David Ignatius’s précis of President Trump’s war in Iran, the opening passage of his latest Washington Post column, is a pretty fair assessment:

For more than 45 years, U.S. presidents have wanted to destroy the radical, anti-American regime in Tehran. They always concluded that the risks of war were too great — until President Donald Trump’s all-out attack with Israel early Saturday.

Trump said Saturday that the massive airstrikes had killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Few outside Iran will mourn the demise of a man who spent his career shouting: “Death to America!” and “Death to Israel!” And by this limited definition, Trump’s decapitation strategy may have worked. But killing Khamenei, who was aging and infirm, isn’t the same thing as regime change. If there’s a plan for what’s next, I haven’t heard any U.S. or Israeli official explain it.

Mr. Ignatius correctly distinguishes leadership decapitation from regime change, but he smuggles in the assumption that regime destruction has long been settled U.S. policy rather than fluctuating strategic posture.

Even better is one sentence from the editors’ of the Washington Post’s reaction to Operation Epic Fury: “Success will likely require more than a bombing campaign.”

The editors of the Wall Street Journal, more favorably disposed to the war than I or the WaPo’s editors, observe:

In his eight-minute video in the wee hours Saturday, President Trump laid out war aims that suggest a campaign of several days or weeks. He said he wants to “raze their missile industry to the ground” and “annihilate their navy.” He will destroy what’s left of Iran’s nuclear program and “ensure that the region’s terrorist proxies can no longer destabilize the region or the world and attack our forces.”

Crucially, he called on the people of Iran to rise up and depose the theocratic regime that has terrorized and murdered them for 47 years. “When we are finished” bombing, Mr. Trump said, “take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be, probably, your only chance for generations.”

These war aims mean that Mr. Trump is enforcing the red lines he drew when the regime slaughtered its people as they protested in January. He said he’d come to their aid, and now he has. He also gave Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, ample chance to strike a deal on nuclear weapons and its missile force, but the ayatollah refused and now he is reportedly dead.

While confident that the Pentagon has contingency plans for overthrowing the Iranian regime (the Pentagon has many contingency plans), I’m less confident that it has one for doing so from the air. Let’s review some possible scenarios for the outcome.

Best case scenario

In my view the best case scenario for the outcome in Iran is a liberal democratic Iran allied with the United States. If anyone encounters a description from a credible source predicting that will happen, I would be delighted to read it. I think the prospects for that are vanishingly small. The Revolutionary Guard has a decentralized leadership. Killing and otherwise reducing identified targets would not be nearly enough.

Not much

This is, I think, the most likely scenario. The Iranian military and paramilitary forces continue to strike back. President Trump declares victory and ends the operations.

Even “not much” may have considerable costs beyond the out-of-pocket costs of the war itself including the risk of regional escalation, oil shock, proxy retaliation, maritime disruption, and terrorist campaigns abroad.

Regime implosion

The operation kills enough leaders and destroys enough that there is some sort of internal “implosion” by the IRGC and/or militias. President Trump declares victory and washes his hands of any responsibility for the outcome which is chaos and/or civil war in Iran. It could even empower hardline factions within Iran.

A return to the negotiating table

After a few rounds of attacks, both sides return to negotiations. There might even be a return to the agreement that was left on the table. Both sides could claim it as a win.

In the near term Iran is likely to be less willing (or able) to fund Hamas and Hezbollah. In that sense it could be a victory for the Israelis.

In all of these possible outcomes the key problem remains that there is no organized alternative to the present regime in Iran.

I don’t want to post on this at length but I did want to make a couple of observations. Although it needs to pass regulatory scrutiny to be a “done deal”, now that Netflix has dropped out Paramount seems poised to acquire Warner Brothers Discovery.

In my opinion that has a number of implications. The first is for Warner Brothers itself. The acquisition increases the likelihood that Warners, which has produced some of the best Hollywood movies, will continue to exist as a movie studio. IMO Netflix would have mined WB as a content library and phased the studio out of existence.

Now consider the properties the combined enterprise will hold. In addition to the extensive libraries of Paramount and WB there are:

News and broadcast: CBS, CNN, and their respective networks
Entertainment: HBO, MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, Cartoon Network, Adult Swim, TCM, BET, and Showtime
Lifestyle and unscripted: Discovery Channel, Food Network, TLC, and Animal Planet
Streaming platforms: Max, Paramount+, Pluto TV, Discovery+
Sports rights: NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB, UFC, NCAA March Madness, Big 10 and Big 12 football, the Olympics, UEFA Champions

Here’s the question: where does that leave Apple? Since its inception in 2019 to a subscriber base of about 45 million. It appears to have, roughly, plateaued there.

As of the acquisition there are a handful of major streaming services including Disney, Netflix, and Amazon.

As I see it Apple has a business decision to make. It can subsidize Apple TV indefinitely from hardware sales. But can it grow in a crowded field of giants?

The distinction between preemptive and preventive war is not semantic. It is essential.

“Preemptive war” means you face an imminent attack and strike first to preempt it. “Preventive war” means an adversary possesses the capability to threaten you in the future and you attack now to prevent that eventuality from materializing.

Preemptive war may, in narrow circumstances, be justified. Preventive war cannot.

The moral and legal distinction between them turns on imminence. If an attack is truly imminent, i.e. the adversary has mobilized forces, missiles fueled, orders issued, the necessity of self-defense may be “instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means.” In such circumstances, striking first is not aggression but defensive timing.

Preventive war, by contrast, is based not on imminent action but on projected capacity. It rests on the claim: “They may attack someday; therefore we attack now.”

Capability is measurable. Intent is not. And intent is the hinge.

There are many reasons a state might increase military capacity including for deterrence, prestige, internal politics, or alliance signaling. To treat capability alone as grounds for war is to collapse defense into speculation.

The moment we substitute projected intent for observable aggression, the category of self-defense dissolves.

Preventive war has a fatal defect: it is not falsifiable. If you claim an enemy would have attacked you in five years, there is no counterfactual world in which that claim can be tested. If they never attack, you say your war prevented it. If they would not have attacked, you can never know.

Preemption can be evaluated. Was the attack truly imminent? Were forces mobilized? Were orders issued? Prevention cannot. It rests on predictions about political decisions that have not yet been made. That epistemic asymmetry is not a minor flaw. It makes preventive war uniquely vulnerable to abuse.

Any principle of war must survive reciprocity. If the United States claims the right to wage preventive war because another state’s growing capacity might someday threaten it, then that principle is available to all states.

Under such a doctrine, for example, Russia may attack Ukraine because it fears future NATO integration, China may strike Taiwan because it fears permanent separation, or China might even justify striking the United States on the theory that American military supremacy poses an enduring future threat. The issue becomes not whether those claims are true but that the logic licenses them.

Unless one argues that the United States alone may exercise preventive force preventive war becomes a universal permission slip for aggression. That is a claim incompatible with any rule-based international order.

The strongest argument in favor of a doctrine of preventive war arises in the context of nuclear weapons. If an adversary is approaching nuclear capability, publicly expresses hostility, and possesses delivery systems, must one wait for imminence? The answer is difficult but difficulty does not erase principle.

The nuclear age compresses timelines; it does not abolish the distinction between capability and imminent use. A state nearing nuclear capability is not the same as a state preparing nuclear launch. The former is a strategic challenge; the latter is an act of aggression in preparation.

If nuclear capability alone justifies preventive war, then every nuclear state would be permanently justified in attacking every rising power. That is not stability. It is permanent war.

Preventive war transforms war from a response to aggression into a tool of anticipatory power management. It shifts the burden of proof from “They are about to attack” to “They might someday become dangerous”. That shift is fatal to any rule-bound order.

The doctrine is elastic enough to justify any use of force, and therefore constrains none.

The deeper principle is simple. War is justified only in response to aggression or imminent attack. The threshold must be high because the costs are irreparable. If we lower the threshold to projected future threat, we convert war from defense into strategic speculation. Preemptive war, narrowly defined and rigorously constrained, may be tragic but necessary. Preventive war is structurally indistinguishable from aggression.

And once that distinction collapses, so does the moral architecture that distinguishes defense from conquest.

The United States is at war with Iran. At Outside the Beltway James Joyner has a round-up of reports from major news outlets on the action, dubbed “Operation Epic Fury”. When you use military force against another country it is war whether you call it that, “operations”, “limited strike”, or another diction does not change the reality.

I oppose this war. It is a violation of our treaty obligations under the UN Charter Article 2(4)—the prohibition of force. It is unjust—Iran has not attacked us and no evidence has been presented that such an attack was imminent. It is illegal: under Article I, Section 8 of the U. S. Constitution the Congress is granted the authority to declare war. The president does not have that authority. The circumstances do not justify military action.

That should not be construed as arguing that I support the mullahocracy that presently rules Iran. I do not. I think it is unjust, engages in global state-financed terrorism, and has treated the Iranian people poorly. Iran would be more prosperous, happier, and probably at peace without them. None of that justifies the use of military force against them.

I also think it is bad policy. If the mullahs are removed from power what will follow? The likelihood that they will be succeeded by a liberal democracy is vanishingly small. The history of revolutionary regimes suggests that they will retain power as long as possible. The Revolutionary Guard will remain and even if the mullahs are removed from power, it is likely that the IRG will retain it. Power vacuums generally result in the best-organized force taking power and that is the IRG. Street demonstrations are not organized resistance. The United States cannot occupy Iran with air power alone and a land campaign in Iran would be costly, both in money and American lives.

Congress should take steps to end this war, operation, limited strike or whatever you choose to call it.

Under Title XIX of the Social Security Act the executive branch of the federal government is empowered to withhold Medicaid funds from a state following prior notice and a public hearing. At the Minnesota Star-Tribune Sydney Kashiwagi and Jessie Van Berkel report that the White House has “paused” Medicaid reimbursements to Minnesota:

The Trump administration announced Wednesday it plans to halt $259 million in Medicaid payments to Minnesota over concerns about fraud in the state’s social services programs, the latest chapter in the federal government’s crackdown on the state.

The announcement comes one day after President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address, where he zoomed in on fraud in Minnesota and announced Vice President JD Vance would be leading efforts to combat the issue. It also follows the wind-down of Operation Metro Surge, an immigration crackdown in the state initially prompted by allegations of fraud.

“A quarter billion dollars is not going to be paid this month to Minnesota for its Medicaid claims,” Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz said alongside Vance in a Washington, D.C., news conference.

The administration said it would withhold the funds until the Walz administration puts together a “comprehensive corrective action plan to stop the problem.”

I think that distinguishing between “pausing” and “withholding” is splitting hairs. Is this action substantively a withholding, regardless of the label? If the executive branch can avoid statutory procedural safeguards simply by relabeling a withholding as a “pause,” then the statutory protections are illusory. I have no objection to the administration’s investigation of Medicaid fraud in Minnesota but I do think it should follow the letter of the law, that is it should issue a warning and conduct a public hearing.

It was the best of speeches, it was the worst of speeches, it was a wise speech, it was a foolish speech, it evoked faith, it demanded incredulity, it was the beginning of a new day, it heralded the coming of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.

And so we listened, not to a speech, but to ourselves.

I’m ready for my close-up!

This picture was taken by Jack’s breeder at Westminster a couple of weeks ago. His handler does a great job in grooming him.

I tried my level best to listen to last night’s State of the Union address. A transcript is here. I gave up at 9:40pm and went to bed. It unfolded much as I had predicted to my wife: a catalogue of superlatives, some true, some arguably false, many exaggerated.

I counted sixteen of them. Too many to make a good drinking game, even when the speech clocked in at 108 minutes. They included:

• “strongest and most secure border in American history”
• “single largest decline in recorded history” (in homicides)
• “lowest level in more than five years” (referring to the rate of inflation)
• “lowest in four years” (mortgage interest rates)
• “all-time record highs” (stock market)
• “More Americans are working today than at any time in the history of our country”
• “cut a record number of job-killing regulations”
• “largest tax cuts in American history”

I’m sure the president’s fans were delighted. Some have claimed it’s an effective way of communicating with ordinary people. I’m not so sure. To my ear when superlatives are overused they are “tuned out”, i.e. they lose impact. I consider understatement a better rhetorical device because it leaves the speaker with somewhere to go—hearers will notice the rare superlative more in that context. Carthago delenda est (Carthage must be destroyed) was rhetorically effective because Cato the Elder wasn’t saying everything should be destroyed in every speech. De gustibus… Is this persuasion, performance, or simply the language modern voters expect?

To his credit President Trump’s State of the Union message this year was not as much of a presidential “wish list” as prior SOTU’s have been. In some cases matters in that wish list are never heard of again. I counted three calls for Congressional action:

• ban sanctuary cities
• require voter ID
• prohibit medical “transition” treatment for minors without parental consent

Please construe neither support nor opposition from that list—they are merely the wish list actions I identified.

Did you listen to the speech? What were your reactions?

I read this list of the “most famous local sandwiches in each state” at Yahoo and my immediate thought was that a steady diet of most of these would be enough to kill you.

IMO it’s proof positive that if American culture dies it will be of a heart attack.

In fairness I’ve tried about half of the sandwiches listed in the article at one time or another, for example the Horseshoe, Illinois’s entry, when I was in Springfield. The only one I’ve eaten lately is the banh mi, Washington State’s entry, and that was ten years ago. I have never had the courage to try a Fluffernutter in Tennessee Massachusetts. As my wife put it, “It’s just wrong”.