Trump Doesn’t Have the Cards
Karma comes for our very stable genius and has he even said “thank you”?
Programming note: Mark Hertling, Ben Parker, and special guest Margaret Donovan are doing a live recording of Command Post at 7:30 p.m. EDT tonight all about Trump's threats to order massive war crimes against Iran and the larger ethics and legality of the Iran war. Donovan is a former military lawyer and federal prosecutor and now a lecturer at Yale Law School. Watch here on Substack or YouTube. We’ll post the replay for members on the site when it concludes.
1. Negotiation
We will, eventually, get a negotiated settlement with Iran. There will be no change of the Iranian regime, nor unconditional surrender. Which means that President Trump will have failed to achieve his primary war aims.
This fact alone demonstrates that Trump does not have, as the saying goes, “the cards.”
The only real question is how much damage Trump inflicts on America (and the rest of the world) before he folds. Broadly speaking, I can see two possible paths. One is quite bad for America; the other is worse.