[View Article at Source]Economic warfare immiserates populations without achieving political goals. The post U.S. Sanctions on Iran Failed—So Why Do They Continue? appeared first on The American Conservative.…

Republican commentator Scott Jennings has been sharing the truth on CNN, which has infuriated staffers at the network. They’re mad that Jennings is calling illegal aliens… well, ‘illegal aliens.’…

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk says he’s making space-based artificial intelligence the “immediate focus” of a newly expanded company that not only builds rockets and satellites, but also controls xAI’s generative-AI software and the X social-media platform. That’s the upshot of Musk's announcement that SpaceX has acquired xAI.

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Culture The 80-Yard Run So long to Irwin Shaw, William Shakespeare, college football, and all that. I rank Irwin Shaw’s 1941 short story “The Eighty-Yard Run” among the best. It’s as good as any of Papa Hemingway’s, but then Irwin’s strengths were always in that genre. I was a friend of his, having written a fan letter after the publication of his novel Evening in Byzantium. We skied a bit and played some tennis. He was a toughie, and he told me how he almost came to blows with the great Papa at the 21 Club in New York. (Hemingway by then was much too old and far too drunk to fight, so Irwin gave him a pass.) Another interesting bit of talk concerned Shaw’s very good novel The Young Lions. Irwin had entered Germany in the closing months of the war with an American outfit as a newsman. During a sweep, his squad came upon a young German pilot hanging from a tree after bailing out. “Cut me down and I’ll accept your surrender,” he told the Americans. Some jerk shot him dead. “I hated it,” said Irwin, “but being Jewish, in my novel I switched the pilot to an American and had the Germans shoot him.” Christian Diestl, the German ski guide returning home disillusioned from the battles, says to himself in the novel, “If all the Americans are like this one, the war sure is lost.”   “The Eighty-Yard Run” is a depressing tale, a sort of Gatsby Lite, as the anti-hero Christian Darling realizes the high point of his dull life was a college football 80-yard run—in practice. His slide from Mount Olympus is depressing because it reveals Olympus was a molehill, and still, downhill it was from then on. Shaw wrote clear strong prose. Today’s writers give us a masterclass of incoherent scribble, with syntax now bending under the weight of confusion. No wonder no one reads any more.  Which brings me to the point I wish to make. I recently read that half of our fellow Americans didn’t crack open a single book in 2025. Ouch! Could this possibly be true? Are there about 175 million Americans who did not buy, open or read a book last year? It sounds like something out of a horror film, or Orwell’s 1984. A pessimist friend said to me it was good news. When I questioned his state of mind and sobriety, he answered that “otherwise they might be reading that Shakespeare was an illiterate moneylender and the plays were written by a black Jewish woman by the name of Emilia Bassano.” (This outrageous rumor is making news in Europe, especially among feminists, antiracists, and certain Jewish intellectuals who believe Brits to be antisemites due to Shakespeare and Dickens.)  All I know is that no black Jewish woman wrote the plays, but a white Englishman, be it the Earl of Southampton, Edward de Vere, or William Shakespeare, or even Christopher Marlowe before his grisly murder. But if one never reads but watches a screen all day and night, how would they know? And it gets much worse. Forget Shakespeare; this is much ado about nothing compared to what’s happening in American schools. Generation Z students are arriving at college with such feeble reading skills that some are incapable of even comprehending full sentences. Generation Z, I am told, is more focused on TikTok than printed text. At first I was surprised, but then I came into contact with a youngster or two, and my surprise turned to understanding. A generation glued to phones, videos and AI is not expected to know who Anna Karenina is, let alone her lover Count Vronski. Mind you, poor schools do not help, nor does wokeness. Apparently woke ideology far surpasses civic literacy in U.S. colleges. Add feminization, digitalization, cancel culture, and narcissism and you have a hell of a mess. The son of a European friend told his father after one semester at Columbia that America is a country divided between zillions of highly sensitive females who burst into tears when watching cartoons, and grim, hatchet-faced, Nazi-like, men-hating maniacs. An obvious exaggeration, I told my buddy—but perhaps it was a black American Jewish woman who wrote those plays after all. It was safer to say that as there were some women around.  “The Eighty-Yard Run” was on my mind recently—it is always there because of my golden memories at the University of Virginia and the beautiful southern belles I dated, lots of booze and great frat parties—because of some football college news: Duke University is suing its student and quarterback Darian Mensah to prevent him from transferring to Miami to replace Miami’s sixth-year quarterback Carson Beck. Duke has rights. Back in 2024 Mensah signed an $8 million contract with Duke. For any of you unfamiliar with American higher education, Duke is a university and college football is an amateur sport. Mensah had previously played for Tulane for an undisclosed amount.  Eat your hearts out, you fools like Frank Gifford, Doc Blanchard, Kyle Rote, Red Grange, and thousands of others who as college athletes stupidly played only for glory. Come back, Christian Darling, all is forgiven—hooray for your 80-yard run in practice. The post The 80-Yard Run appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics Commander-in-Tired Despite evidence suggesting otherwise, President Trump is mortal just like the rest of us. You would be forgiven for wondering from time to time if Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is still alive. He is, by the way, and in recent weeks he’s made that fact more apparent. Though the 83-year-old (who will turn 84 in two weeks) is rarely spotted in the Capitol these days, his vocal opposition to President Donald Trump on a myriad of issues is louder and more present than ever when deemed useful for the motivated liberal press. For instance, McConnell was quoted far and wide last month after he criticized Trump’s desire to acquire Greenland, a move the Kentuckian suggested would “incinerate” the threadbare alliance that remains between the United States and NATO.  McConnell’s declining health (he has been spotted falling on multiple occasions) and his accelerating age are not uncommon sights in Washington DC, where Congress has become fertile ground for boomers who refuse to go quietly into that good night. Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is another ever-present senior legislator, who at the ripe age of 85 finally announced in November that she will not seek reelection in 2026. In the meantime, the San Franciscan’s bank account continues to swell thanks to her remarkably accurate ability to predict the future prices of indexes. Pelosi has performed so well in predicting the ups and downs of the stock market in her latter years that popular accounts on Elon Musk’s social media app formerly known as Twitter are now dedicated to tracking her fluid and constant financial maneuvering.  Despite their inherent political differences, McConnell and Pelosi are similar in that they represent a cohort of aging legislators who likely should have retired over a decade ago. Nor are the pair alone in their desire to remain in DC, a decision that ultimately falls to the voters of Kentucky and Northern California who continue to put them there. Dianne Feinstein, the first female mayor of San Francisco and the first female senator from the state of California, served more than 30 years in the U.S. Capitol before being reduced to a punchline as the then-89-year-old publicly battled health issues. Conservative critics—especially those in the MAGA caucus—mocked Feinstein for staying in office long past her prime. Many of those same critics have also harshly criticized McConnell’s forgetfulness and physical deterioration, despite the fact that he shares the same political party as Trump. Yet when it comes to Trump himself, who at 79 years of age is beginning to show real signs of physical and mental fatigue, age and public mishaps become almost invisible to the same critics.  With his health under renewed scrutiny after cameras caught Trump closing his eyes repeatedly during a lengthy cabinet meeting in December, Trump has responded with defiance, addressing head-on claims that he fell asleep during the meeting. “Look, it got pretty boring,” Trump admitted on Thursday as his inner circle chuckled along in approval. “I didn’t sleep. I just closed them because I wanted to get the hell outta here.” Trump’s sleepy state during the December cabinet meeting was just the latest in a string of health concerns that have cropped up as he nears 80.  In July of last year, The White House disclosed that Trump had been diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency after the president experienced mild swelling in his legs. Then, in September, while attending a 9/11 commemoration at the Pentagon, the right side of Trump’s face appeared to sag, leading to widespread concerns that Trump may have experienced a stroke. Around the same time, Trump disclosed that he had received an MRI at Walter Reed Medical Center, although he appeared not to know what part of his body had been scanned.  More recently, new questions have begun to swirl regarding Trump’s health after members of the press at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland snapped images of dark bruising on the back of Trump’s hand. Visible bruising has been spotted on Trump’s right hand multiple times in the past year, but the images from Davos were the first that showed the same sort of bruising on his left hand. Worse yet for Trump was the fact that one of the president’s most sympathetic voices in Europe signaled private distress regarding Trump’s mental faculties.  Speaking with European leaders in Brussels last month, Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico expressed deep concern about the psychological wellness of Trump after the pair met at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate only days prior. Fico, who has been a sympathetic European ally for Trump among a sea of dissenters, said Trump came across as “dangerous” as the president initially threatened to annex Greenland before walking back those remarks after meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte. In Trump’s defense, his desire to acquire Greenland does not suggest to me that he is losing psychological grounding. In fact, as I wrote in my assessment of the president’s recent speech in Davos regarding Greenland, Trump’s initial threat to potentially use military force to acquire the island should the Danish refuse to sell the landmass was likely just the same blunt gamesmanship Trump outlined in his 1987 business advice book The Art of the Deal. However, the timing of his wild push to acquire Greenland, by hook or by crook, has undoubtedly left his European counterparts questioning if Trump is operating within the same mental framework as the man who captured the White House in 2016.  Trump’s team has consistently refuted speculation about the president’s health. White House physician Capt. Sean Barbabella stated in October that Trump demonstrated “excellent overall health” following a second checkup, which Barbabella described as “routine” after the press questioned the need for a second visit. When asked about the state of Trump’s hands, Barbabella agreed with the president’s claim that the visible bruising is due to shaking hands. When asked if Barbabella could verify such a claim, the U.S. Navy captain and osteopathic physician replied “absolutely” without hesitation.  The president himself has also denied morbid speculation that he is suffering the sort of physical and mental deterioration that all men and women his age experience. “I feel the same as I did 40 years ago,” Trump told the New York Times during a wide-ranging interview that was conducted at the White House in early January. Trump then noted that he had just played a round of golf with legend Gary Player, who had just turned 90. The president then added that businessman Bernie Marcus was “sharp as a tack” and still operating at “100 percent” in the two years before he passed away at the age of 95. When the two-hour interview with the Times wrapped, Trump jokingly told the four reporters present that he “could go nine hours.” And it’s not just the president who believes in his physical and mental stamina. Homeland Security advisor Stephen Miller told New York Magazine this week that Trump is “superhuman” and often outpaces his younger staff members. “If you look at his EKG, that tells it all,” James Jones, a physician assistant who leads the White House medical team, told the same magazine. “The AI analysis shows he’s 14 years younger. So, age 65. His stamina demonstrates that. We get a view that nobody else does. Nobody can stay up with him. The rest of the staff is tired; we are too. And he’s not.” Weeks before the article was published, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Trump was in “incredible health” and possessed the “highest testosterone level he’s ever seen for an individual who is over 70 years old” in a clip that went viral across X.  Beyond Trump and his close-knit team, former advisors and fans of the president firmly believe in his superhuman strength. “It’s not his final term,” former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon argued in the New York Magazine profile. “He’s going to run again in ’28; hell, he’s running now. It’s obvious. He’s got another ten years at least.” Indeed, 2028 was on Trump’s mind when speaking at an event to promote the economy in Iowa on Wednesday evening. “We won twice, we gotta do it a third time,” Trump said referring to his presidential campaigns in 2016, 2020, and 2024. Then he thought of the future. “Should we do it a fourth time?” Trump leaned over the podium and earned a roar from the crowd. “Four victories, four victories,” Trump repeated with a smirk.  Trump’s next three years in office will likely be the most difficult of his two terms. With his polling numbers cratering in real time, liberal pundits believe the November midterms will produce a blue wave the likes of which Washington and America have rarely seen. Should their prediction prove correct, and given the domestic flashpoints recently heightened between ICE and protesters in Minneapolis, Trump may spend his final two years fending off deliberate and consistent efforts to impeach him from office. In such a scenario, there will be no hiding the mental and physical realities of our octogenarian president.  Whether it’s McConnell wobbling through the halls of the Capitol, Pelosi navigating stock charts like a seasoned oracle, or Trump charming—and alarming—the world with his endless, eccentric energy, Washington has become a stage dominated by aging leaders who refuse to step aside. In today’s Washington, the debate isn’t simply about policy, it’s about who can outlast time itself. Trump, superhuman or mere mortal, will test his limits as America hangs in the balance.  The post Commander-in-Tired appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs U.S. Sanctions on Iran Failed—So Why Do They Continue? Economic warfare immiserates populations without achieving political goals. Last month, the United States convened a symposium in Prague with representatives from roughly 40 countries to coordinate “more robust” enforcement of six reimposed United Nations Security Council resolutions targeting Iran. The measures, restored on September 27, 2025 following what Washington described as Iran’s “significant non-performance” of its nuclear commitments, will strengthen a long-existing sweeping sanctions regime aimed at Iran’s nuclear program, ballistic missile development, arms trade, and banking system. Taking their usual cues from the U.S. government, EU leaders responded by approving without any debate a new round of sanctions targeting Iranian government officials and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and moved toward formally designating the IRGC as a terrorist organization. But it remains unclear what new sanctions are meant to achieve that decades of prior economic warfare have not already failed to deliver. The effectiveness of that sanctions regime depends entirely on how one defines “success”;  there is a difference between their economic effects and their political outcomes. “There is a consensus in the academic literature that politically, sanctions do not work,” said David Siegel, a political scientist who studies U.S. sanctions policy. “The economic devastation is not supposed to be the goal. Economic pressure is supposed to produce a political outcome.” The “maximum pressure” campaign, originally designed by then-National Security Adviser John Bolton during the first Trump administration, was intended, as NBC News reported at the time, “to squeeze [Iran’s] economy until its leadership was forced to curtail its aggression in the region and concede to U.S. demands to dismantle its nuclear program,” none of which has happened. As John Mearsheimer has argued, even direct U.S. military action failed to deliver those results. After U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities in June 2025, President Donald Trump claimed the program had been “completely and totally obliterated.” But a Defense Intelligence Agency assessment concluded the attack had set Iran’s nuclear program back by only a few months. That assessment was dismissed by the administration, but no detailed public accounting of the damage to Iran’s enrichment facilities or uranium stockpiles has since been released. As Mearsheimer points out, “one would think that if everything had been destroyed, as the president claims, the tag team [Israel and the U.S.] would be advertising that fact and backing up its claims with at least some data.” Rather, the Israel Firsters who demanded maximum pressure sanctions, and who now lobby for a U.S. bombing and regime change campaign in Iran, argue that Iran is more emboldened and aggressive than ever. “Iran’s recent round of ballistic missile tests underscores the determination of its Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps to replenish its weapon stockpiles,” said Tyler Stapleton of the pro-Israel Foundation for Defense of Democracies, citing continued missile development and alleged sourcing of materials from abroad. Another FDD senior fellow, Behnam Ben Taleblu, argued that Iran’s missile forces have become even more central to its security doctrine, writing that they were “the only element of its security architecture that proved effective” during last year’s fighting and that “the regime continues to invest in these systems.” Those pro-Israel hawks admit that years of sanctions have failed to curtail Iran’s military and nuclear ambitions. What they have succeeded in doing, U.S. officials now acknowledge, is crippling the Iranian economy and forcing that country to rely upon what the U.S. government calls a “shadow fleet” for its exports. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has repeatedly described the sanctions campaign as a deliberate effort to do so, outlining that plan publicly at the Economic Club of New York in March of last year, where he committed to “Making Iran Broke Again.” “I know a thing or two about currency devaluations,” Bessent said at the time, adding that this was precisely what the United States intended to do to Iran.  Bessent claimed the administration’s goal was to drive Iranian oil exports, then estimated at 1.5 to 1.6 million barrels per day, “back to the trickle they were when President Trump left office.” He acknowledged that Iran had already developed “a complex shadow network of financial facilitators and black-market oil shippers via a ghost fleet” to generate hard currency, and said U.S. policy was designed both to force reliance on that system and to target it. Speaking again at the World Economic Forum in Davos last week, Bessent celebrated how that policy had “worked,” crediting U.S. sanctions with collapsing Iran’s economy, triggering bank failures, devaluing Iran’s currency, and causing protests. As Bessent explained to Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business News, “In December, their economy collapsed. We saw a major bank go under. The central bank has started to print money. There is a dollar shortage. They are not able to get imports.”  “This,” says Bessent, “is why the people took to the streets.” His admission raises the question of whether the sanctions regime is truly intended to change Iranian state behavior or if it is simply designed to manufacture an economic crisis that can be politically exploited by Israel and the U.S. government, who attempted to stage a color revolution in that country last month. To achieve that end, U.S. and Israeli involvement went beyond merely crashing Iran’s economy. An official Mossad account posting in Farsi urged Iranians to take to the streets, declaring, “we are with you in the field.” Former CIA Director Mike Pompeo echoed that message publicly. Meanwhile, Israel’s Channel 14 correspondent Tamir Morag wrote that “foreign actors are arming the protesters in Iran with live weapons,” which he said was “the reason for the hundreds of regime personnel killed.” We have been told, by the same outlets and publishers who denied the Gaza genocide, that the Iranian government’s crackdown on those protests has killed tens of thousands of people in a mere two weeks, with Time magazine estimating the death toll at 30,000 people, with “the only parallel offered by online databases occur[ing] in the Holocaust.” Though, as Time was forced to admit, it has “been unable to independently verify” those numbers, and therefore there is little reason to believe them at all.  What is undeniable, however, is the effect that economic sanctions have had on Iran for decades, blocking that country’s access to the global banking system and depriving its population of life-essential medicines and goods. If sanctions neither dismantle Iran’s nuclear program nor curb its behavior in the region, yet reliably immiserate the population and generate unrest that foreign governments seek to weaponize, then the question is no longer whether sanctions “work,” but why Washington continues to pursue them—and how that policy serves our own interests rather than just Israel’s. The post U.S. Sanctions on Iran Failed—So Why Do They Continue? appeared first on The American Conservative.

Russia Will Go for It All in Ukraine in 2026, and Lose