IMHO, you won’t find a more informative military analysis than that of the general.
Wikipedia reports that
Mark Phillip Hertling(born September 29, 1953) is a retired United States ArmyLieutenant General. From March 2011 to November 2012, he served as the Commanding General of United States Army Europeand the Seventh Army. Hertling served in armor, cavalry, planning, operations and training positions, and commanded every organization from platoon to field army. He commanded the 1st Armored Divisionand Task Force Iron/Multinational Division-North in Iraq during the troop surge of 2007 to 2008.
What My Crystal Ball Tells Me
One. The people who are in control in Iran want to put Trump in a position where his only choices are (a) a ground invasion of Iran or (b) abject surrender.
Two. The people who are in control in Iran are not afraid of a U.S. ground invasion. To the contrary, they would welcome a U.S. ground invasion.
Three. This is where it gets interesting. Many say Trump’s ego will lead him to take the ground invasion option. That may happen. But I think it’s more likely that he will surrender.
For all his bluster and bullshit, Trump sometimes recognizes that he has lost, and he sometimes backs down. Remember Trump Taco Tuesday?
Trump possesses a basic animal cunning. Plus, he continues to imagine that he can sell a shit sandwich as the latest premium offering on the Panera menu.
The reason why he presented “evidence” that contradicts the argument he wants to make is that he has a severe mental defect that prevents him from understanding the information he is given. He cannot keep himself from making illogical arguments because he is mentally incapable of distinguishing a logical argument from an illogical argument.
In his old age, this severe mental defect is getting even worse.
Trump is an evil person. In other words, a sociopath.
We are morally justified in hating and despising Trump. But that said, I am inclined to think that our best public strategy is to exhibit pity for Trump.
Every sentient person has observed that Trump wants to use last night’s speech as the predicate for a variety of forms of election interference. Every sentient person is right in that regard. But his malevolence is greatly inhibited by his incompetence.
As a talking head said recently of his Iran strategy, the problem is not that he strategy is mistaken. The problem is that he does not know what strategy is. When all else fails, he may order a military coup. I don’t think it will work, but I am afraid we may find out whether it works or not.
The American people unwisely reelected a proven traitor. They wanted lower consumer prices. They got higher consumer prices—along with a firehose of ridiculous lies about consumer prices. They wanted no more wars. They got the war in Iran—along with a firehose of ridiculous lies about the Iran war.
Although Trump is fortunate to have legions of uneducated and gullible followers, the environment he has created—higher consumer prices and a war in the Middle East—is not propitious for his gullible followers’ acceptance of his firehose of lies about the election. He has cried “Wolf!” way too many times.
Peter Baker on how Trump, utterly misunderstanding Iran, has screwed himself to a fare-thee-well:
In Iran, Trump Has Found an Opponent He Cannot Easily Dominate
The president is accustomed to forcing other countries to bend to his will. But he is struggling to come up with a strategy to extract Iranian concessions as the cease-fire he brokered collapses.
Published July 14, 2026 Updated July 15, 2026, 4:14 p.m. ET
On the 136th day of his war against Iran, President Trump came up with a new plan. He would impose tolls on ships traversing the Strait of Hormuz in exchange for protecting them from Iranian forces.
But that was then. On Day 137, he had another new plan. No tolls after all.
Mr. Trump’s 180-degree reversal this week in the face of protests from his Arab allies who were not so excited about paying tolls reflected how adrift he seems to be in prosecuting his war against Iran. What was supposed to be a clean four-to-six-week operation is now in its messy 20th week. Improvisation and impulse are not working.
A president who has made flexing his power on the world stage a hallmark of his second term has found in Iran an opponent that so far will not bend to his will and a geopolitical conflict that cannot be won through nasty social media posts or tariff threats. The memorandum of understanding that he brokered with Tehran last month to halt the fighting turns out to have been a memorandum of misunderstanding, and Mr. Trump now seems to have neither a clear military nor diplomatic strategy.
“He’s encountered a country that is not willing to play by his set of rules, which is you bend and kiss the ring and tell him how great he is and try to get whatever concession he’s willing to give,” said Vali Nasr, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies who has advised presidents and secretaries of state on the Middle East.
Mr. Trump’s no-end-in-sight venture in the Middle East has become a fresh lesson in why the region has been a sinkhole for presidential ambition for generations. The instruments of power that help advance U.S. interests elsewhere around the globe do not necessarily work there, as many of Mr. Trump’s predecessors have discovered.
It has been especially frustrating for Mr. Trump, who has reveled in getting his way since returning to office last year and even boasted that he might be the most powerful man in world history. But while he has successfully pressured NATO allies into increasing military spending, extracted concessions from trading partners and essentially took over Venezuela with a one-night surgical commando raid, it is not clear that he can get his way in the Persian desert.
“Trump’s forceful approach to the world in his second term has benefited from some luck and the occasional willingness of other states to facilitate an off-ramp,” said Suzanne Maloney, vice president and director of foreign policy at the Brookings Institution. “Nothing in the past 47 years should have led him to believe that Tehran would follow that route.”
John Hannah, a former national security adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney and now a senior fellow at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, in the past has supported the limited use of military force to stop Iran from building a nuclear weapon. But he said that by going for “a massive decapitation strike,” Mr. Trump had clearly underestimated the theocratic power structure that took power in the 1979 Iranian revolution and overestimated American capacity to topple it.
“In retrospect, this was clearly a war based on fatally flawed assumptions,” Mr. Hannah said, “none more damaging than the president’s apparent conviction that Iran’s revolutionary regime was a flimsy house of cards ready to collapse in a hail of American airstrikes and bellicose Truth Social posts.”
“Compounding the error,” he added, “there was no rigorous national security apparatus around the president prepared to speak truth to power and subject his wrongheaded assumptions to systematic questioning based on the knowledge and experience of real foreign policy, defense and intelligence professionals.”
The cease-fire that has now collapsed amid nightly strikes was not even a particularly far-reaching agreement. It was meant to be a stopgap to quiet the guns for 60 days so that the two sides could negotiate the truly thorny disputes, particularly the future of Iran’s nuclear program. If a temporary deal cannot last, it is hard to see how the two sides can get to a permanent accord requiring painful compromises.
Mr. Trump seems uncertain how to proceed. He has turned back to the use of military force and ordered the resumption of a naval blockade in the Strait of Hormuz. He has threatened to take “a nice, big fat shot” at Pickaxe Mountain, a fortified site near one of Iran’s main nuclear facilities. He vowed to “knock out all their power plants” and “knock out all their bridges unless they get to the table and negotiate.”
But for all the saber rattling, he has given little indication that he is willing to resume the sort of full-fledged bombardment that marked the beginning of the war, given popular opinion against escalated conflict.
At the same time, he has suggested there will be further negotiations but has not articulated how talks that failed before could succeed now. In fact, he has expressed deep skepticism that they could, although of course that might simply be a way of lowering expectations. Instead, Mr. Trump seems to think that he can outlast the Iranians because their economy is in dire shape while the Iranians seem to think that they can outlast him because of the politics of gas prices heading into midterm elections at home.
“Trump’s in a box, and he’s facing a brutal and tenacious adversary whose objectives — maintaining leverage over the strait and a newfound desire for hegemony over the Gulf —now hold him hostage,” said Aaron David Miller, a former Middle East peace negotiator who served presidents of both parties and is now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
“Iran consumed and tarnished the legacy of one president,” he added, referring to Jimmy Carter and the 1979-81 hostage crisis. “And the way it appears now, with time on Iran’s side, not on Trump’s, it could very well tarnish or ruin the legacy of another.”
Other foreign policy experts rejected the analogy and cautioned against overstating the impact of the Iran war on Mr. Trump’s presidency.
“I don’t think Iran has destroyed Trump’s agenda, which is a broad one,” said Elliott Abrams, a national security official in multiple Republican administrations, including Mr. Trump’s first term. “As long as Americans are not dying, Iran will be a secondary issue for most Americans.”
Other foreign policy challenges like Ukraine, Cuba and China “don’t depend on Iran,” he added, so everyone should “keep Iran in perspective.”
Mr. Abrams noted that Democrats appear increasingly at odds with each other over Israel and the Palestinians, a divide that has played a major factor in some congressional primaries this season. “It’s the Democrats who are in danger of having a Middle East issue, namely Israel, swallow up their agenda,” he said.
The abrupt flip-flop on tolls underscored how much Mr. Trump is ad libbing these days. In announcing that he would charge 20 percent on cargo to protect shipping in the Strait of Hormuz on Monday, he contradicted his own administration’s position that tolls were an unacceptable violation of international law.
His decision to cancel them on Tuesday after calls from anxious Gulf Arab leaders made clear that he had not bothered to consult his allies before announcing the new tolls or disregarded their concerns. He covered for the shift with a face-saving if barely plausible explanation that the Gulf leaders had promised “trade and investment deals” instead.
What investments he did not say, nor were there further details to suggest any concrete commitments. “They’re going to be making massive investments into the U.S., and I like that much better,” Mr. Trump told reporters. “I don’t like the concept of a fee,” he said a day after calling it a simple “matter of fairness.”
It was hardly the only contradiction of recent days. When Mr. Trump sealed the cease-fire agreement last month, he praised Iranian negotiators. “We’re dealing with people that I think are very rational people,” he said then. “They were nice to deal with. They were strong people, smart people.”
By last week, he had changed his mind. “They’re scum,” he complained. “They’re sick people. They’re led by sick people.” Asked what had changed in just three weeks, Mr. Trump said, “I got to know them.” Which of course begged the question of why he did not know who he was dealing with in the first place.
“I don’t think he has a strategy on Iran,” said Abbas Milani, director of Iranian studies at Stanford University and a research fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution. “That’s the key problem. He approaches these things instinctively and he approaches them with two contradictory goals. On the one hand, he keeps saying, ‘We want to make a deal with you guys and make Iran a thriving economy.’ And on the other hand, he says, ‘I’m going to obliterate your civilization.’”
Mr. Milani said he agreed with Mr. Trump that Iran actually does want a peace agreement, and in fact he believes it is “desperate for a deal” because its economy is in free-fall. But he faulted the president for sending negotiators who are not steeped in the region and do not grasp its intricate history and details.
“I don’t think he ever really understood the nature of this regime,” Mr. Milani said of Mr. Trump. “He still doesn’t understand it. It’s not like any other. It always does the unexpected and will go to any limit to keep itself in power.”
She also won $83.3 million in a later defamation case. A federal appeals court upheld that judgment in 2025, but Trump’s crack legal team is still flailing around, trying to avoid paying up.
And, you know what? If Trump defames her some more, she’s going to sue him again.
Lastly, with my apologies, a point of personal privilege. Back in the day, it was my great honor to work with Lewis Kaplan—now a senior federal judge, and the person who presided over the two E. Jean Carroll/Trump lawsuits, then a litigation partner at Paul Weiss. Together with my colleague Rick Holwell of White & Case, we achieved victory in a landmark antitrust case, Consolidated Gold Fields v. Minorco, see https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/698/487/2356328/
Mr. Kaplan was a gentleman and a scholar back then, and one hell of a litigator, and he remains today one hell of a federal judge.
Unlike his unworthy successors at Paul Weiss, Kaplan knows how you have to deal with someone like Mango Mussolini. Congratulations to the judge. Well done.
I would, of course, have taken a pass on the op-ed, except that it was written by Thomas Edsall, who is nobody’s fool.
The first part of Mr. Edsall’s article, in today’s New York Times, reads as follows:
Even now, according to a new survey by the left-leaning group Data for Progress, the Democratic Party has a net negative rating of minus 29 percentage points among swing voters, worse than the minus 25 for the Republican Party. Democrats seeking to restore their party’s credibility with the electorate as a whole, but especially among those crucial swing voters, might consider adding three planks — on immigration, urban disorder and transgender issues — to the 2028 Democratic platform.
Why? Because it is these three issues that serve to reinforce the perception that Democrats are willing to sacrifice the interests of the working and middle classes in favor of special interest constituencies.
I am more than a little queasy making these suggestions, but I think the Democratic Party needs to perform a kind of brutal surgery on itself.
The hard-edge character and language of what I am proposing is specifically designed to function as a public renunciation of the Democratic Party’s liabilities, its ties to special interest groups and its readiness to succumb to progressive orthodoxy.
The proposals amount, then, to an ideological exorcism.
On immigration, I would suggest — with plenty of room for amendment — the following:
Democrats will firmly enforce laws on illegal immigration, including tough border enforcement and deportation of unauthorized immigrants who commit crimes.
Unauthorized immigrants with no criminal record who have been in this country for at least five years, along with Dreamers, should be offered green cards with a path toward citizenship. More recent arrivals should be deported.
On crime:
The Democratic Party supports aggressive prosecution of those accused of violent crime, those who engage in crowdsourced “teen takeovers” of stores, as well as all forms of child abuse.
The party backs restoration of bail requirements in the case of felonies, lifetime sentences for offenders convicted of multiple violent crimes, tough enforcement of child support laws and the death penalty if supported by the voters in a state and endorsed by a jury.
Transgender and gender dysphoria:
There are two sexes: men and women.
A man can claim an identify as a woman, and the same in reverse for a woman. They have every right to do so. Their claim should be respected and they should be protected from any form of discrimination for their choice.
Their claim does not, however, alter their biological sex.
Consequently, it is legitimate in areas such as sports where a transgender person would have a competitive advantage over non-trans people to bar such participation. Similarly, a claim to a sexual identity does not give a trans woman the right to incarceration in a woman’s prison.
Finally, the debate over gender affirming surgery and hormone treatments is fraught with contradictory assertions. For now, because there are credible scientific claims of irreversible harms, such treatments for those under 18 should be barred pending further study.
There are some other planks I would add, including a strong commitment to free speech and an adamant rejection of all forms of cancel culture; an endorsement of equality of opportunity based on merit; the repudiation of socialism in favor of a free and open market accompanied by government regulation to prevent exploitation, monopolization and unfair trade practices. …
In exploring these issues with Democratic strategists, I was surprised to find significant support — with differences over language — from a variety of sources, albeit accompanied by a harsh rejection from a communications specialist for a firm headed by a major Democratic campaign strategist. …
I have posted several times about the two-pronged dilemma Trump faces in the Iran War that he started: either try to finish it off with a ground invasion of Iran, and thus royally piss off his base, by starting another endless land war in the Middle East, or supinely acquiesce to Iran’s strategic victory.
Some think the ground invasion may be inevitable, and of course they might be right. I say that supine acquiescence will probably be Trump’s final choice, because he really, really does not a land war in the Middle East; because he fears his base; and because he has a naïve faith in his ability to bullshit his way out of any problem that he creates for himself.
For completeness, I should have added that his final choice between these two alternative courses will be down the road a little bit. In the meantime, he will bluff and bluster and try to find some better third alternative. That is what’s happening right now.
He still thinks that bluster and bullshit will make whoever is in charge of Iran bend to his will. That will not happen. He is deathly afraid of a ground invasion of Iran. I actually think the Iranian leadership would welcome a ground invasion.
For several reasons, a big one being that Shi’a Islam is all about martyrdom.
The Australian Broadcast Corporation interviews Richard Pape, professor of political science at the University of Chicago and director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats. Prof. Pape’s discussion illuminates the two—and only two—alternatives for the Iran War.
Prof. Pape is a very smart man, and he knows ten times as much as I know about international security. I believe he’s right about the two, and only two, alternatives: (1) acquiescence in Iran’s regional hegemony, control of the Strait of Hormuz, and continued nuclear program or (2) a much wider war, including a ground invasion.
However, despite his impressive credentials and wisdom, I think Pape is wrong to predict that Trump will pick Door Number 2, a massive land war. I think Trump will pick Door Number 1, acquiescence in defeat, which he will try, clumsily and unpersuasively, to disguise with his usual hallucinatory bullshit. That’s mainly because, (a) he knows his base will desert him if there is another land war in the Middle East and (b) he has a childlike faith in his ability to con the rubes.
The part that isn’t bullshit is the claim that the Iranians are trying to assassinate Trump.
If you have been planning your financial affairs on the assumption that the war with the Islamic Republic of Japan will soon be over, then you are a gullible fool, and you deserve what you are going to get.
I wrote this post in order to reproduce an op-ed from the Wall Street Journal that argues—based, apparently, on European sources—that Putin may attack on of his Eastern European neighbors as a way to undermine NATO.
I think it’s an interesting question. I go further. There is, in my view, abundant evidence that Trump is a Putin tool. Consider, among many other things, the stories that the idiotic acting Director of National Intelligence is busy gutting the intelligence community.
Be all that as it may, Mr. Baker of the WSJ, writes,
Putin May See an Opportunity to Destroy NATO: Even a small incursion could doom the alliance if it lacks the political will to respond with force.
He is mired in a struggle against a country with a population and a military a fractionthe size of his own. Since the decision to launch that war has worked out so well, are we seriously being asked to believe that he would attack an alliance with an economy and military many times the size of his own?
A month ago I would have scoffed at the idea. But conversations with multiple senior European political, military and intelligence figures in the past few weeks suggest to me the possibility is real and rising.
For some Americans, including perhaps the president, the idea that Russia may take a shot at some feckless Europeans who have been notably unhelpful with America’s military preoccupations in recent months might induce a yawn of indifference or even a smirk of schadenfreude. But the risks of any Russian provocation in Europe for America’s global security are profound. Ukraine, a non-NATO member, is one thing. If we failed to respond to Russian aggression against a member of the alliance, NATO would become a dead letter.
Which is why Mr. Putin might attack. As one intelligence analyst put it to me last week: His inspiration may be Marshal Ferdinand Foch, the general who commanded French forces at the Battle of the Marne in 1914. He famously reported: “My center is yielding. My right is retreating. Situation excellent. I am attacking.”
A sudden show of unexpected force just as he appears to be reeling from his ill-advised Ukraine war could be to Mr. Putin’s advantage. Although Mr. Trump’s verbal shock treatment has jolted European NATO members into finally doing more in their own defense, they are still nowhere near ready for a defensive war. Government officials say it will be at least five years before their militaries are close to being capable of replacing U.S. capabilities in Europe.
Mr. Trump has 2½ years left in office. There is no guarantee his successor will have as skeptical an approach to NATO. If Mr. Putin chose the right targets, European leaders suspect Mr. Trump’s administration wouldn’t come to a NATO country’s aid, fatally undermining the credibility of the alliance’s collective-defense commitment—and with it, NATO’s existence—a dream outcome for Mr. Putin.
His political needs might also be suited by an attack on NATO. A former British defense official said to me last week, “After four years of failure and rising popular discontent at home, he desperately needs a military victory.” What better way to lift morale than to plant the Russian flag in some NATO field?
All this suggests we are now in a narrow window of opportunity for Russia to make a move. If Mr. Trump goes ahead with plans to cut European deployments, that window gets wider.
Sure enough, intelligence reports point to rising risks of Russian action. Last week a Polish news report said U.S. officials had warned Warsaw that Russia may attack the country. In an interview last month, a senior military figure from a NATO nation identified multiple risks, including a Russian seizure of islands in the Baltic and an incursion to “assist” the Russian minority in Estonia. None of these would amount to a full-scale invasion, but each would be enough of a provocation that if NATO failed to respond, its credibility would be in tatters.
Is Europe really worth defending with U.S. blood and treasure? Is NATO still an essential strategic interest? I’ve long sympathized with the argument that a large U.S. commitment to the European theater is an anachronism in our security posture, a throwback to 20th-century geopolitics. China is obviously the biggest threat to U.S. security and leadership; managing that relationship requires a shift of strategic resources and attention toward the Pacific. The Europeans can and should take care of their own freedom and security.
But whether we want it or not, we are in a cold-to-simmering war with an axis of resistance that runs from Beijing through Tehran to Moscow. The U.S. is still dealing with the fallout of an inconclusive war with Iran that has left us militarily depleted. As we scramble to manage potential opportunistic moves by China’s Xi Jinping in the Asia-Pacific, Mr. Putin could deal a timely and fatal blow to an already weakened trans-Atlantic alliance. That would be another hammer to the head of Western security and hegemony, and a dramatic enhancement of the power of Russia’s alliance with China and our other adversaries.
Perhaps all the talk of an imminent Russian attack is merely disinformation from European officials, trying to keep President Trump from further weakening NATO. But if you were the American president, would you want to take that risk?
Facing MAGA 