Tea at Trianon: Iran Won the Media War, Then Lost the Only War That Matters

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, April 15, 2026

Iran Won the Media War, Then Lost the Only War That Matters

From Alexander Muse at Amuse on X:

For a few glorious weeks in the spring of 2026, the foreign policy establishment believed it had witnessed the impossible. Iran, a nation whose air defenses had been systematically dismantled, whose navy had been reduced to wreckage on the floor of the Persian Gulf, whose supreme leader had been killed by an American strike, had somehow emerged from 38 days of devastating combat as the victor. That, at least, was the story the drive-by media told. European leaders repeated it with undisguised satisfaction. Democrats echoed it with barely concealed glee. Iran had closed the Strait of Hormuz, the world's most critical energy chokepoint, and was now charging tolls on the tankers that dared to pass. The regime that had just absorbed more than 13,000 precision strikes was now, according to this narrative advanced by renown national security experts like UChicago Professor Robert Pape, the gatekeeper of global commerce. Checkmate. Game over.
Except none of it was true. Not the tolls, not the control, and certainly not the checkmate. What happened next revealed not Iranian strength but the strategic patience of an American president who understood something his critics either could not see or refused to admit: Iran did not control the Strait of Hormuz. It never had. And President Trump, having waited calmly while the world congratulated a broken regime on a victory it had not won, moved with devastating precision to prove it.
The story of how we arrived at this moment requires revisiting the hysteria that followed Iran’s announcement of its strait closure. When the Islamic Republic declared that it was imposing a blockade on the Strait of Hormuz and would begin collecting transit tolls from commercial shipping, the reaction from European capitals and American newsrooms was immediate and euphoric, at least for those who had spent the prior 5 weeks insisting that Operation Epic Fury was a catastrophic miscalculation. French President Macron began negotiating directly with Tehran. Pedro Sánchez, the Prime Minister of Spain, did the same. European nations that had not maintained diplomatic relations with Iran in years suddenly began reopening embassies. Iran, which just weeks earlier had been absorbing wave after wave of American airpower, was now the belle of the ball. (Read more.)