The ‘Iran Deal’ Was Never the Solution to the Regime’s Nuclear Program

By Rebeccah Heinrichs

Wednesday, March 25, 2026

 

We are a mere three weeks into Operation Epic Fury, but with the “doomerism” coming out of a large segment of the professional national security world, you’d think we were a decade into a catastrophic, spiraling world war and on the precipice of a global economic recession.

 

In actuality, the United States and Israel are militarily crushing the Iranians, the Arab world is siding with America and condemning Iran, and the Europeans are leaning toward actively helping the United States secure the Strait of Hormuz.

 

The Iranian air force and navy are smoldering in rubble. The United States is mercilessly bombing  Iranian underground missile factories so that, years from now, if there are enough people still alive who know how to make them, they won’t be able to. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who claimed to be the leader of the Islamic world, was killed on the first day of Epic Fury, and his son, crowned the new supreme leader, is either dead or otherwise incapacitated. He has not appeared publicly. The Israelis have eliminated the leadership of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the regime’s military police force, the Basij. These evil officials were the most competent at and responsible for arming and equipping terrorists, defending the regime, and repressing the Iranian people.

 

The worst-case-scenario predictions about Iran’s possible retaliations against America have not materialized. There have not been thousands of American deaths (there have, tragically, been 13 service member deaths, due mostly to accidents). As the operation goes on, the tempo of Iranian missile and drone strikes continue to decrease, with some periodic spikes. And Iran’s economy, already squeezed by American and European sanctions, is experiencing even greater degrees of distress. Even so, the mere threat of Iranian attacks against shipping in the vital Strait of Hormuz gives the flailing terrorist regime leverage to wield against the world’s superpower.

 

No analyst, no matter how well-informed and equipped with the best historical case studies, can predict with high confidence how this war will end. Will the regime utterly collapse or be sufficiently weakened so that a more pragmatic leader complies with U.S. demands? It’s impossible to know. This war is unprecedented in the overmatch of American-Israeli capabilities and military competency against a shockingly weaker enemy whose strongest backers have mostly decided against helping it (with the important exception of Russia’s reported willingness to aid Iran in targeting). That said, until the Strait of Hormuz is secure, and the Iranian drones and missiles stop soaring, the war isn’t over. Still, the extensive progress of the military campaign so far has not stopped the most ardent critics of the war from predicting — with the utmost confidence — that it will end in catastrophe for America and its allies.

 

Many national security pundits tell us that, despite America’s overwhelming success in destroying thousands of targets on the campaign’s list, the Iranians are winning the war.

 

We’re told that despite the United States’ destruction of Iranian cruise missile sites along the strait’s coastline and the elimination of their mine-dropping ships, there’s nothing the United States can do to stop the regime from holding the strait hostage.

 

They say that the United States’ successful bombing campaign and Israeli targeted strikes against regime leaders have only strengthened the Islamic Republic’s fanaticism and resolve.

 

We are told that, even though the tempo of the Iranian missile and drone launches has dramatically decreased, the Iranians have surprises up their sleeves and are holding back the best capabilities and about to unleash massive, and more precise, strikes (the same argument espoused by Iran’s state media propaganda).

 

We’re told the regime leaders who were renowned for their ruthless repression and terrorism, when eliminated, will be replaced by Islamist radicals who are far more hardened, more willing to take risks, and more dangerous, and that even though the Islamic Republic’s top nuclear scientists have been eliminated, new nuclear scientists will appear and accelerate the nuclear weapons program with abandon. We’re told that the Iranians will rebuild their missiles and drones and that the United States is woefully unable to replenish its stocks.

 

No matter how much the United States and Israel achieve everything on their to-do list, no matter the clearly explained military objectives, strategy, and success of the endeavor, the end is still somehow a humiliating defeat for President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

 

The architect of the Obama administration’s echo chamber, Ben Rhodes, has been the most insightful when trying to divine the meaning behind the fact-defying “doomerism.” He recently posted on X: “As with Iraq, the problem is not the strategy or tactics of the Iran war. It’s the decision to fight an unnecessary war in the first place.”

 

The reality is, many of the loudest critics are wedded to the fiction that the 2015 Iran deal was the solution to the terrorist state’s nuclear weapons work, that it shielded Iran from U.S. and Israeli military intervention, thereby keeping the United States from entering a war it would lose.

 

But even the Iran deal’s biggest defenders must admit that it uncorked billions of dollars in sanctions relief to the terrorist regime, even though it didn’t meet the criteria for a “good deal” set out by the Obama administration at the start of negotiations. It didn’t have “anywhere, anytime” inspections (rather, it provided Iran with a heads-up and a delay before inspections, allowing Iran to hide activity); it required cooperation from Russians and the Chinese for full snapback sanctions; it didn’t restrain its missile program (it shockingly relaxed sanctions on its missile program, to the dismay of senators); and it had sunset provisions.

 

Senator Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) outlined some of the deal’s merits and its shortcomings in his explanation for why he opposed Obama’s deal. As he explained, the defenders insisted that the “imperfect” deal was better than no deal because the alternative was necessarily war.

 

This was the central claim of Ben Rhodes’s echo chamber: the Obama Iran deal or disastrous war. Why? As Schumer explained, this false choice relied on the logic that the Iran deal would moderate the regime, and without it, the regime would not change, inevitably leading to a high-cost clash with the West.

 

Schumer wrote:

 

If one thinks Iran will moderate, that contact with the West and a decrease in economic and political isolation will soften Iran’s hardline positions, one should approve the agreement.  After all, a moderate Iran is less likely to exploit holes in the inspection and sanctions regime, is less likely to seek to become a threshold nuclear power after ten years, and is more likely to use its newfound resources for domestic growth, not international adventurism.

 

But if one feels that Iranian leaders will not moderate and their unstated but very real goal is to get relief from the onerous sanctions, while still retaining their nuclear ambitions and their ability to increase belligerent activities in the Middle East and elsewhere, then one should conclude that it would be better not to approve this agreement.

 

Schumer was right then to reject the deal. Within a year of the agreement being finalized, reports indicated that Iran was busy on clandestine nuclear-related work while using billions of dollars in sanctions relief for funding, training, and supplying Islamist proxies around the region. Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis were all well-resourced at the expense of American, European, and Gulf security — not to mention the long-suffering Iranian people.

 

President Trump withdrew the United States from the JCPOA in 2018 for the same reasons Senator Schumer opposed it, and he immediately reimposed sanctions on the regime to dry up its funds and slow down its aggression and dangerous missile development.

 

But the echo chamber that was so active during the Obama administration is active now, still insisting on pushing the myth that the choices were the Iran deal or a doomed war that a supposedly resilient, formidable, and adaptable Iran regime would win. Today, those echoing the myth blame Trump and Netanyahu for the war, not Iran’s supreme leader or the IRGC for amassing thousands of missiles, advancing its nuclear program and lying to inspectors, and not the Basij for massacring tens of thousands of Iranian protesters, thereby proving the hardened, radical nature of the inhumane regime.

 

Operation Epic Fury is crushing the Iran regime and destroying its ability to threaten U.S. interests. In directing the campaign, Trump is bursting the myth of the loud and determined echo chamber.

Are the U.S. and Its Allies on the Same Page in Iran?

By Mike Nelson

Wednesday, March 25, 2026

 

Speaking to a senior British officer during World War II, Winston Churchill not only succinctly captured the crucial yet frustrating alliance in which he found himself in the fight against Nazi evil, but also gave us an enduring reminder of the truths of multinational operations: “The only thing worse than fighting with allies is fighting without them.”  

 

Currently, President Donald Trump seems vexed by both of those undertakings: fighting with allies and fighting without them. In the Middle East, he is simultaneously dealing with the divergence in plans between the United States and Israel while also gnashing his teeth over NATO allies’ reticence to sign up for the latest American military effort.

 

But both circumstances reflect a basic fact: All countries have their own interests. And while interests among allies may overlap to varying degrees, they are almost never uniformly the same. Beyond this basic and constant reality, there are additional circumstances surrounding the Iran war that are critical to understanding partner-nation decisions, including the operation’s unclear end state and persistent friction between the Trump White House and America’s European allies.

 

Despite high levels of military coordination between the U.S. and Israel, there appear to be some points of disagreement over how the war is being waged. After Israeli strikes on Iran’s South Pars gas fields, for example, Trump criticized the target selection—despite subsequent reporting that America had given the operation the green light prior to its execution. Regardless of the truth of the matter, the president’s statement suggested slight daylight between the U.S. and Israel at the tactical level and prompted renewed discussion on whether the two nations’ long-term goals for the campaign are aligned at the strategic level.

 

To boil down the current conflict into very basic terms, we are fighting the leaders of the Islamic Republic because they are, historically and demonstrably, the bad guys. That the Iranian regime is our enemy, and a disruptive force in the region, is beyond question. But Iran represents a different danger to each of the partners currently engaged in combat with it. Tehran undermines America’s regional interests, works to harm our security efforts, and threatens American-aligned Middle Eastern countries.

 

To Israel, however, the threat Iran poses is existential. Not only has Iran expressed a consistent desire to eradicate the state of Israel, it has taken steps to bring it about—from bolstering the power and presence of Hezbollah on Israel’s doorstep to authorizing the Hamas-led attack that killed 1,200 people. Even the shared American and Israeli goal of preventing an Iranian nuclear capability comes with different costs to each country should the effort fail. Iran cannot bring about the end of the United States. Israel has no such assurance.

 

Taking these differing concerns into account, the ideal end of the conflict might look different to each country. Ending the radical theocracy of the mullahs likely means an end to the Iranian ambition to destroy Israel, which explains why the Israeli military is targeting regime leadership, as well as Basij elements responsible for putting down any revolutionary popular uprisings. The United States, on the other hand, may realize that regime collapse, depending on how it happens and what follows, could create additional dilemmas for regional stability—a lesson hard-learned after the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya led to civil war, instability, and the rise of Islamist terrorist groups, conditions that endure today.

 

Despite speculation from the fringier extremes of the political horseshoe, differences in priorities and national interests are not indications that Israel pulled us into a war, is manipulating us, or is working against us. In fact, differences between coalition partners on a war’s priorities, methods, pace, and goals are the norm, not the anomaly. During World War II, disputes between Franklin D. Roosevelt, Churchill, and Joseph Stalin over the conduct of the war in the European theater were constant—with the Soviets and British focused on addressing threats to their respective homelands and the United States balancing resources to fight in the Pacific theater. Sometimes, these national interests are not in conflict but simply reflect a different ranking of priorities. Poppy eradication and counter-narcotics operations in Afghanistan were of greater importance to the United Kingdom than to America, as Afghan heroin found its way onto the European black market.

 

But while these natural differences occur in coalitions, this current conflict has unique features that exacerbate them. The first is the lack of a clear and agreed-upon end state for the operation. As much as the president’s non-specific language about the goals of the conflict has prompted questions from the American people, it has also invited action by the Israelis. If the operation’s underlying goals are unclear, Israel is entitled to conduct operations aimed at bringing about what it thinks they should be.

 

Further, Epic Fury, unlike other conflicts in our history, is not strictly organized—in terms of command and control—as a coalitional campaign. During World War II, American, British, and Free French forces were all unified under the command of the supreme allied commander, Dwight Eisenhower. During the war in Afghanistan, the four-star American commander was “dual-hatted,” leading both the U.S. forces and the international coalition. Under this construct, countries maintained the decision-making power to determine the manner and types of missions in which their forces could participate, but delegated the planning, synchronization, and oversight of their operations to the coalition headquarters.

 

This arrangement created the country-specific rules of engagement and prohibitions that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and others have bemoaned and mocked, but it also built a framework in which coalition forces could operate in concert despite differing national priorities and risk assessments. Coalitions are not necessarily designed to force partners into certain actions, but rather to establish priorities and limits around what forces will not do. In other words, national priorities that fall outside the collective goals of the coalition are not conducted by coalition forces.

 

In Epic Fury, the American and Israeli militaries are conducting parallel operations that are coordinated with, but not subordinated to, each other. The Israeli Air Force is developing its own targets outside of the command of a U.S. Air Force general, while at the same time, both militaries are synchronizing operations with respect to key functions, like air traffic control and the suppression of Iranian air defenses.

 

On the other side of the equation, the president is growing ever more frustrated with European partners who are not yet willing to commit naval assets to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Part of Trump’s anger seems to stem from a misunderstanding of how alliances in general and NATO in particular work; he seems to think that America’s transatlantic allies are required to come to its aid despite the fact that it isn’t under attack. That’s not to say NATO cannot join in such a conflict, as it did in Libya in 2011, but such operations are voluntary.

 

What’s more, the president’s current demand for NATO support comes after months of claiming the United States does not need European allies, demeaning their previous contributions to American-led conflicts, suggesting America would not support or defend them if an Article 5 triggering event occurred, and even threatening to invade a fellow NATO ally’s territory. In short, the president has not conducted himself in a way that might make partner and allied countries predisposed to assist him in a conflict in which they were not consulted before hostilities began.

 

But, while some Europeans may be enjoying a certain degree of schadenfreude at watching a man who belittled their military prowess appeal for their help, pettiness is likely not the driver of their decision-making. Trump is correct in his assertion that Europe is more dependent upon commerce flowing through the strait and therefore more affected by its disruption. It is indeed in Europe’s interest for the blockade to end. However, the president has not articulated how expansive the war will be, what his theory of victory looks like, nor even his plan to combat Iranian operations to disrupt maritime traffic. His latest proclamation that reopening the strait will be “a simple military maneuver” suggests an enduring unseriousness about the risks involved in such an operation. It isn’t difficult to understand why Europeans might sit it out unless and until the United States figures out a more concrete plan for dealing with the Pandora’s box it opened.

 

It’s worth noting that current American requests of European allies seem to be for niche capabilities, such as minesweepers, not necessarily more of the core fighting functions. Often coalition partners contribute by providing these kinds of small but crucial capabilities, sending unique units in small numbers, such as when a newly democratic Czechoslovakia provided chemical detection units to the Gulf War. This is an example of how allies can be critical and essential partners, even when they are “a little off the front lines.”

 

At the inception of the war with Iran, the Trump administration seemed to have underthought some of the critical decisions and complications, both with regard to Israel and Europe. From the outside, it appears the White House took it for granted that, because the U.S. and Israel agreed that Iran posed an intolerable threat, this mindset extended consensus on all matters springing forth from that initial understanding. The administration seemed to have believed the war would be resolved quickly, before Iran had a chance to respond with measures that complicate global trade or, if it did, that the United States would be able to deal with the fallout quickly. As such, the president likely did not feel he needed to rally support from or even notify our European allies and could instead maintain his adversarial rhetoric toward them.

 

The administration needs to define better boundaries and goals for the campaign. The U.S. then needs to present specific, realistic requests to any European or international partners from whom we seek support. And finally, we should probably find a way to craft an appeal that avoids deriding U.S. allies and partners as “cowards” or “ungrateful.”

Blind Man’s Bluff

By Nick Catoggio

Tuesday, March 24, 2026

 

Yesterday began with a test of credibility between the president and whoever’s in charge in Iran for the next five minutes. We spent the weekend talking peace behind the scenes, Donald Trump announced excitedly. We most certainly did not, the Iranian foreign ministry countered.

 

There would have been no question until recently about whom to trust in a dispute between the White House and Tehran. As it is, with both countries governed by illiberals, it’s anyone’s guess where the truth lies. Who’s the more reliable narrator, Baghdad Bob or Baghdad Bob?

 

I estimated there was a 45 percent chance Trump was correct, a 45 percent chance that the Iranians were, and a 10 percent chance that some prankster got the president’s personal cell phone number (not hard to do) and convinced him he was talking to Mojtaba Khamenei.

 

The reality of what happened appears to fall somewhere in between the official accounts. The two sides are communicating, directly via outreach from Steve Witkoff to Iran’s foreign minister and indirectly through intermediaries from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan. But Trump’s claim that the talks were “productive” is … optimistic.

 

The U.S. reportedly hasn’t backed off its demands that Iran end its nuclear program, support for regional proxies, and ballistic-missile program. For their part, the Iranians want America and Israel to pledge not to attack in the future, to compensate the country for its losses during the war, and to provide some sort of sanctions relief. According to the Wall Street Journal, figures inside the Revolutionary Guard also want to begin charging tankers a fee—i.e., a ransom—to transit the Strait of Hormuz from now on.

 

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?

 

The important thing to understand about this authoritarian Rashomon over peace talks is that it came in the context of a threat. The president publicly warned Iran’s regime Saturday that if it didn’t reopen the strait in 48 hours, the United States would begin destroying the country’s power plants. That deadline was set to pass on Monday evening—unless, of course, Trump contrived an excuse to postpone it.

 

Yesterday’s “peace talks” announcement was the excuse. His new deadline for bombing Iran’s power grid has now been extended for five days while the two sides communicate. To all appearances, the president realized that his bluff was about to be called on a reckless threat he’d made and needed some face-saving way to TACO out of it before it happened.

 

That’s part of a pattern. Even more so than usual lately, he’s gotten into a habit of escalating against opponents to pressure them to capitulate without considering how high the cost might be if they refuse.

 

A dumb bluff.

 

Threatening to blow up Iranian power plants if the regime doesn’t end the Hormuz standoff is dumb in half a dozen ways.

 

It places the Iranian people, our ostensible allies in this fight against the fanatics, in the crosshairs. Imagining what might be disrupted if Trump pulled the trigger, one Iranian activist named: “Gasoline, banks, water, health care, mobile phones, disruption to vital devices like ventilators and dialysis machines, home patients (with oxygen generators, medical devices), cold storage and everything.” It would be a humanitarian catastrophe.

 

If anyone benefited from that catastrophe, it would be the regime itself. “An attack on power plants will backfire, and strengthen the antiwar camp and government,” one resident in Tehran told the New York Times. “It will bring more people to the side of defending the country.” After slaughtering Iranians by the thousands earlier this year, what better press could the mullahs hope for than America racking up a higher body count?

 

Even if everything after the strike worked out well for the United States—the strait reopens, the government falls—the world would be left figuring out how to turn the lights back on soonish in a country of 93 million people whose power grid has been laid to waste.

 

Obliterating Iran’s electricity infrastructure would also give the regime political cover to escalate its attacks on energy production in Gulf states like the UAE, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. What good would it do to have the strait reopen if oil facilities across the region are offline indefinitely due to Iranian missile strikes? What would the price of oil be once the dust settled from those strikes?

 

And what if all of that happened and the strait still didn’t reopen? The regime’s strategy is to win a contest of wills with the U.S. and Israel by surviving and inflicting pain on the global economy until its enemies relent. For reasons I don’t understand, Trump seems to have imagined that bombing their power plants would have caused them to suddenly drop that strategy. It wouldn’t have. Then what? Start bombing hospitals next?

 

There’s also the small matter that targeting the enemy’s electrical grid is precisely what fascist Russia has been doing to Ukraine and arguably constitutes a war crime. The average American doesn’t care about such things, I realize, but the U.S. military might. If Trump ordered Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine to plunge the Iranian population into darkness, would Caine obey? Whatever the answer, American forces would have faced a legal and ethical crisis.

 

In sum, “Do what I want or I’ll blow up your power plants” was a case of Trump putting himself in a position in which his only options if his bluff was called were to make the war an order of magnitude more painful than it already is for the planet or to TACO, humiliating himself and handing the regime a moral victory. How’s that for some fancy strategic thinkin’?

 

It’s not just foreign policy where he’s boxed himself in, though.

 

SAVE-ing face.

 

Remember when the president was set to endorse John Cornyn in Texas’ Senate primary runoff?

 

Cornyn finished slightly ahead of MAGA favorite Ken Paxton in the first round of this month’s primary, leading Trump to hint that he would soon announce his preference in the race. Paxton is drowning in scandal and would stand a real chance of losing to Democrat James Talarico in November, particularly in a national “blue wave” environment. The president seemed poised to support the more electable Cornyn in the coming runoff in order to maximize the GOP’s chances of holding the seat.

 

But then … he didn’t.

 

Paxton cleverly announced that he’d consider dropping out if Senate Republicans passed the SAVE America Act, the voter-ID legislation that’s captured Trump’s imagination. (The president named it his “No. 1 priority” a few weeks ago amid, uh, a major war in the Middle East and a cost-of-living crisis that’s about to eat his party alive at the polls.) With Democrats vowing to block the bill, the only way it can advance is if Republicans eliminate the filibuster or force the minority to conduct a weeks-long “talking filibuster” to try to block its passage, which could shut down Senate business for months. The GOP lacks the votes to do either.

 

So Trump did what he always does when he’s at an impasse. He looked around for leverage he could use to lean on his opponents and found it in the form of the Cornyn-Paxton runoff.

 

Most Senate Republicans, including Majority Leader John Thune, want Cornyn to prevail in the primary, knowing that if he doesn’t the seat will be held next year either by Talarico or by a corrupt Republican who’s destined to embarrass the conference. The president should obviously want Cornyn to prevail too, as control of the Senate and therefore the fate of his future nominees could plausibly come down to what happens in Texas.

 

The rational thing for him to do was to endorse Cornyn immediately and try to snuff Paxton’s chances in the runoff. Instead he’s withholding his Cornyn endorsement to pressure Thune and the rest of the Senate GOP into nuking the filibuster and passing the SAVE America Act—even though he’s reducing his own chances of having a compliant Senate majority next year by doing so.

 

It’s the same idiotic M.O. as the power-plant threat in Iran, gambling that his tactics will force an opponent to surrender meekly and leaving himself with only bad options if they don’t. If Thune and the Senate GOP refuse to go nuclear, the president will either 1) endorse Cornyn anyway and look like a chump for having given in after his bluff was called (TACO!), 2) refuse to endorse Cornyn out of spite, leading to a Paxton win in the runoff and serious jeopardy for the GOP in November, or 3) refuse to endorse Cornyn and watch passively as Cornyn prevails in the runoff, denying Trump the ability to claim that it was his influence over the Republican base that delivered victory to the incumbent.

 

Futile escalation.

 

The Cornyn-Paxton drama isn’t the only example of Trump escalating foolishly over the SAVE America Act, though.

 

Until this week, he and his party had an advantage in the ongoing shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security. Senate Democrats have blocked funding of the department for weeks in hopes of extracting concessions from the White House on how Immigration and Customs Enforcement conducts business. But that standoff has left Transportation Security Administration officers unpaid, and unpaid officers tend not to show up for work as often as they do when they’re being compensated. The result, as you’ve surely seen on the news, is preposterously long security lines at U.S. airports as TSA skeleton crews screen passengers.

 

Republicans were all teed up for a straightforward argument about culpability: If Democrats hadn’t shut down DHS, you wouldn’t be waiting in line for five hours for your flight. That argument was potent enough that Democrats sought a deal with the GOP this week (and are still seeking one as I write this) to restore funding for TSA, although not for ICE.

 

That partial surrender would have been a reasonably clean win for the White House. Enter Trump, who suddenly escalated on Sunday night when he declared, “I don’t think we should make any deal with the Crazy, Country Destroying, Radical Left Democrats unless, and until, they Vote with Republicans to pass ‘THE SAVE AMERICA ACT.’” He doubled down in public comments on Monday, warning Thune and his conference, “Don’t make any deal on anything unless you include voter ID.”

 

How much do you want to bet that whatever deal ends up being made will not, in fact, include new voter-ID requirements?

 

It was stupid for the president to introduce the SAVE America Act into the DHS funding standoff at the eleventh hour when he knew (or should have known) Democrats could never capitulate on that without infuriating their base. In doing so, he guaranteed that the final legislation will embarrass him by not including his big demand. He also foolishly took partial “ownership” politically of the ongoing snarl at U.S. airports: By rejecting Democrats’ attempt to end the shutdown at long last, he gave them an opening to claim that he’s the one who’s now prolonging it.

 

To top things off, he sent agents from one of the least popular government agencies in the United States to “help” with airport screening, inadvertently reminding Americans why Democrats felt obliged to shut down DHS in the first place.

 

At last check this afternoon, Politico was reporting that the White House is reluctantly coming around to a deal that “would pair funding for most of [DHS], save for ICE enforcement operations, with a new GOP reconciliation effort to pass the left-behind funding plus parts of the GOP elections bill known as the SAVE America Act.” If that’s true, it sounds like Senate Republicans are preparing to sucker the president: They surely know that the Senate parliamentarian will likely end up stripping out any SAVE America Act provisions from an eventual reconciliation bill on grounds that they’re extraneous to the federal budget. Rather than kill the bill themselves that Trump has his heart set on, they’re going to let Senate procedure do it for them.

 

Once again the president will have escalated pointlessly, in this case getting nothing for his trouble and actively painting himself into a strategic corner.

 

A strategic rationale?

 

All of these mistakes can be lumped under the familiar heading of “dominance as strategy.” Both by bullying instinct and postliberal disposition, Trump is forever being pulled toward escalation on the assumption that problems can and should be solved by ratcheting up pressure on one’s opponent until they cry uncle.

 

But if they don’t cry uncle, not only does he have no Plan B, he’s frequently in a worse position than he was before.

 

The supreme example of this (before the Iran War, at least) was the Greenland debacle. That was Trump in his element, believing that his leverage over NATO and Ukraine would compel Denmark and its European allies to forfeit the island to the United States without much of a fuss. He underestimated his opponents’ resolve, just as he did in Iran, seemingly not realizing that Europe couldn’t and wouldn’t capitulate to Putinism from the west while it rallied behind Ukraine to beat back Putinism from the east.

 

When those pressure tactics failed, the president had no fallback options: Denmark wouldn’t sell the island, and Greenlanders didn’t want to be acquired. Americans hated the idea of military action to seize the island, and the U.S. military might have been obliged to disobey any order to do so. NATO surely would have collapsed, depriving the United States of valuable alliances. Even Trump’s escalatory tariff threat was quickly aborted after a public outcry.

 

If he had gotten nothing from the Greenland episode, that would have been bad enough. In reality he got less than nothing: It’s not a coincidence that European nations politely declined his request to help out in opening the Strait of Hormuz after he tried to shake them down for territory. The Atlantic alliance will never be the same.

 

That’s “dominance as strategy.” There’s no actual strategy beyond the reptilian belief that intimidating one’s opponent insistently enough will—hopefully—cause them to give up.

 

The best I can do to find something resembling real strategic acumen in all of this is to speculate that Trump realizes the SAVE America Act is unlikely to pass. He might not even want it to pass. What he wants is ammunition to cry “rigged!” if and when (probably when) Democrats mop the floor with Republicans this fall. “If we had passed federal voter ID like I wanted, the left never would have been able to cheat!” the president will cry.

 

He’s setting the table for Stop the Steal 2.0 by moving early to convince fans that only urgent congressional intervention can prevent the midterm elections from being corrupted. That’s a strategy of sorts.

 

But it’s not a very good one, and not just because Americans have seen this movie before.

 

“Rigged!” is persuasive when a race is tight and your own base is highly motivated to believe you, as was the case in 2020. In 2026, neither is true. If the cost of living goes where we all expect it to go amid this clusterfark with oil and the Strait of Hormuz, November’s election will not be close and not even the most zombified MAGA types will need a conspiracy theory to help them understand the result.

 

Meanwhile, because a meaningful chunk of postliberals oppose the war and are eager to claim vindication for opposing it, they won’t be as eager this time to shift blame for Republican defeat away from the president and onto Democratic cheating. With a battle brewing over the future of the post-Trump GOP, which do you think “America First” isolationists like Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene would rather have right-wingers believe? That Americans love Trump’s war but were foiled at the polls by a massive plot to let illegal immigrants vote?

 

Or that Americans hated Trump’s war and turned out en masse on Election Day to punish him for it, requiring the GOP to take a bold new Lindberghian direction on foreign policy in 2028?

 

Weak strategy on the SAVE America Act, no real strategy at all on Iran: That’s what happens when your One Neat Trick is escalating to demonstrate dominance with no fallback plan in reserve. In a week the U.S. will either have bombed Iran back to the de facto Stone Age by destroying its ability to produce electricity or we’ll have witnessed the TACO to end all TACOs. Two bad options, but that’s kakistocracy for you.

Early—and Painful—Lessons From the Iran War

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, March 25, 2026

 

Early Monday morning, financial markets surged when President Donald Trump claimed there had been productive talks with Iran about ending the war. He therefore backed off a vow to bomb Iranian power plants if the Strait of Hormuz wasn’t reopened by Monday evening. Iran denies any such talks actually took place.

 

This is a rare moment in which reasonable people can be torn about which government is more believable.

 

Regardless, markets were buoyed by the hope that this might be another TACO moment—Trump Always Chickens Out—and the belief that he was looking for an off-ramp.

 

I have no idea whether this partial pause will last, whether Iran will grab Trump’s lifeline, or whether markets will stay upbeat. And neither does anyone else. But whichever way things go in the days and weeks ahead, we’ve already (re)learned some useful lessons.

 

For starters, overall success is dependent on more than military success. Critics and supporters of the war have been talking past each other since it started because it has been extremely impressive militarily—but it’s been far murkier politically, geostrategically, and economically.

 

That’s because Iran has an asymmetric advantage. It can disrupt the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil and numerous other vital resources, from fertilizer to natural gas, are shipped. The regime can also strike its neighbors’ oil and gas facilities.

 

It’s like Iran is a beaten weakling holding a vial of nitroglycerin in the engine room of the global economy. You can take him out, but only at great peril.

 

As The Economist recently put it, “Although President Donald Trump says he has ‘destroyed 100% of Iran’s Military Capability’, the 0% that remains is playing havoc with the global economy.”

 

Economic vulnerability is nearly synonymous with political vulnerability, and political vulnerability is strategic vulnerability. It’s great that the Iranians haven’t blocked the strait with thousands of mines as military textbooks foresaw, but if it’s impassable because ships are uninsurable, the results are largely the same.

 

That’s why I have some sympathy for the administration’s efforts to deal with the economic challenge it didn’t adequately prepare for.

 

That effort includes releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, waiving Jones Act rules that require American-flagged and built ships to transport oil for American markets, and lifting some sanctions on Russian oil (a boon to President Vladimir Putin).

 

And, most remarkably, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced a temporary suspension on Iranian oil sanctions for already oil-laden ships parked in the strait.

 

This is exceedingly unusual. Normally, one intensifies economic blockades on enemies in wartime. But that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a bad idea if it works to lower prices. (Although the fact that this could potentially give Iran 10 times more money than President Barack Obama did when he infamously sent the Iranians pallets of cash to secure the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action is pretty wild.)

 

I’m skeptical that Trump’s effort to single-handedly manage the price of oil will work. For whatever momentary relief it provides markets, it also demonstrates that Iran has leverage.

 

But here’s what I find fascinating. The Trump administration has been obsessed with maximizing the president’s war powers to justify his agenda on such things as industrial policy, immigration, domestic deployment of the National Guard, and, most glaringly, trade. But now, when we’re actually at war, officials are reversing their economic philosophy in service to Trump’s seat-of-the-pants decision-making.

 

Trump’s trade policies are exactly what the great 19^th-century economist Henry George had in mind when he warned, “What protectionism teaches us, is to do to ourselves in time of peace what enemies seek to do to us in time of war.”

 

What’s so strange is that Trump is turning George on his head by easing economic pressure on our wartime enemy. But he’s also reversing his own biases by liberating our domestic economy.

 

Of course, sanctions are more coercive than tariffs, but economically they operate on the same logic: Sanctions restrict exchange, reduce supply, and raise costs. The administration is effectively conceding that supply restrictions—i.e., tariffs—raise prices and that relaxing them lowers prices. It usually scoffs at such market logic when defending tariffs or domestic shipping restrictions.

 

The Jones Act, an egregious economic albatross conceived in the wake of World War I that makes all manner of goods more expensive in peacetime, is being waived during wartime, even though the point of the Jones Act is to leave us better prepared to fight wars.

 

I wish I could believe that the Trump administration was actually learning any of these lessons and that they might endure after this war eventually ends. But at this point, that lesson is beyond his ability to learn. Trump believes he’s not just the master of his fate, but everyone else’s as well.

Yes, Voting Fraud Is Real

By Kevin D. Williamson

Wednesday, March 25, 2026

 

Sometimes, the headline raises more than one question: “Quadruple amputee cornhole player fatally shoots man, authorities say.” That is a very efficient headline: It raises many more questions than there are verbs in it. The first sentence of the story from ESPN answers none of these questions and, in fact, raises a couple more: “A county sheriff’s office in Maryland said Monday that a professional cornhole player who is also a quadruple amputee fatally shot a passenger in the front seat of a car he was driving during an argument.”

 

Wait—there are professional cornhole players?

 

People who take an interest in voting fraud have been told—lectured—over and over again, for many years, that voting fraud is not a thing, that there is no evidence of fraud’s having changed the outcome of any American election. And yet there are those provocative headlines, e.g.:

 

South Philly Judge of Elections Admits He Took Bribes to Stuff Ballot Box for Democratic Candidates

 

Turning Point leader, former GOP Rep pleads guilty to attempted election fraud

 

Macomb County Nursing Home Employee Pleads Guilty in Attempted Election Fraud Case

 

Texas social worker charged with 134 felony counts involving election fraud in Limestone County

 

East Texas Democrat Official Pleads Guilty to Voter Fraud

 

3 women charged with voter fraud in Houston Co.

 

And those headlines raise at least one question: Why go to the trouble—and take on the legal risk—of committing voting fraud if not to change the outcome of an election? Maybe Ezra Klein et al. think that as an issue voting fraud is itself fraudulent—“the voting fraud fraud” as Klein’s old Washington Post blog called it—but there are those who disagree, including, presumably, the real experts: the people committing voting fraud.

 

Because we live in a dumb world, it is possible—though not likely!—that this column will be put in front of the eyes of at least a few dumb people, and, so, a few caveats here. It is entirely possible for all of the following things to be true at the same time: 1) Donald Trump lost the 2020 election fair and square; 2) The only people who say otherwise are dopes, dupes, and charlatans; 3) Logistically, it would be extraordinarily difficult to fraudulently alter the outcome of a U.S. presidential election; 4) It is not the case that there are millions of illegal aliens registered to vote and voting; 5) Voting fraud happens; 6) Voting fraud happens regularly; 7) Voting fraud, though not pervasive, is more widespread than many would imagine; 8) It is possible, and even likely, that such fraud can and does change the outcome of certain elections; 9) Evidence suggests that the affected elections mostly are relatively obscure primaries and municipal elections in which the number of total votes is small and, hence, the number of fraudulent votes needed to change the outcome also is small; 10) If No. 8 is not true and no election is being successfully captured, then the only likely explanation for the persistence and regularity of actual, real-world voting fraud—the existence of which has been proved time and again to the satisfaction of the generally excellent standards of evidence relied upon in our criminal trials—is that the ballot-box stuffing and ballot harvesting and such are a kind of expressive, therapeutic exercise in extreme political tribalism, which strikes me as an unlikely explanation though far from impossible.

 

The so-called SAVE America Act (and here I will reiterate my desire to horse-whip legislators who insist on cutesy acronyms), which imposes strict voter-ID rules on the states, may be an imbecilic and bad-faith exercise in political self-interest—these are Republicans we are talking about, after all—but the underlying principles are defensible and, in my view, often prudent.

 

They are, in fact, so prudent that Republicans (however imbecilic and however bad their faith) might want to think twice about them out of self-interest: If, out of sincere concern for keeping noncitizens from voting, we restricted voting to people who could produce a U.S. passport, then Republicans would never win another election. Back in the days in which the typical Republican voter was a very squared-away Alex P. Keaton type and the typical Democratic voter was late for a Grateful Dead show, creating new administrative burdens for voting might have been good for Republicans. If you think that still is the case, then I have some bad news for you, Sunshine: I have been to a Trump rally, and I am pretty sure that the faculty in the women’s studies department at Harvard is more adept at keeping up with their paperwork. (William F. Buckley Jr. posthumously got his wish to be governed by the first 2,000 people in the phone book rather than the faculty of Harvard, except that it turned out to be the Enid, Oklahoma, phone book instead of Boston’s—and look how well it is going!) Today, it is the Democratic Party that represents educated, affluent professionals, while the GOP has become what the Democrats up in Minnesota still call themselves: the farmer-labor party.

 

Disenfranchising the discombobulated, or the merely overwhelmed, might very well backfire on the Republicans. The law could, for example, create some hassles for women who change their names after getting married, putting an additional burden on a traditionally Republican demographic: married women.

 

The federal government probably should not take on any new duties with regard to the administration of elections at all. While the Constitution does invest the central government with some regulatory authority in voting, Uncle Sam’s footprint at the polling place already is too big, and the states are perfectly capable of managing elections themselves in accordance with the constitutional mandate that “the “Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof.”

 

Requiring “documentary proof of citizenship” to register to vote might, as critics complain, make it more difficult for some people to register, and that is, in my view, something well short of a full-blown democratic tragedy. Demanding photo identification at the polls, restricting or largely eliminating absentee ballots and voting by mail, etc.—there is a case to be made for such measures, and that case ought to be made state by state. Some states already have voting by mail exclusively in some elections and, while that is not the model I would choose, the people of Utah, in their wisdom, see things differently. It is a big country, and we have 50 different states for a reason.

 

Making it more difficult to vote is not necessarily a bad thing, and making it easier to vote is not necessarily a good thing. Good citizenship in a free republic requires a little bit of proactivity.

 

Voting fraud may be—almost certainly is—a very, very minor problem. But a little bit of fraud in our elections is like a little bit of penny-ante embezzling by government workers: It is not the grand totals that concern us so much as that the sums in question, however picayune, attest to corruption in the system and a lack of decent oversight.

 

In that sense, voting fraud is like one of Donald Trump’s other big issues—illegal immigration—in that the refusal of responsible parties to confront the issue forthrightly and proactively presents an opportunity for irresponsible parties to take up the issue. Washington has in these matters issued an engraved invitation to demagoguery, and Donald Trump has answered it. But the unseriousness of Trump and his sycophants does not detract from the seriousness of the underlying concerns. We should want our elections to be as clean as possible, even if it inconveniences a few people or a few million of them. 

 

Something to meditate on.

 

Mostly, though, I want to know how that quadruple-amputee professional cornhole player managed to drive a car and shoot somebody at the same time.

The Tide Turns for Ukraine

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, March 25, 2026

 

You’ve probably heard cynical observers of the U.S.-Israeli war against the Islamic Republic of Iran insist that the only true victor in this war will be Russia. If this is what victory looks like, though, Russia was better off mired in a stalemated quagmire.

 

It turns out that Ukraine isn’t bereft of any “cards” to play in this war. In fact, it’s got a full deck at its disposal.

 

“The biggest thing coming out of Ukraine is the rapid pace of innovation,” said Space Force Lieutenant General Steven Whitney in a recent congressional testimony. Kyiv has developed the capacity to adapt, iterating and fielding both new high-tech weapons and low-cost defensive munitions at a rapid pace. “Their level of innovation is out of this world,” he marveled.

 

That ingenuity has transformed Ukraine, in the minds of its detractors inside the Trump administration, from a charity case and a drag on U.S. resources into a sought-after partner in the battle against Iranian forces and the creator of weapons systems that the U.S. and its Middle East partners only wish they had at their disposal.

 

Ukraine isn’t just positioning itself as a desirable collaborator in procurement. Ukraine’s stock is rising among those who only recently dismissed its battlefield prospects, too.

 

In February, Elon Musk’s SpaceX implemented a whitelisting system that cut Russian forces off from accessing its Starlink satellite-based internet services. All of a sudden, Russian commanders could no longer access live footage of the battlespace and lost communications with troops in the field. The move coincided with a Ukrainian offensive that is still advancing eastward.

 

“Since then, Ukraine says it has retaken roughly 150 square miles of territory in the southern Zaporizhzhia and Dnipropetrovsk regions, where Russian forces had previously been advancing rapidly,” the Wall Street Journal reported last week. Indeed, for the better part of a month, while the world’s eyes were locked on the Persian Gulf, Ukrainian forces have managed to advance on several fronts, retaking contested and strategically valuable territory from Russia’s occupiers.

 

With the onset of spring, Russia, too, is back on offense. But while Moscow’s soldiers are making “some tactical gains at significant cost,” according to the Institute for the Study of War, its strategic objectives remain out of reach for now. And the “cost” of this offensive is steep.

 

“The command of the Russian troops threw tens of thousands of soldiers into ‘meat assaults,’ but the price of this attempted offensive turned out to be catastrophic for the aggressor,” Ukrainian Armed Forces chief General Oleksandr Syrskyi revealed this week. “Over four days of intensive assault actions, the enemy lost more than 6,090 servicemen killed and wounded.”

 

“For soldiers in front-line assault units, the odds of surviving the war are approaching zero,” the exiled Russian dissident Mikhail Khodorkovsky wrote, citing Russian-language dossiers disclosing the extent of Moscow’s losses. “I have read the full Russian-language report linked below,” the Volokh Conspiracy contributor, U.S. law professor, and native Russian speaker Ilya Somin wrote, “and [I] can confirm it amply documents these conclusions (based on original Russian military docs provided by an officer who defected).”

 

Kyiv-skeptical elements inside the Trump administration are still trying to force Ukraine into a supplicative posture, and Ukraine is still resisting Washington’s efforts to impose defeat on it. But those who saw Ukraine as little more than a freeloading alms-seeker draining the West’s resources toward no greater strategic end must increasingly rely on baseless prejudices to justify that outlook.

 

Russia’s war of conquest in Ukraine won’t end anytime soon, and there will be more twists of fortune to come in a war that’s been full of them. But those who told themselves that Ukraine’s defeat was only a matter of time allowed the wish to father the thought.

Remember Kermit Gosnell’s Victims

National Review Online

Wednesday, March 25, 2026

 

Kermit Gosnell, the infamous late-term abortionist of West Philadelphia, has died at age 85. Gosnell came to national attention in 2011 after a grand jury report detailed the “house of horrors” that was his clinical abortion practice. Gosnell was convicted of first-degree murder in 2013, charged with seven born-alive infant deaths, and the involuntary manslaughter of Karnamaya Mongar, a patient at his clinic. Gosnell’s life’s work is a testimony to gruesome neglect in American law and society. This neglect allowed Gosnell to profit at incredible cost to his community, to unborn children, and to women in difficult pregnancies. Prosecutors speculated that Gosnell caused perhaps hundreds of born-alive infant deaths.

 

His case illustrates several uncomfortable truths about abortion. Abortion’s propagandists often talk of the dangers of childbirth, but late-term surgical abortions are dangerous to women for an obvious reason. Millions of years of evolution determine that a woman’s body protects the child in the womb. Killing the unborn child with sharp implements and powerful vacuums presents obvious risks to the mother. In Gosnell’s practice, one woman’s cervix and colon were torn, requiring removal of nearly six inches of her intestines. Another was sent home with fetal parts still inside of her, leading to an infection that nearly killed her. Another went into shock and required a hysterectomy.

 

This comes alongside another uncomfortable truth — the kind of callousness required to carry out this work cannot be contained solely to the unborn. Patients at Gosnell’s clinics were given powerful sedatives or labor-inducing drugs by untrained staff. Women were left semiconscious on dirty recliners or on operating tables. They were left on furniture the grand jury report found was stained with blood, urine, and cat feces, which was also in the operating room. Mongar died after being given outdated medication, which led to staff giving her an overdose of it.

 

The Gosnell case exposed more than a clinic; it also exposed Pennsylvania’s government, and ultimately American society. The Pennsylvania Department of Health had three decades to detect and shut down Gosnell’s “Women’s Medical Society.” For political reasons, it was decided that inspections would, inherently, impede “access” to abortion. Gosnell never faced scrutiny from the state, despite 46 civil lawsuits filed against him, including ten for malpractice and one involving a patient death.

 

Well-documented complaints, administrative irregularities, and regulatory violations were ignored by the government as policy. Gosnell’s clinic operated without a formal certificate from 1980 to 1989. By that time, Gosnell was the only physician in the clinic; there were no trained nurses, and no outside lab work was being done. The state renewed the clinic’s approval based on promises to improve. A 1992 inspection left entire sections blank — indicating no qualified person was administering anesthesia or post-op care. The report concluded “no deficiencies” despite the fact that the report itself documented deficiencies. Then, oversight ceased entirely. To their credit, the National Abortion Federation inspected Gosnell’s clinic and concluded it was so far below standard it could not be recommended as a referral site. But this information wasn’t sent on to state regulators.

 

None of Pennsylvania’s 22 abortion clinics had been inspected by the government for more than 17 years before the grand jury investigation of Gosnell, a posture of neglect that began under pro-choice Republican Governor Tom Ridge.

 

Gosnell was finally discovered because the DEA and FBI were doing their job regarding the opioid crisis. Gosnell was running a pill mill out of his abortion clinic, writing fraudulent subscriptions for oxycodone, alprazolam, and codeine. This is perhaps the most obvious uncomfortable testimony. Evil is not easily contained. Gosnell’s fundamental mercenary hostility to life wasn’t limited to abortion but spread to the side hustle of profiting from the deadly addictions of opioid users. By the time he was brought to trial, Gosnell had managed to accumulate 17 properties.

 

Gosnell’s horrors are what American society offered the scared, troubled pregnant women of West Philadelphia, turning a blind eye to the insidious “service” he provided to his community. It brings to mind the warning of Thomas Jefferson: We tremble when we reflect that God is just.