Mar 30, 2026
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The most powerful military in the history of the world is fighting a war it did not choose, for a country that will not fight it alongside them, guided by a theology that says it’s supposed to be this way. This is what happens when a superpower is taken captive by a foreign, inferior nation. And this is what happens when a superior religion gets taken captive by an inferior war cult.
Israel announced this week that it will not be sending ground troops into Iran. The Israeli ambassador delivered this to CNN with no hint of shame or irony. “Boots on the ground” are necessary, he agreed, but they “must be Iranian boots,” a reference to the popular uprising that has not appeared in thirty days of sustained bombing and shows no sign of coming. The entire point of this war – regime change – now hinges on Iranian housewives going out into the street and rising up against the Iranian government. In other words, if boots on the ground are necessary, and they must be Iranian boots, there is zero chance this is going to be successful.
By the way, Trump was reported by Axios to have asked Netanyahu on the phone, when Netanyahu said they should both coordinate calls for Iranians to overthrow their own regime, “Why the hell should we tell people to take to the streets when they’ll just get mowed down.” Of course, that is the point; Iranians being mowed down is Netanyahu’s goal. In the end, Trump didn’t issue such a call. It didn’t matter, because Israel’s tens of thousands of paid influencers in the U.S. got the memo and started making those calls without the lead of the U.S. president. Their leader, the Israeli President, said to jump, and they jumped. Over the weekend, Israel-First Americans have been out making the PSAs that Trump had the humanitarian heart not to.
For those not tracking, the U.S. went to war with Iran because – according to the Secretary of War, Secretary of State, and Speaker of the House – Israel was going to attack Iran either way, leaving our bases in jeopardy if the job wasn’t done right. Now, it says the job can’t be finished without boots on the ground, but not theirs. In no uncertain terms, and without stretching the truth, Israel started a war that the United States has to finish. Classic.
Meanwhile, Netanyahu said last week that air power alone cannot win this war and agreed that a ground component is required, but not his. His ground forces were busy taking roughly a tenth of Lebanon for the Greater Israel Project, and declared the nation’s Christian president an enemy. The Pentagon is already drawing up operational plans to deploy 10,000 American boots there, with 50,000 Americans staged across the theater and the USS Tripoli delivering 3,500 more this week. The people who started this war have decided that the dying on the ground will be done by someone else’s sons.
The audacity of that arrangement deserves more outrage than it has received. A nation that takes more American foreign aid than any country on earth, whose military is equipped and funded and diplomatically shielded by Washington at extraordinary annual expense, has looked at the ground war its own prime minister says cannot be avoided and decided that Americans will fight it for them. We agreed.
As I reported to you weeks ago, Lindsey Graham went on Hannity and told Arab leaders he was personally going back to South Carolina to his constituents to “send their sons and daughters” to this fight. He was using Americans as currency in a foreign diplomatic negotiation, pledging other people’s kids as a promissory note to keep regional partners invested in a war that Americans largely don’t want.
Also over the weekend, Pete Hegseth stood before the press corps and said, “Every single day, especially in this town, all power, all honor, and all glory belongs to our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Christ is King.” Bless his heart, because he means it, and that sincerity is the theological tragedy at the center of this entire arrangement, because he confesses the King while commanding an army that is dying in the service of the one nation on earth whose entire national identity is organized around the rejection of that King. The modern State of Israel regards Jesus as a failed messianic pretender. The Talmud treats His name with contempt. The state that Hegseth’s military is protecting has no category for the Christ he proclaims except the category of impostor burning in hell, and American sons are bleeding in the desert for that country while their Secretary of Defense praises Jesus at the podium and signs the deployment orders. One wonders if this is the prize for recognizing Christ is King, dying for those who don’t.
What makes this moment historically significant is not that Israel is asking America to bleed for it. That is an old and well-worn arrangement. What is significant is that nobody is pretending anymore that this war is about us. There is no elaborate justification, no theatrical appeal to shared democratic values, no carefully constructed argument about converging American strategic interests.
UNMITIGATED FAILURE
The game plan was clear: assassinate Khamenei, shatter the regime’s psychological foundation, ignite the Iranian population, and collect the surrender before sun-up. Thirty days in, none of those things have happened, and several things that were not supposed to happen have. The regime did not fall. Mojtaba Khamenei replaced his father within ten days, the IRGC pledged its loyalty, and the Islamic Republic reconstituted itself around a figurehead thirty years younger and, one presumes, considerably more motivated by personal grievance than his father was. The popular uprising never materialized. The Mossad plan for Kurdish militia forces to cross from Iraq and ignite a broader rebellion collapsed before the first boot crossed the border, killed by leaks, by regional lobbying, and by the entirely rational decision of the Kurdish fighters themselves not to die for a revolution whose fruits would be harvested by others.
Iran is still firing. Hundreds of ballistic missiles and thousands of drones have struck Israel and American assets across thirty days of war, and while the pace has slowed, the more alarming explanation among analysts is not depletion but deliberate conservation, meaning Tehran has looked at this conflict, calculated its resources, and concluded that outlasting the American political will is a more achievable objective than defeating the American military. The Strait of Hormuz remains closed. Trump issued an ultimatum, extended it, extended it again, and has now paused threatened strikes on Iranian power plants until April 6, citing talks that Iran’s foreign minister has publicly and repeatedly described as nonexistent. Iran rejected the American fifteen-point peace proposal and called it unreasonable, noting that a country that opened a war by demanding unconditional surrender and was now sending proposals through Pakistani intermediaries had already told the world everything it needed to know about who was winning.
Oil is up fifty percent. The IEA has confirmed this is the largest supply disruption since the 1970s energy crisis. American families are paying the cost of it at every point where their money touches the economy. My family’s in the middle of a home purchase, and the interest rate has risen twice in one day thanks to the Fed’s gloomy outlook on the near future. Europe wants no part of it. Members of Trump’s own Armed Services Committee walked out of classified briefings unable to get a straight answer about what victory looks like or when it might arrive. And the Pentagon is preparing the ground operations that Israeli officials say are necessary and that Israeli soldiers will not be conducting, because Israeli soldiers are busy in Lebanon, and Israeli civilians are fleeing the Middle East at a record pace, and the country whose war this actually is has decided that the servants will handle the rest.
This is the moment that demands polemicists willing to explain to Americans what the hell is happening here. There’s theology undergirding all of this, and its not ours. Our nation that – as Hegseth claimed – recognizes Jesus is King is now unequally yoked to one whose existence is owed to their rejection of His kingship.
WHAT THE TALMUD SAYS YOU ARE
Rabbinic Judaism is not the religion of Moses. The religion of Moses was rooted in the written Word of God, the Torah given at Sinai, with a sacrificial system centered on the Temple and a priesthood that mediated between God and man. When Rome destroyed the Temple in 70 AD that system was obliterated, and what replaced it was constructed by a rabbinical class that elevated their own oral tradition above the written Scripture, a move Jesus had already indicted in Matthew 15 when He told the Pharisees they had made the commandment of God of no effect through their tradition. That tradition became codified as the Talmud, and the Talmud is not peripheral commentary produced by obscure cranks on the margins of Jewish life. It is the supreme legal and theological authority of modern Judaism, studied in yeshivas worldwide, treated as binding above the written Torah, and consulted by the same religious establishment that shapes Israeli national identity from the ground up.
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