All the way from the savage jungles of Lan Na, Hunter and Coffin are effacingly proud to present their production of their very own Bunkering Hall Bros., a most singular chimerical oddity whereof there is combined into one, discrete being the fearsome hawk and the fleet carrier pingeon, as if the longitudinally demarcated bimorphisms had been rended from their native half in a jagged line vibratingly attenuating its amplitude and miraculously fused in patchwork spatial homologeneity. Watch as the fiendish shade ravenously gorges itself on their shared viscera whilst the virginal volutary in involuntary frenetic reflex dashes themself headlong into a tree.

Alack, fair denizens, turn your consterned, pallid faces away from this distressing sight, and salutarily neglect these idle, fruitless fears and instead behold this grafted medlar’s sup! Embark down this a’way, but be patient friends, for the Gates of Hell shall be opened presently, and we all may proceed to the marquis’ marquee to gaze with righteous fervor on the decacimation of this heathen horde of Saracens; of the multifarious outrages they have perpetrated on their people, none shall rival those descending from us. Oh, what heroes, what latter-day lionhearts shall from vertiginous heights throb out the tumblings skeins of freedom down to plaintively begrutten and pied, yearning, out-stretched palms; and, lo, the freedom shall pierce their very soul, their very children’s souls, and they shall all fall down and weep in the fulgurating face of so provident a benediction.

President Trump sailed into office with handsome majorities in Congress and the putative mandate of the popular vote on the wave of a multifarious, eclectic coalition primarily concerned with the perceived deterioration of the country’s prescripts’ whilom firm grounding in Christian precepts and rudimentary rationale. Initially, this coherence of variously converse forces was able to sustain, at the least, a superficial cohesion byway of their alignment of attitudes on the keystone issue upon which most voters reposed their solicitude, and thus what was duly prognosticated on those upon which the teleologically elected administration would stand stoutly upon in seeking their realization. 

Well before and distinct from this proximate martial excursion, cracks were yet materializing in this composite: the Secretary of Agriculture was extolling the salubrious adversity of ascetic austerity on the dinner plate; a foreigner of dubious competence and lesser probity was granted a puissant position at the head of an enigmatic ad hoc commission, who was summarily dismissed over some school-yard spate with the President; the Justice Department engaged in, and is yet perpetuating, an obnoxious lark of cat and mouse with Congress and the naturally scandalized demos, for which the Attorny General was recently sacked, though forgive me if I posit that Bondi was not the decisively unrelenting impediment to the Files’ divulgence (Trump at the least professes to yet still retain a approbatory view of her as “a Great American Patriot and a loyal friend, who faithfully served as my Attorney General over the past year.”); but, so long as wage augmentation exceeded the pace of inflation, as it on average did during his first year, even if falling woefully short of certain of his more maniacally blustery previsions, the constituent elements of his supporters could perhaps still delude themselves requisitely to pretend to the fulfillment of their milleniarist prophecies heralding the inauguration of a Specious Age. 

But of all the divisions lurking in the turbid admixture, one of the most redoubtable should it rear its chiaroscurant head was that ‘twixt the isolationists and and the interventionists, with a less stark (though not perforce less salient or rancorous) further distinction within the latter of adherents tending more to a reliance on “soft power”, the modus operandi of the maintenance of Usonian hegemony in the dappled umbrial of Bretton Woods and the like, whereof the United States spread its meritoriety through the practiced application of our resources into constructive programs of twofold prominent purpose: the imbuation of a positive attitude towards the United States (in the words of Secretary of State Rubio, such persons who rely on U.S’ aid for their subsistence are “hard to radicalize”) and the development of future consumers who would presumably be prime purchasers of goods and services rendered by the United States. Such proved a wildly efficacious means of preserving power, though almost no interventionist is of an immutably pacific outlook, and so “hard power” would be avowed as a circumspectly reached for, trenchant tool of our stock, with more spongy disciples averring such availment as only justifiable in the case the status quo was contravened. The record of our sublimation of “hard power” is inscribed a bit more spottily, ‘Nam and Eye-rack bywords of, at best, martial nugation, but more often, international humiliation, tending to overshadow our reputedly successful operation in Kuwait and Yugoslavia. Let us dilate for a moment on the former, for its illuming contrast to our present predicament.

To reductively adumbrate, the elder Bush, upon rencountre with the invasion of a peaceable and friendly nation, whom we depended on for their scaturiently flowing black gold, by an overweening and militant Iraq stewarded under the autocracy of Saddam Hussein, a blunder productive of fatal ignominy, Bush, notwithstanding the wide-spread support of the public and the permissibility, as per the War Powers Act, of his launching and sustaining warfare for a limited time, attained a declaration of war from Congress, and colligated an international confederation spearheaded by our forces which proceeded to  decisively rout the Iranian interlopers.

Contrast this to this administration’s laborious, convoluted course in the present conflict: diametrically posterior to issuance of an enjoinder to “come and help us”, and less than half an hour after enunciating that we “need one of the big boys”, President Trump baldly declared that “we don’t need anybody,” further alienating our once bosom allies and sowing apoplexy through imputations of sovereign pusillanimity; he has tergiversated tempestuously on commitment to a ground war in his constant prolongation of ultimatums (I feel rather condescending in spelling this out for a reader who is virtually indubitable in their claim to a higher comprehension and sagacity than the President, but much of the force of an ultimatum is tautologically endowed in the potency of the threat; if the threat is again and again brandished and again and again sheathed, it is each time etiolated in its power to coerce); and his administration has even at this late juncture failed to crystallize a consistent casus belli. Let us briefly enumerate and explicate some of the manifold exigencies, for we are positively spoilt for choice, and see if we can make them fit together in a compelling narrative:

The extraction of oil: putting aside the compunction perhaps elicited by such brazen pursuit of spoliations, I wonder at the nightmarish logistics of fracking and transporting oil in enemy territory; unless of course we hope to cordon off a portion of territory, essentially at least temporarily annexing a section of the country. A ground war would be incontrovertibly supervened ere any such occupation could occur, the cost of the sustainment of such an operation would be exorbitant and likely prohibitive, and, nota bene, coupled with the ineluctable occlusion of what would likely be the vast majority of the country’s repositories, supplies which we could have traded for in a time of peace, would almost inevitably prove itself an irredeemable boondoggle.

Regime change: I quote verbatim, at some length as I think it particularly incisive and prescient, from the late, vaunted Charlie Kirk, in excerpt of an episode of June, 2025 (shortly after the bravura exhibition of martial prowess yclept Operation Midnight Hammer), of his eponymous television program: 

“…[concerning] Israel and Iran, and potentially the United States: on one side is [sic] the Lindsay Graham and John Bolton types, where they are actively calling for regime change…Here is Lindsay Graham – this is just lunacy… This is now that we want to go all in and take out the regime: [quoting Lindsay Graham] ‘It’s time to close the chapter on the Iranian Ayatollah and his henchmen and start a new chapter in the Middle East.’ That sounds good, doesn’t it? But what have we learned when it comes to wars, and especially wars in the Middle East? What[ever] you draw upon on a whiteboard rarely happens, what[ever] you think theoretically is going to occur, there might be unintended and unforeseen consequences, especially when you’re talking about a country two and a half times the size of Texas and [which] has ninety million people and was an ancient and Greek great power, with well over a dozen ethnic groups…Who is going to run the country, Lindsay Graham? This sounds like Hillary Rodham Clinton in Libya, so I’m pointing to the first extreme right now, the neo-conservative extreme, the ‘we must go take the head of the snake off right now!’…That sounds good, but that’s pathologically insane, I’m sorry, it is. How do you know it’s going to be better? Yeah, the Ayatollah’s awful. But maybe he’s one of the few guys that can keep the country together and not have a ninety million person civil war. Lindsay Graham is so consistently out of his mind, it’s hard to even comprehend.” 

I hope and do believe Mr. Kirk would have preserved something as to consistency in condemning with like adamancy at such quixotic notions as seem to prevail on our administration if he were still with us today.

The disinterdiction of the Strait of Hormuz: We, and the world at large, had liberty of free ingress and egress, only sullied by Yemeni pirates (whom also incurred a bombing spree) ere this war was incited by the United States and Israel.

The Potential Developement, or, in times of variance, the actual presence of Weapons of Mass Destruction (déjà vu?) which may pose a threat to our safety: I presume most readers, however customarily inconversant with current affairs, recall the frisson of exultation which radiated from the smashing success of Operation Midnight Hammer (heap scorn on the United States as you like, there yet abides within us the capacity to ever and anon display our moxie, and that moniker I do assert as bursting with it). This was proudly bandied about by the President, proclaiming “Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated,” and his cronies, Hegseth in corroboration avowing, “Iran’s nuclear program is obliterated,” Graham mimicking like a trussed up popinjay in the Senate that the three nuclear sites targeted were “obliterated” (adjuncts, I beg you, run a thesaurus beneath these men’s eyes). So what was the point of this evisceration, incapacitation, razing, annihilation, eradication, and all-around, veritable, doggone extirpation, and why was it so obstreperously lauded if a further conflict was in the offing? And if it was not predicted, how did our intelligence, either presently or in the past, so disgracefully “drop the ball”? Or if it the fault lies in neither of that duplicity, why did the administration allow its rhetoric to so abjectly outstrip its cognizance?

In the course of penning this article, I have come into the not altogether surprising apprisal that we shall once more temporize the infliction of reprisal, rendering this ultimatum certainly the least ultimate I have yet apprehended. A two-week long cease-fire, adjudicated by Pakistan, was reached whereof the Strait of Hormuz shall be left uninterdicted so long as a toll be paid to Iran, with the ostensible object of negotiating a stable settlement. Thus, after all the ceaseless seething bluster, the death of little girls bombed and servicemen deployed to exact the same, we have managed to finagle for ourselves in the eleventh hour the transient and qualified disocclusion of a strait which prior to the war’s instigation we had unimpeded access to; the squanderance of billions of dollars and precious rare earth minerals; the accession of a less amicable Ayatollah than the moribund, chronically indisposed 83 year-old whom we assassinated; and a boomlet of oil prices and the accompanying pecuniary inimicalty. ‘Clear out from the gates folks and rest easy, for that, my friends, is the art of the deal.’