Don't Give the Clown a Flamethrower
Performance is not the same as governance. Surrender is not strength
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In a traveling circus, there’s a division of labor that everyone understands, even if nobody says it out loud.
The business manager runs the books. He’s not funny. He doesn’t drink on the job. He makes the hard calls — where the convoy moves next, which acts get cut, whether the whole operation survives the winter. Nobody loves him. Nobody needs to. His job isn’t to be loved. His job is to keep the lights on and the tent standing.
The clowns have a different job. They drink from flasks between acts. They fall down, honk horns, spray each other with seltzer. The crowd roars. It’s glorious and a little sad and completely necessary. The circus needs them.
But you don’t give a clown the checkbook. And you absolutely do not give him a flamethrower.
This is not a complicated idea. It is, in fact, so obvious that we have had it baked into the cultural DNA of every performance tradition since antiquity. The jester entertains. The king decides. You do not mix the two — not because the jester is stupid, but because the skill sets are categorically different. One requires the instinct to delight a crowd. The other requires the willingness to bear consequences.
We mixed the two. Twice. And we are paying for it.
Act One: Afghanistan
Let’s start where the pattern begins.
By the time Donald Trump took office in 2017, Afghanistan was already America’s longest war — a grinding, expensive, deeply unpopular commitment that no serious person pretended was going well. The desire to leave was understandable. The instinct to end it was, in principle, correct. Let me be transparent, I opposed the withdrawal. We had not seen major combat there in a year, and while Afghanistan was still violent, there was real progress. That said, we fought the war wrong from day one.
But how you end a war matters as much as whether you end it.
What Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo did in Doha in 2020 was not diplomacy. It was a performance of diplomacy. They sat down with the Taliban — the Taliban — and cut a deal for American withdrawal. And they did it while deliberately freezing out the Afghan government. The people we had spent two decades propping up, training, arming, and asking to believe in something, were not at the table. The message to every Afghan soldier, every local official, every woman who had built a life under the assumption of American commitment, was delivered not in words but in the simple fact of their absence from the room.
The deal set a withdrawal timeline. It released Taliban prisoners. It offered international legitimacy to a movement that had harbored the architects of September 11th. And in exchange, the Taliban offered promises about counterterrorism that everyone involved understood to be provisional at best.
Here is the part that doesn’t get said clearly enough: we had built an Afghan military that was structurally dependent on American support systems. Not just weapons — maintenance, logistics, air support, the contractor networks that kept the equipment running. When the withdrawal came, it didn’t just remove American troops. It removed the scaffolding the entire structure had been built around. You cannot build something to require a foundation and then call it a failure when it collapses after you pull the foundation out.
The Taliban took Kabul in eleven days.
The images from the airport — people clinging to the outside of aircraft, falling — are among the most honest photographs of American foreign policy in a generation. Not because retreat is always wrong. But because this retreat was choreographed for an American domestic audience, not designed for an outcome. It was staged. It looked decisive. It accomplished the aesthetic of ending a war while doing maximum damage to everyone we had made promises to.
The clown got the checkbook. He paid off the audience and left the employees with nothing.
Act Two: Iran
The Iran story doesn’t start in February 2026. It starts a year earlier, and understanding that is important to understanding how badly it ends.
In June 2025, Israel launched what became known as the Twelve-Day War — a major assault on Iranian nuclear and military facilities. The United States participated, including strikes on Iranian nuclear sites with bunker-busting munitions. There was a ceasefire. There were negotiations. The nuclear program, which was the entire point, remained essentially intact.
That should have been the first sign.
But rather than treat that outcome as the warning it was — that military action without the commitment to follow it through yields nothing — the administration drifted through the rest of 2025, watched Iran crack down brutally on its own people in a wave of anti-government protests, and rolled into 2026 with the same fundamental problem unresolved.
Then, on February 28, 2026, Trump authorized Operation Epic Fury.
Nearly 900 strikes in twelve hours. B-2 stealth bombers, B-1 Lancers, B-52s, Tomahawks from warships, HIMARS launchers. A military operation of genuine scale and ferocity targeting Iranian missiles, air defenses, military infrastructure, and leadership. In those first hours, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed along with dozens of other senior officials. By any measure of military execution, the opening of this campaign was devastating.
Iran hit back. Strikes on Israel. Strikes on US bases across the region. And then they closed the Strait of Hormuz — effectively a hand around the throat of the global economy, touching off a fuel crisis that rattled markets worldwide.
For forty days, the United States and Iran fought. Forty days of sustained combat. Forty days of real cost, real casualties on both sides, real risk. This was not a pinprick operation. This was war.
And then it stopped — not because Iran capitulated, but because both sides agreed to stop.
The ceasefire took effect April 8th. What followed was months of negotiations, an extended ceasefire period, and finally, on June 17th, a memorandum of understanding signed with the same theatrical flourish Trump has always favored: he put his signature on the document at a dinner with Emmanuel Macron at the Palace of Versailles during the G7 summit, because of course he did.
Look at what we got.
The United States committed to ending all sanctions currently facing Iran — UN resolutions and all unilateral American sanctions. We committed, together with regional partners, to a comprehensive plan for the rehabilitation and economic development of Iran, with financing of at least $300 billion. Iran gets to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and we lift our blockade of Iranian ports.
And the nuclear program — the thing that started all of this, the reason the Twelve-Day War happened, the reason we flew B-2s halfway around the world — is unresolved. Iran’s head of atomic energy has already said they will not accept limits on their enrichment. Trump, who had spent years demanding zero enrichment, told the New York Times that Iran would be permitted to continue low-level enrichment. The status of their highly enriched uranium stockpiles is still being negotiated. There is a 60-day window to work out the details that should have been worked out before anyone signed anything.
We killed their Supreme Leader. We bombed them for forty days with the full arsenal of American airpower. We closed their ports. We disrupted their economy. We spent American blood and treasure and moral credibility.
And we handed them $300 billion, promised to lift every sanction, and left their nuclear program intact enough that the technical questions are still open. Not to mention a reputation that was in tatters after the 12-day war is now repaired.
The Diagnosis
Here is what I want to say as plainly as I can:
This is a loss. Not a complicated outcome to be weighed against competing interests. Not a mixed result with some wins and some setbacks. A loss. In Afghanistan, we abandoned allies and handed a country back to the people who made September 11th possible. In Iran, we used the full force of American military power, sustained it for forty days, achieved extraordinary battlefield success — and then cashed out for less than we could have gotten through sustained pressure without firing a single shot.
That distinction is critical. We had the power to win. Nobody watching those first 900 strikes doubted American military capability. The problem was never whether we could break things. The problem was that the man holding the flamethrower had no plan for what came after the fire.
Here is the core failure: if you go to war — and it should be rare, the rarest of decisions — you use whatever power is available short of war crimes to achieve the objective that justified going to war in the first place. You don’t go in, make the room light up, watch the crowd cheer, and then walk out before the job is done. If the objective was a verifiably denuclearized Iran, then you do not sign a memorandum of understanding that leaves the nuclear questions for a 60-day negotiation window while handing back the financial leverage that took decades to build.
You either go all the way or you don’t go at all. Anything in between is just a performance. A very expensive, very bloody performance.
Entertainers are oriented toward the room. Every decision gets filtered through the question: how does this land? The crowd roared when the bombs fell. The crowd was going to get restless if the war dragged on. So he gave them an ending. It didn’t matter that the ending gave away everything we’d fought for. The crowd got a finale, complete with a dinner at Versailles.
A statesman asks a different question. Not how does this look, but what does this accomplish. If you can’t answer the second question before you start, you don’t start. And if you’ve already started, you don’t declare victory and cash out while your stated objective is still being negotiated.
The tragedy of the circus analogy is that circuses know better. The business manager doesn’t let the clown near the money precisely because everyone in the organization understands that the skills required to entertain a crowd and the skills required to run an enterprise are not just different — they are, in crucial moments, opposed. The clown needs the approval of the room. The manager sometimes needs to disappoint the room to keep the whole thing alive.
We gave the clown a flamethrower. He lit something on fire for forty days. The crowd cheered. And then he handed the people we’d been fighting the keys to the building and called it a negotiation.
We didn’t lose these wars because America lacks the power to win them. We lost them because we handed that power to someone who has never once, in his entire public life, demonstrated that he understands the difference between a performance and a result.
The circus needs clowns. It always will.
Just keep them away from the flamethrower.
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