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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   26571 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 23, 2026

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"He didn't have the choke on me. I could still breathe in little gasps! I just tapped out because of the choke."

Trump himself has said, when justifying the peace deal:

“We run out of reserves at about four weeks,” Trump said in France while at the Group of Seven summit, discussing the recent memorandum of understanding with Iran. “You know, there are reserves all over the world, and we would really run out, and there’ll be a time when you wouldn’t be able to get it.” He said it would be “bedlam” if the oil ran out. “What this does is it allows the ships to go,” he said of the Iran deal. “If we keep bombing, those ships won’t be going.”

And again:

"I didn't want to see economic catastrophe. If you kept this going, that could have happened," Trump told reporters in the lakeside resort of Evian-les-Bains. The Republican president said he did not want to be like Herbert Hoover, who was U.S. president in October ⁠1929 when the stock market crashed, triggering what became known as the Great Depression. "All I know is every time we talked about the possibility of peace, the stock market shot up like a rocket ship," Trump said. "Every time we said something negative, like, guess what, we're not going to be able to settle, it would go down very big."

Trump himself has made one of the clearest statements he's made about the war, saying that the strait of Hormuz was insufficiently open. We can get pedantic about what exactly "closed" means or whether we just needed gutsier ship captains if you want, but I don't think that really matters in assessing the success of "America" or "Trump & Hegseth" as strategic actors. Trump stated directly: the restrictions placed on the strait of Hormuz worked to force Trump to make a deal.

A general or an admiral can claim a "stabbed in the back theory" that "we didn't lose we left" that "we won the war on the battlefield and the politicians lost it at the negotiating table" or that "the civilians followed the traitors at home and didn't support the war enough."

A politician, a POTUS, can't claim that, because rallying public support is kind of his whole job. Coordinating with international insurance companies is within his purview. The home front is his war. Trump can't whine that we were winning the war if it wasn't for public opinion and the markets, public opinion and the markets is his job. The buck stops here. He needs to go to war with the public he has, not the public he wishes he had.

Trump and Hegseth made the specific decision not to attempt to build a public case for going to war with Iran, not to coordinate with international partners, not to plan ahead for the business consequences of the war. They chose speed and surprise over those things. That turned out to be a bad decision.

Trump himself has said, when justifying the peace deal

Are the things Trump claims when he is justifying his actions trustworthy or not?

We can get pedantic about what exactly "closed" means

That's...why I'm here.

I don't think that really matters in assessing the success of "America" or "Trump & Hegseth" as strategic actors.

The context of the conversation had to do with achieving war aims which is a separate-but-related question, since achieving war aims can actually be really bad if your war aims are strategically stupid. The ability to achieve war aims is a question of military capability, and whether or not military capability is exercised successfully is a different question from whether or not it is being exercised wisely.

So: there's a difference between the economic considerations of Iran's ability to threaten transiting ships and their military capabilities to threaten ships. In a discussion about Iran's military capabilities Iran's military capabilities matter. And their military capabilities are sufficient to credibly threaten ships passing through the strait, but insufficient to reliably follow through on that threat. This indicates that they have imperfect ability to complete the kill chain required to strike ships transiting the strait, which is more directly relevant to a discussion of Iran's military capabilities than the degree to which civilian shipping is willing to take on the risks of a transit. For people who think about conflicts in terms of things like kill chains, sensor webs, and material capabilities, that's an important distinction that tells you something about the military capabilities of Iran (and the United States).

It's the difference between saying that German U-boats targeted Allied shipping, imposing a grievous economic cost, and saying that they "closed the Atlantic for the duration of World War Two." It is entirely possible to point out the success of unrestricted submarine warfare without exaggerating its effectiveness.

Trump stated directly: the restrictions placed on the strait of Hormuz worked to force Trump to make a deal.

I did not claim otherwise. You said things that were either untrue or, I am arguing, misleading. I think you can make your case without doing that.

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