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When Trump said, I am going to destroy your civilization, Tuesday morning and Tuesday evening, he said, I am now declaring a ceasefire.

I think it was at that moment that it was clear that the heart had gone out of whatever the hell was going on,

that he had decided that he was no longer having fun and that he wanted to get himself out of it.

When you take out the Supreme Leader and 40-odd members of the leadership of the country,

they're going to interpret that as an attempt at regime change.

That completely blew up the escalatory

ladder thesis on all this. Like if they had gone in and said to the regime quietly, look, you guys are

safe, but we're going to take out your Navy. We're going to take out your Air Force. Don't do anything

with the Strait of Ormoos or this. We're going to take out your regime. That would have been the

right sequencing of threats, but instead to start at

11 and then try to go backwards creates this problem where the Iranians were like, we're a Persian

Gulf Alamo now. We got nothing to lose. Let's start attacking our neighbors. Let's start mining and

droning the Strait of Hormuz because it's this or death. And so I personally think it's possible that the United States could have won this whole thing in real terms, gotten regime change and all that.

But it would have required a level of stick-to-itiveness that it would be folly to expect from this administration.

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