, about a dozen. At the moment Washington had his contretemps with Lee, the battle was still largely bloodless, with both sides maneuvering to take advantage of the terrain.

At around 3:45 PM, the tempo of the guns increased as the Royal Artillery and the Continental artillery engaged in a two-hour duel. It was “the brisket Cannonade on both sides that I Ever heard,” wrote Lieutenant Colonel Henry Dearborn. “If any thing Can be Call.d Musical where their is so much Danger, I think that was the finest musick, I Ever heard.” Yet “the agreeableness of the musick was very often Lessen.d,” he observed, “by the balls Coming too near.”4

The British rearguard made one last effort. A colleague of de Lafayette, Lt. Col. Thomas Antoine, chevalier de Mauduit du Plessis, organized a battery of four guns on Combs Hill that enfiladed the advancing British lines with grapeshot. “With excellent crews, they could fire two or three aimed rounds per minute”, Fatal Sunday observes. “A 4-pounder case round using 1.5-ounce iron shot contained about forty-four shots; a canister of lead musket balls would contain many more. With all four guns firing at a rate of three rounds per minute, at any given minute over 500 pieces of hot metal were hurtling downrange.”

It was simply too much for the advancing 1st Grenadier Battalion and 33rd Regiment of Foot, which turned and ran to find cover on the reverse side of a hedgerow. Lieutenant Walter Finney of the Fourth Pennsylvania noted that “by a few well directed shot on the Head of thire Collom they ware broke in Disorder.”

“With the exception of the sieges at Yorktown, Charleston, and Fort Mifflin, it would be the largest single day’s artillery action of the war, and although it attracted thousands of witnesses, we know surprisingly little about key aspects of it”, write the authors of Fatal Sunday. Monmouth saw the largest artillery duel of the war, the longest cannonade of the war, and the longest single day of battle in the entire war.

Lieutenant Colonel The Honorable Henry Monckton, the highest-ranking British officer to die at Monmouth, was killed by grapeshot. The patriot artillerymen paid a proportional price for the victory. “Of the total dead and wounded, 29 (or about 10 percent) were in the artillery, which also lost six horses killed and two wounded”, according to Fatal Sunday. Indeed, the action was so hot and bloody that legend says a woman stepped up to take her husband’s place at his gun.

The myths of Monmouth

According to the legend, Mary Hays McCauley, the wife of an American gunner in the 4th Continental Artillery, took up his ramrod and continued the battle when he fell. Joseph Plumb Martin, a witness to the battle, recalled a woman who “attended … the piece the whole time.” In his telling, which seems apocryphal, a British cannon shot had passed right through her petticoat, between her legs.

Yet the case for McCauley is “built on a deck of cards,” historian David Martin writes in the single most complete volume on the topic of ‘Molly Pitcher’.5 “Each piece of evidence … has a weakness or loophole, and there is no clear-cut ‘smoking gun’ to confirm her case.” The primary sources left to us “are particularly weak.” Martin concludes that Molly Pitcher is likely a composite character created from real women of the American Revolution.

In 1848, Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton, the widow of Alexander Hamilton, who was at the Battle of Monmouth, recalled meeting “Captain Molly” a total of three or four times. In her telling, Washington made the “stout, red-haired, freckle-faced young Irish woman named Mary” a sergeant, Martin writes.

However, Mrs. Hamilton had in fact confused the purported Molly at Monmouth with “Captain” Molly Corbin, a woman who actually fought at the Battle of Fort Washington in New York during 1776 and who did accompany Washington’s headquarters for much of the war. When her husband John was mortally wounded, Corbin took his place until she was seriously wounded herself by grapeshot.

Indeed, it seems that Washington devotees invented the myth of Molly Pitcher long after his death, probably by building on this misremembered connection. “The confusion is not surprising, since both women were known as ‘Captain Molly’ and both were noted female combatants who served in the artillery”, Martin explains.

The legend of Washington’s meeting with Lee also grew over the decades. In reality, Lee was a disruptive character, vain and opinionated, who opposed the reforms of Steuben and had his own ideas about how the army should be organized. His disgrace was the elimination of Washington’s last critic within the officer corps. Afterwards, he had no rivals for power.

“The incident became part of the folklore of the Revolution, with various witnesses (or would-be witnesses) taking increasing dramatic license with their stories over the years”, Fatal Sunday says. “Thus if Monmouth revealed a newly ‘respectable’ American army, it also confirmed the advent of Washington as the unchallengeable ‘indispensable man.’”

One factor probably enhanced the mythic value of the battle more than any other: it was to be one of the last battles of Washington’s war. “Washington’s role at Monmouth stands out with special vividness because it was the last such major battle in the North during the war”, Chernow writes. Henceforth, the British would stay out of the heartland of rebellion and try operating in the south, where loyalist sentiment was higher.

“Britain never again sought a military solution to the war in the northern colonies”, Fatal Sunday says, and Washington did not get another chance to fight the British, after Monmouth. “Not until Yorktown, more than three years later, would he again be directly exposed to the hurly-burly of a full-scale battle.”

By then, his army would make more improvements, despite the many challenges Washington faced. One of these was staff communications. At Yorktown, “the army had corps moving separately but effectively over considerable distances. At Monmouth, however, the staff capabilities necessary for such results were not yet in place”, producing the “disorder and confusion” that had embarrassed Lee.

Ten days after the Battle of Monmouth, a French fleet led by Count Jean-Baptiste-Charles-Henri-Hector d’Estaing dropped anchor in Delaware Bay. France had entered the war. Spain would also declare war against Britain in 1779, the Dutch in 1780. With more wars on their hands, the British government could not prioritize North America, where most of the empire’s armies were tied down. The American Revolution succeeded when the cost of continued war became too much for London.

With relatively little fighting to do for the rest of the conflict, George Washington’s men were already looking forward to postwar nation-building and the necessity of a father figure who could unite the newly independent states. They had time and motivation to erect myths about what took place at Monmouth, New Jersey, so that he became larger than life.

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“What has taken shape in the Pakistan negotiations is fundamentally different from what was supposed to happen and from what constituted the condition for the legitimacy of the negotiations.” With those words, Iranian lawmaker Seyed Mahmoud Nabavian, an influential MP in the camp that opposes negotiations with the Great Satan, accused the government of treason against the Supreme Leader last weekend.

Reacting to the memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the United States, Nabavian called it a “total loss”. Then on Friday, Nabavian told a state TV channel that Mojataba Khamenei had made repeated objections to the conditions of the MOU while it was under negotiation. “The Supreme Leader explicitly expresses his dissatisfaction,” Nabavian claimed. “He says, ‘Why did you not observe the conditions?’”

Nabavian belongs to the Paydari Front of Saeed Jalili, which has been critical of the MOU. The broadcaster stopped the interview and vowed legal action after Nabavian claimed to be reading messages from Khamenei. According to Nabavian, Khamenei wrote that Iran was “neither in a hurry nor under any compulsion to negotiate or reach an agreement”. Furthermore, the nuclear program was not up for discussion, while “ending the war and securing compensation” were to be paramount goals.

I have no way of accounting for the veracity of these alleged messages, but they do speak to the concerns of the resistance to the MOU within Iran, and they might explain why the Iranian side wanted the MOU text embargoed for three days, as well as the ambiguity of the language on the Iranian side. When Iran denies that any sort of deal regarding uranium is taking place at all, that is because the subject remains extremely sensitive within Iran.

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Nabavian clearly wants to undermine the government. He says that when Khamenei wrote his alleged messages in March, the supreme leader was keen to maintain the Strait of Hormuz as a point of leverage. He wanted complete control rather than a shared arrangement with Oman or any other country, and even came up with a detailed toll scheme.

“If the Americans want pressure taken off their throat, they must first implement preconditions, foremost among them the payment of compensation and debts”, Nabavian read, complaining that “none of these things” was in the MOU. However, these items have turned up again and again in the public negotiating position of Iran, likely to appease reactionary elements.

The problem for everyone in Tehran is that their leverage keeps evaporating.

Hormuz risk premium deflation

Over the weekend, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) announced that the strait was once again closed. This ostensible closure was officially supposed to be a response to what Tehran called MOU violations by Israel; this was a “first step” against IDF “aggression” in Lebanon.

On Saturday, Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, in a directive seen by Iran International, instructed media outlets not to portray the renewed closure of the Strait of Hormuz and Iran’s simultaneous participation in talks as a split between the “field” and diplomacy.

The directive said Iran was pursuing a single strategy combining military pressure and diplomacy, and urged media outlets to frame action in Hormuz not as an alternative to negotiations but as support for them.

This two-track approach played out on Thursday as a cargo ship, the Ever Lovely, was reportedly struck by a “projectile” on the starboard side of her bridge while transiting the ‘Omani route’. At least one VLCC (very large crude carrier) turned around before continuing through the strait later. Traffic continues to move through the strait at this hour. At least 70 vessels transited the strait on Thursday, a new post-February high.

Indeed, ships have continued moving through the strait via the Omani route ever since Iran declared it closed. Approximately 55 vessels made it through the strait on Saturday alone, before the negotiations in Switzerland began. At the time of this writing on Thursday, 25 June, the market price for a barrel of oil has returned to its pre-28 February level. Shipping insurance rates in the strait have declined by almost half from their peak, though they remain above pre-crisis levels.

The “projectile” that struck Ever Lovely turned out to be a drone. It must have been small, as it caused no major damage or casualties. The IRGC is clearly frustrated by the overall decline in risk, so they created more risk. But they barely made a hiccup in the flow of shipping traffic.

Criticism of the MOU inside the United States has emphasized the risk of Iran learning to close the strait in order to extract concessions. In fact Iran has always known they could try to close the strait, and according to Mahmoud Nabavian this was very much what they wanted to do with the MOU.

President Trump seems to understand the struggle for control because he keeps signaling his intentions to keep the strait open. He told reporter Trey Yingst on Sunday that the Iranians “won’t have a country” and “won’t even make it back to your f**king country” if they closed the strait. The Iranian delegation walked out and demanded an apology. None was forthcoming. Discussions continued though Qatari intermediaries.

By my count, this is at least the fifth time since April that the IRGC has declared the strait to be closed. But they cannot close the strait. By contrast, President Trump speculates out loud about “tak[ing] over the strait if we have to” and collecting tolls if Iran fails to make a deal, and Trump has actual power to reimpose the blockade any time he wants, though he says it is “highly unlikely” he will have to do so. The IRGC wishes that they had the same hard power.

This puts Oman in the middle. Oman lets ships pass for free, while Iran wants to charge for passage. The market is choosing Omani waters and the IRGC is mad about it. Iran needs the fear to come back a little bit, but they also fear Uncle Sam will punish them if they go too far.

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Kurd Qaburstan in Iraq has been identified as the ancient city of Qabara depicted in the Victory Stele of Dadusha. A new magnetometer survey of 180 acres by a team from the University of Central Florida has found a massive curtain wall with bastions surrounding the site, matching the fortifications portrayed on the stele.

Found in the temple of the Mesopotamian storm god Adad at Eshnunna, the stele is inscribed with 220 lines of cuneiform text in 17 columns on the sides commemorating Dadudha, a king of Eshnunna, conquering Qabara. The text is ekphrasis, a description of the art.

On it (is) an image of my heroism (that depicts me) smiting, majestically enveloped in the splendour of battle to overwhelm the enemy land. Above it, Sin and Shamash, who strengthen my weapon, appear shining in order to lengthen the years of my reign. Above the wall of Qabara (is) Bunu-Eshtar, the king of the land of Arbil, whom I relentlessly overwhelmed with my strong weapon, on whom my foot treads, standing with pride. Below it, ferocious heroes vigilantly hold captives.

The front side of the stele has four ‘registers’, scenes depicting this episode of siege combat. They are all damaged in the center from the accidental discovery of the stele during a well-drilling operation at Tell Asmar in 1983. Aside from a fragmentary ‘Mardin stele’, it is the only surviving royal victory stele from the Old Babylonian period, and the most complete.

Eshnunna was an important city midway between Elam and Mari. In his 2012 book Reading and Writing in Babylon, Dominique Charpin describes a reformation of scribal practices that spread across Upper Mesopotamia and the Middle Euphrates from the city in the 1800s BC, representing a regional cultural hegemony. The conquest of Qabara happened in approximately 1765 BC, at the height of Eshnunna’s power.

On top of the stele is the sun-disc with its rays of Shamash, the sun god, combined with the crescent of Sin, god of the moon, wisdom, and cattle-herding. Dadudha was invoking heavenly favor with his victory. He has received the most damage, whereas the figure on the right remains. This may very well be his son, Ibal-pi-El.

“Since Dadusha died in the year after which the commemorated events occurred, Ibal-pi-El might have inherited the task of completing the stele that his father had commissioned”, Claudia E. Suter at the University of Bern has written.1 “Under this unusual circumstance Ibal-pi-El need not have been mentioned in the inscription in contrast to Old Babylonian kings who claim to have set up images of their deceased fathers or forefathers, images that they obviously commissioned.”

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Suter interprets the stele as a depiction of the shared conquest. Dadusha sent a contingent of his own men to take the city with an ally, Samsi-Addu, the king of Ekallatum. “Ibal-pi-El may, in fact, have headed the contingent that Dadusha sent to Qabara.”

This may explain why the two sides of the stele front depict two warriors in “antithetical composition” in the middle registers, Suter argues. Politics required portrayal. For while “Dadusha alone claims victory over Bunu-Eshtar on the one hand,” he “bequeaths the conquered land to Samsi-Addu on the other.”

On the third register, second from the top, are two men wielding axes with one hand and holding a long, narrow object in the other hand. Copper axes were the favored weapon of Egyptian storming parties around the same time. The long objects are probably not spears, but ladders. The two men are depicted assaulting the wall, standing on top after climbing their ladders.

Above each man in this third register, at the bottom of the fourth (top) register, we see a depiction of substantial walls with battlements and bastions. According to Tiffany Earley-Spadoni, the survey team found “collapsed structures, burned layers and concentrated debris” that “suggest a coordinated and possibly prolonged assault” took place.

Digging in 2024 and 2025 located “the first significant group of cuneiform tablets found on the Erbil Plain”, “20 cuneiform tablets and more than 100 administrative sealings from destruction layers within the Lower Town East Palace.” According to Earley-Spadoni, director of the project, “Several tablets are dated within days of each other, matching the timeline of the city’s fall.”

Inside the palace destruction layers, the researchers found the remains of 17 people. They had not been formally buried, with grave goods. “Some appear to have been left where they died, including possible palace workers”, Earley-Spadoni says. “One individual was found face down over a stone basin.” It was a scene of carnage. Two rows of severed heads on the bottom register of the stele depict historical violence.

“The two superimposed destructions match the historical sequence of the siege of Qabra and its conquest by Shamshi Addu,” Earley-Spadoni says. “The charred debris, the large number of ceramic vessels and individuals who met untimely deaths and were buried in the destruction layers, provide the clearest archaeological case of Middle Bronze Age siege warfare yet discovered in northern Mesopotamia.”

Bioarchaeologist Andrea Zurek-Ost at Michigan State University is studying the remains. “The tablets are now being studied by epigraphers Paul Delnero of Johns Hopkins University and Parker Zane of Yale University, together with art historian Marian Feldman of Johns Hopkins University”, Arkeonews reports.

Earley-Spadoni is most concerned with recognition for the achievements of northern cities in the Mesopotamian world. Uruk gets all the glory as the wellspring of urban civilization, but northern cities could also be “large, complex, and politically significant, with administrative systems, fortifications, and infrastructure comparable to those of the best-known southern sites”.

For me, this is exciting new evidence that poliorcetics, the art of attacking and defending cities, is as old as the first cities. The art depicting poliorcetics does not often line up precisely with history in these early depictions, which makes the Victory Stele of Dadusha a very exceptional artifact.

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On the internet, ‘cope’ refers to excuses, rationalizations, and comforting lies to deal with an undesirable situation, especially a grievous loss. Iran has lost both military and economic power since 28 February, and many Iranians are still coming to terms with the reality that Iran must come to terms.

The Farsi phrase for ‘cope’ is حریف شدن (harif shodan), with two other phrases, کنار آمدن (kenār āmadan, ‘to come to terms with something’) and از عهده برآمدن (az ohde bar āmadan, ‘to manage or handle something’) being useful equivalents.

In Iran, avoiding loss of face is paramount. The Farsi term for the humiliation of defeat is aberu (آبرو, ‘water of the face’). To experience aberu is catastrophic to the individual, their family, and their larger group identity. Shi’a Islam intensifies this cultural taboo against the tears of defeat.

This Friday, Iranians must nevertheless shake hands with the Great Satan on a deal to make a deal. The Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) has therefore become a new battleground of informational warfare. Today, apologists for the regime and enemies of the regime are united in casting the MOU as a total sellout to Iran. Everyone seems dissatisfied with Trump, who seems eminently satisfied.

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Conservatives wonder why the the full text of the MOU was not released immediately. The short answer is Pakistan. Vice President J.D. Vance also says Qatar was worried about “sensitivities in the Arab and Muslim world.” This is a polite way of saying that fundamentalist Shi’as will cry at some point (‘water of the face’) before “the deal” is finished.

The longer answer is flexibility. Trump does not want to be pinned down by language when he has power. Everyone is trying to pin down what will happen next according to their pet theory of Trump. All predictions assume the impossibility of honest dealing with Persian rug salesmen. Being clear-eyed, because I watched the Iran-Contra hearings, I genuinely identify and empathize with this point of view.

Hard power is not magic

For an example of a legitimate complaint amid the din of confusion and disappointment, I cannot improve on this framing by Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment and Georgetown.

The Memorandum of Misunderstanding between the US and Iran:

The US believes Iran will restore the Strait of Hormuz as a secure international waterway, make significant nuclear concessions, and potentially abandon its revolutionary ideology--including its opposition to the US and Israel and support for regional proxies--in exchange for major investment from the same Gulf countries that have just been on the receiving end of thousands of Iranian missiles and drones.

The Islamic Republic of Iran believes it will continue to control the Strait of Hormuz, receive tens of billions of dollars in upfront sanctions relief and unfrozen assets, make no concessions on missiles, drones, or proxies, while potentially offering to suspend uranium enrichment for the period of time they need to reconstitute their bombed nuclear facilities.

Let us entertain this argument: the Trump administration is making one set of assumptions while Iran is making another set of assumptions, and the agreement is loose enough to entertain both interpretations by both sides. In that case, hard power will determine the outcome.

There is no neutral judge calling balls and strikes, here. There is only power.

Despite earnest puffing-up, the Islamic Republic has not gained any military advantage in the last 72 hours. Tehran will not have a new advantage by Friday, or even November.

Perhaps the best example of where this line of argument breaks down is an anonymous “intelligence source” telling reporters that the United States “actually gave Iran de facto control over the strait, a weapon more powerful than any nuclear weapon.”

Set aside the hyperbole (“nuclear weapon”). What does this “de facto control” consist of, exactly, that Iran did not already claim when they were blockading the strait, like, today?

Did the US Navy disappear on Monday? Did American forces suddenly lose their capabilities to shut down the Strait of Hormuz to Iranian traffic again, at will, whenever the president pleases?

The answer of course is no. Not a bit. This is magical thinking. CENTCOM has in fact clarified they are not dropping the blockade or lowering their level of readiness until after Friday, at the earliest. Hard power is not magic. It does not vanish. Trump is no illusionist. ADDING: Both sides reportedly opened the strait by midnight local time Friday morning after this was published.

Nor has the American intelligence picture of Iran suddenly evaporated this week. A “senior administration official” tells Daily Wire reporter Mary Margaret Olahan that “hourly, if not daily interactions between sides” will ensure “good behavior”. There will be a constant dialogue with Iran. There will be no laboring under delusions, this person says. Emphasis added:

"We come in with the full expectation that they will lie and they will cheat," the official says. "So it's not just coming to agreements. It's also coming up with the mechanism for how we're going to both monitor and enforce those agreements. And again, we have a lot of concessions that we can make for them and we told them we're willing to, but we're not going to do it for symbolic things.

Only “verifiable” compliance will be rewarded, according to the White House. I take this seriously rather than literally. President Trump retains the power to do whatever he wants to Iran whenever he wants to do it. This basic condition has not changed. Misunderstandings on this point from the Iranian side will likely result in renewed kinetic action, followed by renewed pressure, just as we have seen throughout this entire conflict. I am not suggesting anything new, here.

Donald Trump brags about the resolution of Space Force cameras in orbit: “If somebody walks in and he's got a badge with him name on it, like, ‘Mohammad something’ — which is about a 50/50 guess. ‘Mohammad something.’ They can tell the name, they can give you a serial number, we can see things you wouldn’t believe”, enabling success.

More than a brag, it is a communication to Iran: We are watching every move you make.

All-domain superiority matters

Nothing in the agreement says that American firepower will never get used in the next 60 days. I do not think we have seen the last flurry of IRGC targets being hit, or Trumpian threats to destroy things. Iran seems to want to give him the excuse. The IRGC has launched drones at ships in the strait every day since the MOU was electronically signed. CENTCOM keeps shooting them down.

“I don’t want to bomb Iran again, but might have to”, Trump reportedly said today. I take him both seriously and literally on this statement. This is not how a man about to surrender his negotiating objectives talks.

The details on each discrete issue are TBD. Lack of transparency is a condition of the Persian rug bazaar. I am waiting to see what horses come before which carts. Uranium is probably easier than Lebanon. Iran wants Trump to negotiate on behalf of Israel, but he has made it clear he will not. Whatever happens now, Iran will not be able build, or re-build, a military advantage in the next 60 days.

According to the hawks, Trump is supposed to use his own military power infinitely, right now. American forces should use up the other half of their interceptor stocks and land on Kharg Island. Trump is not supposed to apply military force with any kind of restraint or strategy. Instead, he is supposed to bomb the regime until Iran turns into Libya.

Doves say that the war should never have happened in the first place. What Trump was supposed to do was give Iran the money first, and then expect good behavior, and then be very disappointed, and then give Iran more money. That is what everyone has become used to, but this president never pays his own money up front for anything. He leverages other people’s money, in this case the Arabs’ money.

‘Be normal’

Trump is offering Iran the chance to be treated like a normal country if they act like a normal country. The Arab princes have in fact done a ~relatively good job of liberalizing their societies and building civilizations, which is what makes Trump a natural partner for them. Arabs who live in the oil states enjoy a kind of normal that is lacking in societies around them that are ruled by militant Islamists, such as Iran. They have the most to lose from military confrontation. Of course their influence is stamped on the MOU. It has to be.

According to both the hawks and the doves, Iran is too abnormal to act normally. Perhaps they are right. Iran has spent its oil fortunes on proxy wars to make life miserable in Arab states instead of building a society where someone might want to live. The ‘market style’ of the Persian rug bazaar is certainly not transparent, either, which is always an advantage for the regime.

Or perhaps Trump’s negotiating partners in Iran must learn, maybe are learning, how to be normal, now, because Trump punishes Iran with military power whenever they don’t act as expected. The learning starts with reciprocity: give me the thing, to get the thing. This will take time to instill as a habit.

But any new ‘normal’ will take time to achieve in any case. While very large crude carrier (VLCC) tankers were lining up out of the far east yesterday in hope or expectation of a reopening, traffic has not returned to the strait. Hormuz will not reach prewar traffic levels very soon, nor will Iran suddenly export a flood of oil in the next minute, because the insurance market has still not come back — and that is in no small part due to Trump’s deliberate policy.

Reopening the strait was never a priority for Trump. Declaring a win was his priority. Despite his pronouncements, this condition has not changed, so no, the strait will not suddenly reopen and restore business as usual, this Friday. An MOU is not a peace deal that leaves the strait open. It is a deal to open peace negotiations over opening the strait. The strait is not actually open according to either combatant, yet.

Altogether, US forces have disabled 9 non-compliant vessels and redirected more than 135 vessels away from Iran since 28 February. This was a massive economic blow to the regime that can be repeated any time.

Iran has used smuggling tactics to evade sanctions and the blockade. Meanwhile, the US Navy has facilitated similar operations to circumvent the Strait of Hormuz. The sea is a lawless place, ultimately ruled by power, not regulatory regimes. The United States is better at this form of warfare, and capable of doing it for the next 60 days, at least.

Iran was not capable of fighting like this at scale anymore. That is how we got here. The idea that American hard power left no impression on the regime is ludicrous. One of Vance’s most important tasks on Friday will be to impress upon the Iranian side that American hard power will be back whenever the IRGC feels the need to screw around and find out, again.

For the Plan™ to work, this must be the new regulatory regime for the regime: pain and punishment for misbehavior, versus reward for good behavior.

The MOU is not an end state

I maintain that Vance going to the MOU signing in Switzerland is a key indicator that we are still far from the end of this. He is the grinder, whereas Marco Rubio is the closer in the Trump administration. Rubio has disappeared this week, leading to rumors and speculations about infighting over the MOU. I expect that if — if there is a peace deal in 60 days, or later, then Rubio will be involved in closing that deal.

White House sources say the consensus for a deal (to make a series of deals) grew out of the president’s priorities. Trump wanted the deal (to make a series of deals) to happen while he still holds all the economic and military leverage, before politics at home can intervene.

Criticizing Trump, Clifford May writes that Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has made it clear that “if a diplomatic outcome is more important to Washington than to his regime, his regime will end up on top”. Given the constitutional conditions of the American presidency, diplomatic outcomes will always be preferable to regime change. This is a longstanding strategic calculation in Tehran.

The White House on the other hand set out its goals for the Middle East in their 2025 National Security Strategy. Trump wants to make the region “a source and destination of international investment, and in industries well beyond oil and gas — including nuclear energy, AI, and defense technologies.” Put simply, diplomatic solutions were the only kind that could get America out of the business of patrolling the world’s gas station, and that diplomacy would require hard power.

We can also work with Middle East partners to advance other economic interests, from securing supply chains to bolstering opportunities to develop friendly and open markets in other parts of the world such as Africa.

America will always have core interests in ensuring that Gulf energy supplies do not fall into the hands of an outright enemy, that the Strait of Hormuz remain open, that the Red Sea remain navigable, that the region not be an incubator or exporter of terror against American interests or the American homeland, and that Israel remain secure. We can and must address this threat ideologically and militarily without decades of fruitless “nation-building” wars.

Americans are exhausted with Middle East wars. Iran is the wellspring of Middle East wars. Getting Iran to stop their wars was always going to be an exhausting process, and it was always going to involve some amount of warfighting, because Iran is not a normal country in many important ways. Some important changes had to come from outside.

This process has not suddenly become nonviolent. It has become personal, an affair of princes. Donald Trump’s transactional instincts lean towards mercantilism, an economy ordered by sovereigns. A re-ordering of sovereigns is taking place. Trump wants the G7 to re-impose oil sanctions on Russia. He wants Benjamin Netanyahu to use a “softer touch” in Lebanon. “We are the big partner, and he is the very small partner”, Trump reportedly said today. Court favor is relative to his needs at the time.

This is the way someone talks when he has what he wants. Trump is bragging about how many trillions of dollars of Qatari investment capital will now immigrate to investment banks in the United States. He is getting what he wants. This is not the end, it is the beginning of the end, and he is already moving on.

I never wore a MAGA hat. I have no faith in any person or The Plan. As an American, however, I can only hope that this process works the way Trump personally seems to think it will work. Everyone else seems to think it will work out the way Iran wants, but he has all the personal power to say ‘no’ to them.

If 107 days of kinetic and economic warfare convinced even the hardliners in the IRGC to say ‘yes’ to this MOU, then how long will it take to make Iran behave like a normal country? That is the correct question, now.

The first step in coping with the Memorandum of Understanding is to admit that you are powerless over the process, that it will take months, at least, to complete, and that hard power will be available to President Trump throughout the process. He has proven willing to use it and he has been measured in his use.

The second step is to admit you are powerless over the propaganda and spin that assails the MOU from every side. Disappointment is general because satisfaction is personal. The execution will also be personalized. We must all come to terms with the new normal.

The MOU is not a final peace, so it cannot actually serve as a surrender by either side. It is a loose framework in which the credible threat of continued American hard power remains the decisive variable. Iran and the United States are operating under deliberately divergent interpretations of the MOU. The final agreement, whatever it is, will be settled by power, and Trump’s personal will, rather than text.

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We are supposed to get peace in the Middle East this Friday. Actually, we are supposed to get 60 days of peace while the United States and Iran reach a deal on neutralizing the enriched uranium stockpile, so that there can be permanent peace. The Strait of Hormuz is supposed to reopen for business this week. Actually, it will take a month. At the time of this writing, no one has seen the actual text of the agreement.

But it is still happening.

Trump was not supposed to ever get this far. He was not supposed to have any deal, and now that the ink is reportedly drying on a preliminary deal, it is supposed to be a bad deal.

If the deal sticks, and the restoration of frozen funds and the unwinding of sanctions follow on deliverables from Iran, that is not a bad deal. If the deal falls apart, and Iran gets loads of cash but never delivers, that is a terrible, no good, very bad deal. But we don’t know what sort of deal it will be until it is in place.

Not being psychic, I don’t know what comes next. I only know what keeps happening. Negotiations were in a quantum state again one week ago. Then things blew up. Trump made a threat of further action.

Moments later, he announced negotiations were back on, in fact a deal was closer than ever. Then Iran leaked a wish list of fourteen points, presenting them as if the American side had agreed. They did it again this weekend.

Last week, Vice President J.D. Vance refuted the Iranian leak in detail. “The president is going to get us a good outcome, one way or the other”, Vance posted on X. “First, the Iranians are not receiving any cash, and no funds are being released for simply signing a deal or attending a meeting”.

Vance is flying to meet with the Iranian side on Friday. Emphasis added: “The deal is structured to ensure that the US and its allies concerns are prioritized, and that if the Islamic Republic of Iran meets its obligations, then economic benefits will flow to them and to the entire region. This deal has the potential to remake the region and lead to lasting peace.” Historic, if it holds together.

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This cycle of announcement and denial, in which Iran claims various diplomatic victories that don’t exist, happened again over the weekend. There were false reports that the UAE had already released billions of frozen dollars to Iran. Emirati officials shot the report down. The IRGC also launched a salvo of drones into the strait and the US Navy shot them down.

American forces are not leaving the region yet. They will stand down as Iran stands down. Destroying the uranium on-site requires Iran to admit Americans to the country. In 107 days, Trump has made more progress towards a comprehensive peace deal with Iran than the other six presidents who have served a term since 1979.

I lived through the 444-day long hostage crisis, so this little dust-up has been a blink of the eye, for me. I remember what a gasoline crisis looks like and this little war was never at all like that.

Once again, I am told that this is all bad for Trump, that he has surrendered to Iran because he negotiated with the regime instead of destroying it. In fact the Islamic Republic is tapping out at last, trapped in an economic snare by the iron laws of material war.

On Friday, they must shake hands with the Great Satan and go the way of Venezuela. If Iran learns to respect the new set of rules, then the regime is altered, and it will never be the same. No Iraq-style regime change was necessary.

Peace through superior economic power

“Iran will have to pay a price”, Trump said last week. An Iranian drone struck an American attack helicopter, forcing the pilots to ditch. They were recovered by an unmanned surface vehicle (USV), a sea drone. On Wednesday, American bombs struck multiple IRGC targets across Iran. A control center in Robat Karim, a city in Tehran province, was destroyed. Hashtgerd, Abyek, and Varamin, all in the north, were hit along with the port cities of Bandar Abbas and Sirik.

“Based on the fact that discussions with the Islamic Republic of Iran have been brought to the highest level of Iranian leadership and approved, I have, as President of the United States of America, cancelled the scheduled strikes and bombings against Iran this evening”, Trump announced Thursday on Truth Social.

Discussions and final points have been, in both concept and great detail, approved by all parties involved, including the United States, Israel, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Turkey, Pakistan, Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan, Egypt, and others. The Naval Blockade will remain in full force and effect until this Transaction is finalized — Time and place of the signing to be announced shortly.

On Friday, Iran’s foreign minister tweeted a confirmation that the negotiations are close to agreement, indeed they “have never been closer”. Abbas Araghchi took the unusual step of dispelling rumors. Power is so fractured in Iran, and the remaining regime so disunited, that Trump’s hardest problem was finding negotiating partners to represent the Islamic Republic. Note that his partners were the civilians, not the clerics or the generals.

Mojtaba Khamenei, the hidden and maimed cardboard cutout supreme leader, reportedly insisted on having his opinion consulted before the Islamic Republic could agree to sign the peace deal. Just as the clerics have declined in power relative to their generals for many years, they have played a reduced role in the negotiations.

His stamp of approval gave the civilians some leverage over the IRGC, however, which is how the consensus for an agreement happened in Iran. Meanwhile, American kinetic action has been laser-focused on degrading IRGC leadership and capabilities throughout the economic phase of the conflict.

The most recalcitrant part of the regime has been targeted the most during Operation Economic Fury, which has lived up to its name. Iran’s ‘resistance/shadow economy’ has likewise been greatly diminished. About half of Iran’s GDP has already been destroyed, according to some estimates.

This point bears emphasis: Tehran does not have the money right now to rebuild a nuclear program, and also rebuild a missile program, and also build infrastructure to circumvent the Strait of Hormuz, and also stop the soaring inflation that is killing Iran’s economy. Getting back to February 27 is impossible, right now, for Iran and the IRGC.

Trump offers economic incentives in return for performance. This has never been tried in the history of American diplomacy with the Islamic Republic. If Iran does surrender or neutralize their uranium, and does give up on enrichment, then his biggest victory point will have been achieved.

To quote Ronald Reagan, “trust but verify” is the best instruction, here. Trump is making it clear that if he doesn’t get what he wants in the time frame that he wants it, he is willing to use force again. This is a leveraged buyout with military force as one form of coercive leverage.

Iran is still claiming that the deal will involve a new cooperative authority over the strait they share with Oman. This same talking point has been mentioned for weeks, and like the immediate handovers of cash that are not happening, this could very well just be the regime inflating claims of diplomatic success to avoid the shame of admitting defeat by the US Navy.

How Iran lost their Hormuz leverage

Donald Trump also claimed last week that American forces had quietly helped “between 14 and 26 vessels” a night transit the Strait of Hormuz in both directions by destroying or suppressing IRGC radars. Altogether, more than 200 vessels had reportedly passed through the strait via this “Omani route”. There is plenty of evidence to support his claims.

“Whilst underway in the route, the US advise that the ship should be blacked out with navigational lights off. Radar use should be minimised and AIS turned off,” reads a 5 June advisory from INTERTANKO. Per the name behind the acronym, the International Association of Independent Tanker Owners is a membership organization for owners of oil tankers.

“According to the association, vessels provide transit timings and waypoints to U.S. forces before entering the route.” The program has been relatively popular. “In May, 67% of vessels not involved in Iranian trade passing through the strait turned their AIS off”, Lloyd’s List reported this week. “Security concerns drive the blackout as ships aim to make it harder for Iran to identify, target or attack them”.

Of course, before February 28th, when the US and Israel began their 38-day kinetic campaign, over 100 commercial ships passed through the Strait of Hormuz every day. Breaking Iran’s hold on Hormuz had not restored traffic altogether.

But now contrast Iranian propaganda claims that two dozen oil tankers had evaded the American blockade in recent weeks. These claims are contested. Even if they are true, the US Navy is helping the same total number of ships evade the IRGC on a single good night.

Most of this battle was invisible to journalists because it took place in the electromagnetic spectrum. Iran could not overcome the imbalance of air and sea and electronic warfare power arrayed against them. It was eroding their leverage throughout the economic phase of the conflict. Iran was losing by resisting.

The approach seems to have worked. I was repeatedly assured that it would never work. Trump on the other hand understands that he can bring these capabilities back into force any time he wants, that it will work again if need be. He retains the military leverage.

Tehran has capitulated to reality. Pride won’t let them admit defeat, of course, which is why we see all their propagandistic effort to spin the agreement as a win for Iran. They have the help of western critics who spin every event as a loss for Trump, but also the amplification of pro-Israel hawks.

Many Israelis and supporters of Israel don’t want the war to stop at all. They oppose a comprehensive peace plan because they do not believe Iran will ever agree to actual peace. They have their reasons and I will not debate them.

Rather, I was repeatedly assured that these Israelis control Donald Trump, that it is entirely their fault that all of this happened. If so, then it was the most unsuccessful mind-control exercise in the history of psychological operations. Trump is reportedly upset at Netanyahu and the Israel lobby is upset at Trump.

Peace was not part of many plans, and those people are the most upset. Unpossible! I was repeatedly assured that Benjamin Netanyahu controls Trump, and this is why the war would never stop until boots were on the ground doing regime change. We were having World War III because of Israel, they said.

The peace deal exists between three forces that wish to undermine it: Iran, Trump’s domestic enemies, and the advocates of permanent war with the Islamic Republic. To sustain his peace, Trump will need the continued support of his Arab allies.

Trump leveraged his alliances

Turns out that Trump has his own plans independent of the Israelis. Perhaps the Israelis feel a little used. Whereas the IDF was America’s only partner during the kinetic phase, Israel now plays the spoiler role.

Today, Netanyahu has reportedly told Trump that Israel is not bound by the Lebanon clause in the US-Iran agreement. He has complained at not seeing the agreement in writing. After Operation Epic Fury gave way to the ceasefire trap of Operation Economic Fury in April, Israel steadily became less important to Trump while his Arab allies applied economic pressure.

Tehran appeared to be feeling the pain of the Arab-American economic war during May, and we are right on the time-horizon of forecasts for permanent economic catastrophe in Iran during June. The regime needs relief immediately, whereas time is leverage for Trump.

The result has been a furtive process. Trump has consistently applied force and then time. During the third week of May, Trump announced that serious negotiations were underway, so he had suspended action. He said that this occasion was “a little bit different” from previous diplomatic contacts. It was true.

Last week was another fitful effort by some in Iran to break out of the ceasefire trap. When it failed, there was an agreement, at last. Arabs, not Israelis, were the allied partners that turned out to be decisive.

During May, Trump said he was negotiating on behalf of Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. This also turned out to be true, and the Arabs have applied the decisive economic pressure on Iran.

The Islamic Republic attacked their Arab neighbors anticipating an uprising and jihad. Instead, the Arabs redoubled their efforts to circumvent the Strait of Hormuz. Each has gone their own way, in some way, while all of the Arab gulf states have cooperated in starting or speeding up infrastructure projects to circumvent the strait.

Qatar reportedly reached a modus operandi with Iran in which Tehran received cash in return for safe tanker transit. Qatar also served as a key partner negotiations with Iran. Some Israelis see Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff as Qatari stooges influencing Trump to sign a bad deal.

The reader is free to believe what they want. Duplicity is not unusual in Persian Gulf politics. More important, from Trump’s perspective, was that Iran stayed inside the ceasefire trap. As long as his close confidants were in regular contact with negotiating partners through Qatar, Trump did not have to depend on Pakistan or the formal diplomatic process. He had parallel flows of information.

Compared to the IRGC, Trump clearly had a more realistic idea of what the Arab response would be when Iran began to shoot missiles and drones at the crown princes. Instead of street uprisings and jihad, the Arab states stayed calm, carried on, and pursued peace through economic pressure.

Trump’s Arab partners are the most interested in peace. Instead of boots on the ground, burning oil, and an oil-slicked sea, they wanted a deal that ended the conflict with as little destruction as possible. Their influence, rather than the favor of Benjamin Netanyahu, has shaped the character of this deal.

Shaking hands with the Great Satan

Lebanon has the highest chance of derailing the process. Of all the players in this peace plan, Hezbollah is the least cooperative. Israel has all the military leverage in Lebanon, which complicates Trump’s ambition to end Iran’s proxy war. This will be his hardest goal to realize. Trump does seem determined to end the proxy wars, which would effectively snuff out the IRGC’s foreign mission.

A lot of people will have to get over a lot of stuff. Trump does not care to leave any part of the conflict frozen. He wants a comprehensive peace. Rather than purchase the uranium carpets, the missile program carpets, the Hormuz carpets, the capital flow carpets, the proxy militia carpets, and the oil carpets one at a time, over a long time, Trump aims to buy out the whole carpet bazaar at once. This is a leveraged buyout in the structuring and financing phase.

Donald Trump has already done the valuation. After the transaction is executed, he aims to create value and withdraw American military power from the Middle East, cashing out of the decades-long scheme in which American taxpayers underwrote the world’s gas station. Regional bases damaged by Iranian drones are merely distressed properties being leveraged for the buyout. Americans will not miss them.

Altering the relationship between Washington and Tehran alters the regime in Iran. Connecting Iran to the international banking system, for example, would also bring the regulatory power of the Treasury Department to Iranian banks.

Different factions will have different reactions to these developments. The IRGC does not want Scott Bessent looking over their shoulder, whereas the business community would welcome dollars in their accounts. Remember, the regime started cracking in late December, when US sanctions against Iran’s shadow fleet spiked inflation, and the bazaaris led the resulting protests.

Regime change is underway, if incomplete. New players hold more power, while the hardest hardliners hold less power. A new, diminished supreme leader has only perfunctory power. The people have never had any real power in Iran, a condition that is made possible by economic isolation.

Now the regime must smile and shake hands with the Great Satan. Economic normalization is to be the reward for behaving like a normal country. If it works, nothing inside Iran can stay the same as it was before. If it works, then the Islamic Republic will change, despite itself.

Those are big ifs. They might still not happen, but then again Trump was never supposed to get this far. We are here now, and everyone must get used to this new normal.

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The Trump administration is no longer involved in ceasefire negotiations or peace talks between Russia and Ukraine. “We were the only ones both Russians and Ukrainians were willing to talk to”, Secretary of State and National Security Adviser Marco Rubio has explained. “So we got involved. Unfortunately, it didn’t yield results. That’s the point.” Pointless peace talks are pointless. Rubio stood before a NATO backdrop at the Foreign Ministers Summit when he said this. The optics are intentional.

The new Trump policy is the boldest American stance on Ukraine yet: they are allowed to win. World War III is canceled. Nobody is afraid of Oreshnik missiles and rattling nuclear sabers. Russia will not exert leverage on Kyiv through Washington or Europe. Volodymyr Zelenskyy is free to unleash his weapons on Russia wherever and however he wants. Ukrainians are allowed to win as much as they want. This is a very new attitude from the Americans.

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Ukraine has in fact started winning. In the south of Zaporizhzhia Oblast, where the Ukrainian ‘middle strike’ campaign has made a total wreck of Russian logistics, the ‘land corridor’ to Crimea is increasingly threatened by Ukrainian advances. The pace is not fast, at least not yet, but the local counterattacks in this sector seem to be growing in intensity.

‘Middle strike’, the doctrinal shift that brought on this new state of the battlefield, is a package of tactics and technological solutions, primarily Starlink. This package has extended the campaign against Russian logistics from 12 miles (20km), the so-called ‘drone wall’, out to more than 60 miles (100 km) from the zone of contact. Every military Telegram channel is warning readers about the growing effectiveness of this campaign, especially in the southern direction. Their alarms get more substantial every week as the effects of the ‘middle strike’ campaign tell at the front.

Ukraine has made or bought millions of drones. European and American manufacturing has allowed Ukraine to scale up this ‘middle strike’ capability faster than Russia. Production increases all the time in a competitive environment where cycles of failure and redesign are fast, and have to be cheap. Now the Ukrainian drones are forming up at operational levels, in depth, replacing close air support and artillery and missiles in that attritional role at a tiny fraction of the unit cost. But at what human cost?

Manpower exhaustion

Ukraine has plenty of drones, now. Ukraine still does not have enough men. Too many men have been in frontline positions for too long because there are not enough replacements. This is the single biggest reason for the ongoing infantry shortage.

Recently, Ukrainian media has reckoned with this problem: combat exhaustion. According to the Kyiv Independent, soldiers in Ukrainian formations stop caring whether they live or die after about 40 days of “front line” combat.

Picture the pitiable foot soldier, the leg infantryman forced to pick his way through treelines and rubble to find and relieve a man who has occupied a position for forty days. After forty days occupying the position themselves, experiencing daily combat, this private soldier will be finished as a soldier, and need replacement.

This is consistent with the scientific study of combat stress. At 40 days, the individual fighter reaches the end of their period of overconfidence, and their moral collapse yawns before them like a roller coaster drop. Emotional exhaustion, a living kind of death, sets in. Note that this chart assumes at least 60 continuous days of combat, at the end of which the soldier becomes listless and useless.

The United States armed forces tried psychoactive chemicals, hypnosis, sleep therapy, electric shocks, insulin, and barbiturates in a burst of experimentation during the Second World War. Psychiatric medicine was considered the softer, kinder way of dealing with combat fatigue, which they now called ‘hysteria’, compared to the harsher treatment of ‘neurasthenia’ and ‘shell shock’ during the First World War.

Participation in combat, including drone combat, has pathogenic effects. Combat conditions reduce disease immunity and destroy tissue by keeping a man in a hypervigilant state of constant stress while exposed to dirty conditions, reduced caloric intake, and dehydration, which affect the brain.

Anxiety reactions and loss of control are the most problematic symptoms of combat exhaustion. Both are “predicted by physical hardships and poor unit functioning” as well as scenes of death.

The dead can be friend or foe. According to a 1999 study by the Israeli Defense Forces, symptoms historically tend to appear only after a soldier has been evacuated from the battle area and has time to reflect on their experiences.

Psychiatrist Jules Masserman described three basic psychological defenses relevant to combat and other dangerous situations in 1955. All of these defenses become untenable as combat fatigue sets in.

• I am invulnerable to injury and will never die.

• The universe protects me from danger and threat.

• In time of need I can seek support from my fellow man.

Hard conditions and bad leadership reduce the effectiveness of Masserman’s third narcissistic defense, the belief that one can rely on help from their fellow soldier. However, combat stress happens in every unit, not just the bad ones. A good unit that suffers casualties will also experience this psychological injury because its members will have closer bonds.

The sociology of the soldier matters most. The realization that a buddy or sergeant or officer has died, and will not be there to lead them away from “serious blunders”, “may create doubts as to the capacity of the unit to protect the individual from potential threat”, according to Masserman.

Modern combat conditioning succeeds in getting the vast majority of fighters to shoot their weapons at the enemy with intent to kill, violating universal moral heuristics against homicide. This too has a cost, as witnessing enemy death inflicts a psychological toll on normal people.

Our notional Ukrainian drone operator might not see a single enemy threat. However, that Ukrainian is still witnessing the deaths of Russians every day through their drone video feed. The faces of Russians caught by drones are frequently visible, so that war observers have become all too familiar with their hunted, haunted expressions.

Protective factors

Ukraine set out to create an entire new branch, Unmanned Systems Forces (USF), and used a points system to incentivize operators. The ‘drone wall’ doctrine that halted Russian offensive progress in 2025 had a focus on logistics within the last 12 miles (20km) or so of the forward Ukrainian drone positions. However, Russian infiltration tactics often brought Russians and Ukrainian drone teams close together, their positions sometimes overlapping in the gray zone. The result is sometimes close combat with drones.

According to a 2000 paper by Grady Emberey of the Department of Defense and written for the US Army War College, offensive movement tends to alleviate combat stress. Emberey notes that “after the breakout from the beachhead and during the pursuit of the enemy across Northern France, there was a noticeable drop in the incidence of combat exhaustion” compared to the weeks of hedgerow fighting to break out from the beachhead following D-Day.

“This is attributed to the rise in morale incident to the victory, the excitement of the chase and the preoccupation of the troops with the move across France. The limited movement had been replaced with feverish activity, the fighting had decreased in intensity, the troops could see the result of their efforts and there was a feeling that the war would soon be over.”

The more offensive progress Ukrainians make, the less combat exhaustion will affect Ukrainian troops. Conversely, Russian channels are full of urgency about the lack of progress and the potential for a Ukrainian counteroffensive. Limited counterattacks have already captured hundreds of kilometers of territory this year, reversing the slow rate of Russian gains.

Moral purpose also helps. Having your country at your back also helps. These are two conditions that apply to the Ukrainian drone warrior that have not been true for the American drone warrior of the 21st century. The American has typically controlled their weapon from hundreds or thousands of miles away, to extraordinary controversy, whereas most Ukrainian drone operators are still within a few miles of the enemy, and have the permission of their society to kill Russians.

The American drone experience was PTSD. The aftermath of a strike must be observed to conduct a battle damage assessment (BDA). This requires the operator to watch excruciating scenes. Images and experiences haunt the veteran later.

In 2021, “a nonsystematic narrative review of the articles dealing with the issue” over twenty years “found that drone operators and support staff have higher chances of suffering from emotional disengagement, Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSD), emotional exhaustion, and burnout” than fighter pilots. Witnessing the death of bystanders was a high risk factor.

In Ukraine, the drone operators on both sides do not recognize any bystanders. For Russian drone operators in Kherson, the ‘human safari’ has in fact targeted thousands of civilians. Civilian freight trucks are meanwhile banned from the coastal Novorossiya Highway (R-280) in Kherson, so every truck Ukrainians see on it is a military target.

Peer support matters. Whereas the Ukrainian drone soldier works with peers, and shares the danger of battle, the American drone operator has typically gone home to normal life at the end of the day, producing psychological whiplash. Ironically, keeping a soldier in combat for a little while prevents the onset of problems.

I have found an English language memoir by an experienced drone operations author from the Ukraine war, Illya Sekirin. Watch for a review soon.

Drones and sustainment

Rather than biochemical or behavioral therapy solutions, Ukraine has researched technical solutions. Defending a position with a UGV (unmanned ground vehicle) instead of a person, while still stressful and dangerous, relieves a combat soldier of continuous battle at that position. They will still be nearby, of course, laying low and trying to remain unseen by the enemy.

The ‘middle strike’ campaign meanwhile has been effective at depriving the Russian front of supplies and sustainment. “Intensive enemy strikes against our logistics have reached the shores of the Sea of ​​Azov”, with the result that “logistics have been disrupted for almost a month, affecting the delivery of supplies not only to the rear but also to the front lines.”

“The situation has not improved at all, and the number of drone strikes on logistics routes in Novorossiya and the Donbas is increasing”, reports the Archangel of Special Forces channel on Telegram. “Movement has practically ceased in several areas in the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions due to constant attacks by Hornet and RAM-2X UAVs.”

“Furthermore, attack UAV overflights are increasingly being recorded between Henichesk and Chongar in Crimea, which has already impacted logistics to Crimea.” To prevent a deteriorating front line, “it is imperative to rapidly expand countermeasures against these UAVs by deploying our own interceptor drones. Otherwise, logistics, both in the rear and on the front lines, will simply grind to a halt.”

This would require personnel, which is already a problem for Russia, because Ukraine has been killing Russians faster than the Ministry of Defense can recruit them for months, now. People would have to be trained to use interceptor drones, and they would have to be deployed to Russian-held Ukraine in depth, and it would need to happen quickly.

Logistics is now favoring Ukraine. UGV ground drones have become common in Ukrainian units, replacing manned vehicles for resupply and casualty extraction within the range of Russian FPV drones. Ukrainian drone units have specialized in targeting Russian deep reconnaissance drones. While Russia has the means to deliver a middle strike campaign of their own, the challenge is delivering those solutions at scale, and then supporting them in Ukraine.

Russians had used air drone delivery to sustain themselves in forward tactical areas, but these drones are increasingly not being delivered because of the middle strike campaign. They get destroyed on their way to Russian drone teams a the truck or Buhanka van.

While Russia can achieve a quantitative advantage, the quality of Ukraine’s drone war has reached a new level. The asymmetry favors Ukraine in innovation and quality of drones. Ukrainian AI is superior to Russian AI, allowing operators to send drones on their final attack without human guidance. This defeats Russian electronic warfare defenses and minimizes psychological impact on the operators.

Ukrainian loitering munitions have targeted train locomotives with startling accuracy. UAF operators have demonstrated a new focus on trucks within the middle strike zone, especially fuel trucks. Chongar Bridge in Crimea was struck with heavy drones, crimping logistics to the peninsula.

Videos posted to social media from Sebastopol show long gas lines. Fuel rationing is in effect. Rushing tanker trucks into the peninsula with ferries is not going to solve the storage problem. Fuel distribution is simply broken. Storage is nonexistent in Crimea because Ukrainians destroyed it all with drones.

Russian air defense is also broken. New drone countermeasures might be introduced to the occupied zone, but it is unclear that the Russian economy can develop and produce them at scale in time to stop a major Ukrainian effort that takes advantage of the current imbalance. The innovation-adaptation cycle in this war has consistently been six months.

The UAF are in a race to build an army that can advance on the ground using drones at scale. The RAF are in a race to build an army that can defend against Ukrainian drones at scale. Starlink is the underlying difference that makes it all possible, and Russians have yet to replace their access to the single most useful commercial space platform. That’s because they barely have a space program in Russia, anymore.

Signal extenders

Balloons are an underrated Ukrainian advantage. Micro High Altitude Balloons (mHABS) are an old technology that is experiencing a second act. Rather than a drone that runs out of charge, small aerostats can stay up for days and cost very little to operate.

Similar systems are used by both sides in Ukraine as relay transmitters for drone operation signals and radio communications, or as sensor observation balloons. Russians have replaced Starlink to a degree by using 5G systems held aloft. Obviously, a tethered balloon is vulnerable to attack with a UAV.

Set loose in Ukraine, a balloon will tend to fly east. This is because Ukraine lies in the westerly latitudes, so that most of the time, on most days of the year, the high-level winds will carry a balloon into Russia. This is an underrated advantage that Russia simply cannot adapt or overcome.

Drones carried aloft from Ukrainian territory on a balloon will have a full fuel load, or retain most of their power charge, when they are activated and cut loose from the balloon far inside Russian territory. This is just one of the ways that Ukraine has made the entirety of Russian-held Ukraine a kill zone for logistics. The same drone that had a 30 km operating limit can now operate 300 km away using Starlink.

Again, Russian forces have drones to strike in the same deep battle zone, but not Starlink to guide them to their targets. While solutions exist, scaling them is a problem. This matters because the drone war more and more resembles the attritional aerial warfare of the 20th century. Drone-on-drone engagement is increasing in frequency and intensity.

For example, see this Russian Shahed-style drone that crashed in the snow in January. It was equipped with both Starlink and a MANPADS system pointing to the rear. By this point, Ukrainians had posted numerous videos of Geran-2 drones being shot down by all sorts of manned aircraft. The intent, clearly, was to engage in air-to-air combat, perhaps with an F-16, by remote control. This is what Russia lost the ability to do in the skies of Ukraine when they lost Starlink on 10 February.

The tide is clearly turning

Ukraine has outlasted Russia’s grinding offensive campaigns and transformed the battlefield to their advantage. For the moment, these conditions favor very limited Ukrainian gains on favorable terrain. Not by coincidence, the United States and Ukraine have developed a closer, and more cooperative, relationship regarding drone development and production. While the deal has yet to be finalized, Kyiv and Washington seem to have a much better relationship than one year ago.

This is a natural fit. Ukrainian firms have deals with American companies, Ukrainians dominate western field exercises against NATO armies, and collaboration was already quite established before the Trump team came to the White House. The Pentagon wants to modernize capabilities quickly. Ukraine has more than twenty partner countries and the US is still the biggest of them all, while Ukraine now has a massive drone munitions industry ready to serve a global market.

On its own, this cannot explain the new attitude of Marco Rubio and Donald Trump, though. The intervening strategic variable reshaping foreign policy is the reduction of pernicious Russian influence in Venezuela and now Cuba. Iran, which was a key partner in Vladimir Putin’s war effort, is being economically ruined by the continuing blockade.

These countries were partners in the ‘gray zone’ of Vladimir Putin’s ‘hybrid war’ against American power. The White House is feeling less constrained by Russian strategy all the time and Putin has lost his power to frighten them. The presumption that Ukraine must give up territory to avoid World War III seems to have vanished from their calculations.

Can Ukraine take full advantage of this moment? That is the big battlefield question for 2026. They will have enough machines. The rest is going to be a question of manpower.

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By Monday morning, the Islamic Republic had fired a “limited number,” “barrage,” or “salvo” of “about 10 missiles” at Israeli airbases. First Ramat David was targeted, then Nevatim, and then Tel Nof on Monday morning. None of the missiles hit their target. Israeli air defenses intercepted most or all of them. Sirens sounded across Israel, but there were no confirmed hits, damage, or casualties.

Esmaeil Baghaei, spokesman for Iran’s Foreign Ministry, said the strikes “will further complicate an already ‘chaotic diplomatic process’ with the U.S.” He did not say that the process is ended. He is telling the truth about the chaos because that was the entire point of these strikes. Iran, and more specifically the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), has correctly assessed that Operation Economic Fury is a clear and present danger to the Islamic Republic. The ceasefire is a trap.

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Iran did not break out of the ceasefire trap with this exchange. Tehran says they are still engaging in the ceasefire negotiations via Pakistan even after the limited Israeli response against Iran. Rather, the weekend flurry of missiles was very clearly aimed at altering the status quo of the ceasefire while constructing a narrative of Israeli malfeasance.

Let us recall the sequence of events. Israel warned Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy in Lebanon, against launching attacks on Israel. Iran warned Israel against attacking Beirut to punish Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy in Lebanon, in retaliation for any strikes on Israel by Hezbollah, their proxy in that country. Hezbollah, which again is Iran’s proxy in Lebanon, promptly ignored Israeli warnings so that Hezbollah’s sponsor, Iran, could strike Israel in retaliation for the IDF’s retaliation on Beirut.

The entire affair has been directed from Tehran, which would have the world blame Israel for the continued suffering of the Islamic Republic. That suffering, or “strategic erosion” as Hamidreza Azizi terms it, only happens inside the ceasefire trap.

The delay in finalizing the memorandum of understanding is increasingly interpreted as purposive rather than procedural and as a U.S. attempt to use the passage of time as a strategic instrument. The concern is that each week of ceasefire, with American military and economic pressure continuing unabated and Iranian restraint producing no reciprocal concessions, represents a net erosion of the position Tehran believes it secured during the forty days of active fighting.

Azizi reports that “the government finds itself caught between two simultaneous pressures. Engaging in diplomacy without tangible gains — no sanctions relief, no end to the blockade, no reciprocal restraint from Washington — makes the leadership appear to be negotiating from weakness.” As I keep telling readers, this is because the regime is actually negotiating from actual weakness. Azizi is validating my strategic assessment here.

To make peace with the Great Satan requires the regime to change. As this is impossible, the regime has chosen to strangle, slowly, inside the ceasefire trap as the colossal economic damage inflicted by Operation Epic Fury, the kinetic phase of the conflict, sets in.

Analyses of risk to Iran’s long-term economic future made in April set early June as the date for the regime to experience its first serious collapses. On Foreign Policy’s podcast this weekend, economist Adam Tooze said the damage of OP Economic Fury is being underreported in western media. He estimates that the US-Israeli campaign has done 100 times as much economic damage to Iran as the Islamic Republic has managed to inflict on both enemies.

According to DropSite, Iran has already lost roughly half the country’s gross domestic product. Millions of Iranians are out of work. The systematic targeting of steel, petrochemical, and industrial infrastructure underlying Iran’s missile arsenal has simultaneously put a dagger through vital organs of manufacturing. No wonder that “the human and economic toll of the war makes it equally difficult to justify continued sacrifice without a credible account of what it can actually produce”, as Azizi writes.

Hormuz is “the primary mechanism through which Tehran translated battlefield endurance into political leverage” during OP Epic Fury, Phase One.

Now, Phase Two under the ceasefire — Economic Fury — is “a process in which the operational significance of the Strait is steadily reduced until the point at which Iran agrees to formally reopen it yields little diplomatic or economic return”.

As the US Navy blockade continues indefinitely, and effective counter-blockade efforts continue to bring the ‘hostage’ ships that were trapped inside the Gulf out of it, Iran loses Hormuz leverage indefinitely.

As I wrote last week, the IRGC is especially concerned with Lebanon, where the IDF is still advancing against Hezbollah on the ground. Lebanon is the biggest military and political colony of the Islamic Republic. Losing leverage in Lebanon directly affects the IRGC, which largely exists to maintain proxies overseas. The ‘ceasefire’ is in fact a low-intensity strategic competition, but the regime is competing with a snare around its neck. Time is on the side of Donald Trump.

The regime is testing the limits of the ceasefire to create informational space for political outcomes. Put simply, they are betting on the unpopularity of Trump’s war at home, and the embrace of anti-Semitism by the American Democratic Party, to punish him through the political process. With five months to go before the elections, this likely means the heat death of Iran’s economic universe will happen first. It is a foolish bet.

It will not work because the Trump strategy does not rely on Israeli power. Instead, Trump relies on Arabs to continue what they are already doing, applying economic pressure in the form of long-term cooperative projects to circumvent Hormuz. The longer the accelerated construction continues, the more long-term economic leverage Iran loses in Hormuz.

Challenging the US Navy for supremacy in the Strait of Hormuz is another key goal and purpose of the IRGC. Another pillar of their existence is threatened by the extended state of ceasefire.

Iran simply faces a much more powerful macroeconomic alliance than the IRGC has, or can build in any reasonable amount of time. OP Economic Fury found its schwerpunkt, its decisive moment, in Beijing weeks ago. There will not be an emergency Belt and Road Initiative for Iran. Chairman Xi cannot afford it and the Islamic Republic has no credit line.

Before the war even began, I had told readers to expect a macroeconomic analysis of this conflict from me. ALL WARS ARE FUNDAMENTALLY MACROECONOMIC AFFAIRS. The most likely winner of any war is the side with the larger macroeconomic alliance, which is why anti-Israel organizing in the United States is so focused on relatively small Israeli defense support programs and ‘disinvestment’ from the Israeli ‘settler economy’.

OP Economic Fury demonstrates this iron law of polemology with smaller salvoes of missiles than Epic Fury. These are narrative-driven, even symbolic attacks with little or no military impact.

None of this analysis is original to me. I have also repeatedly identified Trump as kayfabe. This analysis of his behavior as a form of public spectacle, a la professional wrestling, is not my original insight, either. It is however an exquisite explanation of his willingness to play ‘the heel’ right now, begging Netanyahu to refrain from retaliation so that a lasting peace can be secured. As always, it is a mistake to take his words literally instead of seriously.

Actions matter more than words. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has announced that Iranian assets held in the West will be used to help Arab allies rebuild all the damage inflicted by Iran. The more Iran resists, the less money they receive for the eventual peace. Bessent’s specific words matter less than the administration’s willingness to arbitrage its own economic leverage in order to force the Islamic Republic to capitulate to the Great Satan. Every flurry of drones launched against their Arab neighbors will have a cost, now.

Time will tell whether this leveraged buyout of the Islamic Republic succeeds. Donald Trump could potentially ride out his entire second term in a state of furtive ceasefire punctuated by intermittent missile and drone barrages. It remains unclear just how much of the Iranian missile and drone programs has actually been restored, and at what cost.

The only certainty is that Iran keeps losing leverage all the time, while the economic risks to the regime grow exponentially over time. Strategic patience has high returns for Trump at relatively low risk.

Regime adaptation in response to these risks comes with trade-offs, including non-economic risks. In order to use bitcoin to circumvent the blockade, for example, the Islamic Republic had to turn the internet back on over the last two weeks. Students at twenty campuses immediately organized demonstrations.

The ceasefire trap is inescapable, now. The regime lacks military power to escape it, nor can it survive the humbling of submission. We are bound to see more of this fitful thrashing, the death-struggle of a snared animal.

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As I write these words, a peace deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz may or may not happen, but is reportedly in some quantum state of happening very soon.

Last week also saw the IRGC message cycle repeat. Iranian demands were leaked to the world as if they were terms the Americans had already agreed to observe. A Hormuz Strait authority loomed large. These rumors were inevitably quashed by the American side, which nevertheless maintained that a deal was close.

Very, very close.

Then a few things exploded.

Two IRGC boats were observed attempting to mine the Strait of Hormuz and got rudely interrupted. US Navy and Air Force planes struck key IRGC targets around Bandar Abbas. Brig. Gen. Ali Azmaei, commander of the IRGC Navy and a hardline Hormuz-hostage taker, was reportedly targeted and killed in his vehicle.

US forces disabled the Gambia-flagged bulk carrier M/V Lian Star over the weekend. After 20 warnings, an aircraft fired a Hellfire missile that disabled the ship, according to CENTCOM. The vessel was reportedly left adrift with no casualties. By that point, the US Navy had already prevented over 100 vessels from passage through the strait.

Yesterday, CENTCOM disabled an unladen oil tanker, the Botswana-flagged M/T Lexie, with a Hellfire missile to the engine room. Iran is desperate to get empty oil tankers into its ports to take on crude oil.

Over the weekend, CENTCOM reported a “measured and deliberate” series of air strikes “eliminating Iranian air defenses, a ground control station, and two one-way attack drones that posed clear threats to ships transiting regional waters” in response to the shootdown of an MQ-1 drone.

This week Iran launched salvoes of ballistic missiles and drones targeting American bases and forces in Kuwait. Terminal 1 at Kuwait International Airport was hit, causing fires, 63 injuries, and one death. Flights were suspended. Kuwait took the brunt of the damage, as US and other allied defenses apparently destroyed the rest of the incoming weapons. CENTCOM is calling these salvoes “attempted attacks”.

Spiritual resistance has material limits

Meanwhile, Israeli forces currently occupy parts of Lebanon that Hezbollah used to launch attacks against Israel. The IDF is clearing tunnels and removing infrastructure that Hezbollah built up right under the noses of UNIFIL, the peacekeeping force that has failed to demilitarize southern Lebanon since the 1970s.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps does not want to give up Lebanon. Masoud Pezeshkian, the pathetic civilian president of Iran, denies reports that he wants to give up and resign because the IRGC keeps undercutting his negotiating authority.

Iran cannot win the war in its current state. Unable to countenance defeat, the IRGC wants to continue an economic contest that Arabs must inevitably win because they hold all the economic leverage. To avoid shame, the fantasy hardliners left in the regime are still taking losses and performing wins.

The salvoes that Iran has fired at Arab neighbors since Monday morning have not overwhelmed their Arab neighbors, or shattered Arab unity. OPEC membership notwithstanding, all the Arab states from Iraq to Oman are cooperating in economic projects to circumvent the Strait of Hormuz. I wrote about this recently:

What Trump wants would topple the pillars of IRGC power in Iran. The IRGC needs uranium, and uranium enrichment, to justify its own existence. The IRGC needs the proxies in Lebanon and Yemen to justify its existence. The IRGC has piratical notions about the international waterway at their doorstep, and these ambitions justify their existence. The IRGC created the ‘resistance economy’ (read: shadow economy) of Iran to justify their own existence.

Removing these pillars of IRGC power would alter the regime of Iran. The flurries of missiles and drones are their acts of defiant, performative resistance to regime change. An airport has been shut down and civilians have been terrorized, but this is not enough damage to force Americans out of the region.

We were assured in recent weeks that Iran had restored their full capabilities to fire missiles and drones at their neighbors. If so, the IRGC is holding back. I am sure the IRGC would love everyone to believe they are just holding back. I suspect that the damage of Operation Epic Fury was greater than the IRGC wants the world to believe.

Some technical details

The IRGC Navy is different from the regular Iranian Navy, Artesh, which operated the larger vessels that are now spectacular wrecks. The IRGC Navy is composed of small craft, most of which are intact. This ‘mosquito fleet’ helped justify the existence of the IRGC. Destroying it in detail is eminently feasible, if tedious, work for the US Navy and Air Force.

CENTCOM has referred to the strikes on the radars, drone command and control stations, communications towers, and related facilities of Qeshm Island and Goruk as self-defense responses. CENTCOM also says they have helped dozens of vessels transit the strait in recent weeks, including a Greek supertanker. While this is far reduced from pre-war levels, it is a notable uptick.

Of course, CENTCOM are not calling this “escort duty”. That would in fact be the wrong term, because they are suppressing the IRGC boats rather than escorting the traffic. Most of this activity is conducted at radar range, so strikes on shore radars aim to blind the IRGC and achieve sensor dominance.

Talks reportedly continue, or not, depending on the source, while this purely defensive battle carries on. It is a strange posture from such a warlike Pentagon.

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Conflict temperature management

Donald Trump differs from previous presidents in his unwillingness to put up with frozen conflicts. He differs from his vice president on this point of opinion. For that matter, second-term Trump differs from his own first presidential term in this dimension. He is ending frozen conflicts and reducing ‘gray zones’ where adversaries thrive. He is already moving on to Cuba. He is not giving up on Iran.

Frozen conflicts require huge bureaucracies of expertise, staffed with experts giving expert advice about how to keep conflicts frozen. Whenever conflicts heat up, these experts recommend a harder freeze. Gray zones are all different shades of gray, so we need experts to explain all the different shades.

Furthermore, all diplomacy is supposed to take place in the Persian rug store. Diplomatic experts tell us that we can only buy one rug at a time. We cannot buy the Lebanon carpet and the uranium carpet at the same time as the Hormuz carpet and the normalized economic relations carpet. Peace is supposed to be the end state of a process, diplomatic experts tell us. In the Middle East, a ‘peace process’ can last decades, all the way through several intifadas.

Rather than use American and allied power to leverage a general buyout of Iran’s regional insecurity architecture, the diplomatic experts have used the retail approach, for decades, through several intifadas, nicely buying one rug at a time from the nice man at the nice used carpet store in the bazaar in order to build up trust that can someday lead to getting the carpets with the uranium dust option.

If we are patient and generous we will eventually have a chance to buy the regional peace carpet from Iran, the experts in Middle East diplomacy say. Trump is not following those rules. His Arab allies are helping him force a leveraged buyout of the whole carpet bazaar.

The real test of the resulting peace, the quiet act of submission, is whether Iran respects the new rules, whatever they are. Even a performative submission to the Great Satan is too much for the IRGC to contemplate, however, for it would be a humiliation on top of their destruction.

Imagine Masoud Pezeshkian flying to Washington to sign a treaty with the Great Satan. I for one cannot imagine him flying home again, after that. Not as long as the IRGC remains in its present, largely intact state.

Dismantling the Iranian empire

Getting Iran to ‘yes’ requires one of three potential decisions from Donald Trump right now.

He can display strategic impatience, restart the war, risk the blowback, and take the domestic political hit.

He could accept a bad deal, for example one that leaves out the uranium carpet to get the Hormuz carpet.

Or he could just hold on until after the November midterm elections while economic pressure continues to crush the Islamic Republic, and then apply whatever force is needed.

This third option would require Trump to acknowledge that a deal is not simply days away, but weeks or months away, to signal that he is fine with a long delay. The IRGC must find this threat credible for it to work.

This option would require CENTCOM to sustain pressure, and Arab unity to continue. Trump would still take a domestic political hit, but the longer Iranian resistance continues, the more long-term economic damage the Islamic Republic will endure, limiting their future ambitions.

Not by coincidence, the IDF has made steady progress in their campaign to remove Hezbollah infrastructure from south Lebanon. An evacuation order for Tyre and its environs this week puts Iran’s proxy army under severe pressure. Iran’s fantasy hardliners in the IRGC are likely holding out because of Lebanon, but they seem to be losing what they physically built in Lebanon the hard way, anyway.

Negotiations are always a process, and negotiating with Iran is fraught with the contrarian internal political dynamics of the Islamic Republic. Rules can be remade on the ground, however. Getting Iran to ‘yes’ may ultimately be easier with Hezbollah reduced as a force. In the meantime, a quantum state of war and peace continues.

Process as punishment

The current negotiations are about the order and process of buying out the various carpets. Referring to enriched uranium, “No Dust, No Dollars” is the current position of the Pentagon. This one part of the larger leveraged buyout process is going to last a while, yet, in any case, because it is complex.

Trump wants to leave the Middle East behind without a near-nuclear Iran. Americans generally want America out of the Middle East, too. If Trump secures a peace deal with Iran that allows America to leave Gulf bases behind instead of rebuilding the damage that missiles and drones did to those facilities, Americans ought not to miss the loss of distressed properties.

Getting Iran to agree to new rules that satisfy the Great Satan will require time and pressure and further force. This new peace process will take as long as it takes, kill as many IRGC leadership as it takes, repel as many IRGC speedboats as it takes, and strike as many IRGC bases as it takes to coerce an agreement out of Tehran.

But it will not last for any number of intifadas, because the Arab world has no interest in uprisings anymore. Try as they might, the IRGC has failed to stimulate the responses they wanted from the Arab street or the Arab states.

Holding on until November, and then exerting new military pressure when the regime is already cooked and Hezbollah is physically dismantled, will seem the lowest-risk option with the highest minimal payoff, to Trump. It comes with risks, such as global fertilizer distribution, that will have to be managed. But they are manageable.

The risks are far less manageable for Tehran. Whether or not Trump ever succeeds in coercing the IRGC to let their leaders say ‘yes’, the process will be their punishment.

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To ‘tap out’ in combat sports competition is to accept the humiliation, disgrace, wounded honor, and the loss of standing among peers that comes with the admission of defeat. Farsi has a word that contains all these meanings and more: dhull (ذل). To verbalize submission to anything but Allah is to lose face, aberu (آبرو, ‘water of the face’). It is a deep, stabbing blow to Persian prestige that makes Shia fanatics cry.

Yesterday, President Trump made another Iran announcement. At the request of Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, “serious negotiations are taking place” to end the Hormuz crisis with “NO NUCLEAR WEAPONS FOR IRAN!” If the Iranian side cannot come to an agreement in 14 days, he stands ready to launch “a full, large scale assault of Iran, on a moment's notice”.

“We’ve had periods of time where we had, we thought, pretty much getting close to making a deal, and it didn’t work out”, Trump told reporters later. “But this is a little bit different.” Also, it is “a very positive development, but we’ll see whether or not it amounts to anything.” Taken seriously but not literally, we may parse this as an attitude change from the Iranian side.

The IRGC have changed their minds about choking out. Regular readers will recall that three weeks ago, Iran was making a lot of noise about overland oil export by trucks and trains to replace the Hormuz traffic, and that I rubbished this talking point as a pure cope.

As a rule of thumb, one Aframax or Suezmax tanker at sea contains enough crude oil to load 2,000 trucks, while one Very Large Crude Carrier (VLCC) carries as much petroleum as 2,800 rail tank cars. Iran can currently export 8-10 percent of their total crude capacity this way.

To replace the lost Hormuz export capacity with new overland connections, the regime would probably need to spend as much as they did on their nuclear program. It would take time they do not have, for as I advised readers in that 29 April update, the oil infrastructure of Iran is decrepit, storage capacity is limited, and the geology of most wells makes shutdown especially risky.

The long-term economic damage of maintaining a standoff in the Hormuz might make it impossible for Iran to build any new infrastructure. Unlike their Gulf Arab neighbors, who banked their money and built civilizations with oil profits, Iran — or rather the IRGC — spent their share of the oil revenue on proxies to colonize and occupy the Middle East and attack their neighbors.

Time is not on their side, though there are many in the west who would have you believe it is. Like the IRGC, those westerners are desperate to save face, but the only plan they have for victory is denial. After the Saudi intervention in the first week of May, pausing American operations, denial hit fever pitch. Regular readers will recall that I told everyone to calm down.

I was confident because Donald Trump has a great relationship with all these crown princes. They are his friends and Jared Kushner’s business partners. They take photos with him, hands on a glowing globe. When Iranian drones and missiles began to strike their cities and infrastructure, their societies did not rise up in revolution as expected in Tehran. The crown princes got mad at Iran. If anything, they are more eager to see the IRGC destroyed than Trump is.

Not by coincidence, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have all made major infrastructure announcements lately. They have been applying economic pressure on Iran, and the signal in the noise is that the IRGC is tapping out.

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The Crown Prince of the UAE announced on Friday that he wants to fast-track a planned West-East Pipeline project to double export capacity through Fujairah (on the Gulf of Oman, outside Hormuz) to around 3 million barrels per day (bpd) by 2027. This project largely builds onto the existing Habshan-Fujairah pipeline. The emirates have left OPEC to become a free agent in the market and this will ensure their independence.

During the crisis, Saudi Arabia has ramped up flows through its existing East-West (Petroline) pipeline (Abqaiq to Yanbu on the Red Sea, capacity up to 7 million bpd). It has carried record volumes (e.g., ~5–7 million bpd at peaks) to bypass Hormuz, sustaining exports despite attacks that temporarily cut throughput by ~700,000 bpd in April. Full capacity was restored in days. This project originated as strategic insurance against Iranian aggression.

During April, the Saudi Landbridge rail project was accelerated. This railroad will connect the eastern oil fields to the Jeddah on the Red Sea and northwest to the Jordan border. Port expansions at Yanbu, and new Red Sea facilities, are all part of longer-term ‘Iran-proofing’ that began before the crisis and became priorities since 28 February.

Kuwait is already half-finished building the Gulf Railway Project, a 1,352-mile (2,177 km) network that will link Kuwaiti oilfields to Muscat in Oman by crossing Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Completion was planned for 2030, but now the project will speed up. Note that this was announced at the end of April.

Cross-border pipelines and rail connections to Duqm, linking the Emirates to a port on the Arabian Sea coast of Oman, are being fast-tracked. This was announced in mid-April. This month, Qatar, Kuwait, and Bahrain, who do not have a direct bypass of their own coastlines, are rapidly expanding overland trucking and rail through Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Omani ports. Because they have access to a global market for oil trucks, they can do this at scale long before Iran will.

If this sounds more like a race than a wrestling match, you are getting my point. I am no expert on Iran, or oil. Military history has iron laws, however. One of them is that war is fundamentally a macroeconomic affair, therefore the winner of any given war is most likely to be the side with the larger macroeconomic alliance.

Iran simply faces a much more powerful macroeconomic alliance than the IRGC has, or can build in any reasonable amount of time. Operation Economic Fury found its schwerpunkt, its decisive moment, in Beijing last week. There will not be an emergency Belt and Road Initiative for Iran. Chairman Xi cannot afford one, anyway. He has his own problems. Trump flew home from the meeting with all the leverage in Hormuz.

Per Marco Rubio, all the Iranians who matter are hardliners. These however can be subdivided into realists and fantasists. The psychic pain of dhull, the avoidance of aberu, and Shia apocalypticism feed into the fantasy of victory, producing AI slop propaganda, for example.

Humans being humans, the humiliation of defeat will always be too much for some of the hardliners to handle. Humans being humans, however, fantasists can also become realists, and in military history that is usually the moment when money runs out.

Iran started reducing flow from their wells weeks ago. When storage ran out at Khargh Island, engineers started dumping oil into the gulf. The catastrophe has washed up on beaches in the gulf, inflicting economic damage on the tourism trade that Iran’s neighbors have built with their oil money. This is not a permanent solution even for the IRGC, nor is it a winning stratagem. Economic warfare is dirty, but the Arab states were always better equipped for it. Iran will pass out before the Arabs ever tap out.

Israel still has Iron Dome units deployed in the Emirates, but the IDF’s offensive combat role was limited to the seven weeks of Operation Epic Fury. In fact, the disclosure of two secret Israeli bases in Iraq likely marks the withdrawal of Israel from OP Economic Fury altogether.

For this phase of the conflict, Donald Trump has instead turned to his gulf allies, even been deferential to them, while they brought their full economic strength to bear. Xi Jinping was the last hope for the fantasists. Benjamin Netanyahu is not going to rescue them with airstrikes. War is not a popularity contest and Trump is happy to play the heel.

The Arabs are applying the decisive pressure now. Pass out or tap out, the crown princes have clearly resolved that Tehran is not going to keep their uranium, their enrichment, or their Hormuz Strait hostages. The Islamic Republic is running out of time and options to avoid the humiliation of wet faces.

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Approximately 430,000 years ago, someone inflicted two blows to the head of a Neanderthal. Either blow would have killed him. “Cranium 17 recovered from the Sima de los Huesos Middle Pleistocene site shows two clear perimortem depression fractures on the frontal bone, interpreted as being produced by two episodes of localized blunt force trauma”, reads a 2015 paper by an archaeological investigation team.

The dead Neanderthal was found in a cave at the bottom of a shaft. He had either been thrown into it or placed there as part of a funeral ritual. Geology and predators have been ruled out as causes of the skull damage. While time and the pressure of soil broke the skull into 52 pieces, the science team was able to reconstruct the skull and determine the “depression fractures” were perimortem, meaning they were inflicted from outside at the time of death and no healing took place afterwards.

Both fractures were inflicted with the same weapon, making them “almost indistinguishable”. This makes it highly unlikely that the injuries were natural, for “any scenario related to the free-fall would require the highly improbable occurrence of the same object striking the skull twice.” The authors conclude that “the most plausible explanation for the perimortem fractures on Cr-17 is as the result of intentional and repeated blows during a lethal act of interpersonal violence” — homicide.

Buried along with 27 others, this Neanderthal “represents the earliest clear case of deliberate, lethal interpersonal aggression in the hominin fossil record, demonstrating that this is an ancient human behavior”, they write. Murder is as old as the hills, however, and Cr-17 merely represents the oldest proven case of homicide. Much earlier evidence is suggestive, but the conditions of the remains make it difficult to be sure.

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A new human ancestor, Homo antecessor, was discovered at the Gran Dolina site in Spain during 1995. During an excavation in the 21st century, 170 fossils and more than 800 lithic artifacts were found, all associated with what is believed to be the last common ancestor of Homo sapiens and Neanderthals. A 2016 paper concludes that the materials “were dragged by debris flow processes from the outside, and introduced into Gran Dolina cave”, which was located on a floodplain. The site is between 1.2 million and 800,000 years old.

About 75 percent of the skeletons in Gran Dolina were pre-adolescent children. They were not buried as part of a ritual. Instead, their flesh was stripped from their bones in “the oldest known case of cannibalism to date”, according to a 2019 paper. The authors calculate that human bodies are more nutrient- and calorie-dense than other prey animals, a finding that is consistent with Optimal Foraging Theory. Gran Dolina is not even the earliest evidence for human cannibalism, anymore.

That would be a shinbone recovered in Kenya and analyzed in 2023. It was found to have cut marks associated with butchering. It is 1,450,000 years old. Put simply, the logic of cannibalism was obvious to our ancestors. So obvious that our ancestors ate each other out of proportion to other animals. And they were our ancestors. Yours, mine, everyone’s.

The story of Cain and Abel mythologizes the collision of lifeways in the distant past, most likely recalling a dim memory of pastoralists in competition with agriculturalists during the Neolithic. Cain survived to marry a woman, the Bible says, and they had a son, Enoch, whose living descendants are supposedly still with us. Abel had no descendants, the Bible says.

None of us can claim a lineage from the innocent victim in the story. Perhaps Cr-17 was the loser in a contest for power with another Neanderthal, or maybe his death was the end of a protean grudge. Whatever the reason for his killing, the killer was left with the potential to survive, thrive, and leave descendants.

Efforts to project modern ideas of pacifistic equality on the past are a form of magical thinking. Everyone alive today is the latest link in an unbroken chain of survivors owing their existence to murder and cannibalism in the deep evolutionary past. No human on earth can claim a special lineage that exempts them from this category of people descended from cannibals and killers. We are all equal. This is the only true human equality.

Rousseau’s fantasy of peaceful, uncorrupted primitives, the ‘noble savage’ myth, is not simply wrong, it is racist. It denies our shared ancestry to some peoples by pretending their ancestors were somehow exempt from the homicide and cannibalism that shaped every human lineage. Such nonsense infantilizes non-Western societies while flattering moderns who want to believe violence is a recent corruption.

Pacifistic interpreters of the past would deny their own birthright as fierce, hungry creatures. It does not make them morally better than the rest of us who acknowledge what we really are. It just makes them tedious and pretentious.

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These survey charts from Skeptic.com reveal something fundamentally broken about the way the western academy views human conflict. War is intrinsic to being human, but the most cultured people always pretend that humanity is intrinsically pacifist.

Military history has waned in the academy because any fair reading of archaeology, ethnography, and historical text completely debunks the pleasant notions of the human past that highly-educated people prefer to believe.

I learned this in 2020 when I asked a tenured professor of military history for a reading list on origins of war and primitive warfare. He gave me the list, but then confessed he no longer teaches the topic because female freshmen and department heads will lose their minds over any acknowledgement of binary human sex difference.

It is just easier to let them carry on with their feminized world-view than educate them about the real world.

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Academic incentives are entirely inverted against an honest reading of the violent human past. While this is ostensibly aimed at eliminating bias, the ‘noble savage’ is in fact incredibly racist. It positions primitive peoples as inherently pacifistic when archaeology shows exactly the opposite, worldwide.

If Native Americans were perfectly peaceful, never ever fighting any wars before the evil white man showed up with his evil guns and his evil patriarchy and his evil capitalism, then the virtuous native is a political instruction for achieving perfect human harmony through the elimination of those supposed evils.

Contrarily, the fact that Native Americans were never peaceful or free of greed, while the tribes with matriarchal organization were equal in violence to the patriarchal ones, challenges any political program that proposes a progressive, peaceful utopian future.

Just as Marxist economics and social pseudoscience appeal to the hyper-rational academic, a false view of the violent past has become predominant among ‘the experts’ in the academy, regardless of the actual evidence.

The pacifistic view of Native American prehistory is simply untenable as a material matter. “Scalping has often been claimed to be of European origin. However, while Europeans may have encouraged and promoted the practice, the ethnographic and archaeological records indicate that it was present before European arrival”, Ashley Kendell writes.1

“There was no terminology to describe scalping in English, French, or Spanish, so when the Native American tradition was first encountered, new words had to be developed or old words were used ambiguously to refer to the practice.”

Kendall has studied 77 craniums of men and women killed in a massacre at Crow Creek, South Dakota in approximately 1375 AD that bear signs of perimortem scalping. This happened approximately 76 years before Christopher Columbus was born, so exactly zero white Europeans were involved.

Archaeologists have determined that the village was in the midst of replacing a dry moat with a new defensive earthwork when an overwhelming force attacked and destroyed the community, killing at least 486 people. Skeletal injuries include signs of torture, beheading, and dismemberment.

Nor is any distinction between soldier and civilian evident in the data. According to Kendall’s findings, the female skulls show a higher number and breadth of cuts consistent with scalping. The war party that overwhelmed the village was able to take their time killing the women after killing the male defenders.

In fact, there seems to have been a perverse incentive to slaughter and scalp the most helpless members of the community with the most care.

Historically, men gained honor and prestige by killing not only their male enemy, but also their enemy’s wives and children. In some ways, the humiliation and killing of another man’s close relatives, such as his wife or daughter, conferred a higher status upon the attacker than killing the warrior himself. Greater honor was associated with sneaking into an enemy village. Infiltration of an enemy village required greater bravery on the part of the warrior than killing an enemy warrior on the battlefield.

Nor was slavery mysterious to anyone in the New World when Columbus got there. Warfare was endemic in the Americas and it provided captives, many of whom were sacrificed in funeral rites for elites. Slaves used for agricultural labor were routinely mutilated onthe Mississippi, having their Achilles’ tendons cut or toes removed to leave them hobbled.

“Deeply rooted in Native history, slavery was already present when the first Europeans and Africans arrived in the sixteenth century”, historian Christina Snyder explains.2 No one had to explain the concept of the ‘outsider’ to them. Indeed, Native peoples recognized outsider groups by their hairstyles, which is why scalping became so important to their warrior cultures.

What they lacked were early notions of ‘race science’ and concomitant ideas about human rights that developed in Europe. “In the Native view, as in many African societies, the opposite of slavery was not freedom: the opposite of slavery was kinship.”

Enslaving the outsider was fine, no matter their race, a backhanded sort of equality that is also present in the Muslim rules about who can be enslaved. Equality was nonexistent in the pre-Columbian Americas. Mississippian culture was in fact “an era of unprecedented social inequality” in the American southeast, according to Snyder.

Nor was urbanization to blame, for suburban settlements “had much greater rates of mortality than palisaded capitals such as Moundville. About 10 percent of those at outlying sites suffered violent death due to scalping, cranial fractures, severed limbs, and embedded arrows; they were sometimes interred at mass graves.”

I am not just picking on Native Americans, either. Massacre and slaughter are endemic to pre-literate humanity, and we have abundant evidence from anthropology that inter-group violence is normal in the state of nature. Modernity is not necessary for violent conflict. If anything, rates of violence decline with civilization.

Homicide rates among the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert from 1920 to 1955 “was four times that of the United States and twenty to eighty times that of major industrial nations during the 1950s and 1960s.”3 Raiding, feuding, and even frequent battles fit the Hobbesian formulation of prehistory as “nasty, brutish, and short”.

Humans everywhere come from the same violent stock. Excluding any single ethnic or racial group from this legacy is always special pleading.

“Cross-cultural research on warfare has established that although some societies that did not engage in war or did so extremely rarely, the overwhelming majority of known societies (90 to 95 percent) have been involved in this activity,” the late Lawrence Keeley observes. Ironically, colonialism accounts for most of the societies that gave up warfare.

Keeley’s book War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage offers the single most useful analysis of why the academy continues to reject the evidence of a violent past.

“Anthropologists were again directly confronted with the realities of warfare among small-scale societies” during the two decades after World War II, as they observed Stone Age warfare in the wild. Unable to analyze what they saw without the prism of modernity, these academics “revived the mythologizing impulses that have invariably attached themselves to this debate.”

Those “mythologizing impulses” are inherently political. When anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon published Yąnomamö: The Fierce People in 1968, his exhaustive study of the Amazonian tribe was rejected by most of his profession for allegedly ‘harming’ native people.

Chagnon linked violence to reproductive success, framing it as a form of natural selection, as he calculated that unokai (killers) had more wives and children than non-killers. His findings were attacked as deterministic and culturally biased. In 2000, journalist Patrick Tierney accused Chagnon of eugenics.

Inquiries by the National Academy of Sciences, Chagnon’s university, and the academic process have debunked the most extreme allegations of Tierney. Nevertheless, Chagnon was barred from Yanomami territory by Venezuela, faced early retirement pressures, and became an academic pariah in his field for the crime of correctly describing high intra-tribal homicide rates.

Above all, this cancel mob was upset by the word “fierce” in the title of the book. Chagnon had supposedly dehumanized a group of humans by framing them as warlike instead of pacifistic.

With a few prominent exceptions, academia actively resists the truth that humanity can be fierce, that fierceness is inherently human. This magical thinking does not preserve civilization or promote peace. On the contrary, denial of humanity’s fierce nature creates dangerous gaps in the prescriptions of educated elites.

Pacifism is a lie, and pacifistic views of the past are hazardous. They make war more likely, not less. Societies that lose the ability to defend themselves are doomed to be conquered by less ‘advanced’ and ‘progressive’ societies. We have the bones to prove it.

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