Trump’s Conundrum Over Iran – Explained
Navarrette Nation Substack — The Explainer 8/14/26
Advisory: Americans are tired of opinions. What they want instead are clear and simple explanations of what they see going on in a world that seems to get more complicated by the week. In that spirit, the Friday edition of Navarrette Nation Substack is titled “The Explainer.” Every Friday, the one big story of the week, explained. Simple as that.
Critical Thinking At A Critical Time
Every Friday
886 words; 10 min
You’ve probably heard of people “talking past each other.”
Well, President Donald Trump and Iran’s leaders are negotiating past each other.
Trump has a list of demands to end the war between Iran and the United States, and the Iranians have their own list. And never the two lists shall meet.
Trump wants Iran to “open the damn Strait” (i.e., the Strait of Hormuz) and back off threatening to impose a toll for countries to use it – unless the U.S. gets a piece of the action. The president also wants Iran to give up all nuclear ambitions.
Perfectly reasonable demands. I’d add a third one: Iran needs to stop funding proxy terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, and stay in its own portion of the sandbox.
The sticking point is the nuclear material. Building a bomb is a longheld goal that, frankly, Iran is probably more committed to now than it was before Feb. 28, when the war started. After all, North Korea has nukes, and so you don’t see Uncle Sam firing Tomahawk cruise missiles at Kim Jong Un.
Meanwhile, Iranian officials want financial compensation for damages caused by the war, sanctions relief, the release of frozen assets, a cessation of Israel’s war against Hezbollah in Lebanon, an end to military threats by both the U.S. and Israel and the withdrawal of U.S. troops and warships from the Persian Gulf.
Also reasonable demands, with one exception.
Obviously, the idea of war reparations should be a non-starter. Any dollar given to the Iranian regime would go toward building more weapons to kill Americans, at home or around the world.
We’re in a terrible spot marked by humiliation and frustration. That’s what happens when a country loses a war.
The United States lost its war against Iran not on the battlefield, but here at home.
We lost this war because of two entities: a president who bragged in his first term that he knew “more than the generals” but who was revealed to be a master con man who didn’t know shit; and the American people who have no patience for a long war, no stomach for receiving flag-draped coffins and no tolerance for the economic pain that comes from higher gas prices.
According to a recent poll by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, about two-thirds of Americans don’t think the war was worth fighting. That includes the majority of Democrats and independents, but also 37% of Republicans.
The Iranian officials know all this. They have been studying Americans – their enemy – for nearly 50 years.
When it comes to what will always be a tense and combative relationship between Iran and the United States, the present is uncertain and maddening. But it is also a cakewalk compared to the future, which is both those things with a side order of scary.
Sometime in the future, another U.S. president – either Republican or Democrat, it makes no difference – will have to deal with an Iran that is, thanks to Trump’s follies, stronger and smarter and bolder and seriously pissed off. That future version of Iran will still be building drones, but the objective will be to create a new generation that can travel far enough to attack U.S. military targets in the Atlantic, or even the U.S. mainland.
After more than five months of war, Trump’s mistakes, missteps and miscalculations have made him the centerpiece of a new Iranian hostage crisis. The Iranians are calling the shots. Trump considers himself a master negotiator. But next to the Iranians, he is a mere apprentice. As long as Iran controls the Strait of Hormuz – illegally and illegitimately, sure, but controls it nonetheless – our adversaries have our president over a barrel, or rather millions of barrels per day.
At this point, Uncle Sam has five choices, all of them bad:
– run, do not walk, to the nearest exit in a humiliating retreat
– accept Iran’s ridiculous terms including war reparations
– continue to fire missiles, only on defense or on offense too
– stall and apply economic pressure, hoping for internal collapse
– send in ground troops to destroy drones and nuclear material
As for Iran, it is suggesting one additional option:
– call off the negotiation, and table the matter until Trump is out of office in January 2029
What?! That is 29 months from now – 2 years, 5 months. That’s a long time for Americans to be in this purgatory.
That’s why I think the best option for the United States is also the least popular: send in ground troops.
Hear me out. Right now, the more than 50,000 U.S. military personnel in the Persian Gulf are sitting ducks. They’re waiting aboard billion dollar warships for a $20,000 attack drone to get past the security perimeter and open fire, killing them off one by one. We need to take them off the ships, and give them a fighting chance to defend themselves. Or – if our leaders don’t have the stomach for that plan of action – we get out completely.
But, under no circumstances should we continue the status quo. The only thing that would accomplish is to put our troops at greater risk from an Iran that is, every day, getting angrier, stronger, bolder and more deadly.
There, that should explain things.
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Fresh Ink —
Ruben Navarrette
Nationally Syndicated Column, Creators Syndicate
8-4-26
SAN DIEGO — As spelled out by former President Thomas Jefferson in our republic, all men are created equal. All states, not so much.
Conservatives like to say that the Kremlin on the Coast is in decline. But to paraphrase Mark Twain — a Missouri native who migrated to the Northern California gold country in the 1860’s to launch a writing career that started with a “celebrated jumping frog” and wound up introducing Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn — rumors of my home state’s demise have been greatly exaggerated.
Yet, it’s no exaggeration to say that California has outsized importance, both to the United States and the rest of the world. Given that its residents contribute between $700 billion and $800 billion annually in federal taxes, California is a mega “donor state” that puts much more into the nation’s coffers than it takes out.
While right-wingers are too proud to admit it, this big, beautiful blue state helps keep a lot of the puny red states in the black.
How ironic. Republicans whine about paying for other people’s stuff. But they have their hand out when a check arrives in their mailbox as the result of a farm subsidy or COVID-19 relief or a $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” handout for allies of President Donald Trump.
That’s how rudderless the Republican Party is in the MAGA era. Nothing says “we hate socialism” like taking free money.
Back to California. This state is a beast. It’s the nation’s most populous state with 40 million residents. And it has an annual GDP of $4.25 trillion — which gives it the world’s fourth largest economy behind Germany, China and the United States.
Say what you like, haters. As Jed Clampett and the rest of The Beverly Hillbillies found out when they struck oil in the Ozarks, California is still the place you ought to be.
And this year’s gubernatorial election on Nov. 3 is the race you ought to watch.
The matchup between Republican Steve Hilton, a former Fox News host, and Democrat Xavier Becerra, a former Health and Human Services Secretary, is a battle of sharp contrasts.
Becerra — a Mexican American born and raised in Sacramento, Calif. in 1958 — is a homegrown product with working-class roots. His mother, Maria Teresa Becerra, was born in Guadalajara, Mexico. His father, Manuel Guerrero Becerra, a day laborer and construction worker, was born in the United States but grew up in Tijuana, Mexico. Xavier graduated from Stanford University and Stanford Law School.
The candidate’s wife is Dr. Carolina Reyes, a renowned obstetrician who specializes in at-risk pregnancies. She helps underprivileged women access health care. A graduate of Stanford University and Harvard Medical School, Reyes practices at UC Davis Medical Center and chairs the board of the California Health Care Foundation, which increases access to health care.
Meanwhile, Hilton is an import from Great Britain who migrated to California in 2012 after serving as a strategic advisor to former Prime Minister David Cameron. An excellent communicator, he knows how to tell stories that inspire people to take action.
But his is not the typical immigrant story. When Hilton came to the United States, he probably traveled first class. Part of the reason is that, like Beccera — and for that matter, myself — he was smart enough to marry way up and out of his league.
Hilton’s wife, Rachel Whetstone — a prominent British public relations executive — has earned tens of millions of dollars helping technology companies improve messaging. She ran communications strategy and public policy at Google, which is located not far from the couple’s $20 million home in Silicon Valley. After subsequent stints at Uber, Netflix and Facebook, Whetstone now works for an AI startup.
As the lifelong politician and bureaucrat, Becerra wants this race to be about moderation and political experience, both of which he has and Hilton lacks. He also wants Californians to see a vote for him as a vote against Trump, given his campaign pledge to be a foil for a president who has made the lives of Latinos - who make up 40% of the state’s population – much harder.
As the communications strategist and storyteller, Hilton wants the race to be about change, which he can promise and his opponent won’t go anywhere near. He spins a narrative about how Democrats — who controlled the governor’s mansion in California for 16 straight years, and 19 of the last 27 years — allegedly destroyed a once great state.
Really? Look here, newbie. California is still great. It just needs better leaders. Finding one is what this race is really about. And yet, I’m not sure that either of these two candidates fits the profile.