No, you don’t, Bret. In the course of a “on the one hand, on the other” take on Trump’s foreign policies, praising “toughness” but bemoaning the lack of interest in, you know, “freedom”, Bret is heartened by Trump’s “get tough” approach to Iran: “Iran suddenly seems interested in discussing its nuclear program after treating the Biden administration with ill-disguised contempt.”
“Ill-disguised contempt”, huh? What does that mean? Well, Bret gives a hint, and a link, and if you follow that link you’ll reach a June 21, 2021 story from CBS news, reporting that Iran's “hardline president-elect” Ebrahim Raisi announced that he would refuse to meet with President Biden. According to the report,
At an inaugural press conference, Iran's new political leader said Washington should immediately return to the 2015 nuclear deal that former President Donald Trump walked away from and lift all sanctions against his country. Raisi also said that Iran's ballistic missile program and its backing of extremist groups across the Middle East were non-negotiable, despite demands by some in the U.S. that those issues be included in negotiations over a prospective return to the nuclear pact.
Excuse me, but what was “contemptuous” about a “demand” that the United States honor a commitment it had willfully broken? Stephens, of course, was frenziedly against the 2015 nuclear deal in the first place, and now in 2025 is apparently so disgusted by the unwillingness of the Biden administration to give Israel as many 2,000 pound bombs as it wants, that, well, he just can’t helping pissing on poor old Uncle Joe every chance he gets.
Dunno what Bret is going to say about Uncle Donald’s “let’s own Gaza!” riff, but the semi-Trumpy National Review is not amused. NR “senior political correspondent” Jim Geraghty, who is “openly” anti-Trump, seems to think that this is perhaps the stupidest thing Trump has said all week, while Noah Rothman clearly wishes that Big Daddy would take it down a notch. Maybe even two!
For those who actually care about such things as, you know, common sense, Reason’s Matthew Petti struggles to find some, without much luck. Over at his substack site, Peter Beinart sees this as yet another step in the moral degradation of American Jewry:
I watched my community. I watched my people in the United States. And I began to notice something. There was no limit. There was nothing that Israel could do where the organized Jewish community in the United States would say: enough. There was no independent moral standard. Israel would act, and then there would be a post hoc justification of explaining why actually this was totally legitimate and in fact quite praiseworthy, or at the very least necessary.
This is not a fun time to be alive. Our “best hope” is that Trump will, when he wakes up tomorrow, have forgotten about the whole thing.
