The title is from a conclusion that someone I subscribe to believes will happen. Hope he is right.
Below is a short excerpt from the article I just finished reading.
And now he finds himself in a massive pickle, to say the very least. First, Epstein won’t go away. Second, he has now depleted America’s very expensive and actually not very extensive missile reserves, which in turn offers openings to enemies such as China and Russia. Third, he has given validation to Putin’s own aggressive territorial expansionism and has paved the way for a Chinese assault on Taiwan, should they go down that route. After all, if America can opt out of the rules-based world order and bomb Iran without legitimate provocation, then other countries can presumably do the same. Fourth, because the Iranian leadership doesn’t care about the suffering they might cause, they’re very happy to close the Straits of Hormuz and cause a global energy shortage, which will have terrible consequences for the world economy and not least in the USA.
Who knows how it will now play out – that’s the point with wars – but a fairly likely scenario goes something like this: Trump realises the effect this is all going to have on the US economy and so at some point this week declares victory. Talk of regime change and unconditional surrender will be quietly kicked into the long grass. After all, look what it took to get unconditional surrender against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in World War II. In the case of Japan, and even after two atomic bombs were dropped, there was still a condition for their unconditional surrender: that Emperor Hirohito remained on throne, which he did until 1989. So, that crass announcement is entirely unworkable. Iran is not Venezuela.