đź”’ Unstoppable Farce Meets Immovable Object
I haven’t written about the Iran War before now because the whole thing just infuriates me, but now I stew in bafflement at its pointless, brutal, stupidity. The most concise way that it can be summed up for future historians is this classic tweet from 2014:
But the topic of “future historians” is part of the trouble, here, because what kind of historians are we talking about? The Trump administration is a Gish gallop writ large onto the pages of history itself. How are people going to reliably document the absolute relentless assault of evil and incompetence that assails our media landscape each hour of every cursed, cursed day?
Our present history dilutes and spoils our understanding of our past history and wrecks our ability to teach its lessons. How can the youth of today possibly take the Cuban Missile Crisis seriously when, just this past Tuesday, the President of the United States vowed to eliminate the entire population of Iran in an escalating series of angrier, more unhinged, profanity-laced social media rants?
It’s just an observable fact that Donald Trump has been growing less lucid and coherent as time goes on, so it wasn’t a stretch for people to worry that, by threatening to kill Iran’s “whole civilization” he meant he was going to launch nukes. In fact, I think a huge chunk of us were in a really uncomfortable superposition of panic and exhaustion, knowing that the man is prone to extreme hyperbole some of the time when he’s kidding, and deadly serious violent overreaction some of the time when he’s angry, and there’s no way of knowing which it is because you can’t measure both his mood and his sanity at the same time. It’s the Quantum Uncertainty Principle of President Bugshit.
The Cuban Missile Crisis is recorded as the closest the world ever came to nuclear war, and that confrontation was between two extremely level-headed, though ideologically opposed, adults: Kennedy and Khrushchev. They hated everything each other represented but they talked it out. How can history possibly rank Tuesday, April 7th, 2026, alongside that crisis? This one played out between, on one side, probably the most fanatic and powerful fundamentalist theocracy on Earth, and on the other side, the Republic of Iran.
Iran was nowhere near creating a nuclear weapon, if it even intended to get one. It is mindblowing that anyone fell for the “we need to invade the gulf because they have WMDs” trick again. They didn’t even come up with a different excuse! If I can quote George W. Bush’s recitation of the famous Tennessee (Texas but probably Tennessee) saying: “Fool me once, shame on, shame on you, you fool me, you can’t get fooled again.” But apparently you can get fooled again, after all.
Iran doesn’t have nukes, but they do have friends with nukes, and that’s the problem. They have at least an on-the-books alliance with every nuclear adversary that America has. Who knows how badly China or Russia would react if America used a nuke? Hell, what might North Korea or Pakistan do?
Look I’m not a fan of the Iranian government, to say the least: The Iranian regime is a monstrous and violent autocracy that regularly kills its own citizens for slights as minor as peaceful protest or even wearing the wrong clothing. It funds militant groups all over west Asia; Hezbollah, the Houthis, the Islamic Jihad. It is the bully of the Islamic world. There are many ways of dealing with bullies, but you know what you can’t do? Bully them.
That’s literally all that Trump knows how to do. He’s never done a deal in his life. He bullies people. Now, he thinks he can bully nations. There’s a reason we usually hire politicians to run countries rather than middle-child nepo babies born into New York real estate empires run by abusive patriarchs: Even politicians who are bullies know that there are people who you can’t bully. Trump has been so insulated all of his life that he’s never encountered anyone he couldn’t bully.
Now that he’s the president of the biggest bully country in the world, he’s running into this problem all the time and he just can’t figure it out. Minutes before his threatened obliteration of a large portion of the Asian continent, when it became clear that Iran wasn’t blinking, he backed down, announced a ceasefire, and declared himself the winner—acquiescing, it seems, to most of Iran’s demands.
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