Week Three is underway. Every goatherd on the planet knows that the way to beat America is simply to outlast her: "We have all the time," as I quoted yesterday. What is the precise point at which a swift surgical strike (which the US can do) becomes a war of attrition (which the US always loses)? Well, you don't want to be typing "Week Twenty-Three is underway..."
Given all the dissent in our comments section, I thought today I would pose a few thought experiments. "I'm just asking questions," as Tucker likes to say:
~First, for the two-points-in-Iowa crowd, is Iran worth losing the midterms over?
~Second, and more apocalyptically, has the Islamic Republic already gone nuclear?
~Third, for you airy warmongers, is this at last an exception to the long-established air-power assumptions?
~Fourth: are we watching Ultimate Trump?
To take them in order:
~Worth losing the midterms? Matt Walsh (of Ben Shapiro's Daily Wire, so hard to paint as a Jew-hating nutter; he has no known position on Mme Macron's penis) thinks not. To be sure, since Newt's Contract with America made the House competitive again, the midterms always go to the non-presidential party - with the solitary exception being the GOP's win in 2002, when disenchantment with the "war on terror" was not yet total. However, given that Trump is on the right side of a bunch of 80-20 issues (from open borders to voter ID) and that the Dems are pandering to a hardcore base of Somali daycare entrepreneurs and the NPR women d'un certain âge who love them, there was a sporting chance we might be in second-exception territory.
But not if the TV news is full of maps of the Strait of Hoonew, with expert analysts explaining that a third of global fertiliser has to pass through the Gulf and that, if this keeps up, the world's more incendiary goatherds will have to make do with passing it through their own colons. If that's still the case by September, the GOP will lose both the House and Senate. Trump was pretty much guaranteed to be impeached a third time - but now it will be not for some bollocks 'phone call to Kiev but for something meatier such as, oh, war crimes. The Democrats have already noticed that Pete Hegseth's promise of "no quarter" for Iran is in explicit breach not just of pansy guff like "international law" but of Section 5.4.7 of the Pentagon's own rule book:
It is forbidden to declare that no quarter will be given.
Last time round, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and five other rock-ribbed Republicans voted to convict Trump on the total codswalloping balderdash of the second impeachment. How many more will string along with third-time's-the-charm? Particularly if their goal is to ensure that the 2027-28 GOP primary season is returned to Uniparty parameters?
To those for whom Trump (and a likeminded successor) is America's last chance, the Matt Walsh calculation is a serious one: Is "Epic Fury" worth all that will follow from the loss of what is, effectively, the west's last election cycle?
Or is it simpler than that? The rules do not apply to Trump: He is the Grover Cleveland of the third millennium - that is, if Grover Cleveland had spent the early 1890s being criminally convicted, fined billions, and having his lovely young bride's bloomers rifled through by disgusting creepy federal agents. In other words: could Trump lose a catastrophic war and simply cruise on invincibly to pass the White House to his designated protegé?
~Second question: Have the mullahs already gone nuclear? If, per Harold Wilson, a week is a long time in politics, a fortnight is an eternity in geopolitics. For a quarter-century we have been told that Iran is two weeks away from a nuclear bomb - ever since David Frum signed them up for Bush's "axis of evil". Eight days ago, Steve Witkoff said that Tehran's delegation told him in Geneva that they had enough enriched fuel for eleven nukes - and they weren't going to give it up. Since then, Bill O'Reilly has announced that the Administration told him the Iranians were within days of ten bombs.
I'm berated by many commenters for not taking the imminence of nuclear mullahs seriously: Am I such a feckless poofter that I want to live with the risk of tens of millions dead any time it tickles the Supreme Leader's fancy?
Okay, let's take it seriously. The "days" have gone by since O'Reilly was briefed by the White House; the proverbial fortnight has passed since Steve Witkoff returned from Geneva. So has Iran already gone nuclear?
Well, why wouldn't they? Witkoff's account of the eleven bombs sounds like it came as news to him; O'Reilly's ten-bomb version suggests a finding by US intelligence, about which it would be nice to have confirmation from DNI Gabbard, had she not had reconstructive surgery and entered the witness-protection programme. So, according to taste, this bomb-making process was going on at a facility Washington was not aware of or which was buried too deep for a bunker-buster.
In that case, why wouldn't the work have continued all this month? Iran is about three times as big as Ukraine, or about the size of western Europe. While the Yanks are offing ayatollahs and flattening apartment houses in the metropolis, why wouldn't the boffins in some hollowed-out mountain a thousand miles away be ploughing full steam ahead?
Last June, the Pentagon took out three nuclear facilities and agreed with the mullahs to evacuate some Yank turf in the region so that Tehran could drop some token ordnance and claim they had "retaliated". The Iranians would not have consented to that if they'd known they were going to be hit all over again a little over six months later. So, if you don't want to be bombed by the Great Satan twice a year, you need a game-changer - and the obvious choice is the one your enemies already use as their semi-annual casus belli.
Kim Jong-Un determined never to give up his nukes after seeing Colonel Gaddafi agree to eighty-six his nuclear programme and then get sodomised to death in the street for the amusement of Hillary Clinton. There are 193 member states of the UN. Officially, there are five nuclear powers - the World War Two victory parade preserved in aspic. Less formally, there are another handful. If nukes are the only way to avoid the Americans clobbering you whenever it suits, then some 183 countries should follow Kim Jong-Un's logic. Even if only six or seven do, that seems a high price to pay for Gaddafi's arse.
The former CIA agent Larry Johnson has a "game theory" on why Iran should go nuclear, and probably will within a month or so. But neither the US or Israel are acting as if Iran is nuclear, so, regardless of the truth of the matter, why wouldn't the mullahs simply announce to the world during an ongoing conflict that they've now got the bomb? One well-positioned nuke between Haifa and Tel Aviv can take out half Israel's population; the entire Israeli arsenal would have, by comparison, minimal impact on a country the size of Iran.
Why would Iran not go for it?
~Third question: Is this war the first exception to the general rule of air campaigns?
It is well-known that air campaigns are generally ineffective, but the fireballs look super-butch on TV - although not so impressive when they turn out to be Ramada inns or girls' schools. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are said to be exceptions to the general rule, but the Pentagon has yet to recommend nuking Tehran and Qom, and the late Emperor Hirohito told the Duke of Edinburgh that Japan folded not because of the Enola Gay but because his government was terrified of Soviet ground troops raping and pillaging their way across Japan, which the USSR announced they'd be doing the day before the second bomb dropped.
Whatever. A few days ago in Congress, the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (ie, the literal successor to Ike) wandered a little off-message:
General Alexus Grynkewich, NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Europe:
"What I've observed over the course of studying air power in history is that any time you attack a civilian population, you usually end up finding that it just hardens their resolve." pic.twitter.com/xv1Ayv10Yj
— Polymarket Intel (@PolymarketIntel) March 13, 2026
That is certainly borne out by the historical record. However, one consequence of Washington's strategic failure over the years is that I try to think of things from the enemy's point of view more than I did a quarter-century ago. Long-time readers may recall a chap I met in Iraq's western desert twenty-three 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.
...which, twenty-three years later, the State Department has just ordered all Americans to get the hell out of immediately.
My petrol-looting pal was, at a literal level, wrong. There were at that time plenty of Americans on the ground. I saw them in Ramadi, Fallujah and elsewhere, wandering about in the full Robocop, which the Iraqis found hilarious. Yet, in a more profound sense, my friend was absolutely right. Psychologically, in Iraq and Afghanistan Americans were "only in the sky". As an Australian prime minister remarked to me after a visit to the soldiers of the Queen in the Hindu Kush, it was a "crusader fort mentality". Inside the "crusader fort" there was Burger King and Dunkin' Donuts. Sufficiently fortified by both, one occasionally ventured out to be blown up by goatherds with fertiliser of whom they knew few and understood fewer. Americans only in the sky, psychologically.
Assuming Trump was correct about having "obliterated" Iran's nuclear sites last time round, an aerial war against Iran offers four remaining kinds of target:
1) military installations;
2) political figures;
3) economic targets;
4) the civilian population.
Trump and Israel say Category One is all but wiped out. So, supposedly, is Category Two, with Iran now being run by the Persian equivalent of the Deputy Assistant Under-Secretary of the DMV. So the Pentagon have moved to Category Four, and are nightly demolishing residential blocks and other low-value targets.
Wait a minute, what happened to Category Three?
Ah, well. As Trump stated in his Truth Social post on the Kharg Island strike, he is not hitting Iran's oil installations and other aspects of the country's economic infrastructure.
Why not?
Well, because Iran for the moment is content mostly to reciprocate. It has droned American military bases in the regions, taking them out of the game, and forced the US naval "armada" further and further away from the action: "I see no ships," as Lord Nelson remarked in another context. Lindsey Graham does not appear to have a condo in Dubai, so it is hard to decapitate the US political leadership. Nor are there many American housing projects or grade-schools in Mecca or Medina.
But the minute the US and Israel hit Iranian oil infrastructure and other economic targets, then Tehran will do likewise across the Gulf monarchies.
So on what basis does Washington think this will be the first air campaign to bring an enemy to its knees?
One thing can be said for certain: What (if any) regime succeeds the Islamic Republic will be anti-American to one degree or another. You can forget about the Crown Prince.
~My final question: is this Ultimate Trump?
If you follow European and Asian media, from Paris to Peking, their coverage boils down to: why is crazy Orange Man blowing up the entire planet - from attacks on the Italian Air Force to power outages in Bangladesh?
Let's go back a few months to when the President was talking about annexing Greenland so it could be inside his "Golden Dome". Thus the "Donroe" Doctrine and last fall's new National Security Strategy: much of the world is bollocksed and past the point of no return - Britain, France, Germany, Your Country Here. Therefore, what matters is to secure America's hemisphere. Of course, President Monroe lived in a less globalised world, so today it is not enough to hole up in the west but also to implode the east. India and China, Europe and Africa need the Strait of Hormuz. But does America?
On this theory, Trump, the Great Disrupter at home, is now taking it to the next level abroad. It is necessary to retrench, so one has to shape the retrenchment, rather than just be on the receiving end. Tough on the two-thirds of Americans who live paycheque to paycheque, but needs must and, as the talking-point has it, it's "short-term pain for long-term gain"...
Questions, questions...
~Footnote: A reader commented that I must be thrilled at finding myself on the same side as the lefties (which isn't strictly true: I just happen to think, after the record of the last three-quarters of a century, that America is totally sod-bollockingly crap at waging war to any strategic purpose). However, if we're playing Mad Libs...
🚨🇺🇸🇮🇱 NOW: Hillary Clinton has begun PRAISING Donald Trump's foreign policy agenda
😂 It's over... pic.twitter.com/eI1jPTswZD
— Jackson Hinkle 🇺🇸 (@jacksonhinklle) March 10, 2026
Oh, and Mike Pence is back on the team.
More on the escalating fiasco tomorrow.
~We had a very busy weekend at SteynOnline, beginning with Mark's column on the battlefield closer to home. Our weekend music show was a special pre-Academy Awards edition, while Rick McGinnis's Saturday movie date was a Katherine Hepburn Oscar-winner. On Sunday we offered an Academy Award-winning song and presented Part Twenty-Eight of Mark's highly prescient demographic bestseller, America Alone. Our marquee presentation was Steyn's serialisation of The Quest of the Sacred Slipper, a Sax Rohmer caper about murderous Mohammedans on the loose in the London of 1914. Click for the penultimate episode and for the conclusion.
If you were too busy this weekend sending money to John Cornyn and Lindsey Graham, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.
