"If you’ve ever wondered what three billion dollars buys in bombs and missiles, wonder no more. In the first hundred hours of Operation Epic Fury, the United States flung munitions costing about that much at Iran, striking nearly two thousand targets. This won the U.S. and Israel nearly “complete control” of Iran’s airspace, allowing them to unleash “death and destruction from the sky all day long,” Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, crowed.
“We are punching them while they’re down.”
The United States has been freaking out about Iran since 1979. That was the year revolutionaries overthrew the U.S.-backed monarch, established an Islamic republic, and took dozens of people hostage inside the U.S. Embassy.
...
Although enmity between Washington and Tehran sprang up in 1979, the seeds were planted in the nineteen-fifties. That was when Iran’s Prime Minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, made headlines by nationalizing Iran’s oil, reclaiming profits that had flowed overwhelmingly to Britain. In 1952,
Time named Mosaddegh its Man of the Year.
...
Having helped Israel kill Iran’s Supreme Leader, Trump has only the vaguest notion of what should come next. Perhaps the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps should hand over its weapons and “surrender to the people,” or perhaps the Corps and the people should make a revolution together. Alternatively, the defanged Islamic Republic could remain intact and Trump could choose a leader from its ranks. He mentioned “three very good choices,” though it now seems that these candidates may have been killed. “Everybody that seems to want to be a leader, they end up dead,” Trump mused, with unconcealed relish. Iran’s government, meanwhile, has made its own choice: Mojtaba Khamenei, the dead Ayatollah’s son, who was himself reportedly wounded by the air strikes. Trump called this choice “unacceptable” and warned the new Supreme Leader that he would not last long without Washington’s approval. Which is to say,
Trump has no plan but reserves the right to reject everyone else’s.
...
Past Presidents, for all their destructive crusades and covert actions, stopped short of invading Iran out of regard for the global chessboard. They worried about Iran blocking oil flows, attacking allies, or imploding and sending refugees streaming through the region. Trump has unburdened himself of such concerns.
He’s not playing chess and doesn’t ultimately mind if pieces are captured.
After Trump seized Maduro, Defense Secretary Hegseth summed up Maduro’s story: “He effed around and he found out.” In a larger sense, though, it’s Trump who effs around. His life has been an unbroken string of outrageous “what if?” experiments. What if I stiff this contractor? Pocket this cash? Reject this election?
Or bomb this country?
Trump effed around, and we’re all finding out. He has shrugged off the imperial mantle, the force that propelled his predecessors into ruinous meddling. From another President, that could have been welcome, but from a wrathful tyrant like Trump it’s terrifying. Because the quest for global control was never just a compulsion. It was also, in hindsight, a constraint. ♦"
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/03/23/whats-behind-trumps-new-world-disorder
