Everything Everywhere at Once Update

There’s a lot going on right now. It looks as if Tehran is crying uncle:

Iran has been urgently signaling that it seeks an end to hostilities and resumption of talks over its nuclear programs, sending messages to Israel and the U.S. via Arab intermediaries, Middle Eastern and European officials said.

In the midst of a ferocious Israeli air campaign, Tehran has told Arab officials it would be open to returning to the negotiating table as long as the U.S. doesn’t join the attack, the officials said. Iran also passed messages to Israel saying it is in the interest of both sides to keep the violence contained.

But with Israeli warplanes able to fly freely over the capital and Iranian counterattacks inflicting minimal damage, Israeli leaders have little incentive to halt their assault before doing more to destroy Iran’s nuclear sites and further weaken the theocratic government’s hold on power.

Iran, in the parlance of our times, has very few cards to play. Principled Non-Interventionist Donald Trump is signaling that he’s going to join the fight:

The U.S. Navy is sending the supercarrier USS Nimitz and the rest of its strike group to the Middle East amid a new buildup of forces in the region ostensibly for defensive purposes, U.S. officials have told TWZ. Overnight, dozens of U.S. Air Force KC-135R and KC-46A tankers had already been tracked heading east over the Atlantic Ocean. That has prompted speculation about the potential start of a major contingency operation, possibly around a shift in U.S. policy toward the ongoing Israel-Iran war, as you can read about in more detail here.

U.S. air, naval, and ground forces have already been aiding in the defense of Israel since the start of the current hostilities last week. Readers can first get up to speed on the latest developments in the conflict between Israel and Iran in our reporting here.

Let’s step back a bit; the US has already joined this fight in nearly every meaningful sense of the term. Trump is using the threat of an even more aggressive and comprehensive use of force in order to wring concessions from the regime. This is war by any other name.

In other news it looks as if Iran is no longer the sole operator of F-14 Tomcats.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) posted infrared targeting camera footage of a pair of F-14A Tomcat fighters being destroyed by air-to-ground munitions as they sat outside hardened aircraft shelters at Mehrabad International Airport in Tehran. The strikes were part of Israel’s broadening campaign to dismantle Iran’s air defense capabilities for good, which includes destroying the Iranian Air Force’s fixed-wing fleet.

This makes Top Gun: Maverick a damnable lie.

Over the past few months the Center for Responsible Statecraft, online magazine arm of the Quincy Institute, has effectively become a MAGA policy shop on the premise that Donald Trump is a Principled Non-Interventionist. Things are going well over there right now.