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Iran: No Plan. No Allies. No End in Sight.

Per Bloomberg, oil is around $112/barrel, Asia is experiencing scarcity of oil and gas, the Dow Jones is down almost 5,000 points from its high, the Strait of Hormuz remains closed and under Iranian control, and American forces are racing to find a downed American fighter pilot before the Iranians can find the pilot first. Meanwhile, the Felon and his sycophants - including Pete Hegseth who is unfit and far in over his head and firing generals based on either their skin color or perhaps their unwillingness to endanger more American servicemembers - have no end game/exit strategy from the Iran war that the Felon launched as a matter of choice.  The Felon's prime time address earlier in the week did little to instill confidence and his proposal to increase defense spending by 40% while slashing domestic programs, including Medicaid and Medicare will only further harm struggling Americans and large swaths of the MAGA base.  The overall take away is that there was no thought through plan for the war, warnings about the impact on oil prices were ignored, and long time allies have been insulted and alienated and, not surprisingly, are not rushing to save the Felon's very large ass from the mess of his own creation.  A piece in the New York Times looks at the mess now facing the nation - and by extension, the world. Here are highlights:

[The Felon] President Trump stood at a lectern on Wednesday night, in his first prime-time address to the nation since the war in Iran began, and declared the monthlong air campaign to be a success.

“We are on track to complete all of America’s military objectives shortly — very shortly,” he said. “We are going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks. We’re going to bring them back to the Stone Ages, where they belong.”

For all his tough triumphalism, however, the {Felon] president failed to provide any evidence of a plan to resolve the two crises that now define the war and that have the potential to reshape the balance of power in the Middle East and the world economy for years to come.

The first crisis is the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas passed before Iran’s military choked it off last month. The second is the lurking threat of Iran’s estimated 970 pounds of highly enriched uranium, believed to be buried at one or two sites in the country.

Walking away from these problems would leave the world a much more volatile place than it was on Feb. 28, when Mr. Trump joined Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel in attacking Iran. If the  [Felon]president does have a plan to resolve them, he didn’t reveal it. If he doesn’t, he’s leaving to chance their impact on America.

It has been just over a month since [the Felon] Mr. Trump authorized the largest American aerial bombardment mission in a generation. He did so seemingly without preparation for what to do if Tehran blocked off the strait, a danger that advisers have warned presidents about for years. He apparently made little or no attempt to build an international coalition. Our Gulf allies have spent the last month defending against incoming missiles while scrambling to stabilize a spiraling energy market and stave off a humanitarian catastrophe. The fighting has killed thousands of civilians across Iran, Lebanon and the Gulf and displaced millions more across the region.

Oil prices shot up and stock markets tumbled on Thursday after Mr. Trump did not offer any end in sight to the conflict, nor any plan to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.  . . . . Iran has now demonstrated de facto control over much of the global economy. Its Parliament is considering whether to formalize the charging of fees for passage, and on Wednesday, an Iranian official warned on social media that the United States would not regain access to the strait.

The other major problem is the nuclear question. After ripping up the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, [the Felon] Mr. Trump has tried but failed to reach another solution to address the country’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium, the key component for a nuclear weapon. That prompted the president to join Israel in a complex attack on the program in June. The stockpile of uranium — which Mr. Trump called “nuclear dust” in his speech, but is in gaseous form in real life — has been enriched to 60 percent purity, one small step from the 90 percent needed for the most powerful warheads.

Mr. Trump apparently intends to leave Iran in control of enough enriched uranium to make around 10 bombs. It was an astonishing demonstration of indifference that having conducted bombing campaigns against Iran twice primarily to crush its nuclear ambitions, the president is now prepared simply to walk away. Mr. Trump said again on Wednesday that he “will never allow” the regime in Tehran to get the bomb, but the world cannot have confidence in that assurance unless that material is seized, destroyed or made subject to international inspection.

Whatever quick fix Mr. Trump sought when he launched this conflict alongside Israel, he’s now facing the potential to inflict strategic consequences not only on the United States’ economy and its national security but also on its allies. He has publicly voiced displeasure over Europe’s unwillingness to send warships and attack planes to help free up the strait. That scorn for NATO allies wasn’t explicit during the address, but he alluded to it when he urged unnamed countries to “build up some delayed courage” to resolve the energy crisis. “Go to the strait and just take it,” he said, as if it were so easy.

America’s European allies have thus far determined that it’s not worth the financial and personnel risk to get deeply involved. It’s an uncomfortable feeling to watch an American president, the leader of broad military coalitions since World War II, go it alone. Perhaps the allies’ reaction would have been different if Mr. Trump hadn’t continually upbraided them over their military spending, or repeatedly threatened to take Greenland, or recklessly authorized a sweeping air campaign without alerting them.

“[The Felon] President Trump has done everything he can to isolate the United States from the rest of the world,” said Chuck Hagel, a former defense secretary and Republican senator from Nebraska who is a Vietnam War veteran. “Choosing to go into this conflict alone was self-destructive. He’s about to learn that wars have consequences.”

The conflict also caught many Gulf allies by surprise, placing them in the middle of a war they didn’t choose. The nations hosting U.S. forces — Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Iraq and Bahrain — have all been targeted by Iranian drones and missiles. They’re now forced to question their reliance on the United States and the partnership they formed with Washington in hopes of bringing peace to the region.

The question of whether to go to war with the regime in Tehran has been weighed for over a half-century by eight presidents. . . . . Two key things prompted previous commanders in chief to opt for diplomacy over war: the bloody violence that they were advised was certain to follow and the stranglehold Iran has on the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps has spent decades developing weapons and military capabilities aimed at halting commercial traffic in the strait in the time of crisis.

[F]or now the core issues — Iranian control over the strait and its sizable stockpile of nuclear material — remain unresolved.

It’s not hard to understand why the president is tempted to walk away from these intractable problems: There aren’t easy answers to them. As the war enters its second month, it’s becoming increasingly apparent why Mr. Trump didn’t try to get buy-in ahead of time from allies, Congress or the American people for his war in Iran. He sold an unsellable war by not selling it at all — and now he’s belatedly looking for help footing the bill

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Trump Is Silencing Warning Signals of an Economic Crash

Oil and gas prices continue to rise - late yesterday on the spot market hit $141.00/barrel - due to the Felon's war of choice in Iran and mortgage rates along with over consumer prices are rising. Poll after poll show that the majority of Americans give the Felon a strongly failing grade his handling of the economy and the only ones benefiting from the Felon's/GOP's policies are the billionaire set and large corporations pushing for more and more deregulation, including deregulation of the the financial industries.  Think back to the 2008 financial meltdown and what could possibly go wrong economically? With most Americans realizing that the economy is headed south for them, one of the solutions of the  Felon's regime is to gut governmental agencies tasked with warning of economic problems and protecting consumers from unscrupulous and voracious lenders and others.  At some point, the situation may become so bad that we see a reprise of the 2008 disaster. A piece in the New Republic that looks at the efforts to remove financial guardrails at a time when they may be needed the most, especially with there being no signs of falling oil prices anytime soon.  Here are article excerpts:

If the United States economy is headed off a cliff, better that we receive no warning in advance. That may not be the stated goal of the Trump administration, but, to borrow a term from the late MIT economist Paul Samuelson, that’s its “revealed preference.” The preference in this case is revealed by Russell “Project 2025” Vought’s determined efforts, as director of the White House budget office, to shut down two agencies created by the 2010 Dodd-Frank Financial Reform and Consumer Protection Act.

Dodd-Frank was Congress’s attempt to head off another catastrophe like the 2008 financial crisis. It was the first major financial overhaul since the Great Depression, and despite commentators’ general feeling that it never went far enough, bankers hated it. Now those same bankers want President Trump to gut two significant parts of it, and he’s obliging—at the very moment that the economy is teetering like a spring breaker at Panama City Beach.

The first of the two offending agencies is the Treasury Department’s Office of Financial Research, or OFR. This is a small office—it’s never employed much more than 200 people—dedicated to furnishing policymakers with the kind of detailed information they lacked during the late aughts about mostly-unregulated “shadow banks” such as mortgage companies, private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and the repurchase agreement market, or “repo.” This last provides overnight short-term loans to manage corporate cashflow. The Washington Monthly has called OFR “The Most Important Agency You’ve Never Heard Of.” Here’s a detailed summary of OFR’s accomplishments.

Every year OFR sends an annual report to Congress that’s written in a typically cheerful tone that downplays financial risks. Still, the necessary information is there if you look for it.  The latest report, covering the fiscal year that ended on September 30, noted that student loan defaults rose to 9 percent; that, at a time when private credit is stumbling, about 7 percent of the regulated banking system’s assets consist of loans to shadow banks; that hedge funds’ dependence on repo increased by 154 percent; and that growth in private repo (the Fed also has a repo operation) is off the charts. . . . . “If large lenders suddenly decide not to roll over repo,” the report says, “borrowers, many of which are securities dealers, must quickly find other sources of financing or sell assets, which may transmit repo market stress to other markets.”

The financial world doesn’t appreciate seeing the federal government advertise its vulnerabilities, even sotto voce, and Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who between 2019 and 2024 collected nearly $2 million in campaign contributions from the securities and investment sector, introduced during that same time period three successive bills to abolish OFR, which he called “useless and unaccountable.” Last year’s “One Big Beautiful” reconciliation bill initially zeroed out OFR’s budget, but the Senate parliamentarian ruled against that. So Vought took matters into his own hands. Having already halved OFR’s staff from 196 employees to 100, Treasury officials informed staff last month that 64 percent of the remainder will be laid off . . .

“As risks emerge in the financial system and cracks in the credit markets spread,” Senator Elizabeth Warren told Government Executive, “the Trump administration is gutting the office designed to evaluate financial risks in a giveaway to Wall Street. This is just the latest move by President Trump and his financial regulators to undermine financial stability and pave the way for another crash.”

The other Dodd-Frank agency Vought is trying to shut off is the better-known  Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB. CFPB’s function is not merely informational but regulatory; it polices abuse of consumers by financial institutions, which is epidemic. Already Vought has reduced CFPB to what E. Tammy Kim, writing last month in The New Yorker, called“The Zombie Regulator.” . . . . Now Vought, who since firing CFPB director Rohit Chopra has been the agency’s acting director, proposes to cut what’s left of the staff in half, from about 1200 employees to 556 employees. The agency had 1750 workers at the start of Trump’s administration.

The CFPB’s primary purpose is to protect consumers, but when financial institutions get busy trying to lure retail customers in over their heads, that’s often a sign that the economy is headed for trouble. In 2008 mortgage companies, ravenous for home loans to package into securities, sold subprime mortgages to customers who quite obviously couldn’t afford them. The result was the worst recession since the Great Depression. At the moment the financial industries perhaps most desperate to find new customers are private equity and crypto. Rather than examine how they got into this fix and take steps to prevent it from happening again, the Trump administration moved this week to “democratize” finance by proposing that 401(k)s be opened to investment in private equity and cryptocurrecies. The only democratization here is that of risk. If the rule is finalized, private equity and crypto will promise unimaginably high returns to non-wealthy investors who can’t weather a sharp downturn. When they go down, as I observed last September, the whole economy will go down with them.

Mike Pierce, a former deputy assistant director at the CFPB who’s now executive director of the nonprofit Protect Borrowers, told me Thursday that he thinks the next financial crisis will stem from private credit, which is different from private equity but often practiced at the same firms. Private credit is in the middle right now of a sort of slow-motion bank run due partly to its exposure to software companies. With household debt right now at $18.8 trillion, or well over half of GDP, consumers are taking out “increasingly risky” loans, Pierce said, with companies “increasingly intertwined … with private credit.”

The administration doesn’t publicize efforts to shut down OFR and CFPB because these agencies serve the interests of non-elites. If MAGA voters knew about OFR and CFPB they might actually like them! Another reason to be silent is that you can’t sell these cuts as fiscally conservative. Closing these two agencies would have zero effect on the budget deficit because neither agency is funded by taxpayers; instead, OFR is funded by assessments on banks and CFPB is funded by the Fed (which in turn is funded by assessments on banks and by interest on securities). The only reason to shutter these agencies is because they get on the financial industry’s nerves.

“The president is very focused on keeping the pieces of his coalition that are still willing to return his phone calls inside the tent,” Pierce told me. “These people have a line directly into the senior staff of the White House. They ask for the world and more often than not they get it.” What they want in this instance is to shut off any warning lights that might dare blink red about the economy. It’s bad for business, and if a bust is coming they’d prefer we suckers don’t know in advance. We may get crushed but the big players will get bailed out, like always.

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Public Anger Focused On the Felon/GOP Is Rising

The Felon's poll numbers are in the toilet on every issue and his address last night - I did not watch because I can't abide his lies or even his voice - is unlikely to calm the oil markets and/or bring gasoline prices down anytime soon.  Indeed, some of the Felon's remarks may have the exact opposite impact.  Meanwhile, the Republican controlled U.S. Senate and House of Representatives have been unable to pass funding for paying TSA agents at the nation's airports as the Felon demands that the misnamed "Save America Act" - which would disenfranchise literally millions of voters - must be passed as part of any funding solution.  As the third "No Kings" protest over the weekend displayed, millions of Americans are over the shit-show that is the Felon's regime, which congressional Republicans continue to pliantly rubber stamp. The level of public anger is growing and even the right wing talking heads are fighting amongst themselves over everything from the Iran war to other failed policies of the Felon.  One has to wonder what it will take for Republicans to grow a spine and rein in the Felon rather than cower and do his bidding. With the 2026 mid-terms ever nearer one would think Republicans would be getting a wake up call.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the public anger:

For a brief moment last week, Congress started to do something productive. The Senate, after weeks of bickering and fruitless negotiations, unanimously approved legislation to fund most of the Department of Homeland Security, taking a small but meaningful step toward resolving one of the many crises that have sprung up like targets in a game of whack-a-mole during President Trump’s second term. All that stood between tens of thousands of federal employees and their paychecks was a similar vote in the House.

But House Republicans would not agree. Instead of considering the DHS bill, Speaker Mike Johnson denounced the bipartisan compromise and then sent the entire chamber home for a two-week Easter recess. The move all but guaranteed that the government’s third-largest department would remain unfunded indefinitely as the nation wages war against Iran. Meanwhile, as lawmakers enjoy time with their families—or jet off on vacations and taxpayer-financed junkets overseas—millions of Americans are struggling with a spike in gas prices caused by the war.

Public anger is rising rapidly. The president’s approval ratings—which were already anemic—have sunk to new lows, and Republicans are facing the prospect of an electoral wipeout in this fall’s midterm elections. The GOP’s hold on the House majority has appeared precarious for months, but now its more comfortable advantage in the Senate may be in jeopardy too. Even TMZ is channeling the national discontent: The website known for trailing  celebrities has begun hounding members of Congress, encouraging its readers to send in photos and video of lawmakers fleeing Washington, D.C., and living it up while the public servants responsible for protecting the homeland go unpaid.

Back in their districts, members of Congress—particularly swing-seat Republicans—seem to be in hiding. Hardly any are holding town halls or other well-publicized events that could put them face-to-face with frustrated voters. We contacted the offices of more than a dozen House Republicans in tight reelection races this year. Only Schweikert responded. No one else would agree to interviews about what they were hearing from constituents, nor would they disclose the events they were holding to solicit public feedback.

Trump did alleviate one pain point for the public last week by declaring that he would go around Congress to pay TSA agents, a move that reduced the snaking lines at airport-security checkpoints across the country. Wait times had stretched to hours as missed paychecks thinned the ranks of on-duty TSA agents, causing staffing shortages.

Yet the [Felon's] president’s unilateral action, though welcomed by lawmakers and air travelers alike, addressed only the most visible part of a crisis that has dragged on for weeks. Thousands of DHS employees, including members of the Coast Guard and FEMA, and administrative staff, have worked without pay for more than a month—and that’s after they missed paychecks during the larger 43-day government shutdown last fall.

In Congress, the dispute over DHS funding has centered on ICE and Trump’s mass-deportation campaign. After federal agents fatally shot two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis earlier this year, Democrats said they would not agree to fully fund DHS without reforms to the way that ICE operates. They’ve demanded that ICE agents wear body cameras and not masks, and have asked for requirements that agents seek judicial warrants before entering private homes in search of undocumented immigrants. The two parties appeared to be making progress toward an agreement early last week before Trump scuttled the talks by insisting that Republicans tie any DHS-funding deal to passage of the unrelated SAVE America Act, an elections bill that Democrats staunchly oppose.

Schweikert’s House district in and around Scottsdale, Arizona, is one of the wealthiest and most highly educated in the nation. But its voters are livid at Congress. In interviews this week outside grocery stores, gas stations, and at the airport, many told us they were scrimping on food—cutting back on pricier meats and fruits—and others said they had changed their driving habits because of gas prices that are nearing $5 a gallon in some locations. Retirees, and those close to retirement, told us they are anxiously riding the volatility of financial markets amid the war.

Erica Squires and her sister Christina made trade-offs as they shopped for Easter goodies for their niece and nephew at Walmart. . . . The Squireses also are intentional about buying gas. They opted to fill up at the Walmart in Scottsdale, where they paid about $4.20 a gallon—less than in other parts of town. And rather than driving solo to visit their sister in a far-flung Phoenix suburb, they are now carpooling. Erica gave up shopping at a natural-grocery store because of rising prices. While they are hustling to make ends meet, the sisters told us, they don’t see Congress doing anything to make their lives better. If anything, they said, lawmakers are making it worse.

Others we encountered felt the same way. One young Democrat who works as a health-care administrator said his girlfriend’s luxury car has been sitting at home for the past month because it needs premium gas, which is almost $6 a gallon. He blames Congress: “It’s ridiculous.” A middle-aged woman whose truck sported a Don’t tread on me sticker matter-of-factly summed up her feelings about the country’s lawmakers: “Everything is terrible.”

The security lines had dissipated yesterday, a day after TSA employees began receiving back pay. Passenger frustration had not. Layton Martin, a Republican from Phoenix who was flying to Salt Lake City, told us that members of Congress were playing with the livelihoods of government employees for their own political benefit. “They’re having, like, an ego party,” the 28-year-old fitness trainer said. “It seems very childish.” Martin’s rent is up $300 compared with last year, he said; his cost to fly to Salt Lake was double the normal price, and his friends can’t find jobs.

Schweikert, the Republican who represents Scottsdale in Congress, seemed just as frustrated. He told us that he views the DHS shutdown as a symptom of a larger unwillingness by Congress to tackle the nation’s structural problems. . . . . His constituents, he said, complain that their wages haven’t kept up with inflation, so they are poorer today than they were five years ago and are stressed about rising housing costs and making car payments.

Schweikert said he would have been happy to stay in Washington over the Easter break if it had looked as though a funding deal was possible, but the votes weren’t there. He placed blame on everyone—“Republicans, Democrats, leadership”—who refused to sit down and keep negotiating. “One side is using their rage at DHS to raise money and the other side—my side—is often terrified to actually have detailed, mathematically honest conversations about population and immigration.”

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Iran: No Good Way Out

Having rushed into a war of choice against Iran and seemingly having ignored warnings about potential consequences, not least the closing of the Strait of Hormuz, the Felon is now anxious to find an exit from the situation he himself put into motion.  Gas prices have now topped $4/gallon for the national average and the financial markets remain decidedly down, wiping out the value of 401K0K accounts and large investor portfolios.  Indeed, the longer the war continues, the more the price of oil, diesel and gasoline will increase, causing financial pain to average Americans and underscoring the Felon's broken promise to not wage new wars (why anyone believed a man who lied 30,000 times during his first term is dumbfounding to me).  A long piece in The Atlantic looks at where the Felon has taken the nation with no clear plan and certainly no clean exit strategy.  The piece looks at possible options for exiting the war and the high negatives attached to each. Between the looming mid-term elections and the pain at the gas pump - and grocery checkouts since high diesel prices have increased transportation costs - one would think that heretofore self=prostituting congressional Republicans would be beginning to panic.  Here are article excerpts:

[The Felon] President Trump clearly wants out—and soon.  The war that the United States and Israel started with Iran delayed what Trump sees as a landmark visit to China, which he postponed until mid-May, suggesting that he thinks he will be free to travel by then. He said in a Cabinet meeting that most of Iran’s military capabilities have been destroyed, implying a high degree of success. And, having twice left the negotiating table with the regime in the past year, he now appears keen to make a deal of some sort that will allow U.S. and Israeli forces to withdraw and, he presumably hopes, reopen the Strait of Hormuz so that the stock market can rise and oil prices can fall.

But wars rarely, if ever, wrap up neatly, or perfectly solve the problems they aimed to address. Sometimes they lead to new problems. And how they end is always hard to predict. Four weeks into World War II, no one could have anticipated how it would end. By the first month of the 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, the Taliban-led government was collapsing. Less than a month after the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, Saddam Hussein’s regime fell, in what turned out to be the apex of the U.S. military campaign.

One month into the war with Iran, U.S. and Israeli forces have successfully degraded Iran’s military capabilities. But Tehran has proved adept at counterpunching in asymmetrical ways, blocking the Strait of Hormuz and targeting U.S. allies in the Persian Gulf with drones. The regime’s allies, Houthi rebels in Yemen, launched at least two missiles toward Israel over the weekend. Those attacks again expanded the battlefield and raised fears that the Houthis could stop ships from using the Red Sea, as they did shortly after the start of the war in Gaza in 2023.

Trump—as his advisers repeatedly remind the public—has options. He is sending ground forces to the Gulf at the same time as he is considering dispatching senior members of his administration to talk peace. Trump said he was extending a pause on strikes against Iran’s energy infrastructure until April 6, while the negotiations continue.

None of Trump’s four current options to bring hostilities to an end comes close to achieving the grand ambition the president outlined on the first night of the war—regime change in Tehran—in the weekslong timeline he promised. Whether his other stated goals—destroying Iran’s nuclear and ballistic-missile capabilities, and targeting Iran’s proxies—can be achieved, or whether the U.S. can withdraw and claim a victory with any credibility, remains unknown. All of his options come with serious liabilities, not least the fact that Iran appears to consider its own position to be relatively strong, given its de facto control over the Strait of Hormuz and, therefore, the global price of oil. Tehran may not feel that ending the war on a quick U.S. time frame is in its own interests.

“While we are inflicting enormous pain on Iran, we are also signaling to them that we are experiencing pain, and we don’t like it,” Peter Feaver, a professor of political science and public policy at Duke University, told me. “That tells them that their strategy—to just ‘survive’ and that will be a win—might be working. And if they hold on, they might get a better deal next week rather than this week. And that complicates negotiations.”

1. Send in the Troops

Trump could send in ground forces to seize energy facilities in a bid to sever Tehran’s economic lifeline, forcing the regime to sue for peace. . . . Kharg Island—which sits off Iran’s coast in the Gulf, 400 miles from the Strait of Hormuz—is the center of Iran’s energy-exporting industry and has already been hit by U.S. forces multiple times. The U.S. calculus may be that seizing the island in a high-risk mission would put such a severe economic choke hold on Tehran that the regime would be forced into submission.

But Iran would not feel the economic squeeze as quickly as world markets would, current and former defense officials told me, and the island’s seizure could ramp up retaliatory strikes on Gulf energy and civilian infrastructure. Oil prices would likely spike at the prospect of losing exports from Kharg and as a result of further Iranian escalation.

But reopening the strait alone would hardly constitute victory for the U.S.; shipping was flowing fine before the war. Neither Secretary of State Marco Rubio nor the White House yesterday identified ships’ transit as a war goal.

Ground forces have also been mooted for perhaps the most daring expedition being contemplated: a strike deep into the country to seize enriched uranium from Iran’s nuclear processing facilities. This would be an incredibly complex maneuver. The uranium itself may be hidden underground. But if successful, the Trump administration could credibly claim to have removed the most existential threat posed by Iran, something previous administrations failed to achieve.

2. Desist and Depart

Trump could also declare victory and walk away.  To hear Trump tell it as recently as Thursday, the United States has reduced Iran’s ballistic and drone capability by at least 90 percent. And on Sunday, he told reporters traveling with him that the U.S. had achieved “regime change.” But the theocrats remain in charge. And Reuters reported last week that U.S. intelligence can confirm only that about one-third of Iran’s missile capacity had been destroyed. More of the arsenal has been damaged, but how depleted Iran’s stockpiles truly are remains opaque.

Still, Trump could declare that the U.S. has achieved one goal—“completely degrading Iranian missile capability”—and simply end the campaign there, much as the U.S. and Israel did last June after 12 days of strikes on Iran.

Such a scenario might mean that, months from now, the U.S. and Israel will have to return to stop the redevelopment of Iran’s missile and nuclear programs, a strategy Israel has called “mowing the grass.” And it takes two sides to end a war. Iran may continue its attacks on U.S. bases and U.S. allies to deter the U.S. and Israel from launching a new campaign.

Among the many reasons Trump has cited for starting the war was to make sure that Iran never has a nuclear weapon. If the U.S. and Israel quickly withdraw, Iran could once again revive its program. Saudi Arabia and other U.S. allies may seek their own nuclear arms in response.

3. Negotiate With the Regime

Trump could still do a deal. The prospect of negotiations has not curtailed hostilities. . . . But Tehran’s five-point plan and the U.S.’s 15-point plan indicate that the two nations are seeking very different outcomes. The Trump administration wants Tehran to give up its ballistic-weapons capability, end its use of proxies, and forswear nuclear weapons. (The U.S. plan makes no mention of better governance for the Iranian people.) Iran wants the promise of no future war with the U.S. or Israel, the lifting of economic sanctions, and to collect a fee to allow ships to transit the Strait of Hormuz. Neither side has retreated from their maximalist claims, signaling that talks could be protracted.

4. Keep Up the Sorties

Finally, Trump could order continued bombing until Iran capitulates or the state fails. If the U.S. and Israeli militaries widen their targeting and keep bombing, Iran’s government may collapse or the country might splinter. But that is an uncertain prospect, given the results so far, and the costs would keep rising. The intense bombing of the war’s first month has already plunged the world into the largest supply disruption in the history of the global market, according to the International Energy Agency. The U.S. military is burning through its weapons stockpiles, and American consumers are seeing prices rise. As of today, the average U.S. price for a gallon of unleaded gasoline crossed $4 for the first time since 2022.

Americans are already paying a daily tax in this war, at the gas pump and at the grocery store. The longer the war continues, the higher that tax becomes, as the midterm elections near. The president also said in the hours after the initial strike that Americans should be prepared for casualties, and the toll has since mounted.

A prolonged campaign would pose even greater challenges to countries that are more dependent on fuel imports. Over the weekend, Egypt implemented a curfew on businesses to preserve energy, and Sri Lanka went to a four-day week for government workers to combat rising fuel prices. Gulf allies may not have air-defense munitions to counter daily attacks from Iran for a sustained period. And the strain on U.S. stockpiles, troops, ships, aircraft, and weapons could leave the U.S. too weakened to protect itself from other threats, including China.

Most important, endless strikes would not resolve the United States’ strategic dilemma. The U.S. has struck 13,000 targets, Trump has said, with 3,000 more to go, and yet administration officials couldn’t tell fellow Republicans on the Hill last week what the president was seeking to achieve. Simply extending a war is not a certain path to victory. The U.S. fought for 20 years in Afghanistan, only to have the Taliban return to power even before the U.S. could complete its evacuation from Kabul.

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America Is Now a Rogue Superpower

Throughout my lifetime until the rise of the Felon, America maintained alliances and mutual defense treaties that kept some semblance of peace across the world.  This strategic system survived 80 years but is now in tatters as the USA under the Felon has insulted and threatened long time allies even as the Felon gives deference to Russia and Vladimir Putin. The winner in all of this destruction of alliances has not been America but rather its principal adversaries, China and Russia. The Felon launched his war of choice against Iran without consultation with allies save Israel and Saudi Arabia (hardly a true ally that can be trusted) yet demanded that erstwhile allies in Europe and Asia send naval forces to assist in opening the Strait of Hormuz after the Felon's regime in a true display of idiocy failed to foresee Iran closing the strait. The end result is an America that is isolated and viewed with deep suspicion by former dependable allies and in the halls of power in China and Russia there is likely rejoicing. Throughout history great powers have fallen, often in no small part by poor decisions of leaders that in retrospect through the lens of history look like efforts at national suicide.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at how the Felon's regime is turning America into a rogue nation:

Whenever and however America’s war with Iran ends, it has both exposed and exacerbated the dangers of our new, fractured, multipolar reality—driving deeper wedges between the United States and former friends and allies; strengthening the hands of the expansionist great powers, Russia and China; accelerating global political and economic chaos; and leaving the United States weaker and more isolated than at any time since the 1930s. Even success against Iran will be hollow if it hastens the collapse of the alliance system that for eight decades has been the true source of America’s power, influence, and security.

For America’s friends and allies in Europe, the Iran war has been a significant strategic setback. As Russia and Ukraine wage a grinding war that will be “won” by whoever can hold on the longest, the Iran war has materially and psychologically helped Russia and hurt Ukraine. Even before Donald Trump lifted oil sanctions on Russia, oil prices were skyrocketing—and filling Vladimir Putin’s war chest with billions of dollars, just as Russia’s wartime deficits were starting to cause significant pain. The unexpected windfall gives Putin more time and capacity to continue destroying Ukraine’s economic infrastructure and energy grid. Meanwhile, the Persian Gulf states are burning through U.S.-provided stocks of air-defense interceptors, drawing on the same limited supply that Ukraine depends on to defend its largest cities from Russian missile strikes.

More worrying for European allies has been the evident indifference of the United States to the consequences of its actions. For Europeans, the existential threat today comes not from a weakened and impoverished Iran but from a nuclear-armed Russia that invaded Ukraine in the most brazen act of cross-border territorial aggression in Europe since World War II. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth told the Europeans last year to be ready by 2027 to defend themselves without American help, and so they have been desperately reorienting their economies and military strategies to take on the Russian threat without the United States. They have also taken on the bulk of military and economic support for Ukraine because they fear, as many American analysts do, that Putin’s territorial ambitions are extensive, and other European states may be next.

Trump’s decision to lift sanctions on Russian oil, over the opposition of Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, France, Canada, and the European Union, showed just how little regard the United States has for Europe’s security. The message to Europe, as the scholar Ivan Krastev has noted, is that “the trans-Atlantic relationship no longer matters.”

U.S. actions have been no less damaging to America’s friends and allies in East Asia and the Western Pacific. Japan gets 95 percent of its oil from the Middle East, and 70 percent of that passes through the now-blocked Strait of Hormuz. Yet Japanese and other Asian diplomats in the first weeks of the war complained that they were “not receiving any communication from the Trump administration.” At the same time, the United States has dispatched an aircraft-carrier battle group and other warships from the Western Pacific to the Persian Gulf, including elements of the Tripoli amphibious ready group, that would be needed for an American response to Chinese aggression, including an attack on Taiwan.

[N]othing about Trump’s willingness to bomb Iran suggests that he’s any more prone than before to seek a “direct confrontation” with Russia. On the contrary, Trump has consistently sought to appease Putin by cutting off direct supplies of U.S. weaponry to Ukraine, pressuring Ukraine to give in to Russian territorial demands, and now by lifting sanctions on Russian oil.

As for China, combined Israeli and American forces have demonstrated impressive capabilities, but their success is not necessarily replicable in the Pacific. Taking out an adversary’s sophisticated air defenses is a dangerous operation—one that Israel shouldered in Iran, making the subsequent U.S. assault possible. The U.S. had the capacity to take that first step but would not likely have assumed the risk. In the event of Chinese aggression against Taiwan, will the Israelis take out Chinese air-defense systems for the United States too?

Chinese leaders will also note that the United States has been fearful of sending warships to open the Strait of Hormuz lest they come under fire from a significantly depleted Iranian force. That’s understandable but not very intimidating. . . . . . the only thing preventing the United States from coming to the aid of Taiwan will be China shooting, with far superior and far more plentiful weaponry. Also not lost on the Chinese is the fact that the United States has had to pull significant air, naval, and ground forces from the Western Pacific, likely for months, in order to fight a decimated Iran.

Some analysts have suggested that Russia and China have failed to come to Iran’s defense, and that this somehow constitutes a defeat for them, because Iran was their ally. But the Russians are helping Iran by providing satellite imagery and advanced drone capabilities to strike more effectively at U.S. military and support installations. And China has not suffered a loss in Iran insofar as Iran has granted safe passage to its oil shipments.

More important, in Russia and China’s hierarchy of interests, defending Iran is of distinctly secondary importance; their primary goal is to expand their regional hegemony. For Putin, Ukraine is the big prize that will immeasurably strengthen Russia’s position vis-à-vis the rest of Europe. For China, the primary goal is to push the United States out of the Western Pacific, and anything that degrades America’s ability to project force in the region is a benefit. Indeed, the longer American attention and resources are tied up in the Middle East, the better for both Russia and China. Neither Moscow nor Beijing can be unhappy to see the war drive deep and perhaps permanent wedges between the United States and its allies in Europe and Asia.

The Trump administration, however, has turned America’s long-standing hierarchy of interests upside down. For eight decades, Americans were deeply involved in the greater Middle East not because the region was intrinsically a vital national-security interest but as part of a broader global commitment to the alliances and freedom of navigation that undergirded the American-led liberal world order.

America’s interests in the Middle East have always been indirect and secondary to larger global aims and strategies. During World War II, the United States led a coalition of nations that depended on the greater Middle East for oil and strategic position. During the Cold War, the United States assumed responsibility not only for the defense of the Jewish state but for the defense and economic well-being of European and Asian allies who depended on Middle Eastern oil. After the Cold War, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Kuwait, and the George H. W. Bush administration believed that failing to reverse that aggression would set an ominous precedent in the aborning “new world order.”

That sense of global responsibility is precisely what the Trump administration came to office to repudiate and undo. The Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy, which has dramatically shifted the focus of American policy from world order to homeland security and hemispheric hegemony, appropriately downgraded the Middle East in the hierarchy of American concerns. . . . . Yet now, for reasons known only to the Trump administration, the Middle East has suddenly taken top priority; indeed, to supporters of Trump and the war, it seems to be the only priority, apparently worth any price, including the introduction of ground forces and even the destruction of the American alliance system.

This might make sense if there were no other threats to worry about. When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, the greatest perceived menace was from international terrorism. China was in an accommodating phase, under Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao. Russia posed no threat to Europe; rather, these were the years of Russo-German partnership, a time when Western Europeans found the overall strategic situation so unthreatening that they were the ones doubting the necessity of NATO. Only Eastern Europeans still worried about the return of a revanchist Russia, . . .

Twenty-three years later, the situation is completely different. The greatest threats to world peace, and to the democracies of Europe and Asia, are not terrorism and Iran but two powerful and expansionist great powers, one of which has already invaded its neighbors and the other of which threatens to. Today’s world looks more like that of 1934 than like the supposedly post-historical paradise that some imagined after the Cold War.

One would be hard-pressed to find any nation in the world that has been reassured by the Israeli and American war against Iran, other than Israel itself. According to The Wall Street Journal, Gulf state leaders are “privately furious” with the U.S. for “triggering a war that put them in the crosshairs.” Despite its impressive power, the United States was unable to protect these countries from Iran’s attacks; now they have to hope that Trump will not leave them to face a weakened yet intact and angry Iranian regime but will instead double down on America’s long-term military commitment to the region, including by putting ground troops in Iran.

For Europeans, the problem is worse than American disregard and irresponsibility. They now face an unremittingly hostile United States—one that no longer treats its allies as allies or differentiates between allies and potential adversaries. The aggressive tariffs Washington imposed last year hit America’s erstwhile friends at least as hard as they hit Russia and China, and in some cases harder. Europeans must now wonder whether Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran makes it more or less likely that he will take similarly bold action on Greenland. The risks and costs of taking that undefended Danish territory, after all, would be far less than the risks and costs of waging the present war. Not some EU liberal but Trump’s conservative friend, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni recently warned that American actions have produced a “crisis in international law and multilateral organizations” and “the collapse of a shared world order.”

Trump has repeatedly made clear, including during this war, that if he is unhappy with an ally, he will withdraw American protection. He temporarily cut off intelligence sharing with Ukraine to punish it for refusing to bend to Moscow. He has warned that allies such as Japan and Korea should pay the United States for protection. During this war, he has threatened to leave the Strait of Hormuz closed and hand the problem off to those who need it more than the United States does. Trump’s tactics with allies consist almost entirely of threats: to tariff them, to abandon them, and, in the case of Greenland, to use force to seize their territory. When Trump discovered that he needed the help of allies against Iran, he did not ask them for help or work to persuade them. He simply “demanded” that they do what he said.

[T]hroughout the Cold War and for nearly four decades after it, allies and partners across the globe clung to the American order through thick and thin. It survived unpopular wars in Vietnam and Iraq. It survived made-in-America global economic calamities, such as the 2008 financial crisis. It even survived America’s relative economic and military decline. . . . Those days are now over and will not soon return. Nations that once bandwagoned with the United States will now remain aloof or align against it—not because they want to, but because the United States leaves them no choice, because it will neither protect them nor refrain from exploiting them. Welcome to the era of the rogue American superpower. It will be lonely and dangerous.

Tuesday Morning Male Beauty

 

Monday Morning Male Beauty

 

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The Reason for the New Homophobia

Yesterday, millions turned out for "No Kings" protests literally all across the country, include red states, to protest the Felon's regime and his policies. Most notably the Felon's war of choice in Iran and the cruel and brutal deportation operations topped the list of motivations for participants, but also fueling the protests was opposition to the Felon's implementation of Project 2025's racist, homophobic and white "Christian" nationalist agenda that depicts anything that benefits non-whites, non-Christians, and non-heterosexual individuals as discriminatory against white males, particularly the less educated.  Indeed, for the LGBT community, the "anti-woke" and anti-DEI obsession of the Project 2025 agenda includes ending same sex marriage, reviving anti-LGBT discrimination and even a reinstitution of sodomy laws. Sadly, this agenda plays to white males who always need someone else to blame for their own lack of achievement or unhappiness rather than pausing to look in the mirror. For those of us in the LGBT community the agenda of Project 2025 and the support for open discrimination the Felon's regime is normalizing - a hallmark of fascist regimes that always need scapegoats - is frightening.  A long piece in The Atlantic looks at the resurgence of homophobia and the straight white male anxiety and feelings of inadequacy that is helping to fuel it. One can only hope that the growing opposition the the Felon and his regime will bring about a backlash against bigotry.  Here are column highlights:

Homophobia of course never went away, but not long ago, it seemed like it might. Implicit and explicit bias against gay people fell steadily from 2007 to 2020 and was on track to soon hit zero (!), according to a 2022 study by the psychologists Tessa E. S. Charlesworth and Mahzarin R. Banaji. This accorded with the ambient feeling of late-2010s culture, when Lil Nas X was the pink-hatted prince of pop and Budweiser was striping its cans in rainbow colors without fear of a bullet from Kid Rock.

But something changed in the early 2020s. Pollsters began noting diminishing approval for LGBTQ legal protections. As trans issues became inescapable in polarized national politics, explicit anti-trans bias spiked 16 percent from 2021 to 2024, according to Charlesworth, Banaji, and the researcher Meriel Doyle. Less intuitively, the trend line of long-declining homophobia reversed, resulting in a 10-point jump for explicit anti-gay bias over that same period.

The past few months in politics have made this turn obvious. Prominent right-wing voices who justified the killing of the protester Renee Good described her as a “lesbian agitator” and a “rug munching leftist,” as though her sexuality might have any bearing on whether she deserved to die.

The White House advertised car deregulation with a video that mocked two blue-haired, queer-seeming people pathetically stalled in a Prius. Commentators have taken to treating gay and its synonyms as an insult. Conservative groups launched a campaign to roll back marriage rights, with the name “Greater Than”—as in, the well-being of kids (allegedly endangered by gay parents) is more important than equality.

In the wilds of digital culture, gay panic roams in more anarchic forms. Reels and TikTok teem with jokes about Jeffrey Epstein, Sean “Diddy” Combs, and a feminized version of Charlie Kirk preying on boys—though Epstein serially exploited girls and Kirk was a straight, married conservative whom no one has accused of abuse. Nicki Minaj, that longtime queer icon turned MAGA trophy, has taken to dissing “cocksuckas” like Don Lemon. Millions of views accumulated for a kid rapping about the demonic nature of LGBTQ people. Zesty became Zoomer-speak for “fruity” or “swishy” a few years back. And in livestreams and chat rooms, the old-school slurs seem as hot as ever.

This wave is one symptom of a broader cultural regression. During the 2020s, measures of intra-group prejudices of all sorts—racism, sexism, ageism—have been rising, according to a New York Times article about the return of homophobia by Charlesworth and her Northwestern colleague Eli J. Finkel. Trans folks, long the subject of sustained conservative criticism, continue losing not only public acceptance but legal rights; Kansas, for example, just revoked driver’s licenses for people whose listed gender doesn’t match what they were assigned at birth.

But although transphobia overlaps with homophobia, Charlesworth and Finkel argue that trans backlash is not the primary reason for rising anti-gay sentiment. Instead, they suggest that one factor explains the rise in all kinds of identity-based biases: the same blend of economic anxiety and anti-establishment sentiment that’s driving so much of American politics. They write, “Gay and lesbian people, newly woven into the fabric of mainstream society, may have been collateral damage in a broader revolt against a system that felt broken.”

The irony is that a minority once viewed as filled with sissies and losers is now portrayed as filled with bullies and power brokers, and straight people, especially men, seem to perceive themselves as the weak and afraid ones. This inversion explains a host of baffling political and cultural phenomena of late. It also shows that some of the most durable stereotypes about gay people were never really about sexuality—which might explain why the homophobes, more and more, seem to fit those stereotypes.

Over the past few months, the young and male-dominated online subculture of “looks-maxxing” has blown up into a mainstream-media cycle . . . . Looks-maxxing is an ethos of self-improvement taken to an extreme, and its more explicit inspirations are the pickup artists of early-2000s infamy and the incels of 2010s 4Chan. The idea is that in a society that has allegedly become hostile to men—male privilege coded as toxic masculinity, and so on—the only way for boys to gain an edge is to be handsome. Methods for maximizing looks range from workouts and skin-care routines to more radical options, such as chewing hard gum for hours to get a squarer jaw.

The poster child for this world is a waifish, wavy-haired 20-year-old who goes by the name Clavicular. He says he started taking testosterone at age 14 and that he does crystal meth to attain hollow cheeks. . . . . He’s also a frequent user of sexist, homophobic, and racist slurs—usually delivered in a tone of icy boredom—and is pals with the Hitler fan Nick Fuentes and the professional misogynist Andrew Tate.

The ostensible point of looks-maxxing is to bag hot chicks, but quite clearly the real fun comes from inspiring awe in men. To the Times, Clavicular described sex with women as mostly a waste of time—something that “is going to gain me nothing.” What he really wants to do is “mog,” meaning attain status over other dudes (mog is short for AMOG or “Alpha Male of the Group”). He’s considering getting double-jaw-replacement surgery in order to look like the guy who (according to his pseudoscientific calculations) has the the most handsome face on earth: Matt Bomer, a gay actor frequently featured in work by Ryan Murphy, TV’s king of queer dramedy.

As many social-media users have suggested, all of this seems a bit, well ... y’know. Clavicular is like a blend of Dorian Gray and Patrick Bateman, those fictional creations of gay authors out to probe the sinister side of male vanity.

The psychologist Alan Downs’s The Velvet Rage deconstructed the “best little boy in the world” syndrome that makes many gay guys into overachievers. Susan Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp’” crystallized a way of seeing the world as full of artifice, which can lead queer people to behave in a self-conscious, knowingly false manner. Oscar-winning movies such as Moonlight and Brokeback Mountain depicted gay men disguising their gendered shame in traditionally manly trappings. The theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick examined the extent to which jealous imitation drives all manner of same-sex relations, straight and gay.

Gay people realize, at some early age, that the world isn’t made for people like them. And for men, raised with the social pressure to seek dominance, that realization can lead to an obsession with climbing the rungs—whether in the context of sex, money, or something else. All of which is to say: Gay men are the original incels. They are born into heightened status anxiety and must maneuver to get ahead. And one way to do that is to be hot.

The looks-maxxers have stumbled into a similar set of psychological conditions by dint of socioeconomic circumstances and social media. The 21st century’s obstacles for young men—as seen in deaths of despair and lagging employment—have been amply publicized both by credible journalists and by charlatans such as Fuentes. Clearly, many boys are struggling with a sense of futility. In one stream, Clavicular explained that he felt “we live in one of the worst societies ever throughout the entire history of the world.” What he meant, he went on to say, is that a woman will barely look at a man unless he’s high status.

Women and girls are becoming only more fixated on their beauty. But they’ve faced the pressure of being pretty for generations. . . . . . Straight men are just catching up, vanity-wise, and political opportunists have eagerly fed into their insecurities. Fuentes, a self-declared proud virgin at age 27, recently urged his followers to spend all their energy trying to “ascend,” the looks-maxxing term for becoming your best self. Tate has said that any man who has sex with women for pleasure is “gay” because they should be focused on procreation. Men like these preach that various historically marginalized groups—gays, Jews, Blacks, women—are to blame for the cultural conditions their viewers chafe at. Self-improvement, in this view, isn’t pursued to, well, improve the self. It’s to win a competition.

Yet the link between looks-maxxing and rising anti-gay sentiment is probably even simpler than that. Straight men feel they’ve fallen in the social hierarchy. And when they look up, who do they see?

The factual basis for broader perceptions of gay prosperity is mixed. . . . . In any case, the young generation that’s now transforming American politics grew up at a time when pop culture made LGBTQ people into aspirational figures. . . . . To many adults who’d grown up in a world in which LGBTQ people were stigmatized and sidelined, this visibility felt groundbreaking. To many of the kids who were just coming online then, gay acceptance was simply a mainstream norm—and queer people were affiliated with success. In the conspiracy-minded 2020s, that success is more widely feared than admired or understood.

This conflation of anti-establishment angst and homophobic paranoia didn’t arise organically. After Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, conservative activists looking to rebuild an electoral majority stoked conspiracy theories about queer people’s newfound cultural visibility. Efforts such as Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law and the various protests against drag-queen story hour pushed back against an alleged liberal plot to “groom” or “indoctrinate” kids. And the censorious and controlling nature of those efforts offers a reminder of another comparison for the vanity of the new homophobes: fascism. A fascination with appearance, self-mastery, and masculinity has also long been the provenance of authoritarian regimes—including ones that brutalized gays, Jews, and immigrants. Mass status anxiety, history has shown time and again, can be exploited for the most dangerous kind of politics.