CROSSPOST: DAN DREZNER & No 1: Welcome to the Lax Americana & March 19-21: God Is a Comedian
It is, I think, one of the more disorienting features of our current moment that we cannot even say with confidence who is attritting whom over the Persian/Arabian Gulf. The fog of war has...
It is, I think, one of the more disorienting features of our current moment that we cannot even say with confidence who is attritting whom over the Persian/Arabian Gulf. The fog of war has thickened into a kind of policy smog: selectively leaked sitreps, market-moving rumors, and presidential mood swings substitute for any clear account of what is happening to ships, aircraft, oil flows, or regional power balances…
There is, however, quite a lot that we do know:
We know that it is appalling that there is even a single vote against 25th‑Amendmenting Trump right now—let alone that his continued occupancy of the Oval Office is treated as a normal parameter of American politics rather than as an ongoing dire national emergency:
Dan Drezner: Welcome to the Lax Americana <https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/welcome-to-the-lax-americana>: ‘When a lazy, incurious administration starts doing things with a deconstructed state…. Here’s the thing about the Trump administration: it’s not just that their policies do not make a ton of sense or that they failed to do any strategic planning. It’s that they don’t care that they haven’t put in the work.1 This comes through most clearly in hearing Trump zigzag his way through various frustrations and policy reversals:
[No 1: March 19-21: God Is a Comedian <https://no01.substack.com/p/march-19-21-god-is-a-comedian>:] “Trump asked NATO to send ships to help secure the Strait of Hormuz. Every. single. ally. refused. Trump called them ‘cowards’ and said NATO has a ‘very bad future’. He then announced that the United States doesn’t actually need the Strait of Hormuz. He then said countries that do need it should police it themselves. He then told China to police it. He then sent 5,000 Marines toward it.
“This sequence of statements was delivered, as far as the public record shows, by the same person, using the same mouth, within roughly 24 hours. The allies are cowards for not helping with the thing he doesn’t need, which is why he’s sending Marines to die for it, unless the countries that do need it do it themselves, which they won’t, because they’re cowards.
“Trump told reporters the strait could be opened with a ‘simple military maneuver’ that is ‘relatively safe’ but requires ‘a lot of help”’ Help. From the cowards. Who he doesn’t need. For the strait. That he also doesn’t need…
Instead of caring about, you know, implementing competing policies, Trump administration officials seem more keen to cash in on their official connections or their insider information, secure in the knowledge that they will not be prosecuted for any corrupt act…
And:
No 1: March 19-21: God Is a Comedian: ‘This is simply the news, and nothing but the news. Told straight, in a universe that has clearly stopped taking its medication. The United States is sending 5,000 Marines into the Persian Gulf to seize Kharg Island, a speck of land 15 miles off the Iranian coast that handles 90% of Iran’s oil exports.…. The Marines aboard the USS Tripoli and USS Boxer must first sail through the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran has mined. The strait is also, as of this week, a toll road. The IRGC verifies vessels on VHF radio and charges up to $2 million per transit, payable in cash, cryptocurrency, or barter. At least eight ships have paid. Iran’s parliament is legislating the arrangement formally, because even revolutionary theocracies require a compliance department…. A White House source told Axios they need “about a month to weaken the Iranians more” before attempting this. One month. Of a war Trump described as ‘winding down’ on Friday - three weeks in, which by his count is basically four days… Both statements were made, as far as anyone can tell, by people who occupy the same government and occasionally share a building….
The USS Gerald R. Ford, meanwhile, the most expensive warship in human history, is retreating to Crete. The official reason is a “laundry fire”. 266 consecutive days at sea, 28 days short of the Vietnam-era deployment record, and the crown jewel of the US Navy is fleeing the theatre, not because of being damaged in combat, not because missiles are flying around it… But because someone's skivvies got too hot.
And:
No 1: March 19-21: God Is a Comedian: ‘This week, the US Treasury lifted all oil sanctions on Iran. For 30 days. 140 million barrels of Iranian crude, sitting on ships at sea, may now be sold freely on the global market. Including to the United States itself. In yuan. The United States is purchasing, with Chinese currency, oil from the country it is currently bombing?! The same oil that funds the missiles that just shot down an F-35 for the first time. The same missiles that are redecorating allied oil infrastructure. Treasury Secretary Bessent called this “narrowly tailored”. Narrow like in white, and tailored as in card, apparently. In the same OFAC filing, Russian oil sanctions were lifted as well. And Belarus potash too, because apparently the universe was running low on irony and needed to top up.
The logic, insofar as there is any, goes like this: the war has crashed the global oil market so hard that the administration needs the enemy’s oil to keep gasoline prices from eating the midterms. They are unsanctioning the people they’re bombing because the bombing is working too well at the thing they didn’t want it to do. The sanctions were necessary to stop Iran funding the war, but the war made the sanctions too effective, so the sanctions had to be lifted to fund the war effort against the country that no longer needs sanctions because the oil revenues that sanctions were preventing are now required to prevent the economic damage caused by preventing those revenues, which is itself a consequence of the military campaign designed to make the sanctions unnecessary by making Iran the kind of country that doesn’t need sanctioning, which it would be, if the sanctions hadn’t been lifted to pay for making it that…
And:
No 1: March 19-21: God Is a Comedian: ‘Two F-35 stealth fighters have been hit by Iranian air defences. The first was confirmed by CENTCOM, which used the phrase “emergency landing” in the way that a funeral director might describe death as “a permanent change of address”. The pilot had shrapnel wounds. The aircraft, they said, “will not return to service”, which is the sort of thing you say about a car that hit a bridge abutment at speed, not about a plane that landed. A Chinook helicopter was subsequently tracked conducting an extensive search pattern over eastern Saudi Arabia. This is what you do when something has come apart in the sky and you need to find the bits. It is not what you do after a landing, emergency or otherwise. The entire F-35 doctrine, the single most expensive weapons programme in human history, rests on the assumption that the aircraft is invisible to radar. Someone forgot to tell the Iranians the planes were invisible.
Then there’s Diego Garcia. The B-2 bomber staging base in the Indian Ocean, roughly 4,000 kilometres from Iran. Iran sent two intermediate-range ballistic missiles. One failed mid-flight. An SM-3 intercepted the other. The outcome is beside the point. Iran had publicly claimed a maximum missile range of 2,000 kilometres. They were lying by a factor of two, which, in the context of ballistic missile capabilities, constitutes what experts call “a very bad surprise”. Rome, Paris, and London are now within the theoretical strike envelope. The British gave permission for Diego Garcia to be used for strikes against Iran and discovered that the Iranian response could, if Tehran felt creative, arrive at Heathrow…
And:
No 1: March 19-21: God Is a Comedian: ‘Friday’s press gaggle. Barely exaggerated: at 12:03 PM, President Trump told reporters he wanted a ceasefire with Iran. At 12:05 he declared victory. At 12:07 he announced he was sending Marines. At 12:08 he said no boots on the ground. At 12:11 he said he did not want a ceasefire. At 12:16 he declared victory again. At 12:17 he asked for a ceasefire. At 12:23 he told NATO they were cowards. At 12:29 he said Iran was begging for a ceasefire. At 12:31 he said everything was perfect. At 12:36 he said $500 oil was a good thing. At 12:37 he demanded Iran open Hormuz. At 12:39 he said Hormuz was never closed. At 12:41 he said the US was not at war with Iran. At 12:42 he declared victory in Iran. By 3:43 PM he told CBS he doesn’t want a ceasefire. By 5:13 PM - 13 minutes after futures markets closed for the weekend, in a coincidence that should be studied in every securities fraud textbook - he posted on Truth Social that the US is “getting very close to meeting our objectives as we consider winding down our great Military efforts”. The S&P reversed more than 1% in seconds. QQQ had already surged 1.1% in the 80 minutes before the announcement, with call options flowing in at a pace that suggests someone, somewhere, had an itinerary…
We know that it is even more appalling that J. D. Vance has decided that his road to power lies in doubling down on “Great Replacement Theory,” thereby implicitly declaring his own mother‑in‑law, father‑in‑law, wife, and children to be at best second‑class citizens in the America he wishes to build. We know that most appalling of all is the fact that there is not a single Republican office‑holder in the country willing to stand publicly and say that Trump and Vance are unworthy standard‑bearers for their party.
We know, further, that nobody inside the Trump administration appears willing to take any career risk at all—much less the sort of risk that used to be associated with the phrase “public service”—to try to make American policy sane, or even to do anything other than profit from the opportunities for grift that a deconstructed state presents.
Into this hall of mirrors steps “No1” (pronounced “no one”). No, I do not know whether rhiu No1 to whom Dan Drezner, Charlie Warzel, Bill Kristol, and Jonathan Last subscribe is, in the long run, reliable and grounded in his judgments about geopolitics and precious metals. But I do know that he is certainly not less reliable and grounded than everyone currently engaged in sanewashing Donald Trump and the Trump administration. That, today, is a very low bar—and a very telling one.
I wish I could agree that the problem is Trump, or Trump's court, or the Republican party. But the entire DC establishment seems to have gone insane, carrying on blithely as though they were still living in an Obama administration. Did you listen to Paul Krugman interview Robin Brooks? Or read the transcript? Brooks is a respectable, well-credentialed fellow, and as far as I can tell a decent one. When embedded in a suitably supportive - and constraining - context, he is probably useful too. In the present context, I think he is a dangerous lunatic. The longer I listened, the more appalled I became. How can a think tank hack be such a political naif? He is working professionally in the field of sanctions, yet seems to have no conception at all of the history of sanctions or blockades - "the economic weapon". You'd have better luck explaining de Rham cohomology to penguins than explaining to him the politics of the Persian Gulf - or the politics of America, for that matter.
Am I the only American disturbed by our normalizing assassination as a tactic?
We can tell ourselves, "Our assassinations are different," and proclaim outrage if a pod of martyrs takes out Bibi or MBS or Marco or Pete or even Caligula themself. Those wicked terrorists ! But why? Really. War is war. We have changed the rules we play by. Why should our antagonists stick to the old rules? Will Ukraine and Russia stick to the old norms? I suspect we will regret it if they do not?
Does any of this make sense to anyone? Please tell me why I am crazy or silly. Please!