Resetting the Reset

Greetings from Budapest - a town whose charms I've been enjoying for over half my life. I shall be here through Hungarian election, which is expected by the Eurocrats to be the pitiful last stand of their bête noire Viktor Orbán. Or maybe not. We shall see. After that, I shall be off to Ukraine, to "fight the last war", as numerous correspondents accuse me of.

In between come the US/Iranian talks in Islamabad. Maybe. Tehran's lead representative, the parliamentary speaker Mohammad ​Baqer Ghalibaf, craftily waited until the 'plane of his opposite number at the negotiating table had taken off for Pakistan to tweet that the meeting may not take place because the Great Satan was already in breach of the agreement:

Two of the measures mutually agreed upon between the parties have yet to be implemented: a ceasefire in Lebanon and the release of Iran's blocked assets prior to the commencement of negotiations.

These two matters must be fulfilled before negotiations begin.

— محمدباقر قالیباف | MB Ghalibaf (@mb_ghalibaf) April 10, 2026

Will Air Force Two turn around mid-air? The vice president's boss is not happy:

"We're loading up the ships with the best ammunition, the best weapons ever made — even better than what we did previously and we blew them apart," he said.

"But we're loading up the ships. We're loading up the ships with the best weapons ever made, even at a higher level than we used to do a complete decimation.

"And if we don't have a deal, we will be using them, and we will be using them very effectively."

Bit tame by the standards of last weekend's threats, don't you think? So Mr Trump butched it up a bit an hour or two later:

The Iranians don't seem to realize they have no cards, other than a short term extortion of the World by using International Waterways. The only reason they are alive today is to negotiate! President DONALD J. TRUMP

I gather that his opposite number, Supreme Leader Khameini Jr, is not terribly active on social media: not much of a tweeter, no viral videos with the Easter Bunny, more generally not a lot of evidence for continued corporeal existence. And yet I occasionally find myself wondering what it would be like to live under such a rhetorically soothing system. So forget the menacing soundbites; what's actually happening?

Well, Iranian 'planes are (as I write) over Afghanistan and Pakistan-bound.

Meanwhile, as ceasefires go, there's not a lot of ceasing of fire:

1) Israel continues to fire on Lebanon;

2) the Houthis continue to fire on Israel;

3) Iran continues to fire on Israel and the Gulf monarchies;

4) Israel and the Gulf monarchies continue to fire on Iran.

So, as a practical matter, the only chaps who've ceased fire are the Americans.

Mr Vance could have negotiated that with himself, couldn't he? Rather than involving the man the President now calls his "favourite field marshal"?

Gee, it's almost as if those moron towelheads figured that, if you detoured the Great Satan on to the off-ramp and brought the price of oil below a hundred bucks, it'd be really difficult for him to talk himself back to the on-ramp for Shock'n'Awe II.

So is it, as my old friend Pete Hegseth says, a stunning military victory? Or is it, as I have argued more or less from the get-go, a profound Suez-sized strategic defeat? Or are concepts such as "winning" and "losing" now obsolescent and it is more accurate to speak of the "world's most powerful reset"?

In the geopolitical sense, "resets" are something I had hitherto associated with Klaus Schwab and HM The King. But, to reduce it to its parochial Beltway essentials, in the old days Iran would have been perceived as a definite loss because all the Administration bigshots are leaking to the media that it was nothing to do with them: "Yes, well, I was always a bit leery. Wasn't it your idea, old boy?" There aren't a lot of fellows going: "Actually, I came up with it. The President was a bit comme-ci-comme-ça, but I stiffened his spine: I said, 'Now is the hour. I know all the pantywaists are saying there's no exit ramp, but, if you need one, there's a Pakistani field marshal you're gonna love. But you won't need him because you'll be ribbon-cutting at our new base where the Qom madrassah used to be...'"

Instead:

The C.I.A. director used one word to describe the Israeli prime minister's regime change scenarios: "farcical."

At that point, Mr. Rubio cut in. "In other words, it's bullshit..."

General Caine was not a political loyalist, and he had serious concerns about a war with Iran... General Caine shared with Mr. Trump and others the alarming military assessment that a major campaign against Iran would drastically deplete stockpiles of American weaponry, including missile interceptors, whose supply had been strained after years of support for Ukraine and Israel. General Caine saw no clear path to quickly replenishing these stockpiles...

He also flagged the enormous difficulty of securing the Strait of Hormuz and the risks of Iran blocking it. Mr. Trump had dismissed that possibility on the assumption that the regime would capitulate before it came to that...

Ms. Wiles had told colleagues that she worried about the United States being dragged into another war in the Middle East. An attack on Iran carried with it the potential to set off soaring gas prices months before midterm elections that could help decide whether the final two years of Mr. Trump's second term would be years of accomplishment or subpoenas from House Democrats...

Nobody in Mr. Trump's inner circle was more worried about the prospect of war with Iran, or did more to try to stop it, than the vice president... The figure inside the White House most opposed to a full-scale war described it as "a huge distraction of resources" and "massively expensive..."

Beyond all of this was perhaps the biggest risk of all: Iran held the advantage when it came to the Strait of Hormuz.

Yes, I know there will be those who don't understand how a corrupt media works and will scoff, "Oh, well, that's just bollocks from The New York Times... But those quotes are in there because the people who uttered those words want to get them on the record. And, for what it's worth, they accord with the positions of those principals with whom I have some small acquaintance.

Oh, but surely some senior figure other than Mark Levin must have been in favour of the war?

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was the biggest proponent of a military campaign against Iran.

Which is why, as I noted three weeks ago, my old chum was being lined up as the designated fall-guy:

Trump suggests unpopular Iran war was Pete Hegseth's idea.

And also why at his "massive victory" press conference Pete was so eager to ensure that only this president could have been courageous enough to launch and see through the soi-disant "unpopular Iran war". Maybe Trump will find a fall-girl instead: last week he was said to be minded to dump Tulsi.

Mark's international bestseller America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It. If you haven't read the book during its first seventeen years, well, you're missing a treat. It's still in print in hardback and paperback. (Buy it at a 77% discount by clicking here or order in KINDLE edition at a 47% discount by clicking here. Sales help fund JWR)

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Mark Steyn is an international bestselling author, a Top 41 recording artist, and a leading Canadian human rights activist. Among his books is "The Undocumented Mark Steyn: Don't Say You Weren't Warned". (Buy it at a 49% discount by clicking here or order in KINDLE edition at a 67% discount by clicking here. Sales help fund JWR)