This is entirely plausible, and it was is a great post. But the question remains…. will Donald Trump resume the war? Does he have any choice?
I ask because the consensus before the ceasefire was Trump was looking for a way out of the war by any means possible. If that’s true, the last thing Trump will want is to get dragged back in to a war that really could become a “never ending war”.
I honestly don’t think Trump cares about a way out of this war. No matter what happens, there’s always someone else to blame. And, assuming he leaves office on or before 20 January 2029, there will be those same people and the Democrats in congress to blame. He’s actually managed to create the perfect storm of combat.
Agreed. Trump’s desire to end the war has been overstated. He’s never faced a negative consequence for anything he’s ever done, so why wouldn’t he keep going with the fun of making bigly explosions that his 30% Kool-Aid base approves?
I’ll say no more in this thread.
I know I shouldn’t be, but I am flabbergasted that they didn’t utilize the entire “two weeks” of a ceasefire to negotiate.
And now he faces a tangible loss: open transit through the Strait.
I suppose Trump could just declare victory and go home, but the market cost of oil will be a stark reminder that he failed miserably.
I have to think that he’s stuck in a quagmire.
In more practical terms, his military is eventually going to need time to restock their munitions. I fear, for want of a better option, that ground troops will be engaged by the time the midterm election rolls around.
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/trump-says-us-start-blockading-strait-hormuz-2026-04-12/
You can’t blockade us, we’re blockading you! Winning the war by blocking global trade!
I think he’s trying to force a coalition of nations to come together to solve the “Strait problem”.
Trump is used to being bailed out by others. There was too much pressure when he was being tasked with negotiating directly with Iran. If he disrupts global trade, he drags Europe (and Russia and China) into this. That way, others can do all the work, and he can deflect blame if it doesn’t work out in his favor.
Won’t they already be otherwise engaged on that august date?
I thought that’s what ICE is for.
He’s already obligated reserve components domestically. All bets are off if there’s going to be a repeat of that. We have to wait and see who’s available to send over there.
Talks of the mid-terms and using government forces is not what this thread is for. Drop it immediately. Try a different trump thread for such.
Moderating:
I hid the most off-topic one.
This topic was automatically opened after 12 minutes.
We shouldn’t forget that there’s at least a fifty fifty chance that this is Trump talking out his ass and there are not enough naval assets in the region to implement such a blockade, or he’ll change his mind momentarily.
ninja’d
My opinion is that this entire ceasefire / negotiation farce was a performance designed to rescue Trump from his laughably incompetent negotiating skills.
As Tuesday progressed, as the deadline from Trump’s maximalist threat approached and the outrage over these threats grew with no response from Iran, the Trump administration knew they had to do something to exfiltrate Trump from the hole he’d trapped himself in.
So they worked through their back channels to get the Pakistani PM to issue a statement they crafted, which included calling the 10 point Iranian proposal “workable”, even though it wasn’t……it had already been made public and it was obviously something the Iranians issued to troll Trump over their 15 point list of demands.
When news organizations pointed this out, calling the Iranian demands maximalist, they pretended that Iran had sent them a different super double secret list of demands - then they declared victory!
But to complete this charade they actually had to go through with a negotiation, so they put three stooges on a plane. To be fair, Kushner and Witkoff have some skills in selling investment opportunities to Sunni royals - but sending them to do real foreign policy is like thinking a surgeon can fly a 747. Then they sent Vance, because the Iranians wanted to humiliate a high level official and they were too dumb to see this.
The outcome of these negotiations was more than predictable, it was the only possible outcome. If the past week had been a movie, it would have been a comedy, a funny one with a predictable ending.
But it’s not a movie, and we are seeing the results of both the ransacking of the administrative state and the fact the guy at the head of the executive branch is the worst negotiator in history, a guy that can’t win a hand of poker unless he’s the only person holding cards.
Real negotiation is based on information, which the US government has (or had) unprecedented access to. If there is a high level Iranian official, there is someone that has made studying them their lives work. There are teams of people that spend their days studying every aspect of Iranian policy. A successful delegation finds their advantage inside this information so they know where to apply leverage. But we’ve replaced those people with people whose only qualifications are that they are Trump’s friends and political allies.
The military campaign against Iran was successful if you score it like a video game, but that’s only part of the war, you need to know what to do with that success….and we obviously don’t.
ETA — Republican strategists need to vary their talking points so the scripting isn’t as obvious, if I hear one more stooge say “the Iranian navy is at the bottom of the sea” my eyes might actually roll out of my head.
It does kind of smack of “you can’t close the Strait of Hormuz because we’re closing it”! ….which reflects the toddler thought pattern that’s the hallmark of this adminstration.
ETA- missed your earlier comment.
I think Ann Hedonia has nailed it here.
Trump announced at the beginning of this debacle he created it would be over in four weeks. It’s well beyond four weeks now.
Therefore he’s lost the war.
He cannot admit that so he has real humans fighting and dying in a completely unneccessary war that has accomplished little other than knocking America’s reputation worse.
I see that, and I also see:
It cannot be overstated how much the mindset of Republicans and conservatives is that liberals are to blame for everything. Their only task is to figure out the right messaging for any given situation, which isn’t that hard because the entire body politic has apparently bought into the idea that only Democrats and America’s adversaries have agency.
Everyone else is “forced” to do things, whether that’s Republicans bombing Iran or Russia invading Ukraine or Israel flattening Gaza. So they’re free to break and disrupt whatever they want because that’s the nature of things. And when Dems try to fix it, it involves making a choice and executing a plan, which will be undermined and used as evidence that Dems can’t do anything.
This is why it’s impossible to show Republicans the error of their ways. Liberals forced Trump to bomb Iran by not bombing it first. Liberals force Trump to keep bombing Iran by reporting (accurately) that Iran has defeated Trump. When the country next has to choose its representatives and leadership, the failures in Iran will be Democrats’ fault for criticizing and obstructing Trump. They’re still trying to blame Obama and Biden for this, and it’s working to an extent.
The Republican man-in-the-street wants to believe this, so Fox keeps reinforcing it. There’s no bottom, nothing that will shake Republicans out of their delusion, because there’s always some veneer of a reason why all of Trump’s screwups are really Democrats’ fault.