It isn’t always easy to keep up with what’s happening in the US. “Shorter America” is a series where Dr Emma Shortis loops you in on what’s going on in America and shares news and analysis that you can trust.
Fri 13 Mar 2026 01.00
The White House/Flickr
On the tenth day of his war on Iran, Trump said that war was “very complete, pretty much”. It’s not. On Thursday Australian time, the Iranian regime hit three cargo ships attempting passage through the Strait of Hormuz. American and Israeli attacks continue – on Iran, and now Lebanon too. And Australia is getting dragged further in.
This week:
Following all this is genuinely really difficult – things are changing by the hour. This summary by the Center for American Progress is a good one – it’s really helpful in laying out how wrong this all is on so many levels.
We’re also constantly getting more horrifying detail about the outrageous lack of planning or strategy or even just thought that went into this war.
The whole thing has highlighted for me just how much these men (and it is men doing the decision-making about this) are just completely unable to imagine anything outside their own frame of reference – one that is highly individualised, highly racialised, and highly gendered. They think everyone else is just too weak and woke and that they can easily dominate those they see as being beneath them.
So they can’t anticipate things like a collective response – they can’t imagine that people in Minnesota might organise to protect their neighbours, for example, because that’s not what they would do. It’s a ‘might is right’ world and all that.
So it’s not just a matter of not planning (though that is bad enough) – the administration was unable to anticipate responses that should be obvious. Like it’s not actually that hard, if you know even a little bit about the context, to anticipate how an Iranian regime facing what it would regard as an existential attack might respond. That it would be very likely, for example, to attempt to close the crucial shipping lane that is the Strait of Hormuz.
After a classified briefing, Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy posted this thread, in which he wrote:
“…on the Strait of Hormuz, they had NO PLAN. I can’t go into more detail about how Iran gums up the Strait, but suffice it say, right now, they don’t know how to get it safely back open. Which is unforgiveable, because this part of the disaster was 100% foreseeable.”
This is all backed up by this piece in the New York Times, and this one in the Wall Street Journal (neither of which are famous for their radical opposition to American militarism).
It seems they thought it would be like Venezuela; that they thought they could do what no president for the last four decades has tried, simply because they were less woke and more brutal than those who came before them. They couldn’t believe they wouldn’t win. They couldn’t believe the regime wouldn’t bow down to their power.
And just to add a regular reminder: here in Australia, we are trusting these stupid, lying drongoes with our security.
None of this will stop them, of course. Trump is already flagging who’s next – another longtime target of the neocons. It’s Cuba. And “it may be a friendly takeover, it may not be a friendly takeover,” according to the president of peace. Cool.
The Council of Foreign Relations has a (quite wonky) backgrounder on Cuba. If nothing else, it illustrates just how much Trump is a prisoner of history that he has no interest in understanding.
Speaking of toxic white masculinity! I’ve said this before, but Pop Syllabus is SO GOOD at breaking down the links between pop culture and politics. This episode of the podcast, on “looksmaxxing” was great (/horrifying, but isn’t everything).
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While the initial Israeli and US air strikes on Iran are legally very dubious, the pace with which the war has escalated will result in those significant legal issues being set aside – for the time being at least.
Former Greek finance minister and economist Yanis Varoufakis has warned that fascism is re-surging in global politics, with extremist ideas gaining influence even in countries where the far-right is not in power.
Australia’s AUKUS agreement has dragged the country into the Trump administration’s war on Iran with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese accused of obfuscating the country’s involvement.
It isn’t always easy to keep up with what’s happening in the US. “Shorter America” is a series where Dr Emma Shortis loops you in on what’s going on in America and shares news and analysis that you can trust.
