Donald Trump is all over the place on Iran. After insisting a deal was imminent, he’s now threatening more full-scale bombing. He just claimed that “I love the inflation” caused by the war. And in several rants, he insisted that the United States has secretly smuggled 100 million barrels of oil out of Iran and onto the world market (the whole thing appears mostly invented). In an extraordinary exchange, Representative Emilia Sykes sharply confronted Energy Secretary Chris Wright over Trump’s “love” of inflation. Wright finally blurted out: “I would prefer lower inflation.” And Wright stammered before admitting that “um, I’m unaware” of Trump’s oil-smuggling scheme. We talked to former Defense Department official Ariane Tabatabai, who’s now at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. She parses through what we know now, explains why Wright’s public meltdown captures the very worst of the Trump administration, and charts what’s next. (After we recorded, Trump resumed bombing.) Listen to this epsidode here. A transcript is here.
Nationally speaking, the humble state of Delaware doesn’t get much attention. As the second-smallest state in America, it measures roughly 96 miles long and at its widest point, only a svelte 35 miles across. Should you be so inclined, it would take you about an hour and a half to drive all the way from the bottom to the top—presumably, to get somewhere more exciting. The most famous commodity to emerge from Delaware is Joe Biden, along with, apparently, something called “scrapple”: a regional mid-Atlantic breakfast food enticingly described as a “congealed loaf of pork scraps and cornmeal.” What the state lacks in cultural impact, however, it makes up for in far more insidious arenas.
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The war on Iran has not only ended in a humiliating defeat for the United States, but resulted in a dramatic shift in the balance of power in the Middle East and the Global South.