https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/july-31-2026
"Courtney Kube, Monica Alba, Peter Nicholas, Gordon Lubold, Katherine Doyle,
and Andrea Mitchell of
NBC News reported Wednesday that President Donald J.
Trump is “exasperated” that the Iran war is dragging on and that his advisors
can’t agree what to do next. Reportedly, he erupted last week during a meeting
with his national security team, shouting expletives at the officials in the
room. One of Trump’s allies told the reporters that Trump had not expected the
war to last as long as it has. “There was not a real strategy for how long or
what they should do to get to the endpoint.... He did not intend this to be a
long, drawn-out war,” the person said.
Yesterday the war began to widen as a drone hit a gas storage tanker owned by a
U.S. company in Egypt near the Suez Canal—no one has claimed responsibility—and
Iran struck at American installations in Jordan. U.S. and Saudi Arabian forces
launched strikes against Iranian-backed militias in Iraq.
At a Cabinet meeting at Camp David today, Trump told reporters he intends to
hit Iran with heavy military strikes again to force Iranian negotiators to give
in to his demands. “We will be hitting them very hard,” he said. “And you know
at some point, they’re going to say, ‘We just can’t take it anymore.’” “We just
want to win,” he said. “We’re doing very well.”
Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth did not appear to have a strategy for
their war on Iran. Instead, they had an ideology. That ideology elevates
individualism over the idea behind the modern American state: that government
should regulate business, maintain a basic social safety net, promote
infrastructure, protect civil rights, and support an international order based
in rules rather than in military might.
Since the 1950s, opponents of that modern state have celebrated the American
individual, especially the American cowboy, as the figure the American
government should privilege and protect. In their mythology, the cowboy wanted
nothing from the government but to be left alone to rise through his own hard
work, protecting himself and his family from wrongdoers with his gun and his
principles. The education, expertise, cooperation, and coalitions on which the
modern U.S. stood before Trump were signs not of strength, but of weakness."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
