Monday morning, President Donald Trump threatened to bomb an American ally that is currently trying to solve the problem that was created by the very war he started.
This unfolded on Trump’s favorite cable show, Fox & Friends, after Trey Yingst reported on an 11-minute phone call with the president, in which he said: “If Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the shit out of them.”
This wasn’t regarding a nation currently helping Iran or obstructing U.S. military attacks. No, it was in reference to Oman, which has the temerity of trying to negotiate an end to the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. A president casually threatening to bomb an ally who is actively negotiating an end to his own catastrophic war? That should set off every alarm in Washington, but instead it barely survived a morning news cycle and was met with “what are you gonna do?” shoulder shrugs.
Numbed apathy. That’s how almost all of his threats land now, with feckless indifference. And it’s every bit as shocking as villagers seeing an emperor parading nakedly through the town square, each believing the invisible clothes are real.
Just six months into this war, Americans have been promised a complete regime change, an imminent surrender by Iran, a crippling blockade, a Hormuz that “may soon become a territory of the United States,” and economic pressure the world has never seen. What we have instead? An expired ceasefire that Iran used to rebuild military power, and a president threatening the neighbors. Piled up together, Trump’s proclamations look abjectly incompetent at best.
Lest we forget that on the day the attacks started in late February, the Strait of Hormuz was blissfully open. More than a hundred ships carrying the oil the global economy runs on moved through it each day. Last week, eight ships reportedly got through. On Saturday, that number was five, and Sunday? zero. The Iran war did that, and the real-time cost of this disastrous foreign policy foray can be seen on every gas station sign in America: four-plus dollars a gallon, the highest it has ever been this deep into a summer, during the very war that Vice President JD Vance said the first objective is keeping energy cheap. Instead? It strangled the economy it was supposed to protect, and Americans are paying the difference at the pump.
And the strait is just the easiest example of how poorly this has gone. Remember that Iran was supposed to be contained by now (four to six weeks, they said), but instead the battlefield has continued to grow. There is now a cash bounty on American soldiers, and fifty thousand of them are in range of it. Negotiations meant to force capitulation have instead led the United States to speak directly to the Revolutionary Guard through the Kurdish president, which Trump himself confirmed during that Monday morning conversation with Yingst. Something, something never negotiate with terrorists, amirite?
But wait theres, more! American military power meant to intimidate Tehran has instead produced embarrassing news items like USS Abraham Lincoln spending more than 250 days at sea without a port call. Another carrier is getting pulled out of Asia to give it a break, and the Navy took four days to tell one wife her husband went overboard.
Diplomatic alliances designed to project American strength are now taking on water and slowly sinking. Oman got threatened with American bombs on Fox & Friends, which is so bonkers it bears repeating, but at least Oman is tangled up in the Iran War. South Korea isn’t directly involved in the Iran war, but it is paying the price in diesel. And this long-time American ally just watched Trump gut a seventy-year-old joint exercise in a Truth Social post over an unrelated grudge, and is now openly wondering if an American guarantee means anything at all. In other words, the Iran war is exhausting American strengths that have nothing to do with Iran.
Any one of these developments would typically produce congressional hearings, emergency briefings, demands for a strategy, and days of argument over who exactly is fucking this up so badly. But so far they’ve produced relatively little, other than outraged cable news panels no different from every outrage panel we see regardless of the topic, so this one just gets lost in a sea of commeditzed anger designed to move Skirizi units.
But Sunday night we learned that Iran’s hardliners never believed in the ceasefire. Shocking, I know. According to a Wall Street Journal report based on intercepted communications between Tehran and its proxies, Iran has spent those 60 days entirely building munitions and preparing for a larger-scale war. They read Trump’s “memorandum of understanding” as a sign that Washington needed to calm the global economy, and probably as cover for a bigger attack down the road. So they used the pause to prepare for an escalation.
Iran IS hurting, according to multiple reliable reports. Inflation is climbing, and if reports are to be believed, the regime is struggling to pay some of its own Revolutionary Guard officers. The hardliner takeover in Tehran may be desperation or a last gasp of power. But punishing the regime is an action, not an objective. And Iran is showing that it’s willing to be poorer, battered, and frightened, and at the same time, Trump can still be losing this asymmetric war. Both things can be true at the same time.
But somehow none of this has produced anything resembling a political emergency. A 60-day deadline expired Monday morning with nothing to show for it except munitions shortages and a massive cost to US taxpayers, and most networks covered it as a pivot, punctuation to the next chapter in the Iran War show.
If we’ve learned anything from six months of Trump’s and Pete Hegseth’s over-the-top rhetoric, it’s that it’s just empty bluster. Trump’s warned about so many supposedly apocalyptic moments and deals that are days away that this disastrous foreign policy failure now gets processed as more Trump content and less the abject shit show its become.
We are all standing around looking at a naked president while he insists the new clothes aren’t bullshit. It’s time to call it out. The political class (both in DC and in cable news studios) is sleepwalking through a foreign policy disaster that is actively weakening the United States, and nobody is freaking the fuck out.
Democracy can be a maddening thing, and the US’s particular brand of democracy permits a tyranny by a minority, as we have been finding out with MAGA. The only way to fix this is to beat MAGA at the polls, and Dems are doing quite a lot to undercut their ability to do that, even while the GOP is undercutting its own electoral prospects. It is a right mess.