‘The United States has capitulated to Iran. There is a “deal,” which has been signed, on terms that can only be described as those of complete Iranian victory.

The US-Iranian talks that were supposed to begin today were cancelled, so today is as good a day as any to discuss the signed “memorandum of understanding” and mark the completion of the disaster. We have what we have: humiliation.

War, as some people apparently needed to learn, is not about the pleasure one takes in watching things blow up. It is politics by other means. To win a war means changing the politics of the enemy such that they must surrender. That is what Iran just did to the United States.

This war was a parade of Trump’s incompetence at every possible level from the beginning. To win a war requires understanding the politics of the other side and how it might be changed. Trump, Hegseth and the others treated the Iranian leadership as cartoon characters who would immediately do what Americans wanted as soon as the bombs fell. The Americans had no strategy — no sense of how violence could change politics — and it did not occur to them that the Iranians would have one. Once the Iranians did the obvious, which was to respond to American long-range strikes with their own, and close the Straits of Hormuz, the war was over, and they had won. The Americans had no second move, except to claim that they had won when they had lost (which they are, laughably, still doing)…’ (Timothy Snyder via Substack)