‘Potato’ Or ‘Potaahto’, Just Call It All Off Now
· Free Press Journal
Six months into a grinding, unplanned, entirely unnecessary conflagration with Iran, Donald Trump has cheerfully dismissed the bloodshed and chaos he has wrecked as "small potatoes", while Vice President JD Vance insists with a straight face that this isn't even a war. It is a breathtaking characterisation that even plumbing-deep denial cannot salvage. Nobody in the world actually believes Trump anymore—not his exhausted sailors on extended deployment in the Gulf waters now slumming it up in Pattaya port calls; not the career civil servants down at Foggy Bottom, and perhaps, in their loneliest midnight hours; not even the clueless architects of the disaster themselves. This remains without a shred of doubt a military venture utterly without parallel in either whimsy, lack of logic, clear strategic plans, merits, or just cause. It has cost the United States and the wider world an unprecedented scale of economic hardship, strategic exhaustion, and human toll, with no end in sight. Never has Washington deployed such an exhaustive, blunt-instrument array of secondary sanctions and threats to coerce global behaviour, and never has the US encountered such a wall of collective, albeit politely calibrated, resistance from its own traditional allies. Blind to the basic geography of their own escalations, the administration completely failed to foresee that choking the Strait of Hormuz would trigger the single largest supply block across a vast array of vital international supply chains—eclipsing by far any historical oil shock or pandemic-era bottleneck. Compared to the systemic financial and logistical trauma radiating from this misadventure, previous US military blunders begin to look like a leisurely Sunday picnic in Central Park on a sunny day.
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Even American stomachs are visibly churning at the endless, dizzying filibustering coming out of the West Wing. The public backlash is starkly quantified across every major metric: Trump’s overall job approval has plummeted down into the low-to-mid 30s, with disapproval ratings surging past 58%. On specific parameters, public faith has evaporated entirely. Over 60% of the country disapproves of his handling of the economy and inflation, nearly two-thirds reject his foreign policy alignment with allies, and an overwhelming majority views the Iran campaign as an unmitigated failure. Let it not be forgotten that the Commander-in-Chief breezily promised to wrap up the war in Ukraine in a single day and the confrontation with Iran in just three. Months later, a beleaguered planet still waits on both counts for the Grand Wazoo, as that notable philosopher Frank Zappa might have dubbed him. The Gershwins, who had a finer ear for musical possibilities of, among other things, vegetables, wrote a great tune. Whether you call it a war or a minor fracas, whether you pronounce it ‘potato’ or ‘potaahto’, the systemic damage is identical. Just call the whole thing off.