{"id":44746,"date":"2026-03-31T12:06:41","date_gmt":"2026-03-31T12:06:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/44746\/"},"modified":"2026-03-31T12:06:41","modified_gmt":"2026-03-31T12:06:41","slug":"the-boomer-uncle-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/44746\/","title":{"rendered":"The Boomer-uncle war"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cMissiles launched, missiles launched, missiles launching, they\u2019re launching, OK \u2026 fire, fire, fire. The most unbelievable thing. Fire, boom, fire, boom.\u201d With 15 American service members killed in action, hundreds more having suffered life-altering injuries, and the American basing system throughout the Gulf region in ruins, this was how President Trump described<\/a> his \u201cexcursion\u201d into Iran.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Speaking not to the American people, but to the Saudi Future Investment Initiative Conference in Miami Beach, Trump went on to show officials from the Persian Gulf region a video clip proclaiming his \u201c100% approval rating\u201d \u2014 without noting that it came from a single poll gauging the views of self-described \u201cMAGA Republicans\u201d \u2014 before declaring that \u201cCuba\u2019s next, by the way, but pretend I didn\u2019t say that please.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Welcome to the Boomer-uncle war, launched with calamitously vague objectives not mainly because the president fell in thrall to Israeli influence \u2014 but because he embodies a broken American gerontocracy: an aging generation of leaders whose perceptions of America\u2019s relative power are stuck in the halcyon 1980s and \u201990s; and whose yearning for the war spectacles of old is now fulfilled by short online clips, long-term strategic considerations be damned.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s wartime command closely resembles the Boomer uncle who can\u2019t help himself from scrolling through social-media reels at the Easter dinner table. His briefings as commander in chief now reportedly consist of two-minute-long highlight reels<\/a> that show \u201cstuff getting blown up,\u201d as NBC News recently reported. His attention can only be permeated by ever-escalating spectacle, chasing the high of a more intense \u201cfire, boom, fire, boom.\u201d An anonymous White House official has told the media that the president\u2019s efforts to end the conflict are likewise driven by the fact that he\u2019s \u201cbored and wants to move on<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

The trouble is that this time, someone else besides MAGA Boomers gets a vote: namely, the Tehran regime. The Iranians, of course, are good at spectacle and even social-media \u201cdunking\u201d \u2014 witness Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf\u2019s post trolling<\/a> CENTCOM over the destruction of an AWACS command-and-control aircraft (\u201ccaused by a clogged kitchen pipe\u201d). But for the Islamic Republic, the trolling and spectacle serve a larger strategic imperative: to impose high enough costs on Washington and Jerusalem to prevent a third \u201cexcursion,\u201d even if this means Iran taking a bad beating, too.<\/p>\n

The same cannot be said for the Boomer uncle in charge in Washington. Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz famously wrote that \u201cwar is the continuation of politics by other means.\u201d He meant that war itself isn\u2019t an outcome, but rather the means to achieve some political end or range of ends. So what has been the political end pursued by the American military \u201cexcursion\u201d in Iran? Trump himself doesn\u2019t seem to know.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Since the initial American attack on Feb. 28, Trump and his administration have continually moved the goalposts. First it was to support regime change \u2014 empowering the Iranian people to control their own \u201cdestiny,\u201d as Trump put it in his early-morning speech announcing the war. Then we were told that this was actually an exercise in Venezuelan-style coercive decapitation, in which we would keep the regime in place and continue to assassinate successors to Ayatollah Khameinei until we \u201cfind another Delcy [Rodriguez],\u201d in reference to the Maduro deputy tapped to lead that country as an American cat\u2019s paw.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cFor the Islamic Republic, the trolling and spectacle serve a larger strategic imperative.\u201d<\/p>\n

Later, the objective was to destroy Iranian long-range missile capabilities and to destroy the Iranian nuclear program that we were told had been \u201cobliterated\u201d last June in the course of the 12-Day War. Still later, the war became about reopening the Strait of Hormuz<\/a> \u2014 a problem that didn\u2019t exist prior to American military action. \u201cThe objective of the war has become undoing the consequence of the war,\u201d as one online wit put it, adding<\/a>: \u201cthe stupidest war in history.\u201d Most recently, the State Department struck reopening Hormuz from the list of objectives<\/a>, reprising instead the destruction of capability, which is a tactic not a political objective.<\/p>\n

This inability to articulate strategic goals is mirrored by the administration\u2019s failure to consider the consequences of action. While the early pro-war motto of \u201cyou can just do things\u201d may be true, it risks obscuring an important countervailing fact: namely, that others can do things, too. Iran\u2019s closure of the strait and the resulting disruption of the global economy weren\u2019t unexpected to anyone paying attention; the IRGC had been preparing for decades to close that chokepoint in response to an invasion. The 2023-2024 Houthi attacks on a similar bottleneck in the Red Sea demonstrated the asymmetry in costs for this type of conflict, showing how relatively cheap projectiles can become overwhelming for expensive and high-tech American weaponry.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

We knew these things before Feb. 28, just as we knew that the Islamic Republic would be preparing for another attack after last June\u2019s incursion. The economic fallout from both the closure of the strait and the destruction of petrochemical infrastructure isn\u2019t yet clear, but one thing is certain: despite the weak attempts to spin this in Trump\u2019s favor, no one benefits more from this disruption than China and Russia. The former, China, is seeing a boost to its renewables industry (Trump scrapped US investments in America\u2019s analog); the latter, Russia, is making a mint from oil sales since Team Trump un-sanctioned its exports (and some of Tehran\u2019s oil exports, as well).<\/p>\n

Speaking of China and Russia, both are likely celebrating America\u2019s fumbling pivot back to the Middle East. Apart from the asymmetric impact of the energy crisis, the depletion of US missile stockpiles and relocation of materiel from East Asia have underscored the brittleness of American hegemony. Notably, THAAD air-defense systems are being removed<\/a> from South Korea (a state with whom America has a formal defense alliance<\/a>) for use in Israel (with whom Washington has no such alliance).\u00a0<\/p>\n

More than 25% of America\u2019s THAAD stockpile was used last summer to defend the Jewish state following Benjamin Netanyahu\u2019s attack on Iran in June. Such depletion harms the US ability to project power and defend allies in other regions. Plus, the rapid exhaustion<\/a> of long-range interceptors and air defense should be alarming for anyone who genuinely believes that there is a threat to the American homeland. While America may not \u201crun out of bombs,\u201d it is running short<\/a> on the expensive, sophisticated weaponry and radar that enable US air-defense systems.\u00a0 Replacing these stockpiles will take years, and is also dependent on rare-earth minerals, of which China controls a significant portion of the global supply (98%, in the case of gallium).<\/p>\n

So what have these expenditures won? No faction on the American Right should be content. For the America First populists: skyrocketing prices and a pivot away from domestic issues such as immigration, poverty, and addiction. For the defenders of Western Civilization: a degradation<\/a> of those distinctive values the West claims to represent, as the US increasingly takes up Israel\u2019s Gaza-style methods and rhetoric (\u201cmaximum lethality, not legality,\u201d to quote Secretary of War Pete Hegseth\u2019s edifying hip-hop rhyme<\/a> glorying in a new disregard for the laws of war). For the congressional Republicans who have largely ceded legislative power to the executive: a newly energized Democratic Party likely to capitalize on these blunders come November. And even for the neoconservatives and pro-Israel hawks: no regime change, no democracy, and collapsing primacy.\u00a0<\/p>\n

None of these groups should trust that Trump will advance their policy aims, for he has no ideology but spectacle. For a man whose life has been so defined by pageantry and performance, the crowning achievement of his presidency is shattering the illusion of American invincibility.\u00a0 Like a dying animal lashing out, this paroxysm is more pathetic than powerful.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Yes, those who influenced Trump bear some blame: from the ultra-hawkish Sen. Lindsey Graham (who used childish word-association<\/a> games to persuade Trump that he\u2019d clinch a Lincolnian or Rooseveltian legacy by invading Iran); to overconfident Israeli intelligence that recently prompted Vice President JD Vance to dress down Bibi<\/a> (for overselling an Iranian uprising). Yet the buck stops at the Oval Office and the Resolute Desk: susceptibility to such pressures demonstrates just how unsuited to lead Trump has become.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Anyone who can be manipulated by Graham belongs in a care facility rather than the Oval Office, and those who continue to enable such embarrassment deserve to answer for the damage they\u2019ve done. As long as Trump continues to seek the next \u201cboom,\u201d the next war, too, will have no political purpose beyond perverse spectacle.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cMissiles launched, missiles launched, missiles launching, they\u2019re launching, OK \u2026 fire, fire, fire. The most unbelievable thing. Fire,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":44747,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[18656,18657,196,1889,39],"class_list":{"0":"post-44746","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-persian-gulf","8":"tag-boomers","9":"tag-carl-von-clausewitz","10":"tag-iran-war","11":"tag-maga","12":"tag-persian-gulf"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44746","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44746"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44746\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44747"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44746"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44746"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44746"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}