BREAKING: U.S. Resumes Strikes on Iran. A Clean Exit Is Unlikely. Tucker and John Mearsheimer React.

**John Mearsheimer** (0:00)
US. Central Command announced just moments ago that the American and Israeli militaries are commencing with strikes on Iran.
These strikes are reported to be planned to continue for the next several days. In fact, this may well develop into another phase of a full-scale war, a hot war, kinetic war, people dying, bombs dropping, missiles flying. And on one level, this is not surprising if you haven't been checking in on the progress of our war with Iran. But if you have been sporadically reading headlines about where we are and where this is likely to go, you may be a little bit confused because we were just told the other day that a deal, the President of the United States told us that a deal with Iran is imminent. Any moment now, we've been hammering out the details, our crack diplomatic team has been traveling back and forth to Pakistan, and we're very, very close. That turns out it's not true. That is, and we counted, the 38th time the President of the United States has announced since March 23rd an imminent deal with Iran. And like the other 37 times, this one turns out to be completely untrue for whatever reason. And we are back to bombing Iran. And Iran has pledged to respond, not by bombing the United States because they can't, but by hitting our allies in the region, the six Gulf states who are our closest allies to the Middle East, and they've, almost all of them have sustained tremendous damage, in some cases very severe damage, to military and civilian infrastructure. And they'll continue to do that. So this is escalating, the war is back on, despite repeated promises that it was over, that we'd already won. We could play you a lot of clips, no point really in doing that because it's depressing. We could play you all 38 announcements of an imminent deal. Again, you get the point, but we can't resist playing just one from about six weeks ago. This is the President of the United States saying that victory is already ours and we're all really only hanging around to increase the magnitude of the victory.
Here's President Trump.

**Tucker Carlson** (2:08)
We've already won, but I want to win by a bigger margin. But we have, we have already, we have destroyed their Navy, destroyed their Air Force, destroyed all of their, if you look at their anti-aircraft equipment, their radar equipment, their leadership, their leadership is destroyed.
We've destroyed everything.

**John Mearsheimer** (2:32)
So it's hard to know which of those details is accurate or not because there has been really since February 28th when this began a total news blackout on the details of this war. We don't know how many Americans have been killed. We don't know how many have been injured. We don't know how they were killed and injured. We really don't know anything beyond what we read on the Internet or in press releases. And in case after case, that has turned out to be untrue. So there really has never been a war of this magnitude with this little factual coverage supplying the public with usable information about how it's going. So we don't really know. We can take some of that at face value. The United States military is formidable. It's huge. It has a budget of over a trillion dollars a year. So we can bet that tons of Iranian assets have in fact been destroyed over the last several months. But fundamentally, we can conclude that Iran has not lost this war. In fact, by the only measure that really matters, Iran is winning the war. What's that measure? Well, of course, it's the ability to control the Persian Gulf, the eastern aperture of the Persian Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz, now famous. And as of right now, Iran controls the Strait of Hormuz. It did not when this war began, now it does. And so what do we learn from this? Well, we learn that President Trump is not a great diplomat. He's overselling this. Like it's an all-you-can-eat buffet in Atlantic City. Oh, it's going to be the best.
And so it's tempting to kind of lay all of the blame at Trump's feet. And on one level, it is all his fault. He decided to do this. Whatever pressures he faced, it was his decision. And he has oversold America's position in this. And he is in some very real way not good at this. But that would be to minimize the profound nature of this moment. What we're really learning is not simply that Trump is a spotty commander-in-chief and certainly no diplomat and obviously not a deal-maker. If you announce a deal 38 times and it doesn't materialize, you're not a deal-maker.