Krystal

I don't see anyone really disagreeing.

Even the neocons now, the ones who are like, oh, we got to do more war.

You know, Lindsey Graham in that tweet that we talked about with Trita Parsi on whatever day that was, on Sunday.

He said, if this concludes with the deal right now, I don't know why we went into this war to start with.

Because even them, or the Robert Kagan piece that we talked about in The Atlantic, where he says, it's checkmate, like we lost in Iran.

I don't think that there's really anyone who can disagree with that at this point.

Now, some of those people use that as a justification

That's why we need a ground invasion.

That's why we need to nuke them or whatever insane plans they have.

But it's pretty undeniable at this point, unless you are the just most blinded, mega sycophant loyalist you could possibly imagine who just hears Trump go, we won, and are like, I guess we won.

Outside of those people, it's pretty undeniable.

It's really undeniable.

And that's actually one of the obstacles to being able to secure some sort of a deal at this point, because even Trump knows he's not going to be able to sell this as a win.

Even he knows with all of his powers of persuasion and reality distortion and all, you know, something that he's very talented as, the probably greatest bullshit artist in American history, even he knows people are going to see this as a loss.

as nothing more than a devastating strategic loss and one of the greatest blunders in history.

So, you know, I think it's fairly undeniable.

And this latest, you know, OK, well, we're not going to do the weapon sales to Taiwan at China's request.

By the way, we're just got to go along with what they want at this point because we're in such a position of weakness.

It's just a sign of a new reality.

Well, and this is why I continue to be concerned about nuclear weapons because we haven't experienced a hegemonic decline in the nuclear age.