As we begin a third week of shock-and-awe, the partying-like-it's-2002 vibe continues to dominate much of the establishment "conservative" commentary. I'll attend to recent developments tomorrow, because I insist, like the Royal Navy dockyard at Portsmouth, that the new war keep office hours. However, my initial pessimism from that first weekend has not changed, for the obvious reason that the Pentagon - as much as the Minneapolis daycare industry - is a racket, which is why, since VJ Day, it has an almost unbroken record of failure for anything lasting longer than three hours.
By contrast, as I said at the start, in order to win, the mullahs merely have to survive. As those Afghan goatherds like to say, "The Americans have all the watches, but we have all the time."
Right now, Tehran thinks it can run out the clock. President Trump, for his part, remains bullish:
Our Weapons are the most powerful and sophisticated the World has ever known.
That's true. Unfortunately, because of the aforementioned racket, forty per cent of the entire planet's military budget doesn't buy you very many of them. Headline from yesterday:
Israel is running critically low on interceptors, US officials say
The IDF denies that it's running "critically low", but the fact that in Washington the insiders are already leaking against their bosses is also of note, no?
At any rate, tell it to the Ukrainians, whose re-supply of Patriot interceptors Washington ended last year. Tell it to the South Koreans, whose interceptors were moved to the Middle East a week or two back. Tell it to the Gulf monarchies hosting Washington's hugely expensive military bases, which now lie effectively abandoned because the Pentagon has concluded it is unable to defend them without significant loss of life.
The "military-industrial complex" manufactures about six hundred Patriot missiles a year, which Washington would like to triple to about two thousand. However, that has not yet happened. So, in the first fortnight of this war, the Pentagon fired off two years' worth of Patriots. Each missile costs north of three million bucks; that's more than most of the stuff it hits: a cruise missile or a tactical ballistic missile costs about half that; the new cheapo cruise is $150,000; a drone costs twenty grand. So Patriots are a somewhat costly way to take out incoming drones - although the British have developed a cheapo drone interceptor for about two thousand quid. Lindsey Graham and his chums have staged an ongoing dress rehearsal in how this differential plays out - across the Donbass for the last four years - but nobody in Washington seems to have noticed there might be lessons of broader applicability to draw from that.
The good news - for opponents of forever wars like, er, Tulsi Gabbard and JD Vance - is it makes "boots on the ground" all but impossible: Where are you going to mass your troops preparatory to the land invasion? A lousy bargain-basement drone can take off from Iran and reach RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus. All those westerners who've scoffed at how slowly Russia has advanced in Ukraine seem not to have noticed that that's the only way you can do it without being wiped out. Try re-enacting the beaches of Normandy under drone bombardment.
So the Gulf monarchies, which have successfully reinvented themselves as the Monte Carlos of the Middle East, are now getting a grim lesson in the value of US security guarantees.
Which brings us to this week's episode of my ongoing audio adaptation of the bestselling America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It. Twenty years ago I wrote:
"You're either with us or you're with the terrorists"? Most of America's European "allies" checked the Neither Of The Above box and most Middle Eastern "allies" checked the Both Of The Above box. Belgium isn't exactly with the terrorists but it isn't with us in any meaningful sense. Saudi Arabia is with us but also funding the terrorists in every corner of the world. And both countries get away with it...
America is in danger of finding itself in the same lonely camp as Israel. Nudge things half-a-decade down the road. There'll be an informal Islamoveto over many other areas of French and European policy. Russia and China have already determined that, whatever their own little local difficulties with Muslims, their long-term strategic interest lies in keeping the jihad as an American problem. The internal logic of the demographic shifts will be to make much of the world figure it makes sense to be on the side America's not.
And so here we are in Week Three of a new war - with not only India and China but also at least two European countries (France and Italy) frantically dialling the Deputy Assistant Under-Ayatollah in whatever ICU he's weekending in to negotiate one-on-one with the "Death to America" crowd about getting through Hormuz. Your nation not yet schmoozing the firebreathing evildoers? It's not too late:
Iran 'open to countries who want to talk' about safe passage through Strait of Hormuz
So the principal consequence of the first phase of this war is that Iran has leverage in Europe, Asia and beyond that it didn't have a month ago. Which is one reason it's shipping more oil than it did before the war.
Members of The Mark Steyn Club can hear me read Part Twenty-Eight of America Alone simply by clicking here and logging-in. Earlier episodes can be found here.
~If you prefer more fictional fancies of a weekend, there are spy thrillers, comedy classics, tales of horror and historical romance and much more, all over at our Tales for Our Time home page. If you've a friend who might be partial to almost eighty cracking capers, we have a special Gift Membership that, aside from audio adventures, also includes video poetry, live music and more. And I'll be doing a live-performance Tale for Our Time at sea on the next Mark Steyn Cruise - sailing aboard the Queen Mary 2.
To become a member of The Mark Steyn Club, please click here - and don't forget that special Gift Membership. As soon as you join, you'll get access not only to America Alone but to over six dozen gripping yarns in Tales for Our Time. Please join me next weekend for Part Twenty-Nine of America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It.