I’m old enough to remember when that sort of pronouncement from a U.S. leader had credibility.
Now, I’ll count it as evidence that we are not close to any final resolution.
probably off topic
Do you remember Henry Kissinger announcing “Peace is at hand” in Vietnam a week before the 1972 elections? Six weeks later the U.S. began the most intense bombing campaign of the entire war.
Trump is an amateur liar.
No, he’s just an incompetent and inveterate one. Sadly, he still makes money off the rubes who believe his lies.
Rubio says peace talks could be finalized “today.”
Iran says, “Put your beer down.”
Interview with a 25 year Israeli intelligence veteran focused on Iran:
In short, this war has been a catastrophic failure and has strengthened the Iranian regime. And this was due to a combination of the strong geographic position of Iran relating to global trade, and the fact that there was zero strategic planning by Trump and Hegseth. And not just a failure of US strategy, but a total collapse of Israeli policy on Iran. Iran is massively strengthened in the entire region knowing that not only can they survive direct hostilities with Israel, but direct hostilities with Israel plus the US.
Is anyone shocked that a war started and led by Trump and Hegseth is one of the biggest US blunders in history?
Looks like Trump remembered that if you want to have a war you have to actually like, you know, bomb stuff:
https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/25/world/live-news/iran-war-us-peace-deal
So this is the US, travelling halfway around the world to strike another nation, in “self-defense”.
“The US strikes targets during an ongoing ceasefire” is not something I expected to read in my lifetime.
We’ve tried to. We’re just really bad at it.
And also, this is the first time when it’s the president saying the US should steal the oil.
Now has, not should,
“By the way, how did we do in Venezuela? Not bad. We’ve taken out so much oil in Venezuela, we’ve paid for the cost of the war about 25 times over.”
Which comes to $725,000,000,000 to $1,250,000,000,000.
Not that this has only occurred in Trump’s fever dreams of war crimes he’d like to commit.
So there’s no need for any supplemental funding. Great, superb, masterful … unless we’re using "presidential math"
Looks like Israel is getting ready to attack Lebanon again:
Iraq 1, Iraq 2, and Iran were all about controlling the government in an oil-producing region so that it didn’t interfere with access to oil for the US or its allies.
The US is not energy independent. It is a net exporter of refined products, and is self-sufficient in some products such as natural gas, but the US absolutely is a net importer of crude. That’s why we keep starting these wars. We need friendly countries to keep the crude coming, otherwise our refineries have nothing to do. It needs to be at a favorable price, otherwise our oil execs don’t get their bonuses.
Unfortunately people tend to shorthand this as “stealing the oil”, which isn’t really true. What we can say is that the US stole (or attempted to steal) that country’s autonomy in order to further its own interests in oil markets for ourselves and our allies, killing many thousands of people in the process.
That’s actually kind of worse than just hooking up a tanker and doing an oil heist. That would actually be way more moral than what we’ve actually been doing.
And we’ve been doing it for nearly two centuries. “I’m a hired gun for United Fruit” at the turn of the last one to Cuban sugar and Chilean copper just for the highlights.
“Again”? They never stopped.
“We were on a break!”
Speaking of which, who is up for a couple more months of kinda-sorta war?
All of the investors following Trump’s whims are up for it. 60 more days to make the oil markets go up and down? They’re in.
I hear that the President of Iran offered his resignation, citing that he was being deliberately excluded from decisions by the IRGC. I can’t find a credible source so I am not going to link to an incredible one, but it’s plausible on the face of it, since the President’s power had always depended on how much power the rest of the power structure was willing to give him, and it is plausible that the hard liners and military would be more forceful in retaining power in the wake of the attacks.
If true, this is bad news for any hope for a moderation of the regime in Iran. It was always a faint hope, since you don’t win friends in the government by killing everyone in the government. But if the IRGC has actually taken firmer control of the country, then the strategy of bombing government officials until morale improves looks to be firmly dead in the water.