There Is A Donroe Doctrine
We Have Seen It In Venezuela And It Will Be His Litmus Test In Iran
Hi All,
The last few days have been rather interesting when it comes to interacting with the Press. I have had a number of reporters asking me to analyze how the US air campaign is going. The problem I face in answering that question is that it is fundamentally impossible to respond if the US has no clear war aims. The US/Israeli air campaign is certainly destroying lots of targets, has severely degraded Iranian anti-air defense, seems to be substantially weakening the ability of Iran to strike back with missiles and drones, and has killed a large number of Iranian politicians.
The question remains, to what end?
It is worth noting that since I sent out the piece on Monday of last week that the US seems to have ways and means but no ends, that this narrative has spread far and wide. I am starting to wonder now, however, whether this chaos might be overstated. It relies too much on all the chaff being thrown out by the White House and Trump personally, chaff that can completely contradict itself in the space of a few minutes.
Take for instance the chaff about the course of the war. In the space of a few hours yesterday Trump claimed that victory had already been achieved (a narrative he has pressed a few times). Fittingly, he did it while disparaging a US ally.
And then a few hours later Trump admitted that the war was ongoing and would only end when he agreed a plan with Israeli PM Netanyahu. This kind of contradictory narrative might have reached this high point two days ago when one Trump tweet claimed that Iran had “surrendered” while not yet having “surrendered”.
We might call this The Schrodinger’s Surrender Tweet.
