Dispatch from the Front Lines: Is Doug Ford out of runway?
The U.S. continues to beclown itself in the Persian Gulf. End of the road for Doug? And why keeping money out of politics hasn't made us any less corrupt.
Hey! Hope you all are doing well. The Line won’t publish on Monday due to the long weekend, but we’ll be back and roaring after that. To tide you over, please enjoy the latest episode of The Line Podcast.
Also, don’t miss last week’s On The Line, where Jen Gerson was joined by Jean-François Bélanger, Senior Non-Resident Associate Fellow at the NATO Defense College, for a chat about the future of the alliance.
And now, on with the dispatch.
We’ll open this with both a statement and a confession. The statement, and we hope you agree, is that The Line tries to have a sense of humour. The job is serious. The stories are serious. We take our work seriously. But we try not to take ourselves too seriously, and to have a good time. The confession is simpler: when you’ve been doing this as long as we have, you have to be consciously aware of not repeating yourself. We bang out words so fast it can be legitimately hard to remember whether we’ve covered a topic already, and if we did, what we said.
So when one of your Line editors sat down today to write yet again about the renewed fighting, but then renewed not-fighting, in the Persian Gulf, the thought process went something like this: “Okay, so we’ve written about this a bunch already, but this time we’ll take a more light-hearted approach and bemoan all the absurdity of the U.S. position, while also striking a serious note about how America’s allies have to prepare to defend themselves since the U.S. is clearly too erratic to be counted on. But overall, let’s keep it funny.” We figured that, at least, would let us recap the latest while keeping it fresh.
Not so much, it turns out. That was our take just a few weeks ago. Sigh. At least we double-checked!
If there’s any consolation, it’s that out take then has the virtue of having aged well. The ceasefire fell apart again in recent weeks, the U.S. and Israelis began preparing for a major attack, U.S. sources were whispering to the media that it was going to be unlike anything seen in the war thus far ... and then, at the last minute, Trump called it off. He cited calls from allies in the region claiming that negotiations with Iran had made a breakthrough. In reality, it looks like he simply blinked again. Iran, for its part, swiftly denied that there had been any breakthrough, beyond noting that it was still negotiating with neighbouring Oman about shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.
We really do try to give our readers good value here but, one again, this is nuts. It’s hard to imagine how the U.S. could erode its credibility any further, but we’re sure they’ll find a way.
And in the meantime, we couldn’t help but chuckle at a little snippet of actual news buried in some of the coverage by Axios. It was only a few sentences, buried quite a ways down, but it struck us as maybe the single most important bit of reporting we’ve seen on this war in recent weeks. We’ll quote it directly: “A U.S. official said the Iranians have been ‘very aggressive’ in recent days. Some U.S. officials were stunned by how much the Iranians were willing to escalate.”
Of course they’re being aggressive! Iran has clearly figured out what everyone but us has figured out — for all his bravado and tough talk, Trump is fundamentally a wimp. He had no plan for Iran other than Iran swiftly giving up after the initial (and admittedly successful) decapitation strike on its leadership. Every single thing that has happened since has confirmed to the new Iranian leadership that refusing to back down, and indeed escalating, as Axios noted, is the better path. Because they’re banking on Trump getting cold feet. That’s not to say he won’t eventually strike. He might well! But if he does, the Iranians will know that if they can just ride it out for a few days, and launch some attacks on U.S. allies in the region, Trump will rush to call it off and declare victory. For a few more days.
Like we said last time — and sorry for repeating ourselves — every U.S. ally needs to grasp this. No U.S. defence guarantee can be trusted anymore. Trump is too easily cowed. America’s enemies will figure this out fast, if they haven’t already. Its friends had better move fast, too. In the meantime, we’ll keep covering it, and we’ll try to have a sense of humour, because we’re well past the point where you can’t help but laugh. What a fiasco.
We’ll just use this opportunity to repeat ourselves yet again on what we can take from the U.S. administration and apply it to our own dealings at home.
On Sunday, while aboard Air Force One, Trump was asked how he was planning to punish Canada for the wildfires.
“I have yeah,” he said, and nearly chuckling, he noted “you’ll find out about it soon.” And did we at The Line also detect a few notes of laughter from the press scrum while he said it?