Critical Canon

Welp, I think we're done here. Trump himself is now saying he buckled under the pressure of Hormuz. It's as bad as it could possibly be. He's saying aloud that Iran can have anything it wants because America can't afford the staring contest. If this is his own explanation in his own words, then the fact that the sanctions relief is front-loaded...suddenly becomes important. The fact that the inspections regime that will verify compliance will be negotiated by an American side that has already admitted defeat, that needs this more than the opponent needs it...is now significant. And the fact that the proxy system is now recognized as legitimate by the United States -- is suddenly exactly the disaster you feared it might be. And the fact that America has declared aloud that it's not actually capable of imposing its will even in the world's most vital energy chokepoints, causing its allies in the Gulf to already begin to seek a new accommodation with Iran -- makes all of this worse than Obama and worse than the JCPOA. Remember: the great unfixable flaw of the JCPOA that none of its boosters ever had a good answer for was that it merely kicked the can down the road. It solved nothing. Trump's deal, as of this moment, is not even close to accomplishing so much. "Iran never won a war and never lost a negotiation," Trump famously said of Obama's deal (as a reporter reminded him at today's press conference). Ironic that the Iranians would win a negotiation most spectacularly against a man who styles himself the greatest negotiator to ever grace the White House. So what does it all mean? It means that in the coming years, nuclear programs will sprout like mushrooms after the rain throughout the Middle East. It means that many nations will now build out new and larger ballistic missile arsenals. It means that the state system will give way before the march of the region's transnational ideological axes. Minorities will again be trampled, new wars will be fought by stronger states to dominate the power vacuums within weaker ones. You're thinking of Israel in Lebanon -- but that's just a specific campaign against a specific enemy. Think Turkey, which right now occupies a region of Syria vastly larger than Israel's presence in Lebanon. Think heightened Iranian support for the Houthis in Yemen and a new influx of money and guns to the different sides in Libya. It means, in other words, that we will have a few more wars to fight, a few more technologies to invent to deal with this new age of cheap missiles and drones -- and also of supersonic Chinese missiles bearing nuclear warheads that Iran will eventually, inevitably, be capable of deploying against us. And it didn't have to be this bad. (And maybe, when he's heard all the criticism, it won't be.) He could have left something, anything, to concede later. He could have kept the Iranians a little bit in the dark, just a smidgen, as to just how defeated America feels. Israel's position in all this is simple, and more or less unchanged from last week. America gave us more than we had a right to ask for. But we may be going it alone from here out. Dust off the nukes. Maybe test one somewhere far away from anywhere. Quadruple the interceptor production lines, double the size of the Mossad and the Air Force. And no, don't let Hezbollah breathe, not for a second. It's the 1960s again. And Israel will have to defeat a couple more enemies before it can once again eke out a few decades of peace.

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