If you imagine a world a month from now where the war is winding down, or has wound down, because America couldn’t bear the disruption to global energy, helium, fertilizer, et cetera, supplies, the Iranian regime remains in place, controlling the Strait of Hormuz, probably charging different ships tolls to go through. And that feels to me like a war we would have lost. Is that wrong? I think that’s correct. I don’t see a victory in real terms at the end of this crisis. We may be able to extricate ourselves without even more catastrophic human losses than have already been experienced. But the wider implications of the United States having undertaken this action in a way that alienated partners and allies in the region and all around the world, and effectively ceded huge financial benefits to the Russians and potentially ceded some diplomatic opportunity to the Chinese. And it’s not clear that President Trump is prepared to sustain American leadership, or that, even if he were in the aftermath of this, what appears to be a catastrophic overreach and miscalculation with the attacks on Iran, that in fact, the United States will be trusted to do that by countries around the world. And also, I mean, and I think this is one of my other concerns, maybe has left a more dangerous Iranian regime that has both learned lessons about what its deterrence capabilities actually are, and has also learned lessons that negotiations cannot be trusted. Your only true safety is your deterrence capability to impose tremendous pain on the global economy through the Strait of Hormuz, through attacking infrastructure throughout the gulf, data infrastructure, energy infrastructure, and ultimately, perhaps trying to get a nuclear weapon. And so, I mean, a world in which we have somewhat degraded Iranian weapons capability in the near term, but left a regime with that set of lessons in charge for the long term. And with that set of battle-hardened learnings, I mean, that seems, again, not like a contribution to world security at the end of this. I think that’s exactly what the Iranians are driving toward. And at this point in time, it appears as though they may in fact achieve those aims of being stronger at the end of this war, even if the economy has been battered, even if they’ve lost thousands of their own people, that they believe that their ability to endure the worst, that two technologically superior, economically superior adversaries have given them and come out on top, I think will be tremendously emboldening for a regime that has been very dangerous, even at its weaker moments.
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