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Jun 17, 2026

Bret Stephens

Iran Found Trump’s Bone Spur

June 16, 2026

Editor: it’s hard to make sence of Bret Stevens latest hysterical ditribe on Iran? Such is its swift and cartooish screecing about Iran, that reminds the reader of lame pastisch of Walt Disney, a little too much? But probably the reader might just surmise that Stephens riffed on his usual cobbled together themes, that failed to hit the mark?

Iran’s military leaders have greeted the cease-fire agreement with President Trump as a triumph, crowing that “through the imposition of their divine and iron will” they had “humiliated American and Zionist enemies.”

Mostly, they’re right.

Mostly, because it’s worth remembering that the current regime in Iran is far less formidable than it was before the Hamas assault on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Back then, Iran had potent allies and proxies in Syria, Lebanon, Gaza and Yemen. Its nuclear program was intact and steadily accumulating ever larger quantities of highly enriched uranium. It had a powerful military-industrial base, a weak but functional economy and a government that — for all its repressiveness — was internationally recognized as legitimate.

Today, much of that is either gone or diminished. Iran is no longer within sprinting distance of a bomb. Its ally in Syria was deposed. Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis have lost much of their fighting strength. The Iranian rial is the world’s most worthless currency. The leadership rules an unhappy population that — outside of die-hard loyalists — would almost certainly overthrow it if given the chance. Its latest ballistic missile salvo against Israel failed to land a serious single blow. Its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz strained, but did not strangle, the world’s energy markets.

Editor: Stephens finally ignites his diatribe with this sentence pragment ‘evil, ambitious regime’ !

Those are real achievements against an evil, ambitious regime. Yet the outcome of war rarely rests on a tally of relative strength. War is a contest of wills. And in that contest, the hard men of Tehran appear to have scored a decisive victory over the vain man of Washington.

Editor: Mr. Stephens writes as a Zionist there can be no mistake about his loyalties!

I write this as someone who supported the war from the outset and hoped to see Trump carry it through to a decisive result: if not regime change, then at least a deal in which Iran would be forced to relinquish all of its enrichment capabilities and access to the Strait was unfettered. Those goals were well within the president’s reach, particularly if he had continued to attack Iran’s military-industrial infrastructure until it agreed to terms, rather than conducting most of the negotiations after the fighting had mostly stopped.

Editor: Stephens diatribe is awash in victimhood! For a person who has lived a highly privileged existant, this is the pureist expression of self-serving agitprop!

…

The worst betrayal, however, is of Americans who supported the war — not only neocons like me but also most of Trump’s MAGA base — because we believed that Iran, which has waged a 47-year war against us, posed an increasingly intolerable threat to our security and vital interests.

This cease-fire neither ends nor eases that threat; it hardens and magnifies it. It removes the one point of U.S. leverage over Iran — the naval blockade of its ports — before there’s any negotiation over its nuclear program, which the Iranians will almost surely drag out until Trump is out of office. It reminds the world of the adage that while it can be dangerous to be America’s enemy, it is fatal to be its friend. And it gives Iran’s leaders something even more vital: The confidence that, whatever Trump may threaten, they can withstand the most any American president or Israeli prime minister can throw at them.

There’s a word for this: debacle. Not because the war, for all its costs or errors of execution, was a mistake. It’s because this pretense of a peace is an act of geopolitical self-harm that will haunt our standing in the world for years to come.

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