Trump

The evening had started pleasantly enough. The most alarming thing about the party I was attending in the Hilton Hotel where the Washington Correspondents’ Dinner was being held were the $18 martinis. Those, and the woman in the nice black dress screaming “criminals” at the police as they dragged her out the door as I arrived. Protesters had gathered outside. They chanted indiscriminately at guests filing through the entrance, calling for an end to the war in Iran and to free Palestine. I was one floor above the main dinner at a party hosted by ABC, engaged in the kind of self-congratulatory socializing this weekend was designed for, when heavily armed police officers started moving through the room. First one, then several – and they wouldn't explain why.

The Special Air Service, Special Boat Service and other elements of UK Special Forces are held in the highest regard by the Pentagon and by US special operators. British and American special forces have forged a bond of trust over decades with joint high-risk operations and combined training. A recent visit to Washington made clear that the American leadership on both sides of the political divide, and within the military and intelligence services, believe the current British government has broken that alliance. America views the SAS and SBS as equal to its own tier one special forces operators in Delta Force and SEAL Team Six. The eight saber squadrons of the SAS and SBS contribute a significant amount of the special forces’ manpower relied upon by both countries.

A useful rule, when trying to understand current affairs, is AAL: Acronyms Always Lie.A case in point would be the acronym of the year so far: TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out). It means that Donald Trump is always bluffing and, when push finally comes to shove, he folds.TACO has caught on since Liberation Day and the onset of Trump 2.0’s tariff agenda, and is now deployed again and again to describe the President’s latest ceasefire with Iran. Over free trade, Greenland, and the Middle East, he’s shown himself to be a playground bully who loves to intimidate adversaries only to cave whenever the going gets tough.

Monday’s White House press conference came in two distinct parts. The first was an extraordinary tale of heroism in the rescue of two downed pilots. America’s military and intelligence leaders provided details that were new to the public. The danger of a daytime rescue mission in the face of enemy fire. The harrowing climb by one officer to a crevice in the mountains. The technical sophistication needed to find him. And the misdirection executed to confound Iranian forces in the area, determined to capture the American serviceman before help arrived.  It was impossible to listen to that tale of bravery and professional excellence without an overwhelming sense of patriotic emotion, suffused with gratitude for the men and women who have pledged their lives to keep America safe.

Was Donald Trump’s profane and threatening tweet, which included an F-bomb and an allusion to Iran’s leaders as "crazy bastards," on Easter Sunday itself a bunch of BS? Trump is riding high after the daring rescue of an American airman from Iran, but its leadership doesn’t appear to be overly impressed by his tweet threatening a major attack on Tuesday if the Strait of Hormuz is not reopened. On Saturday, Iran’s military leadership indicated that it had no intention of complying with Trump’s demands, dismissing his vow to destroy its infrastructure as a "helpless, nervous, unbalanced and stupid action.

As US troops flock to danger, Donald Trump seeks ways to disentangle himself from the war on Iran. “We are on track to complete all of America’s military objectives shortly, very shortly,” he said in a 19-minute address at the start of the month. “It’s very important that we keep this conflict in perspective.” What’s increasingly clear is that, despite its tactical successes, Operation Epic Fury is turning into a strategic quagmire and a political miscalculation. The President’s approval rating has sunk to -18 percent, the lowest in his second term. Among independents, Trump is on -45 percent, the worst recorded score of any second-term president. That is the perspective concerning the White House.

Reflecting on the resignation of Cyrus Vance, James Thomson, the American historian and journalist, wrote in the Washington Post that the former secretary of state “has done us all a great public service.” In doing so, Thomson argued, Vance gave “new life and spine to a somewhat rare and weak convention in our nation: resignation in protest of an issue of principle.” The year was 1980. Vance had resigned in protest over the Carter administration’s decision to authorize Operation Eagle Claw, the ill-fated mission to rescue American hostages held in Iran after the Islamic revolution. The mission ended ignominiously. President Carter pulled the plug after equipment failures and a deadly helicopter collision killed eight service members. Vance was vindicated.

The politics of the Iranian war feature an observable gap between interest and action for nearly all parties. The Americans possessed overwhelming casus belli versus Iran for nearly half a century, and did not act upon it until three weeks past. The Iranians possessed none against America for just as long, but exerted themselves with religious fanaticism to bring this war upon themselves. The Arab autocracies of the Persian-Gulf region find themselves under direct attack from the Iranians, but do not respond in kind. The Chinese observe a core strategic proxy and key commodities supplier taken off the chessboard – for the second time in under 90 days – and refrain from direct engagement.

While Americans anxiously watch the price of gasoline tick higher as the war in the Middle East squeezes the global oil supply, the conflict has highlighted another energy vulnerability that could prove just as costly: Taiwan’s dependency on foreign natural gas. At first blush, energy issues an ocean away seem peripheral to American interests. They are anything but. Though the effect on the American economy won’t be immediate, energy insecurity in Taiwan is a looming disaster. Qatar, the source of 30 percent of Taiwan’s natural gas, has been effectively bottled up The reason is that AI – in fact, virtually all modern computing – is highly reliant upon the steady production of semiconductors in the world’s only true hub, Taiwan.