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 20 Mar 2026 11.00
The White House/Flickr
The war on Iran is now in its third week, and things are very quickly spiraling out of control. The United States is increasingly isolated. Allies humiliated and bullied by Trump are being put in impossible positions. None of this is going anywhere good.
This week:
I stole that line from The Onion. As we discussed on After America this week, so much of what is now playing out in Iran is so obviously part of a long trend in post-war American military adventurism – this idea that you can just bomb your enemy into submission. It didn’t work in Viet Nam, Afghanistan or Iraq. It won’t work now.
This is part of a long-term trend that President Eisenhower warned us about in his 1961 farewell address – that military power would become self-serving, and the use of military force would become its own end. For Trump’s America, military power is performative, not strategic.
In the New York Review of Books, Fintan O’Toole has a characteristically heart-rending piece on Trump’s war of choice. As always with Trump, we have to be able to hold several things at once: Trump is at once a prisoner of American history and yet also something new; he is at once stupid and embarrassing and incredibly, terrifyingly dangerous.
Sometimes that embarrassment is so intense that it makes you want to curl up into a ball and die.
In the White House this week, Trump met with Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, who he’d just criticised for not helping him in the Strait of Hormuz. Takaichi has positioned herself as a great Trump ally (for more on that, here’s my colleague Allan Behm in The Point), but of course he doesn’t care about that. In the presser, Trump was asked why he didn’t tell any of the United States’ allies that he was going to attack Iran. So he made a “joke” about Pearl Harbor. Because of course he did. But Takaichi did deliver Trump a lesson in gracious behaviour.
This comes off the back of Trump constantly complaining that allies won’t help him in Hormuz – including a post on Truth Social saying he doesn’t “need” allies like Australia. In The Atlantic, Adam Serwer has a great piece on what Trump’s treatment of allies means for the United States.
It’s all just another reminder – as if we needed one! – that it doesn’t matter how much you give him. Too much is never enough.
I wrote last week about this administration’s inability to anticipate or appreciate the reactions of people they’re dealing with. Jamelle Bouie posted another of his really interesting pieces of analysis along those lines, describing this as “pyschopathy”: “someone who doesn’t appear to recognise that other people exist”. Bouie sits this alongside the administration’s “bloodthirstiness” and the way that Trump, and cronies like Hegseth, relish violence.
And these “criminal losers”, as Drew Magary describes them over at SFGate, are running the show. It’s not a nice note to end on, exactly, but I did enjoy Magary’s evisceration of FBI Director Kash Patel and his loser shoes.
As Bec Shaw put it in this evergreen headline: “I knew one day I’d have to watch powerful men burn the world down – I just didn’t expect them to be such losers”.
As we line up at the petrol bowser to pay 60 cents per litre more – and rising – than we did before the US and Israel attacked Iran, we should remind ourselves how indebted we are to Don and Bibi. And indebted is the word. Iran’s approach to asymmetric warfare hits the global community’s hip pocket hard, as it is intended to do. Erosion of political support is the result.
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.
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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.
