Anne Applebaum

And so you kind of throw up your hands and say, I just don't know what's going on.

And maybe that's the purpose.

Maybe that's exactly what he's trying to do.

It seems pretty clear to me that the Iranians are calculating that he doesn't want to use ground troops.

In other words, that he doesn't want to continue the war, that he's also bored of the war, that he doesn't want to keep fighting, that he's looking for a way out.

And it seems to me that they're using that.

I mean, there are various things that they want from the United States, right?

They want sanctions lifted.

You know, they want a better relationship with the U.S., with the world.

They've been playing on that, you know, the assumption that Trump doesn't want to fight farther.

And so maybe now he's decided to at least rhetorically try to call their bluff and say he will send in troops as a way of getting them to to concede more.

You know, again, we're back to where we started.

Is it real?

Is it not real?

It's hard to know.

I mean, I think it's interesting that Trump keeps returning to this thing about we're going to take their oil.

we're going to make money out of this war.

In the end, it wasn't about regime change.

Obviously, it was never about democracy.

It's not really about peace in the Middle East.