Donald Trump says Keir Starmer has damaged the special relationship by not helping him more in the US-Israel war on Iran. But you have to remember that when you do help, Trump pretends you didn’t anyway, and also pisses on your war dead. Still, what could be more enticing than the Americans trying to sell you a timeshare on a war in the Middle East?
And so to Iran. “War is the realm of uncertainty,” said Carl von Clausewitz, who – and not to be a bitch – I still think of as a more impressive military theorist than Pete Hegseth. Certainly, Carl had fewer Crusades tattoos than the US defence secretary. Hegseth is 100% certain about all his nailed-down positions, even the ones in apparent conflict with each other. And it feels like a great sign that he, Marco Rubio and JD Vance already seem to have different rationales for why this war was launched. This is an administration that came to power on an explicit “no more wars” ticket – but look, as Pete keeps saying, this isn’t a regime-change war. If that seems confusing, given he first said it about 10 minutes after US-Israeli strikes had just cratered the ayatollah’s compound, Hegseth has since been on hand to scoff that what’s going down in Iran is “no nation-building quagmire, no democracy-building exercise”.
