Peter Zeihan

He actually has been in the trenches with the generals and has military experience, much more so than his father.

So he doesn't have the gravitas or the political talent.

cachet that his father might have had after running the country for a few decades.

But he's definitely a military leader.

And that tells us everything we need to know about the willingness of Iran to accede to whatever it is the Americans demand upon.

And by the way, what the Americans have been demanding upon has changed about every 36 hours since this started.

I mean, part of the problem is when you don't know what the goals are, you don't know what to expect.

Two of the more recent things that Donald Trump has said is that he wants to be able to handpick the next leader.

The other one is that he says he demands an unconditional surrender at Iran.

Both of those are wildly unrealistic options unless you have a million troops in the country and have physically crushed dissent.

in a way that I would add we were unable to do in Iraq and Afghanistan or Vietnam or Korea.

As long as that's our starting point, we have no idea what the ending point is.

All we know is that the Iranians will resist because there's nothing it seems that they can do to appease the Trump administration, not to mention that this is their home and they can't just walk away from it.

So Trump could wake up tomorrow and say, you know what, we won and we're done.

And maybe, maybe the Iranians are like, yeah, that's totally fine.

And now we can get along.

Stranger things have happened in the last year, but that is a very specific and very unlikely scenario.

Iran has been a thorn in the side of the United States for quite some time.

And the idea of taking down their military and especially their paramilitary capacity down a few notches, obviously there's some attraction there.

But I'm really getting the look that this war was not prepared for.