Trump’s Iran Move: For Dummies

The attention economy is not our friend

I. Drenched

I’m writing this brief thumbnail on Iran because I’m finally sodden from the bucketsful of bad takes raining down. We are drenched in bad takes.

Of course the Left is making their usual rabid, anti-Western screeching noises. I’m not talking about them here. The American Left is not what it was in the 20^th century. It’s now basically a mass psychosis. I mean that very literally. I’m not going to even bother.

What irks me is the Right, the people who voted for Trump. Many of them really don’t get it. A huge swathe. They seem to think the world is like Netflix or the internet—that the thing they’re watching can’t finally emerge from the screen to bite them. So they’re free to just randomly ascribe, according to the tenor of their obsessions.

There are two basic readings that keep appearing, both inadequate to the situation.

First there’s:

He PROMISED not to do neocon nation-building. Now look at this. WTF!

Then there’s:

The Jews wanted it, so he did it. All US governments are just PUPPETS of Israel, and now you’re a puppet too, Trump! Betrayal of MAGA!

The first reading is understandable, but anachronistic. Trump didn’t care about the John Boltons during his first term, and he still doesn’t. This Iran move is not a misty-eyed “All men desire freedom” nation-building shakedown. I see zero evidence Trump is morphing into George W. Bush.

Unlike Iraq, this is not a war of choice. Any sane American leader would see the situation for what it is: they’d see both the window for action and the need to hit now or face a much worse scenario down the road. This is not nation-building for Halliburton.

The second reading—“It’s the JOOOS”—is clearly based on a mistaken understanding of the board Trump is looking at. Whatever you think of US-Israeli relations, I don’t care. The board in front of Trump’s face is not Bibi Netanyahu’s board. They overlap, but are different. Trump is looking at the American board.

Yes, the operation could go south in many ways. It’s the riskiest move Trump’s ever made. Since most of his voters don’t want it, he’s angering many of them. Obviously. So why did he do it?

It’s a combination of factors. If you’re grinding your teeth about Bush & Co. or if your every third thought is about the JOOOS, you’re probably not going to see those factors. But that you also pretend they’re not real—well, it’s the screen thing again.

Put that damn phone down and listen to me.

I see I’ve just written “if your every third thought.” That’s being very generous in terms of estimate. The nonstop focus on JOOOS from some of you is frankly pathetic and fake and bordering on psychotic. Put your fucking podcasts and rage play down for a while and look at the globe why not. The world is not a boys’ version of Instagram where the meaning of life is chasing attention from fellow ragers.

Nick? Nick who?

I’m going to state six facts that make the present moment different from the days of yore, and that justify Trump’s action in a strategic register:

1) Iran really is, by best expert analysis, very near having nukes. They’ve 400-plus kilos of uranium refined to 60%, and it’s likely, if they’re allowed to return to refining, they could get it to weapons grade before 2028. This is unacceptable. If you don’t understand why, you should study the question a bit. It’s not that Iran will use these weapons—though they might—but that they’d give the regime enormous sway in their neighborhood and beyond. All Gulf Arab states would immediately scramble to get nukes too. You would yourself if you were them. This fact—i.e. the clock ticking down to Iran having nukes—is new.

2) Iran is weaker right now than it’s been in a very very long time. Israel (who some of you hate) has done most of the heavy lifting here, wiping out both Hamas and Hezbollah, Iran’s main proxies. Syria is no longer in the loop either. So the hyena crouching in Tehran is finally wounded, and you have a choice. Let it recover, or go in for the kill. If you’re Barack Obama, you’ll probably call in a vet and send the bill to US taxpayers. “We can feed it veal. A little champagne. To pacify it.” But that’s another story. Iran’s relative weakness is new.

3) For more than a decade US leadership has wisely talked of the need to “pivot to Asia.” The reason we haven’t been able to do so is too much of our military force must be parked near the ayatollahs, just to make sure key shipping lanes stay open. If we didn’t have this permanent burden, we could reposition. Of course our main current rival loves that we’re more or less stuck policing the Mideast.

4) Speaking of which, China is very clearly signaling its intent to move militarily on Taiwan. This was not so even a few years ago. China is regularly conducting invasion drills, and President Xi has given a timeline in which he wants his military ready. Whether you like it or not, Taiwan (and thus Taiwan Semiconductor) falling to Beijing would be a disaster for America, for all the most vibrant sectors of the US economy. We Americans simply cannot produce the high-end chips the Taiwanese can. My thinking is—even if we were to get the blueprints, some of which we already have, we still wouldn’t be able to produce them. The Taiwanese are Supreme Wizards of this art, while Intel is still grilling hamburgers. American corporate culture ensures that the burger smell will be around for years. For the near future, then, preventing war in the Taiwan Strait is top priority. For MAGA.

5) Key to preventing this war is deterrence. The Chinese leadership must be convinced that such a move is too risky. For them to make any such move with confidence, they’d need to have secure black market oil supplies, not to mention allies who might help them project force elsewhere, complicating US response. Because once they launched on Taiwan, much of the West and the Arab world would impose crippling sanctions. China now has a solid supply from its ally Russia, but its really dirt-cheap supplies were provided by …. yes, Venezuela and Iran. You may have noticed that Trump also recently moved to decapitate the Venezuelan government. Probably because the JOOOS told him to, yes? No. It’s because of the board Trump is looking at: the board on which US success or failure will be determined for the coming decade. The main rival on that board is China, and China’s main proxy in South America was Venezuela. It’s main proxy in the Mideast is Iran. Does this not make sense to you?

6) The BRICs have a fond dream that someday soon they’ll see an opportunity to dislodge the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency. This is not an immediate threat, but many analysts see that we’re getting uncomfortably close (depending on exigencies) to where such a move might become feasible. If you understand what the petrodollar is, you’ll understand why it’s not good to have our main BRIC rival able to apply pressure on the main oil producers in the Mideast through its Shia proxy government in Tehran. This is also relatively new, as an emerging threat.

These are the six factors that make Trump’s move something other than nation-building and something other than being Israel’s puppet. These are the factors that explain his decision as strategically coherent.

Meanwhile Tucker Carlson is drunk on what Candace is drinking.

Yes, it’s a troublesome question what kind of state might emerge should Trump pound the remnants of Iran’s Shia regime into dust, but that is now a secondary question. Whatever emerges, it cannot be allowed to possess nuclear weapons. And again, none of this status quo held when cranky John McCain was around. Some of it didn’t even hold when “Joe Biden” was president. It’s a new situation that any responsible American leader would feel compelled to address.

Yes, this move represents a threat to MAGA. But Trump is not averse to risks. He’s taking his responsibility as president seriously, regardless of how it plays with the base. That’s what a leader has to do sometimes.

I of course think bombing Iran is a last resort. The Trump team sees this last resort condition has been fulfilled, as regards the mullahs’ nuke program. More, no sane American wants war between the US and China. They want the basic status quo to hold. Trump is in fact pushing the envelope here. But he’s doing so in part because he sees his rival pushing the envelope. That and because he sees that his predecessors—Dubya, Barack, and Joe—really couldn’t tell an envelope from their ass.

Trump’s predecessors let the US’ key rival move into position in Africa, Latin America, the Mideast, all while they profiteered or bloviated or drooled ice cream spittle and blinked at the lights.

Trump’s gambit may not work. But at least look at what it is.

No I do not think Trump is playing 4D chess. But he’s playing chess.

II. Lion: “I don’t want to get up. Should I get up? Shit I have to get up.”

None of us wants the US to be the world’s policeman, but we still live on a globe interconnected in such a way that complete isolationism is nonsense. Sorry, it’s nonsense. Many of you, to read your takes, I’m convinced you’re not actually living on the planet I live on. You live in a small screen you carry around in your pocket. I get it. It’s a temptation for all of us. But it leads to distorted priorities.

In terms of understanding the real, the attention economy is not our friend.

Go ahead and tell me the six points I lay out above are not significant strategic facts that make 2026 different from 2021 or 2014. Go ahead and tell me you think these facts aren’t relevant to American security and prosperity heading into the late 2020s.

All my points so far are in a strategic or Realpolitik register. I’m laying out the logic of what Trump is doing, in those terms. But there remains the question of whether what Trump is doing is just or right. Many on the Right are arguing that it’s not, and I sympathize with their position. I agree that a nation is a sovereign entity, and that a more powerful nation doesn’t simply have the “right” to invade it. Here we’re paralleling the discourse of the RBIO, the rules-based international order.

The Trump administration would say that they’re not in fact disrespecting nations, but responding to nations that themselves have broken the RBIO. With Venezuela, that argument seems weaker than it does in relation to Iran. The US may (in my mind rightly) take out what are clearly drug-trafficking boats in whatever way it chooses. To take a leader from his bed is a bit different. Even if the Venezuelan people end up better off for it.

Many recognize that we seem to be returning to cut-and-dried Realpolitik, and some have referred to a return to the Great Game. If this is right, if the RBIO is defunct, is that the US’ fault? One might argue it is, but one might also argue that the shift is unavoidable.

Any rules-based order must be backed by force. That’s undeniable. The UN has proved that it cannot play this role. It’s failed repeatedly, it is basically a speech-making forum in which powers scold each other, then get scolded back. It does not project force to back up its speechifying.

There was a notion in the 1990s that the US, having won the Cold War, could itself maintain the RBIO with the help of allies. But the 1990s “end of history” assumptions about what kind of order would begin to dominate globally proved false. China lifted millions out of poverty and attained major power status without becoming a liberal democracy, proving the “end of history” thesis wrong. Afghanistan and Iraq offered very expensive examples of populations who in fact didn’t want to become like Americans. Who’d have thunk, right?

The “end of history” notion, in brief, was culturally myopic, and the RBIO was suddenly revealed to be not a smooth highway getting smoother and smoother, but a permanently thorny and expensive headache.

The Trump administration believes that the RBIO cannot be sustained by the US alone. Since no one else will sustain it, the globe must return to a more natural order: multipolar, state-to-state, transactional.

Many Americans see this as cynical, and they’re possibly right. But these same people mostly don’t see what the Trump team sees: that there’s no choice. Forty trillion dollars of US debt means this status quo will break soon enough. For Trump, it’s wiser to shift to a different model than it is to collapse.

All this impinges on the fundamental political questions. Questions as to what the state is, what the word international means, what countries owe each other and what they don’t. We’re in a transition period, and we would be in any case, even without Trump.

Finally, re: the Lion, and how good times make soft men and we’re probably it, el gato malo has some things to say. Everyone who knows me knows I loathe cats, but the gato is so sharp I stifle my aversion in order to read him. He gets at the recurring nature of the hard choices we face. He covers some of the same ground I did, but as far as the choices, he does it far better.

So read "The Iranian Ink Blot". You can thank me by subscribing before you click over.