Spotted on a lawyer’s web site:

To be fair, the lawyer was apparently one of the lawyers on what would commonly be called a low eight-figure settlement ($11M), and the lawyer’s site mentions a couple of similarly sized verdicts, one later on the same page and one or another page. It thus seems more like a funny glitch than a telling error. On the other hand, the lawyer has recently been sanctioned for AI hallucinations in a filing written by an associate but also signed by the lawyer.

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From Jimenez-Fogarty v. Fogarty, decided Wednesday by Magistrate Gabriel W. Gorenstein (S.D.N.Y.); Lindsay had run for the N.Y. State Senate in 2024:

Tricia S. Lindsay, attorney for plaintiff Sai Malena Jimenez-Fogarty, responded to two motions to dismiss by filing a pair of memoranda of law that cited to numerous nonexistent cases. In response, the Court ordered Lindsay to show cause why she should not be sanctioned for her misleading filings. Upon consideration of Lindsay’s response to these orders, we find that she should be sanctioned in the amount of $2,500.00 ….

[T]wo briefs were signed by Lindsay, and each contained a number of fabricated citations. When we say “fabricated,” we do not mean citations that arguably contain typographical errors—for example, Lindsay’s citations to cases that exist and support the propositions for which they were cited but are not located in the volume or at the page of the reporter (or database identifier) given. Similarly, we exclude any otherwise correct citations that give the wrong case name. We also exclude those instances where the cited case covers the same topic as the proposition for which it is cited but where the case’s holding is completely mischaracterized, although such a citation is itself grossly misleading and perhaps deserving of sanctions.

Instead, we consider only citations to cases that cannot be located at all by name—or that were not located where Lindsay said they were and have nothing to do with the propositions for which they were cited—thus showing that the citations were completely made up. The following are descriptions of some of the fabricated citations [listing seven items -EV] ….

Lindsay’s response to being alerted to the fabricated citations did not follow the typical pattern in cases where courts have called upon attorneys to explain the presence of fabricated citations in their papers. The Court’s first OSC [Order to Show Cause] specifically ordered Lindsay to provide “a complete and detailed description of the process of the drafting of the two memoranda of law.” While most attorneys provide such an explanation, which often involves an admission of reliance on artificial intelligence (“AI”) platforms, Lindsay’s brief sworn statement in response offers only airy generalities and conclusory statements. Her response contains no coherent explanation for how the two memoranda of law came to contain the fabricated citations. The most basic questions—most obviously: what was the source of the fabricated citations?—are never answered.

Thus, Lindsay states merely that she “follow[s] a structured and diligent process designed to ensure accuracy, thoroughness, and compliance with all applicable legal and ethical standards.” Bizarrely, she then discusses her “typical” process for drafting briefs without specifically attesting that this was the actual process she followed in drafting the memoranda of law at issue in this case. The clear implication of her statement, however, is that her “typical” process was followed in this case; otherwise, there would be no reason to mention it. Lindsay states that she “manually cross-check[s] case names, docket numbers, and reporter citations against the primary sources in legal databases” and verifies that “the authorities cited support the propositions for which they are referenced.” Lindsay’s contention that these actions occurred in this case are obviously false, however, because a “manual[ ]” check of any of the fabricated citations would have instantly shown that each citation was fake or inaccurate. Thus, while Lindsay’s response acknowledges that eleven citations are inaccurate, she provides no explanation of how these citations came to be included in the memoranda of law.

At one point, Lindsay states that citations to “nonexistent cases” resulted from “typographical errors, misreading of secondary sources, or limitations in the search functionality of legal databases.” In addition to being conclusory, this explanation makes no sense inasmuch as Lindsay never shows how “typographical errors, misreading of secondary sources, or limitations in the search functionality of legal databases” produced the “nonexistent cases” cited to in the memoranda of law. And, in any event, no explanation is made of how Lindsay’s “manual[ ]” check did not reveal the nonexistent cases.

At another point, Lindsay emphasizes that she relied on “established legal research platforms.” But that obviously did not occur here, as there is no evidence that any “established” legal research platform generates or contains fabricated citations, or that an “established” legal research platform somehow supplied the fabricated citations in the memoranda of law. Tellingly, in her initial response, Lindsay never even named what “legal research platforms” she used to draft the memoranda of law and thus never specified which one supplied her with the fabricated citations.

In light of the complete lack of evidence to support the claim that any “established” legal research platform could have supplied these citations, we reject this contention. As a result, there remain only two plausible explanations for the source of the fabricated citations in Lindsay’s memoranda of law: a person who deliberately created them knowing they were fabricated or an AI system. Lindsay never claims that she had the assistance of any person in drafting the memoranda of law. To the contrary, her declaration states:

I am solely responsible for the research, drafting, and review of the memoranda at issue. While I utilize legal research databases and citation management tools to assist in my work, I do not delegate these core responsibilities to others. No other individual or computer system played a substantive role in the drafting process beyond the use of standard legal research and word processing software.

Denying she had any human help, Lindsay thus asks that Court to accept a proposition that is utterly devoid of evidence: that an “established” legal research platform created the fabricated citations.

In her response to Hirshowitz’s filing, Lindsay for the first time states that she “routinely utilizes Lexis Nexis[‘s] … AI-driven features,” and then states that the fabricated citations “may very well have been generated by the Lexis Nexis software during the research phase.” The response, however, is devoid of any specifics as to what Lexis Nexis’s “AI-driven features” she used, how they actually supplied any of the false citations, or any examples where Lexis Nexis’s “AI-driven features” have supplied fabricated citations.

{In her response to the Court’s second OSC addressing the applicability of Rule 11, Lindsay continued her failure to describe how the fabricated citations ended up in her brief. Instead, she stated that “the citation errors at issue were not the result of any intent to mislead the Court or opposing counsel” but rather “were isolated and inadvertent mistakes that occurred despite good faith efforts to ensure accuracy.” She also states that she “reli[ed] on technology that is not immune to error” without specifying that technology.}

We thus find that Lindsay used an AI program that generated the fabricated citations in the memoranda of law and that Lindsay failed to check that these citations were genuine….

“[C]ourts in this [C]ircuit have repeatedly found that presenting AI-generated hallucinations as valid caselaw constitutes subjective bad faith.”

Lindsay’s bad faith is also reflected in the fact that she failed to provide the “complete and detailed description of the process of the drafting of the two memoranda of law” and “detailed and complete description of the role of any individual or computer system that was involved in the drafting process” required by the Court. Her obfuscation reflects a complete lack of acceptance of responsibility, notwithstanding her assertion that she “deeply regret[s] the errors that occurred” and her claim to have “taken all reasonable steps to address and correct them.” Moreover, her other representations to the Court consistently minimize her actions. See Resp. at 9 (“Citation errors, while regrettable, are not uncommon in complex litigation.”); Lindsay Aff. ¶ 6 (“These errors … reflect the inherent challenges of legal research and citation in complex litigation, particularly when working under time constraints and with voluminous records.”); Supp. Resp. at 4 (“The citation errors acknowledged by Ms. Lindsay were the result of an innocent oversight in the review process, compounded by reliance on technology that is not immune to error.”). Even if Lindsay had meaningfully apologized or accepted responsibility for her conduct, “regret and apologies are not necessarily enough to avoid the imposition of sanctions for the submission of non-existent legal authority.” Here of course we have no real acceptance of responsibility….

Lindsay’s bad faith is further reflected in the fact that she filed papers with false citations on two occasions after the Court issued the OSCs.

First, two months after the first OSC, she filed a brief in the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit that contained two fabricated citations….

Second, in October 2025, Lindsay filed objections to a Report and Recommendation issued by the undersigned that addressed the motions to dismiss filed by defendants. In a brief filed in opposition to the objection, Hirshowitz’s counsel pointed out that Lindsay’s objection contained eight false, fake, or “hallucinated” citations. These suspect citations were described at length and in detail.

In response, Lindsay stated that she was withdrawing the “specific … citations contained within [the objection] that defense counsel has claimed violate Rule 11” while at the same time asserting that she was doing so “without admission of liability.” In other words, Lindsay again failed to own up to her errors or give any explanation of how they occurred. We have examined the eight citations in Lindsay’s original objection identified by Hirshowitz’s counsel and concur that they are in some cases completely fabricated.

Lindsay’s repetition of the same mistake makes it impossible to credit her contention that the erroneous citations do not “reflect a pattern of disregard for professional obligations” and “were isolated and inadvertent mistakes that occurred despite good faith efforts to ensure accuracy.” Lindsay represented that she “has taken steps to further strengthen her review protocols to ensure accuracy going forward.” These unspecified efforts have turned out to be completely inadequate….

Deterrence is paramount here, given Lindsay’s obdurate refusal to explain how the citations came to be included in her briefs. We believe that a fine of $2,500 will serve as an appropriate deterrent, along with a requirement that she supply to her client a copy of this Opinion and Order. Additionally, it is important that other courts be aware of Linsday’s repeated misconduct, which calls into question filings she has made. Thus, the Court directs that Lindsay supply a copy of this Opinion and Order to the presiding judge in each pending case where she appears as attorney of record by means of a letter filed on the docket and served on opposing counsel….

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5/2/1927: Buck v. Bell decided.

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Self-checkout machines are in the crosshairs. In recent months, numerous states and localities have considered legislation to curtail the use of automated checkout in grocery stores. These bills are often positioned as part of an effort to cut down on retail theft, but it appears the driving force behind them is to create more unionized jobs.

According to USA Today, at least six states have considered rules that would restrict self-checkout machines. The states range from blue Connecticut to red Ohio, but it doesn’t stop there. Two cities in California already have self-checkout limits in place, while New York City is currently considering restrictions as well.

Self-checkout restrictions are often framed as a commonsense crime prevention measure that protects grocery store workers and cuts back against the recent uptick in retail theft nationwide. But when it comes to these bills, the fine print points toward a different motivation.

For instance, the Connecticut bill mandates that stores must have one employee for every two self-checkout machines, in addition to having one manual checkout station for every two automated lanes. Stores cannot go over eight self-checkout lanes total. And any employee designated with the task of supervising self-checkouts is barred from engaging in any other simultaneous duties that could interfere with such supervision.

The various bills percolating in other state capitals and city halls are all largely structured the same. A previous iteration of California’s self-checkout bill specified that any store seeking to implement technology that “significantly affects the essential job functions of its employees” or “eliminates jobs or functions” must conduct an “impact assessment” before doing so, underscoring the real impetus there.

In other words, in the name of reducing theft, these rules would functionally operate to increase the number of clerks that each store must employ at any given time. Given that the grocery industry has historically had higher unionization rates than other retail sectors, this would translate into more unionized jobs.

If any doubt remains, one need only look at the biggest supporters of these bills. In Connecticut, all the legislative testimony submitted in favor of restricting self-checkout came from labor unions, including representatives affiliated with AFL-CIO, Service Employees International Union (SEIU), and the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), which is the largest grocery worker union in the U.S. A CalMatters summary of sponsors and opponents for California’s self-checkout bill likewise shows that the majority of the bill’s boosters are labor unions.

News articles published about these bills also frequently quote UFCW reps touting their virtues. The effort to restrict self-checkout dates back to at least 2019, when unions in Oregon pushed a state ballot measure that would have limited groceries to two self-checkout lanes per store.

To be sure, there is evidence that self-checkout machines can result in higher shoplifting rates. One frequently-cited study found that so-called inventory shrink at grocery stores was 16 times more likely with self-checkout than with traditional cashiers. A LendingTree survey reported that 27 percent of self-checkout users admit to intentionally stealing items in self-checkout lanes, with another 36 percent saying they took items inadvertently.

But unsurprisingly, stores themselves—who have a direct bottom-line incentive to prevent shoplifting—have proven more than capable of responding. Walmart and Target have garnered headlines for dropping or limiting self-checkout at various stores around the country, while Five Below and Dollar General have also curtailed automated checkout in recent years. Technology also offers promise, with various groceries now onboarding smart video and AI to crack down on shoplifting in the self-checkout lane.

In the end, no one wants to clamp down on retail theft more than grocery stores themselves. If that means cutting back on self-checkout, they will do so. But they don’t need the government, aided by unions, to decide for them—and to forcibly inflate their payrolls at the same time.

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The Strait of Hormuz is straight out of a storybook. Named for an ancient Persian god, the 24-mile-wide waterway flows between jagged cliffs, inlets that look like a desert version of Scandinavian fjords, and multicolored salt formations. Centuries-old Portuguese castles dot both sides of the straits, and traditional sailboats called dhows still ply the waters, carrying tourists and small wares.

Hormuz, the only connection between the oil-rich Persian Gulf and the wider ocean, is also the artery of the modern industrial economy that is most vulnerable to war. On February 28, 2026, shortly after Israel and the United States attacked Iran, the Iranian military broadcast on the radio that the strait was closed for shipping. Two days later, a (presumably Iranian) weapon smashed into an oil tanker, killing two crew members. Iran began charging multimillion-dollar ransoms for the few ships that continue to pass.

Global crude oil prices nearly doubled in the first few weeks of war—and oil isn’t the whole story. Many critical manufacturing processes around the world rely on inputs from the gulf’s petrochemical industry, which Iran has also bombed directly and which will take months to restart once the coast is clear. Electronics manufacturers in South Korea and Taiwan are suddenly short on helium, which they need to produce semiconductors. So ends the age of uninterrupted artificial intelligence growth. The plastic, metal, and pharmaceutical industries are running into similar shortages of raw materials. And the world is staring down a food crisis next year as farmers struggle to find fertilizer for the current planting season.

President Donald Trump has made reopening the strait a major goal of the war and the negotiations to end it during the mid-April 2026 ceasefire. In other words, Trump’s struggle is now to reverse the consequences of choosing to start the war.

Starting this war was indeed a choice. The Trump administration spent months building up military forces in the Middle East while issuing constantly shifting demands. Iran had agreed to negotiate; the U.S. attacked on a weekend between two scheduled rounds of talks.

Although the war came out of the blue for most Americans, the Iran hawks spent decades working to put the United States in this position. They made it politically easier to go to war than not go to war. Politicians took it for granted that Israel and the Arab monarchies’ problems with Iran were also America’s problems. But hawkish factions from both parties also shot down any attempt to solve those problems through compromise or even containment of Iran. They pushed the U.S. to take greater and greater risks while avoiding a public debate on war.

“If Iran presents a quasi-existential menace, diplomacy is a political liability and sanctions don’t work, what is left besides military force?” Robert Malley, the Biden administration’s envoy to Iran, wrote in a recent New York Times essay criticizing his former boss for helping create the conditions for war. “If the United States wants to stop plunging into Middle East wars, it needs to value its own interests more than it hates its old enemies.”

The hawkish coalition’s shifting goalposts, designed to make avoiding war impossible, haunted the execution of the war itself. Since the conflict began, the Trump administration has thrown out many different, contradictory victory conditions: overthrowing the Iranian government, making a deal with the Iranian government, destroying Iran’s nuclear program, sending Iran’s entire industrial base “back to the Stone Age,” unleashing a “prosperous and glorious future” for Iran, taking control of the Strait of Hormuz, or letting the strait “open itself.”

For many hawks, the specific rationales for fighting Iran don’t seem to matter. What they want is someone to pay for the past decades of U.S. failures in the Middle East. The Trump administration and its allies have tried to hold Iran responsible for attacks by Al Qaeda, Tehran’s sworn enemy. More accurately, politicians from both parties have blamed Iran for stirring up violent resistance to U.S. troops during the Iraq War, the last big regime change war of choice. At the same time, hawks insist that this regime change war will be different.

“Iran is not Iraq. Anyone saying otherwise doesn’t understand Middle East geopolitics, the Iranian people, their neighbors, or the diaspora. The Iranian people hate this regime,” Rep. Nancy Mace (R–S.C.) argued in March 2026. But that’s a lot like how the Bush administration sold the Iraq War in 2002: Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz claimed that Iraqis were “the most educated people in the Arab world, who are going to welcome us as liberators.”

Of course, it takes two to tango. The Islamic Republic of Iran was founded in a 1979 revolution that intentionally antagonized America, including by taking U.S. diplomats hostage, and that announced its intention to spread that revolution by sending guns to rebels around the region, including to the Lebanese militia Hezbollah, which attacked U.S. troops sent to end Lebanon’s civil war in 1983. Over the years, Iranian leaders have made threats (including the destruction of Israel) that were both aggressive enough to provoke a response and empty enough to make Iran look weak.

But a majority of Americans and Iranians weren’t even born yet when most of these grievances happened—and the world has changed a lot since then. Iran, exhausted by the consequences of its revolution, has been looking for a way out.

The Grand Bargain

After Al Qaeda attacked America on September 11, 2001, the Iranian intelligence services actually participated in the U.S. retaliation campaign in Afghanistan. Two years later, Iran quietly shut down its nuclear weapons research, and a Swiss diplomat presented the U.S. government with a letter from Iran proposing a “grand bargain.” Iran would open up its nuclear facilities for inspection, cooperate in stabilizing Iraq, support Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, and even pressure Hamas and Hezbollah to lay down their arms. In exchange, Iran asked for normalized relations and an end to U.S. regime change threats.

The Bush administration disagreed internally on whether the offer was serious and how to respond. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice argued that the seriousness of the Iranian offer was actually proof of Iran’s weakness, so the U.S. should turn it down and push for more. Her view carried the day.

That became the pattern of U.S.-Iranian diplomacy for the next two decades. Every time Iran offered compromise, American hawks used that offer to argue that more pressure would lead to more Iranian concessions. This circular logic—the U.S. demand should always be something more than Iran is offering—made diplomacy almost impossible. Yet there would never be another Iranian offer as good as the grand bargain.

The next big diplomatic moment came under President Barack Obama. Though Iran had stopped its secret nuclear weapons program, it was now openly enriching uranium, ostensibly as fuel for nuclear power plants. In response, Israel threatened war and assassinated Iranian scientists while the U.S. imposed economic sanctions to cut off Iran’s access to foreign trade and carried out covert sabotage against Iranian enrichment plants. But then, in agreements signed in 2013 and 2015, Iran accepted a set of temporary and permanent restrictions on its nuclear industry in exchange for the U.S. and five other world powers lifting economic sanctions.

Hawks hated the deal, insisting that they could have secured a better bargain with just a little more pressure—or that any deal with Iran was cowardly “appeasement.” The debate had a bizarre quality to it: Sens. Lindsey Graham (R–S.C.) and John McCain (R–Ariz.), both of whom had publicly called for bombing Iran, feigned outrage when Obama said that the alternative to a deal was war.

Iran’s regional rivals also lobbied against the agreement. They were particularly alarmed by Obama’s comments that Saudi Arabia would have to learn to “share the neighborhood” with Iran while the U.S. military made a “pivot to Asia.” (East Asia, that is.) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave a speech to the U.S. Congress in 2015 attacking Obama’s “very bad deal” with what he described as a Nazi-like regime. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman denounced “the new Hitler in Iran” to The New York Times in 2017.

The United Arab Emirates, meanwhile, played the classic game of “bootleggers and Baptists,” working with the pro-sanctions lobby in Washington while continuing to profit from Iranian sanctions busting in Dubai.

Opponents of the deal often said that it failed to address two nonnuclear issues: Iran’s conventional missile arsenal and its proxy wars in the region. (In addition to arming Lebanese, Palestinian, and Iraqi paramilitaries, the Islamic Republic had by now intervened in the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.) Asking Iran to leave its neighbors alone was one thing. But demanding its conventional weapons was another. Even an ability to hit back against foreign attacks was now deemed an unacceptable threat.

The hawks got what they wanted from the first Trump administration, which tore up the nuclear agreements in 2018 and began a policy of “super maximum economic pressure.” The regime-change maximalists took the initial results as a vindication. In November 2019, a fuel price hike in Iran led to the deadliest civil unrest there since the 1979 revolution. Two months later, Trump ordered the assassination of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani, and Iran retaliated with a one-off military operation that did not kill any Americans (though it accidentally blew up an airliner full of Iranian civilians).

Although President Joe Biden promised to return to diplomacy on the 2020 campaign trail, his advisers were convinced that pressure was working better than expected. Ariane Tabatabai, who later worked on Biden’s negotiating team, warned in an essay before Biden took office that the next U.S. president should not “rush” back to a deal, because continued pressure over time would only degrade Iran’s position. Ilan Goldenberg, another future Biden official, wrote a paper suggesting “calculated risks” against Iran, modeled on Israeli raids into Syria that Israel dubbed the “campaign between wars.”

And the hawkish Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair Bob Menendez (D–N.J.)—later convicted of selling information to Egyptian spies—threatened to block any return to Obama’s deal. Biden’s negotiators thus spent fruitless years pressuring Iran to give the U.S. a “longer and stronger” deal than before. Meanwhile, Biden offered the Arab monarchies defense pacts that would guarantee permanent U.S. military protection, even as Saudi Arabia was quietly negotiating with Iran for a separate peace.

Iranian protests against hijab laws in September 2022 and the Hamas attacks against Israel on October 7, 2023, both made further negotiations with Iran politically toxic in America. The surprise violence of October 7 also seemed to vindicate Israeli factions who believed that enemies could not be deterred, only destroyed. In response to Hezbollah’s cross-border shelling, Israel launched an all-out invasion of Lebanon in the autumn of 2024. Contrary to the Biden administration’s worries—and my own—this campaign did not escalate into an international war. Immediately after the Israeli-Lebanese ceasefire in November 2024, a revolution in Syria ejected Iranian forces, another sign of Iran’s weakness. By the end of his term, members of Biden’s camp were publicly and privately endorsing an attack on Iran itself.

After returning to office, Trump embraced that feeling that taking risks against Iran pays off. He reopened and then reclosed conflicts in Gaza and Yemen, seemingly at his leisure. In June 2025, he took the greatest gamble so far, supporting an Israeli attack on Iran in the middle of U.S.-Iranian negotiations, joining in with an air raid on the 12th day of the war, and offering a ceasefire immediately after. Iran launched a token retaliation on U.S. forces and then accepted.

The Green and the Dry

The decisive moment for Trump was probably an incident halfway around the world from the Middle Eastern desert, on the lush Caribbean coast. On January 3, 2026, a detachment of U.S. special operators swooped into Caracas by night and arrested Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on drug trafficking charges. Vice President Delcy Rodríguez immediately began kowtowing to U.S. demands. Overthrowing foreign leaders had never looked so easy.

The same week as the raid on Caracas, inflation protests in Iran escalated to a nationwide uprising against the Islamic Republic. (U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent bragged that the unrest was the “grand culmination” of U.S. sanctions.) Much of the Iranian opposition was now explicitly asking for foreign military support. One Iranian told the Financial Times that Venezuela had given her hope for a “clean, bloodless regime change.”

On January 8, the Iranian government shut down the internet and began clearing the streets with gunfire, killing thousands of people. Four days later, Trump posted on social media, “Iranian Patriots, KEEP PROTESTING—TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!! Save the names of the killers and abusers. They will pay a big price. I have cancelled all meetings with Iranian Officials until the senseless killing of protesters STOPS. HELP IS ON ITS WAY.”

The unrest died down as the government imposed martial law. Iranians within the country told me at the time that everyone, whether opposition or loyalists or bystanders, was waiting to see what the U.S. would do.

Then Trump uncanceled the meetings, sending Special Envoy Steve Witkoff to negotiate on the future of Iran’s nuclear program, which had been badly damaged during the June 2025 war. Witkoff’s team was openly contemptuous of spending time discussing or even understanding the details of the nuclear issue, refusing to bring technical experts to the final round of negotiations. What Trump really wanted, Witkoff told Fox News on February 22, was for Iranian leaders to explain “why they haven’t capitulated” in the face of an ongoing U.S. military buildup.

Trump still expected a quick and unambiguous surrender when he and Netanyahu launched the war a few days later. Israel assassinated Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in a first strike, and Trump said that he was anticipating a situation “like with Delcy in Venezuela.”

A month into the war, Trump admitted at an Easter dinner that he had told the British prime minister the war would last only three days. He gave a similar timeline to “skeptical” Middle Eastern leaders before the war began, telling them it would “only take 100 hours,” according to Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a pro-diplomacy nonprofit, who also broke the news of Iran’s 2003 offer.

At the same time that the Trump administration was looking for a Delcy figure, Israel’s intelligence services were promising that they could spark another uprising in Iran. That didn’t materialize, either. Even Kurdish rebels directly armed by the CIA were reluctant to rush into what they feared would end with “a massacre of our own people,” as one Kurdish commander told New Lines Magazine.

Instead of falling, Iran fought back and escalated. The U.S. military is stuck playing Whac-A-Mole with Iranian missiles and drones, burning through valuable munitions that are also supposed to be on hand to defend Ukraine and Taiwan. Bessent even lifted sanctions on Iranian oil exports in hopes of relieving some of the shortages caused by the fighting in Hormuz. Iranian civilians have paid the highest price, with between 1,700 and 2,400 killed in the bombing by mid-April. And the war spread beyond Hormuz, reigniting fighting in Lebanon and Iraq.

In mid-April 2026, the United States and Iran agreed to a “fragile ceasefire,” as U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance put it. Immediately, both sides tried to change the terms. Despite Pakistani mediators announcing that the ceasefire would cover “everywhere including Lebanon”—and Trump agreeing privately, according to CBS News—the Israeli government escalated its bombing in Lebanon, and the Trump administration rushed to justify it. Despite promising “safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz” during the ceasefire, Iranian authorities continued to limit shipping and demand ransoms.

Whether or not the truce holds past April, Trump has lost control over the conflict he has entangled the U.S. in. With its back to the wall, Iran discovered that it holds a lot of leverage over the world economy. Israel and the Arab states, meanwhile, found that they can push the U.S. to adopt maximalist goals.

The war has led to an outcome that neither Iranians nor Americans wanted. But it has fulfilled the vision of Netanyahu, who declared from the rooftop of the military headquarters in Tel Aviv that bringing the U.S. directly into the war “allows us to do what I have been hoping to do for 40 years.”

Ironically, it has also fulfilled the vision of the late Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, who foreshadowed his plans in a 2022 speech: “By God, I see it with my own eyes, a war that will change the face of the globe, a regional religious war that will burn both the green and the dry.” The American political class helped pile a lot of the kindling, and it doesn’t know how to put the fire out.

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