Programming note: On May 6th 2017 The Mark Steyn Club slipped quietly onto the Internet, and, unlike many of the noisier online launches of the era, we're still here nine years later. We thank (almost) all our First Week Founding Members for re-upping for a tenth year, and we hope our First Fortnight members will want to do the same as this first week of our new season draws to a close. I shall be here tomorrow, Wednesday, for another edition of our Clubland Q&A: I wouldn't miss it for the world or even for an intensive care unit, so I hope you'll want to join me at 3pm North American Eastern - which is 8pm in London, and 9pm in whatever bit of the Austro-Hungarian Empire I chance to be passing through.
~The other day President Trump Truthed out former Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen's demand for the failed "decapitation strategy" to be extended to Iran's negotiating team:
Given that Tehran's Foreign Minister and his colleagues were already worried they were going to be whacked while they were in Islamabad, I'm not sure it's necessary for Mr Thiessen to make the threat explicit. Either way, "decapitation" wouldn't work any better next week than it did two months ago: "Didja hear the Great Satan offed..." (Checks notes.) "...er, the wife of somebody who was foreign minister a quarter-century ago?" "Oh, no! We are finished! My son-in-law's imam was deputy-assistant-under-secretary for women's rights back in the Eighties. He could never get a decent table in a Tehran restaurant. But nevertheless we must throw in the towel now!"
As I have done since the start of this war, I urge readers to think of things from the enemy's perspective - as I try to look at them through the blood-coloured glasses of Marc Thiessen, Lindsey Graham and Mark Levin. A few days back I had an interesting exchange with a friend in the United Arab Emirates (not Farage or the soon-to-be Mrs Richard Tice, as I always hasten to add), and he passed on an intriguing nugget. Even though it's a strategic flop for the Yanks and Israelis, the "decapitation strategy" is sufficiently irksome to Tehran that, in the event President Trump is minded to do as his Truth Social hints and resume it, the mullahs would this time reciprocate with a little decapitation of their own.
So who to decapitate? Marc Thiessen? Doubtful. Like Mark Levin, he probably lives in a gated community. My UAE chum says the word is Tehran has in mind a much easier and proximate target: that's to say, the Gulf monarchies who have made the mistake of taking America's side. None of their royal families is especially popular - they're basically a bunch of bedouin chieftains who two centuries ago did Trumpian "deals" with the Brits and found they'd hit the jackpot. Any minimal favour they enjoyed with their subjects has been further dissipated in recent years by (a) the emirs' willingness to host US bases for "security" reasons and (b) the spectacular failure of those bases to provide any actual security - as the ruling families discovered when American troops were promptly evacuated to Germany, Diego Garcia and beyond.
Just to be clear, by "Gulf monarchies" I generally exclude the House of Saud, whose bigging up was more of a twentieth-century American project than nineteenth-century British. However, Trump's buddy Mohammed bin Salman certainly knows which way the desert wind is blowing. So, within forty-eight hours, America's artfully named "Project Freedom" was killed stone dead. Just one week ago, last Tuesday morning, straight from the US Department of War:
'Project Freedom' Aims to Get Thousands of Commercial Ships Safely Through Strait of Hormuz
As my old chum Pete Hegseth declared, there's now a big red-white-and-blue dome over the strait.
A few hours later, the big red-white-and-blue dome was being dismantled and trucked to the recycling dump. Of those "thousands of commercial ships", Project Freedom got out precisely two. At that point, President Trump Truthed out that his Project was being suspended indefinitely because he was expecting a deal with his imaginary Iranian friend any moment now. As usual, the proposed deal turned out to be "totally unacceptable" and "a piece of garbage", and, even though it was only a one-page memorandum of agreement, the President didn't bother reading it to the end.
The real reason Project Freedom was stillborn was because MBS declined to permit American bases on Saudi soil to participate in it. Unlike Sánchez in Spain and La Meloni in Italy, the Crown Prince did not get pissed on by Trump all over the media for his general gutlessness. America has just shy of 800 military bases in close to eighty foreign countries. In fact, Washington accounts for around eighty per cent of the entire planet's foreign military bases. Former powers such as Britain and France have a few remnants from their days of imperial glory; ascendant powers such as China don't really go in for it. So today overseas bases is largely a Yank thing. Of the forty per cent of world governments who host the Pentagon, how many right now would allow their bases to be used for "Project Freedom" or whatever bleepwit moniker is chosen next? If you're a US taxpayer, as I am, how's boots on any ground anywhere working out for you?
Nevertheless, droning MBS in his palace would be a pretty big escalation for the mullahs, and these last two-and-a-half months they've been careful not to over-escalate. In that sense, their decision to "close" the strait was a brilliantly calibrated act of escalation: the northern half is in Iran's territorial waters; the southern half is in Oman's. To be sure, Marco Rubio bleats that it's an "international waterway" - but that's under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which Iran has chosen not to ratify, and neither has America. The Saudi Crown Prince doesn't see why his country should get bombed because the US has decided to unilaterally enforce a treaty it's not a signatory to.
So that leaves the wealthy coastal emirs. How hard would it be to "decapitate" the Emir of Kuwait or King of Bahrain? Or, preparatory to that, if not the head honcho of the United Arab Emirates, then maybe one or its constituent emirates? In good times, nobody speaks of the "UAE", only of its glittering if not quite sovereign quartiers such as Dubai. Suppose Tehran decapitated one of those guys. Why, you never know, it might provoke actual regime-change, as opposed to the fantasy regime-change talked up by Princess Lindsey and the Micropenis.
Trump himself has told us he didn't expect Iran to close the strait. Nor, apparently, did anyone else in Washington. For the rest of the world, the quickest way to "open the fuckin' strait" is not to be on America's side. The President seems to think that one more threat of impending Armageddon that's never acted upon should do it - see the dismal timeline that my formerly gung-ho friends at Powerline have now posted. Tehran seems to be relaxed about the prospect of "one big glow". To go back almost a decade to the then candidate's pussy-grabbing tape, Ann Coulter made the interesting observation that Trump was in a difficult position when it came to walking it back because, while there is no record of him ever grabbing anyone by the pussy, he likes to be seen as the kinda guy who can grab women by the pussy. Something similar is playing out geopolitically: on our relatively few personal interactions, ever since I first met him thirty-five years ago when Marla Maples was auditioning for The Will Rogers Follies, he has always struck me as a far softer and gentler man than his image might suggest. Of his apparently schizophrenic Truthing in the weeks since the ceasefire - open the fuckin' strait or get ready for a big orange glow to wipe you off the face of the earth; two hours later: hey, these fabulous new mullahs are way easier to deal with than the last guys; MIGA! - I would ajudge the latter to be far closer to the real Trump.
So Tehran seems to think he's being bullied into being a bully.
I would say Trump is in the position of Pam Ewing in that famous Dallas episode: the new season is a disaster and he would like nothing better than to step into the shower and discover that it was all a bad dream and he's back to the day before it all began to go wrong - February 27th. Alas, every morning he wakes up and steps into the shower to find Lindsey Graham in there soaping Mark Levin's back.
No strategic goals have been accomplished. Right now, Trump would settle for getting back the February 27th Strait of Hormuz. And his political gifts are such he might be able to sell that as a tremendous victory to sufficient people at least to keep the Senate in play.
The Iranians have figured that out. As I said on the fifth day of this catastrophic strategic blunder:
The Iranians have it easy. They just have to survive in order to win.
They've survived - and in fact done rather more than that. So there will be no return to February 27th.
If you're in bed with Thiessen the Assassinator, Princess Lindsey and the Micropenis, you're a loser.
~UPDATE! Just to confirm the previous three words, Lindsey Graham on the first day of the war:
The biggest change in the Middle East in a thousand years is upon us.
Lindsey Graham today:
This damn thing is going nowhere.
BREAKING: Sen. Lindsey Graham unloads on Pakistan after reports claim the Middle East mediator allowed Iran to use their bases to park military aircraft.
"I don't trust Pakistan as far as I can throw them. If they actually do have Iranian aircraft parked in Pakistan bases to... pic.twitter.com/ULF5CPQSXM
— Fox News (@FoxNews) May 12, 2026
Yes, it's almost like it's a big ol' complicated world out there, and you haven't a clue about it.
~We had a very busy weekend at SteynOnline, beginning with Mark's column on the English elections. His weekend music show started with centrefolds and ended with chaperones, while Rick McGinnis's movie date explored a Korean on the beaches of Normandy. Sunday's Song of the Week was the only choice for the Steyn Club's ninth birthday, and our marquee presentation was the conclusion of his highly prescient demographic bestseller, America Alone.
If you were too busy this weekend drinking blood with Marc Thiessen & Co, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing in this still new week.
