War is over, if you want it!

So, Secretary of State and "acting" National Security Advisor Marco Rubio averred yesterday, as you can see, that the Iran War was "over," and the United States achieved all its operational objectives. Forget that the Strait of Hormuz is closed. Forget that Iran's nuclear ambitions are undented. Forget that Iran's support to its terrorist proxies goes unabated. We won, suck it losers, nyah!

So what now? More from Pequeño Marco:

Meanwhile, the US still seeks a deal with Iran that addresses its enriched uranium stockpile.

He argues that US economic pressure against Iran can work, even though Tehran appears to have a high pain tolerance.

“There has to be a pressure point on them that causes them to realize they cannot continue to close the straits or they’ll face crushing economic consequences and global diplomatic isolation, which they have proven in the past to be susceptible to,” Rubio asserts.

“They have a high pain threshold, but they don’t have an unlimited pain threshold. Nobody does,” he argues.

The war was to destroy Iran's nuclear capabilities. That hasn't happened. The war was to effect regime change. Instead, the Revolutionary Guard Corps is now firmly in charge. And now you're telling me we're going back to economic blockades and diplomacy? You mean we could have avoided $7 gas and civilian deaths just by doing what we had been doing all along?

Of course, now we have the slight problem that the sea passage through which 40% of the world's oil and gas travel is blockaded by Iran. One would think that would be cause for some military operation. The soi disant "secretary of war" Pete Hegseth avers that Hormuz is "another war." He may want to check with his senile boss on that.

Yet again, someone flatters our senile president, and he rolls over like the dogs he hates. 

I'm all for diplomacy. We, in fact, had reached a diplomatic solution with Iran in 2015. But that was under Barack Obama. And a racist like Donald Trump's entire existence is to erase anything President Obama did. Now we're back to diplomacy, from a much weaker position, against a regime which sees its nuclear program, its missile program, and its funding of regional proxies as existential matters not to be jettisoned for some vague promise from a country which has elected a maniac twice. (This is not to defend the Iranian regime. This is merely to point out that 2026 is not 2015, and the rules which obtained under serious and sober diplomats are no longer operative.) Whatever delusions pop into Trump's declining brain, if a diplomatic solution can be attained it will be on terms far worse than those secured under the Obama administration.

What is stupefying is that this was all so predictable. We warned everyone: Trump Redux would be the Revenge Tour. He would not make the mistake of having "adults in the room"; he was going to stock his regime with the absolute worst people whose only commendation was that they relied on him solely for their positions. He would appoint only people who were absolutely loyal to him. The loyalty, of course, was never reciprocal; but anyone who would take a job in this second regime had no sense of self-worth to begin with. They are absolute ciphers, whose only reason for existing is to be moths to Trump's flame. These are people who should not be in charge of the church bake sale. Yet here we are.

To get personal, being told you have cancer—even a cancer which is completely manageable—does concentrate the mind. You learn to control what you can control, and to look on everything else with, in my case, resting bemused face. This is my coping mechanism. Right now we are ruled by not only evil people, but stupid people. Their stupidity is our saving grace. Their lack of popularity across the country is another. But I'm not sanguine about us getting out of our current pass. The political culture has descended into the screeching of howler monkeys. (As our Victor the Crab posted yesterday, the louder the screech, the smaller the testicles.) And this isn't something infecting only the United States. On Thursday England and Wales are set to have local elections, and the two new extremist parties—Reform on the right, the Greens on the left—are poised to make huge gains in local councils, sidelining the governing Labour Party and the Tories. We are in a struggle for civilization, where the enemies are both external and internal, with internal foes often being funded by our external antagonists. The second Trump regime has been the disaster we all predicted, and then some. If we are to have any hope of victory in this struggle, we have to set clear boundaries and red lines. Coddling extremists under the guise of "free speech" has led us to where we are in a war begun on a whim and being lost. Free speech is not a suicide pact.

But hey, war is over, if you want it.