The dangerous illusion of ‘a little Epic Fury’
I keep coming back to that phrase, "a little Epic Fury," because it captures something real about how Washington talks itself into wars. There's always a faction that believes one sharp, limited strike will shock the adversary into reason, and it almost never works. The history here is littered with those gambits, and the author is right to call them failed tactics rather than bold strategy.
The Strait of Hormuz angle is the part that makes this worth reading. It's easy to get lost in the drama of strikes and counterstrikes and forget that the entire global economy breathes through that narrow waterway. If the strait stays choked, every barrel of oil that can't move is a political problem in every capital, not just Tehran or Washington. That's a concrete, measurable objective, and it's refreshing to see an argument that anchors the war's endgame in something so tangible.
I don't know if Trump will actually tune out the hawks, and I'd want more specifics on how he'd reopen the strait without escalating. But the core instinct here, that you need a clear goal rather than a posture, strikes me as sound. Sometimes the most honest thing you can say about a war is that the exit matters more than the entrance.