I’m going on a break. I can’t afford to let this consume me — I have something big planned, and I’m not the type who can do two things at once.
War makes me dysphoric and this is dedicated to my fellow war dysphorics and cynics. I truly hope that Israel can destroy the Iran nuclear program, there are many pitfalls ahead.
Oh, I have NO crystal ball. I just analyze. I’m only good at predicting the past.
Events are moving too fast to keep up.
I sat down to write something earlier today, left it aside to polish later—and then today happened.
It would be fair to say that if not for the U.S. Fifth Fleet, Israel today would be a smoking ruin. I think the article downplays how comprehensive the missile defense is. It’s vast and multilayered, requiring the diversion of significant American resources, a subject to which I’ll return below1.
Iranian missiles hit the Weizmann Institute and targeted the Haifa oil refineries. I have conflicting info on the latter—I think it was hit, but not too badly and the port is still functioning. In any case, one missile, slightly better aimed or slightly less intercepted, could have caused an environmental and economic catastrophe.
You can bet more missiles are coming. From what I’ve read, the Iranians first used older stock to probe defenses. Next, they’ll come back with newer, faster, and more precise models. One of them, reportedly, was hypersonic.
This is not theoretical. This is real. And at this point, Israel’s relationship with the US isn’t partnership; it’s utter dependency.
Let’s be clear: U.S. destroyers, fighter aircraft, and missile batteries stepped in because Israel’s own systems couldn’t handle it. This isn’t Hamas or Hezbollah. Iran is a nation the size of Alaska and Texas combined, with defense-in-depth and manufacturing capacity. So they lost a few air-defense systems? They have more. Israel took out some commanders? You did them a favor. These old guys were dead wood. You cleared the way for younger, smarter guys to take over. Someone should do you the same favor.
There’s talk that Bibi didn’t start this expecting Israel to finish it. He started it expecting America would.
If that’s true, it’s the end of America’s relationship with Israel. Americans will defend Israel from missile attacks—up to a point. But they will not nation-build Iran, and they won’t put boots on the ground.
What’s that “up to a point”? Supposedly, there’s a power struggle inside the Trump camp: China hawks vs. pro-Israel hardliners. Even the U.S. doesn’t have infinite resources. Diverting missile batteries from Vietnam to the Gulf has real costs. And in a straight showdown—Taiwan or Israel—who do you think wins?
Anyway, here is what I wrote before today happened. Might as well put it out there. It still applies.
When I first sat down to write an open letter to Matt Walsh, it was because I saw someone who speaks boldly on cultural issues turn strangely evasive on matters of war and power. So I wrote. Then I wrote again. And now I’m writing a third time, because things have come into sharper focus.
Here’s the arc of my thinking over the past few days.
Like most people, I started on June 11 thinking this was a war between Iran and Israel—a regional war finally coming to fruition. But I’ve spent time studying the Persian Gulf—amateur, but serious time—and the more I thought about it, the more that framing felt, if not false, inadequate—and then false.
This isn’t about Israel. Or rather, it is, but only because Iran wants it to be. Israel would prefer to have zero to do with Iran. The real issue is control of the Persian Gulf and its shipping lanes. That’s the game. The Israel/Iran drama is the curtain.
J.B. Kelly was blunt about this half a century ago: when the British withdrew from the Gulf in the 1970s, the only viable replacement was the United States. That’s not the Global American Empire. It’s geography, logistics, and reality.
The real issue is the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz—through which a fifth of the world’s oil and another fifth of its LNG moves. That’s the prize. That’s what Iran wants to dominate or disrupt. It’s always been this way. The Iranians call it the Persian Gulf. The Arabs call it the Arabian Gulf.
This has been going on for centuries and there’s no escape from history. The ultimate aim of “The Great Game” between the British and the Russians in the 19th century was control of the Persian Gulf. The British won, and the Gulf became “the British Lake.”
If not us, then who? Iran? Russia? China? Let’s not pretend someone else won’t fill the vacuum. The power in the Gulf is whoever chooses to be.
The brutal part: The United States has spent the past two decades kicking the can down the road—distracted by “forever wars,” and suffering internal rot. So when Iran crossed a line, Israel had to respond.
Let me say it again: This isn’t a war the US is being dragged into. This is a war we should have seen coming, should have prepared for, and should have led. The question is whether we’re willing to admit that we already are at war and have been since the 1960s.
Whether Israel exists or not, that wouldn’t change.
People who think of this as an Israeli/Iran affair aren’t being antisemitic, they just don’t know the history, and I think it’s a stupid tactic to lecture them about antisemitism. How many people know this history. Did you?
For Those Burned By the Last 20 Years
I want to speak directly to readers—especially those like one of my recent interlocutors—who are understandably skeptical of American military involvement abroad.
I don’t dismiss that instinct. You’ve watched bad wars waged on bad premises, fought by people who were far too willing to send American boys into meatgrinders without a plan, a purpose, or an exit. You’ve watched our own border disintegrate while trillions were spent chasing illusions overseas. You’re not wrong to be wary.
But here it is: those same leaders who misused our strength in Iraq and Afghanistan are the ones who left Iran’s ambitions unchecked. The same American politicians who failed to defend our borders also failed to defend the most strategic waterway in the world.
Policing the Persian Gulf is not Iraq. It’s not futile nation-building. It’s not chasing ghosts in the hills. It’s sea lanes, tankers, trade, energy. It’s basic global infrastructure. Even if most of America’s oil doesn’t come from there, most of our trade partners depend on it.
So be suspicious of wars of choice. Be ruthless in demanding clarity. But don’t conflate forever wars with stepping up and confronting aggression. This isn’t a crusade, it’s legitimate self-defense.
If we don’t hold that line, someone else will. Who?
Patriots: You’re not babies, you know that the US Navy must patrol the Gulf. I have a simple question for you. Do you want to see our ships facing down a nuclear Iran, backed by Russia and China? Then we must confront Iran.
All this said, I also disagree with those on my side who welcome the fall of the mullahs. Here’s Sohrab Ahmari, an actual Iranian-Ameican, who knows something about his native land.
The potential nightmare scenarios are as numerous as they are appalling: regime collapse that leads not to the restoration of the Pahlavi dynasty and the ascent to the Peacock Throne of its chubby dauphin, Reza, but warlordism and ethno-sectarian warfare that drives millions of refugees into Europe. Or a Chinese intervention in favour of a crucial energy partner and anchor of the new Eurasian bloc led by Beijing. A blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and attacks on the Persian Gulf monarchies.
For better or worse, Iran is what it is. As the rabbi in the Sholom Aleichem tale said, “God bless and keep the Tsar—far away from me.”
God bless and keep the mullahs, far away from me, and without their nukes.
This won’t be easy. Look at a map—Iran sees itself as the Persian Gulf hegemon. They project power in a variety of ways: undermining rivals (Saudi Arabia, UAE) and spreading instability just enough to keep the region on edge, but not enough to trigger full war.
They do it through proxies from Lebanon to Yemen and in every Gulf state. They’ve waged a calculated bet that Americans won’t have the balls to stop it, and so far, they’ve been right more than they’ve been wrong.
Iran views itself as an ancient empire with true cultural, political, and religious roots and it sees the Arab Gulf monarchies as young, artificial states propped up by the West, especially the U.S. and Britain. As for Israel, that’s in a next-level category of hatred for Iran, combing all of the above with eschatological insanity.
Iran has repeatedly harassed US Navy vessels, seized British and Greek tankers – for which it has received good old “sternly worded letters.”
That’s how we got where we are.
But so what, what’s done is done, and here we are.
Anyway, I wrote all of the above with people like Matt Walsh in mind, and then I realized it wasn’t the show-biz influencers who matter.
It’s what’s going on in the Administration that matters.
I don’t know how he gets this info, but this very anti-Israel Xer claims that there’s a real split in the Admin about resources.
For the first time in decades, the United States is split, not over how to support Israel, but whether it should bleed strategic bandwidth to do so at all.
At the center is Elbridge Colby, architect of the post-Afghanistan “Asia First” doctrine. He’s quietly drawing a red line: no more asset diversion from the Indo-Pacific to patch over Israel’s escalation spiral. That red line was crossed when CENTCOM rerouted a Patriot battery from South Korea to the Gulf in April. Now the internal fracture is open, and visible. '
CENTCOM chief Gen. Kurilla wants more, another carrier strike group, more interceptors, more direct posture. But Colby and the restrainers have clamped down. Their argument is surgical: every system shifted to Israel is a node removed from the China war map. Every THAAD redeployment, a delta in Taiwan’s kill chain. The future isn’t the Levant, it’s the First Island Chain.
Trump himself, despite the optics, leans closer to Colby. The recent ousting of Mike Waltz, partially over “intense coordination” with Netanyahu, is a message to the Likud lobby: unquestioned loyalty is no longer guaranteed currency in a reindustrializing, China-facing America.
And that’s the subtext no one wants to say aloud: the strategic divorce between U.S. Indo-Pacific doctrine and Israeli exceptionism has begun. Not a rupture, but a reassignment of priority. Israel, once the gravitational center of American foreign policy, is now being weighed against Pacific deterrence timelines, hypersonic launch readiness, and semiconductor choke points.
The Tehran strike didn’t just activate Iranian escalation. It forced a zero-sum accounting in the Pentagon, and this time, Israel wasn’t the uncontested answer.
So there you have it. “every system shifted to Israel is a node removed from the China war map…” Of course. “Not a rupture, but a reassignment of priority.” Yes.
Except that what’s a “reassignment of priority” to the US could mean disaster to Israel. Every carrier in the South China Sea is one less in the Eastern Mediterranean.
See you next week. I’m going offline.
In other words, this is finite.