Israeli paratrooper near the Mitla Pass, 1958. Read on, it'll make sense.
Donald Trump is about to become what he never wanted to be: Jimmy Carter. Held hostage by Iran. And it was all voluntary.
Chris Christie.
We've never seen anything like it. It's an existential defeat. We're never going to recover as a country from this.
This is our 1958 Suez Crisis.
We've lost wars before, of course, in spite of what Americans like to believe. The War of 1812 was a loss. The Korean War ended in a stalemate, which certainly isn't a win, if it's not a loss. The Vietnam War was a flat out loss. And the war in Afghanistan, which didn't have to be a loss, became one as Donald Trump surrendered to the Taliban. So, we've lost wars before.
But not like this.
People may be tempted to draw parallels to Vietnam, which was a really bad loss. It was touch and go if the country would recover from for about a decade, and with the complete failure of Operation Eagle Claw, the attempt to get the hostages out by force in 1980, it really looked like we'd faded beyond repair.
Importantly, however, the United States didn't lose any allied because of Vietnam, in no small part because it didn't ask for any to participate in the war. Some did, such as South Korea.*
The Reagan Administration, which I frequently criticize here, turned things around. It rebuilt the military and made a calculation that it could spend the Soviet Union to death in the Cold War, which it did. The Soviets collapsed and the Cold War ended, a major American victory. . . without fighting.
The fighting we've done since Vietnam has been impressive, right up until now. And that's the military that Reagan built. A military designed to take on the USSR. It still basically is. It's a big war military. So was our military in Vietnam.
In Vietnam the military learned that it wasn't good at asymmetric wars. And it finally learned the lesson that should have been clear in 1945 that airpower can't win a war.
In came Trump, and Hegseth, who have proven incompetent.
In a few short months they've lost the war to a second rate power, destroyed our relationship with our allies, eliminated our position in the globe as a superpower, emboldened the Chinese and probably the Russians, and made war with China, which we now stand a good chance of losing, inevitable.
There were signs that we were in trouble already, but they were mostly economic. Between 1945 and the 2000s the US had lost control of its budget. When the Cold War ended we did not return to a rationally sized military, even though we did go to a smaller one. We maintained quasi colonial connections with some countries, notably those in the Middle East, which we did not need to. At home we let education decline.
In short, we lost the self discipline and sense of purpose a democratic nation should have. And that lead to the election of Donald Trump, twice. And in his second term, Trump has so accelerated American decline it leads to rational questions on whether or not he's a foreign agent.
Whatever he is, Donald Trump and his defense secretary Pete Hegseth aren't students. They're not smart people. They certainly aren't students of history.
Indeed, if they had, they might have realized this has happened before.
Following the Second World War the United Kingdom and France retained claims to being wold powers, indeed superpowers. But the end of that is now clear in retrospect. Both were losing control of their colonial empires rapidly. The United Kingdom retained food rationing until 1954. Both nations still fought colonial wars, although the French could really only do it with American help, which was only reluctantly given, if given at all.
In 1956 Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal. The UK, France and Israel, the latter of which had its own issues with Egypt, decided to militarily intervene. Israel attacked first, on October 29, with the objective of re-opening the Straits of Tiran and the Gulf of Aqaba. The United Kingdom and France joined in on October 311 seeking to depose Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser and regain control of the Suez Canal. France and the UK expected the Eisenhower Administration to support it, but it didn't.
The net result was that Israel gained in the war, although the US forced it to give back the parts of the Sinai it too. The US and France proved incapable of carrying on without US support.
Israeli paratroopers near the Parker Memorial, Mitla Pass. The paratroopers here are quipped with K98k rifles, likely Czechoslovakian built, although they could also be World War Two German production. By אברהם ורד / IDF Spokesperson's Unit, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33261678
In short, Israel got what it wanted from the war. France and the United Kingdom were shown to be impotent without the US, and their status as global powers was severely retarded.
Sound familiar? A major power that has Allies acts without them, and loses. Those Allies regard them as now being second rate.
Just what happened to us against Iran, except the fall is so much more severe.
So, where from here?
Trump can't get us out of Iran. We can't build anti missile missiles quickly enough. Iran won't open the strait. We can't make the open it.
We have only two choices.
The first one is to mount a full-scale ground invasion of Iran. Completely setting aside the immorality of the current war and the immorality of escalating an immoral war, militarily, that's actually the only thing that makes sense. If you were playing (the nonexistent) Avalon Hill United States v. Iran hex and counter board game, that's what you'd do. You'd marshal ground forces in Kuwait (and maybe Iraq), call up National Guard divisions, and launch a multi division invasion.
We could still win such a war. The casualties would be massive, 50,000 dead or more, and the net result would make us a colonial administrator in Iran for at least a decade.
And we have to do it, if we're going to, soon. Basically in no more than a month. After that, our supply of anti missile AAA will be so depleted we will not be able to marshal in the region.
It couldn't be ignored as a real war, however.
Trump would have to finally go to Congress for authorization. If he didn't, he'd be successfully impeached without a doubt. And Congress is not going to authorize such a war. So he won't.
Probably.
He could, and as he has no regard for the law at all, muster the multi division strength force necessary and launch the invasion wholly illegally. That's really risky for him, however, and he's very unlikely to take that sort of risk. If he did it, he'd be impeached.
The other choice is to surrender. At this point, with the Strait closed, that's a defeat. Indeed, it's worse than a defeat as while it would end the fighting, it wouldn't repair the de facto state of war between the countries.
So a formal surrender is the only option.
And that will be a political disaster for Trump.
It also cements the geopolitical disaster for the United States.
Just as France and the UK went into Egypt without support from the US, and went into decline thereafter, we've gone into Iran's skies without support from our allies, including the UK and France. They've moved on without us. At one time, they looked to us. . . now we'll look to them.
For the time being, however, we're hostages to Iran. Iran knows it. This will just drag on and on while we deplete our weapons stores. It won't resolve at all until after the November election. It won't be possible to ignore it after that.
Sic transit Gloria Mundi.
The US as a superpower, 1945-2026. Cause of death. Neglect, hubris, and the vanity and stupidity of Donald J. Trump.
August 12, 2026
Headline in the CST:
Iran has said the Strait will remain closed u ntil the US accepts its terms.
August 14, 2026
The US and Iran both claimed to control the Straits of Hormuz yesterday, which means that the US doesn't control them. Pete Hegseth claimed that the US can remain deployed in the region's waters indefinitely.
Iran has very clearly determined not to enter into any deal with Donny, at least one that isn't abject humiliating defeat. And they don't have to. They're winning the war. At this point, the only way the US can actually win would be a ground invasion, which appears unlikely so far.
The USS Abraham Lincoln is headed home to be replaced by the USS George Washington. We wrote on this story yesterday:
There's more to this than meets the eye, but what it is we don't really know. One sailor attempting to leap overboard, which is now acknowledged, would actually not be that unusual in a deployment. It was two that we know of, but one was with a life vest. It's clear that morale problems have become severe. The ship hasn't had a port call in over 200 days, and that appears to be part of it. Ships have had long deployments before, however, which raises questions.
Part of the aspect of this is, however, that a nuclear submarine can stay out indefinitely. Oil fired ships like those of the Second World War could deploy for extremely long times, but they would make port calls.
August 15, 2026
The always empathetic Donald Trump:
Reporter: Family members of service members are concerned about conditions on the LIncoln.
Trump: No they’re not.
Reporter: Has the deployment gone on too long?
Trump: No. Not nearly long enough.
August 16, 2026
This strait will be opened and closed only under Iran’s command, and so long as you do not accept the reality of defeat and stop indulging in fantasies, Iran will
continue to enforce the blockade.
Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi August 15, 2026.
According to a NYT article behind a paywall, so I wasn't able to read it, part of the USS Abraham Lincoln's problems stem from Iran taking out a US Navy installation in Bahrain at the beginning of the war, requiring the Navy to switch it's regional logistical center to Diego Garcia. If that's correct, it's another example of who the US was caught really flat footed when it started this war with Israel.
August 17, 2026
CNN reports that there have in fact been multiple attempts to jump overboard from the USS Abraham Lincoln and ties low morale to there being no defined mission.
It's unlikely, we'd note, that the morale problem and resupply problems impact just one ship.
In an interview on Fox Trump threatened to "bomb the shit out of Oman" if it somehow interferes with whatever it is that we're going.
Reports are growing that Gulf states have become increasingly irritated with Trump.
Footnotes:
*Australia and New Zealand fought in the war, but very rarely noted is that Australia had indicated it was going into Vietnam whether or not the US did and its somewhat responsible for the US going into the country. New Zealand participated as it felt obligated to Australia.
Last edition:
Labels: 2020s, 2026, Chris Christie, Iran, Israel, King Donald's War, Oman, Rudyard Kipling, Straits of Hormuz, The roles of men and women, The Second Trump Administration, United States, United States and Israel v. Iran, Wars
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