Derek Thompson

Both Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran, and Trump have been acting from a place of significant hubris.

Khamenei, for his part, felt like he was untouchable, that the U.S.

wasn't possibly going to come after him directly, and that was clearly wrong.

He's dead.

Trump is also a little bit on tilt, you could say, that now that he's seen that he can decapitate

the regimes of other countries by, say, abducting the leader of Venezuela.

And now we're talking about maybe decapitating the leadership of Cuba.

Maybe he felt like, you know what?

Regime change isn't as hard as I thought it was.

You don't need boots on the ground.

You just need a really well-timed AI-inflected drone or missile operation that takes out one guy at one time.

And then when you take out the top guy, democracy will just grow.

Yeah, there's something to that.

I definitely, I don't want to get over my skis and like equating war that's killing hundreds of people with like a hot streak in the craps table.

But at some psychological level, what Kareem Sajadpour was saying is there's something similar between those two phenomena.

The feeling of, oh,

Venezuela was easy.

Maybe Iran is easy.

Maybe Cuba is easy.

And we're stuck in the middle of some kind of on tilt hot streak that at the moment is just, at least it seems to me, sort of unspooling out of control.