I'm not seriously following the current state of things in The War With Iran. That's because I know the current state today will not be the current state on Wednesday, which will not be the current state on Friday…and so on. And you certainly couldn't figure it out listening to our Commander-in-Chief, who keeps saying we're winning and they're losing, then acting as if those roles are reversed. So I just wait for the latest Fred Kaplan article. The one from today starts with…
Iran's latest demands in the diplomatic quarrel over the Strait of Hormuz may seem excessive — Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said they "could never be an acceptable condition of any deal" — but in fact they were part of the deal that President Donald Trump agreed to two months ago.
The proposal, issued Saturday by the secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, stated that Iran would not open the strait — the waterway for a quarter of the world's seaborne oil traffic — until the United States ended its naval blockade, lifted sanctions on Iran's oil exports, released Iran's frozen assets, withdrew its military forces from the area around Iran, and paid reparations for the damage inflicted by its massive bombardment of the country since February.
Looks like Trump's plan is to surrender, then make a full court press to convince as much of America as possible that he won the war and that any suggestion otherwise is treasonous fake news. We'll see how well that works.