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Trump’s greatest advantage is speed — and he’s wasting it in Iran
The war in Iran has entered its second week, and the Trump administration is fighting on two fronts: the physical battlefield and the narrative one.
Most Americans expected U.S. firepower to dominate, and it has. Seven American service members have died so far, but Iran has suffered far heavier losses in lives and materiel. Even those surprised by the damage Iran managed to inflict on U.S. allies can see the basic reality: Tehran is outmatched. The real question was never whether the United States had superior force. The question was whether the administration could sustain support long enough to translate force into victory.
Trump built a foreign policy around brief, decisive action in America’s interest. He should stick with it — and finish this war — while the window for narrative victory remains open.
That challenge matters more for Trump than for most modern presidents. He was never an isolationist. His second-term foreign policy has relied on limited but highly effective strikes rather than long occupations. He has projected power through single bombing runs and midnight raids, then exited before the mission metastasized into a nation-building project. Skeptics of foreign intervention grumbled, then quieted down when operations stayed brisk, competent, and contained.
That becomes more difficult when “contained” turns into weeks and potentially months.
“Boots on the ground” has become the clearest public marker of commitment. If the conflict remains primarily air and naval, most voters will still read it as limited engagement. Costs will rise and gas prices will sting, but casualties will likely remain comparatively low. A sharp show of force followed by a clear exit would keep the war from becoming a long-term liability. Whether he intended it or not, Trump has likely gambled the remainder of his term on avoiding that trip wire.
The Iranians know it. So does the administration.
That’s why Tehran keeps daring Washington to deploy ground troops. Iran’s leaders don’t believe they can beat American infantry in a straight fight. They’re betting the war loses support the moment U.S. ground forces start taking steady casualties.
George W. Bush enjoyed a powerful rally-around-the-flag boost after 9/11, and his administration spent months building a public case for war. Trump has no comparable national trauma to unify the country, and his administration did not spend much time laying out the necessity of this war before it began. That means his narrative window of victory is narrower by default — and it can close fast.
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth appears to understand the dynamic, but he also understands a basic rule: You don’t win wars by announcing what you will not do. If the administration takes ground troops off the table, it tells Tehran that patience equals victory — that holding out long enough will force America to go home.
So Hegseth keeps the option alive. Practically, that means he keeps getting dragged into briefings where he must say ground deployments remain possible. The media treats that as the headline. Anxiety rises. “Boots on the ground” starts to feel inevitable, even when it remains only a contingency. The administration takes a beating in the public mind with every news cycle.
RELATED: America First can’t survive an Iran quagmire
Wars have always had a narrative battle, but the pace has changed. News doesn’t arrive weeks later in a paper or even once a night on television. It hits phones all day, in an endless stream of micro-skirmishes designed to create dread and exhaustion.
No one really doubts U.S. military superiority. Iraq and Afghanistan proved that military superiority is not enough. America toppled regimes quickly, then watched “mission accomplished” become a punch line for years of occupation and nation-building.
Trump hinted recently that operations in Iran are nearly complete. If true, that’s the right direction. The old supreme leader is dead, along with many key figures, and the new supreme leader already may have been gravely injured. Iran’s naval and air capacity has been degraded. Tehran has isolated itself further by striking a range of U.S. allies. Trump could declare meaningful victory now and begin drawing down forces, preserving the very pattern that kept his base — skeptical of intervention — largely onside: quick, effective strikes with limited U.S. casualties.
Trump has also said Israel will have a say in when the war ends. It shouldn’t.
The United States is sovereign. It is also the senior partner in a conflict Israel could not possibly execute alone. The administration has already acknowledged that Israel’s decision to strike materially reshaped U.S. war planning. That is a mistake not to repeat. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made clear that long-term regime change is Israel’s goal. If Israel wants that objective, it should secure it on its own terms.
Trump built a foreign policy around brief, decisive action in America’s interest. He should stick with it — and finish this war — while the window for narrative victory remains open.
Trump Is Dismantling Xi’s ‘China Dream’ One Piece At A Time
China has been chasing the title of world superpower for over a decade. Trump is still holding Xi back.China is at war with us. Start acting like it.
Communist China isn’t hiding its ambitions. Beijing wants to displace the United States as the world’s leading power. It flies spy balloons over our country, runs influence operations, steals technology, pressures neighbors, menaces Taiwan, and builds missiles and ships meant to drive America out of the Western Pacific.
The Pentagon’s newly released National Defense Strategy puts the People’s Republic of China at the center of the threat picture. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth frames the task in blunt terms: “peace through strength,” including a favorable balance of power in the Indo-Pacific so that China can’t “dominate us or our allies.”
China won’t ‘take over the world’ in some comic-book way. But it will keep testing the seams of American power — and it will keep exploiting our habits of denial and delay.
That doesn’t mean the United States and China are “destined for war.” China’s weaknesses cut against that. It lacks the kind of soft power that makes alliances easy and coercion unnecessary. Outside its borders, China inspires far more fear than admiration. Demographic collapse also looms. The one-child policy left China facing an aging population and a shrinking workforce.
None of that makes Beijing harmless. A declining regime can still lash out. It can still intimidate neighbors, manipulate markets, and exploit American openness. It can also run influence operations in plain sight — through front companies, academic partnerships, lobbying, investment vehicles, and the slow capture of key choke points in tech and infrastructure.
That calls for something Washington too often refuses to do: enforce rules like a serious country.
Start with basic counterintelligence hygiene. Aggressively investigate covert foreign influence. Enforce FARA. Protect sensitive research. Tighten screening around critical supply chains. Treat strategic industries like strategic industries. Strip Chinese “paper Americans” of their citizenship and deport them.
This is where internal discipline matters as much as external posture. A national strategy collapses when parts of the bureaucracy slow-walk it, freelance against it, or treat it like optional guidance.
Consider the recent ouster of Assistant Attorney General Gail Slater. She was in charge of the Department of Justice’s antitrust division until last month. But she butted heads repeatedly with Attorney General Pam Bondi. Their disagreements slid into insubordination. Slater allegedly lied to Bondi on national security matters that appeared to help China.
RELATED:Iran, China, and Trump’s ‘art of the squeal’
For example, Slater opposed the Hewlett-Packard Enterprise acquisition of Juniper Networks, which national security experts say is essential to combat Chinese tech dominance. Blocking the deal would have hurt U.S. industry and helped Chinese telecom giant Huawei. Happily, the administration overruled her and approved the deal.
Washington can’t run a serious China policy with internal sabotage, bureaucratic drift, or officials acting like they answer to a different set of priorities.
The same standard applies to national security decisions in the tech arena. If competition with Huawei and China’s tech ecosystem matters — and it does — then Washington should evaluate mergers, procurement, and infrastructure policy through that lens, not just through abstract theories divorced from geopolitical reality. America needs to win the next generation of networks, not regulate itself into strategic dependence.
China won’t “take over the world” in some comic-book way. But it will keep testing the seams of American power — and it will keep exploiting our habits of denial and delay.
Peace through strength isn’t a slogan. It’s a posture: defend critical systems, enforce the law, remove vulnerabilities, and stop treating strategic competition like a seminar topic. The first step is simple and unglamorous: clean up our own house, then face Beijing with the seriousness the moment demands.
'Needs a reset': San Francisco mayor's security detail attacked just as he admits city governance is 'broken'
The mayor of San Francisco's security team was attacked on Thursday just before he called for giving the city a "reset."
On Thursday evening, members of San Francisco Democrat Mayor Daniel Lurie's security team were involved in an altercation with two suspects in the city's Tenderloin neighborhood, Fox News reported.
'We are grateful that the officers assigned to the mayor’s security detail acted swiftly and courageously to protect him in a dangerous and unpredictable situation.'
San Francisco Police confirmed to Fox that the confrontation occurred around 5:40 p.m. local time. The altercation unfolded after the mayor's vehicle was stopped on the road.
Video from the scene shows a member of the security detail engaging with one of the suspects, who subsequently throws the security guard to the ground.
The suspects were arrested and later identified as 44-year-old Tony Phillips and 33-year-old Abraham Simon. Both were transported to San Francisco County Jail and booked, according to Fox.
Police have not explained the cause of the confrontation or whether the mayor was directly threatened.
In a statement to CBS News on Thursday night, Lurie's press secretary, Charles Lutvak, said the mayor was not involved in the incident.
"There was an altercation this evening involving the mayor's security detail. The mayor was not involved," Lutvak said. "We appreciate our SFPD officers for their quick response and for keeping our city safe every day."
Louis Wong, president of the San Francisco Police Officers Association, confirmed that one union member was injured and praised the response of officers.
"The San Francisco Police Officers Association is relieved to hear that Mayor Daniel Lurie was not injured in the violent incident that occurred Thursday evening in the Tenderloin," Wong said in a statement to Fox News Digital. "We are grateful that the officers assigned to the mayor’s security detail acted swiftly and courageously to protect him in a dangerous and unpredictable situation."
At nearly the same time as the altercation, Lurie's X account, which has Chinese characters that supposedly spell his name, posted a video saying, "San Francisco needs a reset."
"Our city charter is one of the longest in the country. It is bloated. It is broken. And it only works for the people who know how to manipulate it — not everyday San Franciscans," Lurie says in the video. "Today, I’m proposing reforms to clean up our city charter and make the government, and me, more accountable to you."
The replies section of this video was quickly flooded with footage from the Thursday altercation when the news of it broke.
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Trump and Rubio are playing ‘the art of the squeal’ in Cuba
Commentators keep treating President Trump’s moves against Venezuela and Iran as random, emotional, or “impulsive.” They aren’t. They read like strategic actions aimed at the real peer adversary — China — which now finds itself short roughly 20% of a key commodity that powers everything from industrial output to military operations: oil.
Orange Man Bad managed to hit another long-term communist adversary at the same time: Cuba.
Trump isn’t sending Marines to Havana. He’s squeezing the regime into an economic takeover.
After the Maduro snatch-and-bag operation — and after Washington threatened heavy tariffs on Mexico if it kept shipping petroleum products to Cuba — Havana’s fuel supply has reportedly fallen to roughly 35% of its monthly needs.
In 2025, Cuba imported about 13.7 million barrels of oil — roughly 112,000 barrels per day of crude and refined petroleum products — supplied primarily by Venezuela (about 61% of imports) and Mexico (about 25%), with Russia and Algeria covering most of the rest.
Trump’s executive order in late January authorized heavy tariffs on any country supplying oil to Cuba. Mexico suspended shipments to avoid U.S. retaliation. At the same time, a de facto maritime quarantine has targeted “ghost tankers” attempting to evade sanctions. Even Russian deliveries have run into trouble. Reports say the tanker Sea Horse, carrying roughly 200,000 barrels of Russian gas and oil, diverted in late February to avoid seizure or sanctions risk.
Cuba now faces a severe fuel crunch.
International observers — including U.N.-linked agencies — have described the situation as catastrophic. The island’s power grid has slid toward collapse, and the global fuel spike tied to U.S. action in Iran has only tightened the vise.
The petroleum deficit has reportedly cut national electricity generation capacity by about 65%. That leaves roughly one-third of needed power available at any given time. In Santiago de Cuba and Guantánamo, residents report blackouts lasting more than 20 hours a day. In Havana, scheduled cuts reportedly jumped from four hours to as many as 18 hours a day. Hospitals have reportedly performed surgeries by cellphone light. Water systems that rely on electric pumps have failed across large areas. Garbage collection in Havana has stalled because the trucks are out of gas.
The communist government has responded with wartime austerity measures. Major airports have suspended refueling for international flights. Airlines such as Air Canada and Air France have canceled or rerouted flights, gutting tourism — one of the regime’s few remaining sources of cash. State companies have shifted to reduced schedules to conserve power.
RELATED: Iran, China, and Trump’s ‘art of the squeal’
Washington has offered one narrow escape valve. On February 25, the U.S. issued a limited license allowing American companies to sell oil to Cuba’s emerging private sector. Analysts have described it as “a drop in the bucket.” It isn’t enough to run the heavy thermoelectric plants the national grid needs.
Last week, Trump publicly floated the idea of a “friendly takeover” of Cuba. The phrase stays diplomatically vague, but the surrounding actions and rhetoric suggest a specific approach. Trump described Cuba as a failing nation because it has “no money. They have no anything right now.”
He isn’t going to send a Marine expeditionary force to Havana. He’s pressuring the regime to cut a deal that looks like gently coerced economic integration: end the communist monopoly over banking and energy, allow U.S. firms to buy and operate failing infrastructure (telecom, ports, the power grid), and expand the private sector until the Communist Party can’t enforce centralized control.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has echoed that direction. He has argued that Cuba needs a “different economic model” and said the U.S. would welcome reforms that open space for economic and political freedom. Reports also suggest back-channel contact, though the administration has not confirmed details.
Cuba’s current leader, Communist Party chief Miguel Díaz-Canel, now sits in the position of a man about to get a colonoscopy. He should pray Orange Man Bad feels generous with the sedation — or he’ll learn the hard way what “the art of the squeal” means.
NASA Is Broken. It’s Time For A New One
One small step in restructuring NASA now could lead to one giant leap for the American space program in the years to come.‘Not just about Iran’ — former Navy SEAL reveals Trump’s REAL endgame in the Middle East
For nearly half a century, every U.S. president has drawn a firm red line against Iran — only to watch the regime cross it time and again.
Now, following President Donald Trump’s decisive military strike last weekend that targeted hundreds of sites and eliminated key figures in Iran’s top leadership, Glenn Beck sits down with former Navy SEAL and bestselling author Jack Carr to unpack what this pivotal moment truly means for the region and beyond.
When he first heard the news that the U.S. and Israel had launched a joint military attack on Iran, Carr’s initial reaction was one of “sadness.”
“It made me sad because diplomacy had failed,” he says, arguing that Trump’s maximum-pressure campaign against Iran was doomed to fail because acquiescence to any of the three non-negotiables — no nuclear weapons, no ballistic missiles, and no supporting terrorist proxies — would make the Iranian regime look “weak,” something it cannot suffer if it wants to stay in power.
“Any covert action we’d attempted over the last year or in previous administrations over the past decades, that has failed also, and now we’re in a full-scale military engagement with Iran,” he laments.
Glenn agrees wholeheartedly: “Jimmy Carter said, ‘This can’t stand.’ ... Ronald Reagan said, ‘They got to stop.’ ... H.W. Bush, ‘It’s got to stop. They got to get to the negotiating table.’ Clinton said that, W. Bush said that, Obama said that, Trump said that in the first term, Biden said that.”
“I mean, at some point you’re like, this is insane. We’ve tried giving them billions of dollars; we’ve tried holding money back; we’ve tried carrots and sticks, and nothing works,” he continues, calling Trump “the first one to say, ‘I’m not kicking the can down to the next president. It’s over.’”
“Some of [those former presidents] actually helped Iran get either more powerful or gave them more options when it came to building up these different weapons programs, to crushing any popular uprising or protests. So I’m not surprised that we got to this point,” Carr says.
“When people declare war on you and tell you that they want to destroy you, you probably don’t want that person to have a nuclear weapon or to have options that can lead to your demise,” he adds.
But Glenn thinks this military operation against Iran is “much bigger” than preventing the terrorist regime from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
“This is about Trump redesigning the entire world and going after CRINK,” he says, arguing that Trump is aiming to “take the I” out of CRINK, “which hurts oil for China, hurts money through the oil for Russia,” and weakens Iran’s supply of drones to Russia.
“To look at this just as Iran, I think you’ll never understand why we did this. Do you believe that’s true, or am I wrong?” he asks.
“You’re absolutely right,” Carr says.
He explains that Trump’s military strike on Iran disrupts China’s crucial economic and technological lifeline to the regime. China buys huge amounts of discounted Iranian oil to evade U.S. sanctions and has committed $400 billion over 25 years to Iran — including selling advanced surveillance technology that helps the Iranian government monitor and suppress its own people.
By weakening or breaking this support, the U.S. not only destabilizes Iran’s regime but also frees up American attention and resources to address bigger long-term threats — confronting China over Taiwan (the island China claims as its own) and the tiny but vital computer chips known as semiconductors (the essential “brains” powering phones, computers, cars, AI systems, and military equipment), most of which are produced in Taiwan — while also handling threats from Russia.
“So you’re exactly right. This is not just about Iran,” he says.
To hear more of the conversation, watch the video above.
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