Blain’s Morning Porridge Extra – What would PJ O’Rourke make of the Iran Deal?

There has been lot’s of talk and political mumble-swerve on Trump’s Iran deal. We’ve had a prominent Republican Senator, Bill Cassidy, comment it’s: “Worst foreign policy blunder in decades”, and “Ronald Reagan is rolling over in his grave”…

To be strictly fair I decided to try the new Ouija Board LLM Model on OpenAI to contact the ghost of my favourite right-wing conservative “college republican reptile”, PJ O’Rourke, to ask him to write about it. (For those of you who have never heard of PJ O’Rourke – he was sharp, funny, and politically hilarious, understanding that the way to make politics interesting was to make us laugh as we think about it.

I used the new Ethereal AI model to contact PJ. This is what he sent me from the afterlife via ChatGPT “Hellzapoppin” V.2.2:

How Iran Won Trump’s War

PJ O’Rourke (deceased)

War is supposed to be simple. That’s why politicians like it. You bomb the bad guys, they surrender, and then everybody goes home for a parade, preferably before the next election.

Unfortunately, war has developed a nasty habit of refusing to cooperate with campaign messaging.

Donald Trump launched his Iran adventure with all the usual promises. Iran’s nuclear ambitions would be crushed. Its missile program would be neutered. Its proxies would be declawed. The ayatollahs would discover a sudden passion for democracy, or at least for keeping their heads down. The people would be freed. Instead, after several months of explosions, threats, emergency G7 meetings, market panics and enough presidential social media posts to cause repetitive strain injury among White House interns, America ended up negotiating with the very people it had just spent a fortune trying to intimidate.

This is not necessarily a military defeat. It’s something more modern: a PowerPoint defeat.

The United States entered the conflict with a shopping list of objectives. Iran was supposed to abandon nuclear ambitions, ballistic missiles and regional influence. The resulting memorandum appears to achieve approximately one and a half of those things, depending on which press briefing you’re reading and how much coffee you’ve had.

Iran, meanwhile, remains governed by the same people, controls the same country and is still negotiating over many of the same issues that existed before the war started. That’s not losing. That’s surviving.

And survival is the Middle East’s version of victory.

The great irony is that Trump spent years attacking Barack Obama’s Iran deal as the worst agreement since Eve accepted produce from a talking snake. Yet here we are, watching Republicans argue over a new agreement whose details remain mysterious enough to qualify as religious revelation. Critics are already comparing it to the very deal Trump once denounced.

Some Republican senators have reacted the way accountants react when their teenager announces a career in poetry: with visible pain and demands for documentation. They want to know why sanctions are being eased, why oil can flow again and why the whole arrangement seems suspiciously dependent on everyone behaving sensibly.

Iran’s real weapon wasn’t missiles. It was geography.

For decades Americans have stared at maps of the Strait of Hormuz the way suburban homeowners stare at a faulty boiler. They know it’s important, they don’t understand how it works, and they hope somebody else fixes it. Once energy prices started climbing and financial markets began imagining unpleasant scenarios, the strategic calculus changed dramatically. Even the White House acknowledged that a wider conflict risked severe economic damage.

The result was predictable. Wars begin with speeches about principles and end with negotiations about shipping lanes.

The funniest part is that everyone is claiming victory.

Trump says he prevented catastrophe and secured peace. Iran says it defended its sovereignty. Europe says diplomacy worked. Markets say they’re relieved. Oil traders say they’ll believe it when they see it. Republican hawks say civilization has collapsed. The ayatollahs say America blinked. Everybody gets a trophy except the taxpayers.

So who won?

Iran didn’t conquer Washington. It didn’t destroy the U.S. military. It didn’t turn the Stars and Stripes into a prayer rug.

What it did was far more impressive.

It convinced the world’s strongest military power to start a war aimed at transforming Iran and then settle for an agreement largely focused on managing Iran. The Persians have won the war that America paid for.

In Washington, that’s what passes for victory.

(PJ O’Rourke c/o ChatGPT.)