I’m at a bar in Canada and the whole place just went nuts.

Guy to my right:
“Trump will just say they won.”

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— Brandy Zadrozny (@brandyzadrozny.bsky.social) March 17, 2026 at 9:32 PM

On Trump:

1/2. He took the greatest military force in history, lost a war to a middle power in a week, begged the world to save him, & demanded the media lie about this & everything else. I try, but at a simple human level I do not see how anyone mistakes this man’s almost supernatural weakness for strength.

— Timothy Snyder (@timothysnyder.bsky.social) March 17, 2026 at 4:44 PM

2/2. His weakness is something negative, gravitational, so deep that it can draw in a whole country. But only if we fail to see it. Only if we let it.

— Timothy Snyder (@timothysnyder.bsky.social) March 17, 2026 at 4:44 PM

Wesley Wark National Security and Intelligence Newsletter The Mad King’s war rationale unravels (further)

It was always clear that the US-Israeli attack on Iran was an unnecessary war. A much- weakened Iran posed no imminent threat, and good progress had been made on Iran-US nuclear talks, mediated by Oman.
As the war turns from unnecessary to potentially catastrophic, the absence of any rationale for it is becoming increasingly clear.
The director of the US national counterterrorism centre, a key component of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, has just publicly resigned….
Neither Washington nor Tel Aviv have been able to offer any explanation for the decision to go to war, rather than let diplomacy proceed. It looks increasingly like the only explanation for abandoning the talks was simply the desire to go to war. That desire is something that is increasingly marking the presidency of the mad King.

Shankar Narayan The Concis No Cards Left

…Bullying does not work in diplomacy. It does the opposite. It pushes countries to make decisions they would otherwise delay.
-India is now moving to dramatically deepen its relationship with the European Union.
-Canada dropped $40 billion on Arctic defense and is already tying that into cooperation with five Nordic nations to keep it moving.
-Instead of calling Trump, the French president picked up the phone and called the Iranian president directly.
That is where this has reached.
It has gone so far that Canadian Prime Minister Carney now finds himself boxed in on the American F-35s. This is not a clean procurement choice he can freely revisit. NORAD ties the two militaries together at the most sensitive layer—continental air defense, shared radar architecture, integrated command, and real-time threat response.
Canada does not just buy aircraft in that system; it plugs into a binational defense grid that is already built around U.S. platforms.
That limits his options. He can reduce the size of the order, stretch timelines, adjust at the margins. But some level of purchase has to go through if Canada wants to remain fully interoperable inside NORAD’s command structure. And yet, with growing opposition on the ground, his room to operate is narrowing.
It is hard to believe it took just over a year to get here. But this is where it has landed.
Trump overplayed the tariff card. That is gone. Then he overplayed the military power card. Gone. He used the air-defense card well for a while with Ukraine. That is gone too.
An emperor without cards.

Phillips O’Brien Phillips’s Newsletter Yeesh, Who Would Have Thought That Allies Actually Mattered?

Donald Trump is best understood, in geopolitical terms, as an accelerant of US decline. He is systematically weakening many of the crucial pillars of American national power, from its societal cohesion, to the strength of US political structures and institutions, as well as the ability of the US military to think. As much as any of these, however, he has been accelerating American decline by blasting away at one of the greatest pillars of American world power; the US-led alliance system which has dominated the globe since the end of World War II.