Sargent: And you sort of see this same mistake being duplicated over and over by Donald Trump. It’s almost like he’s caught in this weird mental loop. He just keeps tweeting over and over, if Iran doesn’t do what I say, then the bombing will really start. And it’s a little hard to keep escalating that. We were sort of treated to the comic spectacle, I guess comic isn’t quite the right word, of Donald Trump threatening to obliterate Iranian civilization entirely, which would have killed 90 million people.
And then when that didn’t bully Iran into opening the Strait of Hormuz, he said, well, I’ll tell you what, the bombing is going to really start. Like, how can you actually top obliterating Iranian civilization? You can’t. And so you can sort of see that we’re trapped in this fun house where Donald Trump won’t learn the lesson that force by itself can’t solve the problem, right?
Grossman: It’s not even force by itself—it is threats that he’s trying to solve the problem with. One of the problems of this war is, while it was never a good idea in the first place, Trump did not deploy the type of force that would be necessary to accomplish it—they just thought bombing from afar. And the thing about bombing from afar is it has literally never won a war, ever. Bombing on its own—you can damage some stuff, but you can’t really win big concessions from a country.