If Washington’s participation in Israel’s June 2025 war with Iran elevated U.S. military force to a perfectly viable instrument of the United States’ Iran policy, the success of current talks would signal the formal undoing of that logic. But should the failure of talks pave the way for another full-scale war, the United States and Israel will be fighting an Iran vastly different from June. For the Iran of today appears to have made its peace with the grim conclusion that while a decisive slog with Israel and the United States is sure to be agonizing, it is preferable to the recurring attrition of repeated wars and a chronic strategic vulnerability that only emboldens adversaries to target Iran and its regional allies.
Trump is a senile lunatic, of course the nonsense spewing out of his brain is contradictory. Nothing he is doing makes any rational sense on any level. People are just trying to play idiot-whisperer to sus out what random two malfunctioning brain cells are going to form his next policy choice (foreign or domestic). Of course what they’re saying is contradictory, the random-bad idea generator running the country is a contradiction factory.
Again. Trump is not operating with a blank canvas. The JCOS present him with specific options after heavy bureaucratic deliberations and he is choosing between those options.
The country, including the military, is still a bureaucracy. Electing a president to preside over that bureaucracy, while certainly subject to individual differences in leaders, is predominantly driven by that bureaucracy and not by the individual in the oval office