Subject: Re: I think he genuinely doesn't understand
He has put himself in a no win situation in Iran. He may or may not yet realize that. I suspect he has an inkling that he’s in a weak position, as he’s getting more strident, which is a bully’s go-to tactic when things are bad.

The big risk is that he will resort to nuclear weapons to “win” in Iran. That would be a disaster of epic proportions.

It seems like he's actually more likely to just declare victory and go home:

“We are getting very close to meeting our objectives as we consider winding down our great Military efforts in the Middle East with respect to the Terrorist Regime of Iran,” Trump said in a Truth Social post.

The president went on to cite the objectives as degrading Iranian missile capability, launches “and everything else pertaining to them,” destroying the country’s defense industrial base, eliminating its navy and air force, never allowing Iran to get close to nuclear capability, as well as protecting U.S. allies in the region, including Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Kuwait.

Trump went on to address the Strait of Hormuz, saying nations that use the vital shipping lane will have to guard and police it.

“The United States does not! If asked, we will help these Countries in their Hormuz efforts, but it shouldn’t be necessary once Iran’s threat is eradicated. Importantly, it will be an easy Military Operation for them,” he said.

https://thehill.com/homenews/a...

Which...wow. Really? So we mobilize one of the largest deployments of U.S. military might in a generation, and we thereupon completely: i) fail to secure the most strategically important part of the military theater (even though it would be "an easy Military Operation"); ii) fail to dislodge the regime; and iii) fail to take any action that would materially impede them from restarting their nuclear program. All for the low low price of many tens of billions of dollars and alienating nearly all of the countries in the Gulf were trying to build a new security edifice around (so much for the Abraham Accords model) by exposing them to massive threats without consulting them. Oh - and as an added bonus, we've almost certainly increased the nuclear threat posed by Iran; after all, we've completely proven the hardliners' theory that the U.S. and Israel will not be deterred by a sub-weapon threshold, and that they need to race to an actual nuke in order to secure their borders.

Trump will declare it a victory and all his followers will oblige, praising his masterful stroke of accomplishing....whatever it is, without it taking years. We will have eliminated the stuff that never really posed a threat to anyone (like their navy and conventional Air Force), and some of the stuff that's exceptionally easy to replace (like their missile program and some of their drone inventory). And this will be treated as if it was an amazing accomplishment, even though we're almost certainly worse of than if we hadn't done this at all.

A terrible result, if he ends up doing it. The only good news is that it might be the least bad outcome, because the only real alternative to going home but calling it a victory might be a long grinding ground war. We failed to achieve Venezuela 2.0 in the very early days (either because we inadvertently killed anyone we might be able to bargain with or because there was never any such person to begin with). The Iranian precautions to protect the regime proved too durable for us to quickly overcome by killing leadership, so the regime wouldn't collapse. The recent Israeli assessment that any civilian uprising would simply be massacred by the IGRC rather than succeeding probably put the kibosh on any last hopes of the regime falling that way. Without the regime falling, there's little chance that we can defend Hormuz without putting boots on the Iranian coast (and even then?).