Armchair Observations - Vox Popoli

 Armchair Warlord contemplates the prospects for an imminent sequel to the 12-Day War between the USA, Israel, and Iran:

1. Deployment prior to this week was, as I pointed out at the time, consistent with a show of force to underline a negotiating position rather than a serious operation. Although that has begun to change, US aerial forces in the Middle East remain inferior in strength to the Israeli Air Force that quickly ran out of steam in combat last year. Any air campaign would not be a step-change from that of the Twelve Days’ War.....

Full text:

https://voxday.net/2026/02/20/armchair-observations/ 

....The TACO trade is real. Trump talks a big game until the markets start to believe him, whereupon he reliably beats a hasty retreat and pivots to a new distraction from the Epstein Files. The moral hazard here is that Trump has done this so many times that by this point global markets don’t actually take him seriously and so they’re reacting late and weak to what are objectively very concerning developments. With that said oil prices are – finally – starting to rise. US deployments to the Middle East thus far are to give Trump a credible military option if he decides to use force against Iran – prior deployments were non-credible and the Iranians would have taken them as such – but talk that war is necessarily imminent or that this force is actually adequate to the absolutely colossal task at hand (Iran is a country of 90 million and a geographic fortress) is irresponsible.

It’s certainly possible that Short Fake Trump is bluffing again. Or that he’s desperately trying to keep Netanyahu and his donors off his back a little longer before declaring victory and going home. But it will be a major faux pas and admission of military weakness to send such a comparatively large naval force to the region only to turn around and sail back home again.

Then again, Trump has declared bigger victories with even less in the way of results before, so we can’t count it out.

UPDATE: What goes around, comes around.

China has begun doing to the United States in the Middle East, what the United States has been doing to Russia in Ukraine: Providing imagery of US bases, planes, troop concentrations and more so Iran can use them against the United States, the same way Ukraine uses US-provided info against Russia. Not only is the satellite imagery clear, they overlaid identification tags showing “F-35” or “E-18 Growler” as seen in one image.