Six months into a grinding, unplanned, entirely unnecessary conflagration with Iran, Donald Trump has cheerfully dismissed the bloodshed and chaos he has wrecked as "small potatoes", while Vice President JD Vance insists with a straight face that this isn't even a war. It is a breathtaking characterisation that even plumbing-deep denial cannot salvage. Nobody in the world actually believes Trump anymore—not his exhausted sailors on extended deployment in the Gulf waters now slumming it up in Pattaya port calls; not the career civil servants down at Foggy Bottom, and perhaps, in their loneliest midnight hours; not even the clueless architects of the disaster themselves. This remains without a shred of doubt a military venture........

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