Programming note: Tomorrow, Wednesday, I hope to be back behind the microphone taking questions from Mark Steyn Club members around the world at 3pm North American Eastern (8pm British Summer Time) for our latest Clubland Q&A. Hope you can swing by.
~Well, another twenty-four hours in the nuclear news cycle, and the pendulum has swung and hit John Bolton in the moustache. President Trump has decreed that there will be "no further HATE" and proclaimed "Peace and Harmony in the Region". He then issued the terms of a ceasefire for what he announced would henceforth be known as "the Twelve-Day War".
The Iranian Foreign Minister, something of a cool customer, initially responded by saying their government had yet to receive any such ceasefire "proposals", before, shortly afterwards, leaving it to a low-level minion to confirm that, yeah, sure, they'd be stringing along with them. Peace and Harmony in the Region! Peace and harmony and understanding, sympathy and trust abounding, no more falsehoods or derisions, golden living dreams of visions, mystic crystal revelation... Had Trump announced that Prime Minister Netanyahu and Supreme Leader Khamenei would be joining him in Qatar for a grand finale of "This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius", backed by Lindsey Graham dressed as the Dalai Lama and Mark Levin garbed as a Bollywood bridesmaid, the Foreign Minister would have reacted coolly and then gone for his costume fitting.
Or maybe not: in the early hours, Iran broke the ceasefire and Israel had to shoot down at least two ballistic missiles. The Zionist Entity promised to ¨respond forcefully" - but perhaps Trump can prevail upon them to respond tokenly, as Iran did at that US base ...was it only yesterday? All seems longer ago now. At any rate, there was not a lot of harmony:
President Trump on Israel and Iran: "We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don't know what the fuck they're doing." pic.twitter.com/xrztmebALZ
— CSPAN (@cspan) June 24, 2025
So what have we just witnessed this last week? The markets appear to have concluded early on that this was all Armageddon dinner-theatre, although there are others who suggest that in the last thirty-six hours Trump had belatedly been reminded how much he loathed hanging out with the Bolton-Kristol all-war-all-the-time wing of American "conservatism" and decided it was time to row back to saner waters. Mark Levin's initial reaction was to complain that what he calls "the Iranian Nazi regime" was being given an "off ramp" and a "lifeline" that would enable it to "survive to terrorize and murder" - which would be "a disastrous outcome after all of this". As I well know from my mercifully brief business relationship with Levin, the initial reaction is always the more sincere one - and then the need to protect his bottom line kicks in. So, within a couple of hours, Old Yeller had gone rather more sotto voce and clarified that "to be absolutely clear... President Trump is to be trusted."
Tucker Carlson unloads on Mark Levin in his conversation with Emily Jashinsky here, including use of the phrase "sex life", but that's for stronger stomachs than mine. Still, how bonkers did it get yesterday? Mr Levin to Putin's right-hand man:
Hey, dummy. Maybe we arm Ukraine with nukes too. You scare nobody.https://t.co/MiAvoahW7q
— Mark R. Levin (@marklevinshow) June 22, 2025
Which is a useful reminder that there are regions that remain bereft of Peace and Harmony - such as Europe, where a brutal old-fashioned meat-grinder war has gone on for three-and-a-half years and has utterly destroyed the remnants of Ukraine's demographic future. But hey, who knows? Maybe Mr Levin's sophisticated analysis is right, and the answer is to take it nuclear: let's face it, nothing else has worked.
So today the leaders of Nato convene for a landmark summit:
NATO countries agree to increase defence spending to 5%
That headline isn't strictly accurate. Member states have apparently agreed to commit to a target of 5% by 2035, to mark the start of the fourteenth anniversary of the Ukraine war. Which means that, as always with Nato, they'll all look butch at the photo-op, and then they'll do bugger all. Even the "commitment" to a "target" is too much for Spain, which has secured an opt-out.
But hang on a minute: Nato has been at war - or at proxy-war - with Russia for three-and-a-half years now. So it's been on a war-footing, supposedly, for seven-eighths of the length of the First World War. How's that war-footing going? Per Nato's head honcho, Mark Rutte (the woeful former Dutch PM - ask our pal Eva Vlaardingerbroek), earlier this month:
The Russian army is developing its war capabilities by multiple times more than that of NATO despite having an economy 25 times smaller, NATO's secretary general has warned...
"The Russians, as we speak are reconstituting themselves at a rapid pace and producing four times more ammunition in three months than the whole of NATO in a year," said Rutte.
That's a rather confusing way of putting it; what he means is: the Russians (who, as Mark Levin assures us, "scare nobody") produce more ammunition in three weeks than the whole of Nato does in a year. Can even Nato be that worthless?
Taking the Secretary-General at his word, if you're wondering why the Pentagon has to divert ammo marked for Israel to Ukraine and then divert it back from Ukraine to Israel ...well, let's do what everybody else does and dredge up the only historical analogy anybody knows - not the First World War, but the Second (see Levin's "Iranian Nazi regime"): We're asked to believe that Nato needs longer than the US was in the Second World War for to move to a war-production footing.
To be sure, supply chains are always difficult: Iran's threat to close the Strait of Hormuz could have seriously impacted McDonald's need to recall the hash browns it sent to Montenegro and divert them to Kiribati.
Trump gets something very basic: Flying the highest of high-tech weaponry seven thousand miles to drop down a ventilation shaft opening the size of a dishwasher is the kind of brilliant, dazzling one-off only the United States can do. But what next? Almost all geopolitical conflicts start with a bit of shock-&-awe (Pearl Harbor, even the assassination of the Archduke) and then dwindle down to old-school wars of attrition - as the United States should certainly know after taking twenty years to lose to goatherds with fertiliser, and three years to lose to "a gas station masquerading as a country" (thank you, John McCain). In wars of attrition, old-fashioned unglamorous things become important, like the ability to manufacture bullets in a timely manner. The basic arithmetical calculations are not complex: Don't get into a long war with an enemy whose stock of long-range ballistic missiles outnumbers your surface-to-air missiles.
So Trump had the narrowest window of opportunity, and used it.
On the other side, the last week-and-a-half mostly revealed the shallowness of the War Party. You'll recall, for example, that Ted Cruz got into a spat with Tucker over the actual population of Iran. Last week, a UK podcast had a brief discussion on The US Army-Marine Corps Counter-Insurgency Field Manual, which notes the following (foot of page xxvi):
The troop demands are significant. The manual's recommendation is a minimum of twenty counterinsurgents per 1,000 residents.
That's roughly what the British had in Malaya. Which they won, by the way. Twenty-two years ago, a couple of weeks after the fall of Saddam, I stopped on the shoulder of the main western highway from Jordan to Baghdad to fill up from an enterprising Iraqi who'd retrieved some supplies from a looted petrol station and was anxious to sell them to any passing Canadian tourists. As he was topping off, I asked him how agreeable he found the western soldiery. He grinned a big toothless grin and pointed to a chopper that had just come up over the horizon to hover above our heads. Then he said: "Americans only in the sky."
We did not win that one, you'll recall. Instead, we created an Iranian client-state.
That's why Ted Cruz's breezy indifference when Tucker asked him the population of Iran was so revealing. The senator told Tucker that it doesn't matter whether the population of Iran is eighty million or a hundred million. Really?
Because, per the Pentagon's own field manual, the latter figure would require finding an extra 400,000 troops. Oh, wait. If it's a Nato mission, the other members could muster 127 guys between them, so it would only require 399,873 extra Americans.
Even if the public were minded to put one-and-a-half million pairs of boots on the ground, it couldn't do it. "Americans only in the sky" equals what an Australian prime minister told me, after a flying visit to the troops in Afghanistan, was "the Crusader fort mentality".
It doesn't work. The political divide in America is between, crudely, Trumpians and neocons. The former are anti-war; the latter are pro-war ...but a way of war that doesn't work.
A quarter-century ago, I chanced to be sitting at lunch next to Lord Carrington, a Tory not to everyone's taste but an amusing companion over the soup-and-fish. We were discussing the fall of the Soviet Union, then less than a decade in the rear-view mirror, when he suddenly drawled to me in his languid aristocratic vowels: "What is Nato for?"
I replied: "Well, you were the Secretary-General, so, if you don't know, why should I?"
What is Nato for? Twenty-five years after that lunch, there is still no good answer to that question. But, from the Hindu Kush to the Donbass, the lack of a good answer has left a lot of people dead.
Trump's high-stakes brinksmanship these last few days appears to have worked. Now he returns to humdrum reality: a summit of wealthy nations that can't make ammo.
~We thank you for all your kind comments on the commencement of The Mark Steyn Club's ninth year - and especially thank all our new members, and those old members who've signed up a chum for a SteynOnline Gift Certificate or a Steyn Club Gift Membership. Steyn Clubbers span the globe, from London, Ontario to London, England to London, Kiribati. We hope to welcome many more new members in the years ahead.
