Strategic Defeat
A News Link Round-Up
Here is the latest weekly round-up of links, mostly covering the various ways in which the US has failed to achieve any of its strategic goals in Donald Trump’s war in Iran—but as an antidote to that, there is the event depicted above: the launch of Artemis II, the next stage of America’s return to the Moon.
A reminder on this News Link Round-Up format: The main headlines are there to provide context and perhaps a little commentary, the headlines with the links are the original headlines from the articles, and the quotations beneath are extracts from the articles.
Short Attention Span Theater
Inside Trump’s Daily Video Montage Briefing on the Iran War
Each day since the start of the war in Iran, US military officials compile a video update for President Donald Trump that shows video of the biggest, most successful strikes on Iranian targets over the previous 48 hours, three current U.S. officials and a former US official said.
The daily montage typically runs for about two minutes, sometimes longer, the officials said. One described each daily video as a series of clips of “stuff blowing up.”
The highlight reel of US Central Command bombing Iranian equipment and military sites isn’t the only briefing Trump gets about the war. He’s also updated through conversations with top military and intelligence advisers, foreign leaders, and news reports, the officials said.
But the video briefing is fueling concerns among some of Trump’s allies that he may not be receiving—or absorbing—the complete picture of the war, now in its fourth week, two of the current officials and the former official said.
They said the videos are also driving Trump’s increasing frustration with news coverage of the war. Trump has pointed to the success depicted in the daily videos to privately question why his administration can’t better influence the public narrative, asking aides why the news media doesn’t emphasize what he’s seeing, one of the current US officials and the former US official said.
Three weeks into Donald Trump’s war against Iran, the president has still refused to define victory other than to say the war will soon be over. From the moment he launched hostilities, he offered many rationales for the war, choosing among them like he’s picking hors d’oeuvres from a buffet at one of his golf resorts: It’s about nuclear weapons, it’s about terrorism, it’s about ballistic missiles. As the media, and the world, press him for explanations, he continues, as Pegah Banihashemi and Paul Poast wrote in The Atlantic on Wednesday, to “careen” between demanding “unconditional surrender” from Tehran and signaling “that he might abruptly declare victory and leave.”
