Note: Last night, America’s two leading moderate voices held a special episode to discuss the looming war with Iran. You can listen here.

One of the things skipped past in the flurry of happenings over the last ten days is that the Trump administration has abandoned Ukraine. Pete Hegseth said as much in Congressional testimony where he said there were no plans to send Ukraine additional weapons or ask Congress for more money. At the G7 in Canada, Trump blew off a meeting with Zelensky without saying a word. The reason given was the crisis in the Middle East, which is now the priority.

For the Iran hawks, this is being greeted as good news as they assume this means Trump is onboard with their war schemes, but it may simply be the result of the clash between short term and long-term thinking. Like the this war scheme, Project Ukraine was a short-term operation. All involved assumed it would be a quick and glorious victory, but it turned into a long grind. The American empire does not do long grinds, so it is onto the next military project.

Project Ukraine did not become a long grind by accident. It was made so through deliberate actions by the Russians. Once they realized in 2022, after the war started, that the West was never going to negotiate, they quickly reorganized themselves and their war plans to turn it into a long grind. They correctly surmised that if they wanted a long-term solution to NATO, they needed to win a war of attrition with NATO, so they made Ukraine into a war of attrition.

It is why Trump’s deal making with Russia failed. He assumed that the people who got everything about Russian wrong to this point were right that Russia would jump at a short-term solution, so they used that as leverage. What he learned was that those people advising him were all wrong and Russia was unwilling to take a short-term deal like a ceasefire or a quick peace. Trump has dropped normalization talks with Russia because he sees that he has no cards to play.

Project Ukraine is an important lesson that no one in Washington is ready to grasp as the empire stumbles its way into another Middle East quagmire. The same people who were entirely wrong about Project Iraq two decades ago turned out to be wrong about Project Ukraine, but the results are much worse. The empire was eventually able to subdue Iraq and install a neutral government, but it came with long-term costs that continue to drain the imperial coffers.

The lesson of Iraq should have been that there are no short-term solutions to long-term problems and long-term problems come with long-term costs. People forget that the war with Iraq was touted as the solution to the Middle East problem. Even if it did not result in regime change in Iran, it would sufficiently terrify them that they would cease to be a problem as far as Washington was concerned. Twenty-five years on and Trump is on the edge of becoming George Bush.

We are getting the flickers of this gap between the long-term and the short-term in the war between Israel and Iran. When Washington and Tel Aviv cooked up the Pearl Harbor style sneak attack, it had two base assumptions. They assumed it would work and by work it would collapse the Iranian regime. There was no thought to what would happen after the sneak attack. There was no thought to what could happen if it did not work exactly as the planners promised.

Note that the Iranians have turned this into a long-term issue. They have more missiles and drones than Iran has attack missiles and air defense. Iran is ten times the size of Israel, so they can take a lot of damage and survive. Just as Ukraine found itself in a numbers game that favored the Russians, Israel is facing a similar math problem with the Iranians now. It is why they are demanding Trump join the war. They cannot overcome the math of their war with Iran.

If you can bear listening to the cries for blood from the usual suspects in Washington, what you hear is a demand for quick action. They insist that the Iranian regime is fragile, and it just needs to be pushed over in order to get regime change. These are the same people who said the same things about Iraq in the Bush years and said the same things about Russia just a few years ago. There is no talk of what comes next, because like Ted Cruz, they are incapable of such thinking.

What we are seeing with Iran is the same time dilation that has haunted the American empire since the end of the Cold War. Perhaps it is the result of foreign policy being run by short-term visitors or perhaps it is the nature of democratic societies. No matter the cause, America operates in a world where the clocks always speed forward to the desired result. In the rest of the world, clocks move at their own pace and often that pace is very slow and deliberate, as we see with Ukraine.

An attack on Iran assumes the clocks speed up, but that is unlikely. For all its problems, Iran is a stable society. It has survived fifty years of American sanctions. It survived a monstrous war against Iraq. They think in the long term and seem to have been thinking for a long time about what will happen if America makes war on them. Victory over Iran means a long, bloody fight, one where the clocks move slowly. What would come after that is decades of blood and treasure.

Ironically, the clock is now ticking on the Trump admin. They can take the bait and fall into another grinding war of attrition. That is the quick answer and the way the trap has been constructed by the trap makers. They want to speed up time for Trump so he cannot wait for better choices. On the other hand, they can just wait to see if better choices emerge over time. In Trump’s office, there are two clocks. One moves normally and the other races forward. Which one does he choose?

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