For Donald Trump, the news is getting worse on his war against Iran. The New York Times reports that the Trump team badly miscalculated Iran’s response to the American invasion, leading to a developing energy fiasco. The Times also reports that some officials are pessimistic about the lack of any real strategy to end the war, adding this: “They have been careful not to express that directly to the president, who has repeatedly declared that the military operation is a complete success.” Their fear of telling Trump the truth about our fix is highly unnerving....

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Saunders: To be honest, I think he just has no grasp of what the situation really is. I think he wants brave captains to run the Strait of Hormuz like in Star Wars—you know, the Kessel Run or whatever it is. And I don’t mean to make light of it, because it’s a dangerous state of affairs. He wants these ships to be taking on very dangerous journeys through this very narrow, very shallow strait that may now have mines.

As he said in that clip, he said they’ve destroyed all their mining ships. That’s absolutely not true. They may have distributed some of the mines around Iran so that they couldn’t be targeted directly in one go. They may have already laid some mines. We don’t fully know, but I would say that is not something we can just take on Trump’s say-so.

This is not something the world, and in particular the financial world that insures these ships, and the companies that run these ships, and the pilots and captains, you know, the people who crew these ships, can unsee. Iran struck these tankers—at least three, at last count, that I saw today, and I may already be out of date. And if you look at these images of tankers on fire, what captain, what company in their right mind would send a tanker laden with fuel through the Strait of Hormuz? It’s really dangerous.

And so there’s been talk of a naval escort by the U.S., and the Navy is simply not equipped to do that. And even if it were, it really does not want to, because it makes the U.S. naval ships a target as well, right? These ballistic missiles that Iran has could hit these ships—they can attack them from the shore and they can also mine the Strait. And this is a problem that U.S. military planners and analysts, national security analysts, and presidential administrations have been thinking about for 20 years. And every president until Trump has been deterred from doing it, precisely because this is such a mess.