Category: Reflections

Keeping Up With The Greeks

When Christopher Nolan decided to film The Odyssey, he had no shortage of distinguished English translations from which to choose. From among them, he chose Emily Wilson’s, remarkable for its freshness, clarity, and contemporary English while remaining faithful to Homer’s poetry.

Wilson, a classics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, has also translated The Iliad. Unlike some modern “translators,” whose work consists largely of revising earlier English versions, Wilson translates directly from the ancient Greek text. She is equally at home in Latin, a reminder of the extraordinary linguistic preparation classical scholarship once demanded.

That accomplishment is no small feat. Were Homeric Greek taught as a modern foreign language, its highly inflected grammar would make it among the most demanding languages to master, up there with Chinese, Arabic, and Russian.

Wilson also reads classical Greek fluently, the evolved language of Plato, Sophocles, Thucydides, and Aristotle with its unique vocabulary and grammar.

My own acquaintance with the classical languages began in high school, where I studied Latin for two years. The curriculum offered four years, but I opted instead for French and German. Today, my old high school no longer teaches those languages, having replaced them with Spanish.

A few years later, I enrolled in an intensive eight-week Harvard summer course in Koine Greek, the lingua franca of the eastern Mediterranean during the Roman Empire and language of the New Testament. Easier than Homeric or classical Greek, it nevertheless presents formidable challenges.

Our Australian instructor insisted that we learn Greek actively rather than merely decipher it. Instead of translating Greek into English, we were expected to orally translate English into Greek. With only ten students in the room, we couldn’t evade being called upon repeatedly to think, speak, and stumble in the language in real-time. That meant knowing where the accents fell for each word, often very arbitrary, unlike Spanish and Italian.

It was a demanding approach, but by the end of the course I could work through New Testament passages with little more than the aid of a dictionary. Most of that Greek has long since vanished, although I can still read the alphabet, which proved unexpectedly useful years later when I studied Russian, whose Cyrillic alphabet derives in part from Greek.

Impressed with my teacher, I asked him how long he had studied the classical languages. His answer has remained with me ever since: “Thirteen years of Latin; eleven years of Greek.” I was in good hands.

I’ve often regretted not keeping up with Greek, a language renowned for precision in contrast to English, whose richness often lies in words layered with multiple shades of meaning, wonderful for poetry, but often less exact. Reading Greek reveals layers of irony, structural symmetry, and philosophical nuance that disappear in translation.

Growing up in Massachusetts, one could spend a Saturday “junking” through secondhand bookstores and antique shops, coming away with Latin and Greek grammars for a dime apiece, evidence of the former preeminence of classical languages in the curriculum of schools such as Boston Latin School.

Long before my own time, that same New England landscape was shaped by minds saturated in the classics. Ralph Waldo Emerson read Plato in the original Greek, finding in those ancient dialogues the architecture for his own transcendental philosophy. His friend Henry David Thoreau famously carried his Greek text of The Iliad with him to Walden Pond, writing in Walden that true literature must be read in the language in which it was written—the ancient letters “carved out of the breath of life itself.”

Much of that world has faded. Outside a handful of elite institutions like Deerfield Academy, Groton, Phillips Exeter, or in schools like England’s Eton, the sustained study of Latin and Greek has become increasingly rare. Wilson herself began studying both languages at Oxford High School, an independent all-girls school in Oxford before reading Classics (“Greats”) at Balliol College, Oxford, and earning her doctorate at Yale.

I sometimes imagine what it would have been like had I continued with Greek throughout my life: to read Sophocles, Euripides, Plato, and Homer in their own words, perhaps allowing my synapses to mount a quiet resistance to incipient forgetfulness.

I think, too, of modern writers like J.K. Rowling and Toni Morrison, whose formal classical training echoes structurally throughout their work. And yet, the figure who haunts me most is one who had to build her own door to the ancient world: Virginia Woolf.

Denied the university education her brothers received, simply because she was a woman, she taught herself Greek and continued reading it throughout her life. For Woolf, Greek was not an academic ornament, but a living intellectual companion shaping her prose, her essays, and her understanding of literature.

Each year I return to her magnificent essay, “On Not Knowing Greek” (1925), invariably lingering on her summarizing sentence:

“It is to the Greeks that we turn when we are sick of the vagueness, the confusion, the Christianity and its consolations, of our own age.”

—rj

Why Chris Nolan’s The Odyssey Is A Must See

I haven’t been to a movie theater in five years. With inflation, it’s become an extravagance, unnecessary when you can simply wait a few months and rent the film for home viewing.

Having said that, and still believing it, I fully intend to break the habit for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, opening in theaters July 17.

Perhaps I’ve fallen prey to the hype, but I have an almost irresistible urge to see this one on the big screen. I taught Homer’s epic for thirty years, and every time I returned to it I discovered something I had somehow missed before.

If pressed, I would call The Odyssey the greatest saga ever told. Born of an oral tradition nearly three thousand years ago, it remains astonishingly contemporary, its influence reaching through Western literature: Virgil’s The Aeneid, James Joyce’s Ulysses, William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Derek Walcott’s Omeros, Nikos Kazantzakis’s The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, and countless other works that consciously echo Homer’s enduring voyage.

Joyce called it the most universal of stories, and I think he was right.

Within its pages are some of literature’s most enduring archetypes, recalling Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth: the hero’s journey of separation, ordeal, and return; the enchantress and the temptress; the faithful spouse; judgment, homecoming, and restoration.

Then there are the symbols: the sea, the descent into the underworld, Penelope’s shroud, the bow that proves identity, the purifying fire.

Three great themes, however, lend the poem its lasting power.

First, assertion versus passivity. Thoroughly existential long before existentialism, The Odyssey insists that we become ourselves through engagement rather than retreat, through action rather than surrender. The Lotus-Eaters, Calypso, and the luxurious ease of Phaeacia all tempt Odysseus to abandon his purpose.

Second, boundaries. Again and again Homer reminds us that there are limits human beings ignore at their peril: reverence for the sacred, loyalty to family, fidelity to one’s companions, respect for hospitality. Even Scylla and Charybdis embody the necessity of steering between destructive extremes.

Finally, there is cosmic evil. Whether arising from nature’s indifference or human cruelty, evil is real, unmoved by moral persuasion, and must be recognized before it can be confronted. Odysseus’s encounter with the Cyclops remains one of literature’s unforgettable dramatizations of that truth.

Some critics have faulted Nolan’s film for historical inaccuracy. Matt Damon, they say, doesn’t look Greek. The armor is not archaeologically faithful. Telemachus reportedly calls his father “Daddy.” Most controversially, Nolan casts the Oscar-winning Lupita Nyong’o in a double role as Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra.

None of those objections strikes me as especially important.

Few moviegoers will care whether the armor is perfectly Mycenaean. As for the contemporary dialogue, Nolan appears to have drawn heavily from Emily Wilson’s celebrated translation, whose accessible modern English has introduced Homer to an entirely new generation of readers.

That seems to me a virtue, and not a flaw. The Odyssey deserves as wide an audience as possible, especially among younger readers, upon whom its future ultimately depends.

As for Nyong’o’s casting, Elon Musk condemns it as “groveling” to “woke” expectations. The resultant backlash, unfortunately evident in some 600,000 dislikes of YouTube’s final trailer, says far more about our present moment than it does about Homer.

I find Nyong’o a magnetic presence, and admire Nolan’s willingness to ignore predictable objections. We inhabit a global culture now. Homer belongs to all of us.

Advance sales suggest that plenty of people agree. The film’s 70mm IMAX screenings have been selling out months in advance.

My wife and I already know where we’ll be.
In our seats. And with buttered popcorn, too.

–RJ

Resplendent Brilliance: A Birthday Tribute to Peter Singer

Today is renowned ethicist Peter Singer’s birthday, and I wish him everything well, both now and in the future. No one has shaped my values more than Peter, consistently monitoring the ethical dilemmas of contemporary life with courage, sensitivity, candor, and clarity—attributes resplendent in the intellectual brilliance of some fifty books treating animal suffering, poverty, mortality, the environment, affluence, and the plight of developing nations.

As a dedicated environmentalist, I wouldn’t be a vegetarian were it not for Singer: “We are, quite literally, gambling with the future of our planet—for the sake of hamburgers” (Animal Liberation).

Across the years, I’ve made transparent my profound admiration for utilitarian John Stuart Mill, whose On Liberty is a must-read. In Singer, we have his worthy successor, reinvigorating the intrinsic value of philosophy rooted in the factual and empirical, while putting to the test the prejudicial assumptions that deter our collective happiness.

In a time of ubiquitous existential despair, he reminds us that humans possess a latent altruism that can respond and make for a better world; one more equitable, lived with empathy and tolerance.

And Singer walks the talk. Upon graduating university, he began donating 10% of his income to charity. Today, that’s mushroomed to an astonishing 33% of his income, directed entirely to high-impact charities. On winning the coveted Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture in 2021, he gave its $1 million award entirely to charity.

Singer has restored philosophy as an axiom of the purposeful life, writing that “philosophy ought to question the basic assumptions of the age. Thinking through, critically and carefully, what most of us take for granted is, I believe, the chief task of philosophy, and the task that makes philosophy a worthwhile activity.”

The happiest of birthdays to you, Peter, and many more!

–RJ

The America I Remember

Mort Kūnstler, Washington Crossing the Delaware

I didn’t celebrate America’s 250th birthday yesterday. How could I, with Trump still at the helm of a listing ship? Our country is so deeply fractured that I lack confidence our ship of state can ever be restored to an even keel again.

While the mid-terms loom, a new, more radical faction seems to be taking hold, offering simple remedies, under the aegis of expanded government, to complex problems that may well prove incendiary to America’s best interests.

History is being distorted—accompanied by the rise of a heated rhetoric, the past filtered through a modern lens, as if we can sanitize our heritage by consigning to oblivion our flawed heroes who nonetheless made America possible.

To contend, as some now do, that the Revolution was fought primarily to preserve slavery is a profound untruth. In 1776, Great Britain had no intention of dismantling the institution. While Royal Governor Lord Dunmore famously offered freedom to slaves who fled rebel masters to fight for the Crown, his proclamation was a cynical tactic of war, not a moral crusade; Dunmore himself owned a hundred slaves whom he exempted from his proclamation, and Britain did not outlaw slavery in its empire until 1833. The colonists revolted over representation and imperial overreach, not a defense of bondage.

Far from protecting slavery, the radical ideals unleashed by the Revolution ignited the Western world’s very first widespread abolitionist movement, a moral arc that would ultimately culminate in a bloody Civil War and Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.

History taught from the periphery, filtered through rigid ideology or simplified into monolithic narratives, is intrinsically dangerous. It rests on a priori assumptions and is too often promulgated with dogmatism. True understanding requires nuance, humility, and courage.

Intolerance and intimidation increasingly menace our daily life. It’s a different America from the one I grew up with—dynamic, prosperous, a nation deserving of its patriotism.

And why not?

At the end of WWII, a victorious America was the sole nuclear power. It possessed an army of 14 million, an air force of 50,000 planes, and the largest naval force in history with nearly 7,000 ships, including 99 aircraft carriers.

Yet, alone among the global empires of history, America walked away from total dominion and chose peace over subjugation.

This is the America I remember and want back again.

—RJ

Caesar’s Circus: The Chilling Reality of Trump’s Iran Truce

I dare you to look at photographs of what Trump has done to the once pristine White House lawn—yesterday’s campus for a public UFC cage-match on the occasion of his turning eighty.

Meanwhile, the skeletal steel grids of his coveted ballroom, replacing the former historical East Wing, now surface above ground as he rushes to complete the project before the courts ultimately render their final verdict. The next project: his touted arch.

This morning he left the country for the annual G7 summit in Evian, France, leaving behind a polarized nation in supreme danger as he walks away from a senseless war that ultimately disrupted the economic welfare of many nations, including our own, achieving minimal returns.

Topping things off, Trump thanked Putin, whom he called before his departure like a child seeking parental approval, allegedly—with Xi Jinping as well for helping secure the present settlement by “not interfering.”

No thanks whatever for the Omani, Qatari, and Pakistani intermediaries who worked feverishly to secure this agreement. Rest assured, he’ll be reviving his campaign for the Nobel Prize.

In the negotiated ceasefire with Iran, the primary issue of Iran’s close proximity to creating a nuclear bomb has been deferred; its growing ballistic prowess, conceivably capable of striking the U.S. heartland, receives no mention.

Nevertheless, the effective U.S. blockade of the Strait of Hormuz has been immediately lifted, with billions in held Iranian assets and the undoing of sanctions to follow shortly. Trump, in keeping with his mercantile lusts, foresees an economic jackpot in a close partnership with Iran.

As for the fate of millions of repressed Iranians—7,000 murdered just last January, thousands still imprisoned, hangings continuing—Trump is indifferent to their suffering, on vivid display in this dubious agreement.

There is every likelihood that Iran will continue to violate any agreement. They are already contradicting his claims of a “toll-free” passage, proving they will use the threat of closure of the Hormuz waterway to gain their ends. What then?

As for Iran’s proxy, Hezbollah, suspending the lobbing of Iranian-supplied missiles into Israel—that’s just not going to happen.

In truth, this dubious agreement paves the way for a chilling reality the media has completely failed to grasp: a nuclear domino effect across the Middle East.

If a transactional, unreliable America signals it will tolerate a near-nuclear Iran for the sake of mercantile optics, do we honestly believe Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates will merely stand by? We are staring down the barrel of a terrifying regional arms race, triggered by the collapse of Western deterrence.

Worse still is the immediate, existential scenario that should send goosebumps up your torso. It is a poorly kept secret that an isolated, cornered Israel is already a potent nuclear power, with an estimated arsenal of up to 90 plutonium warheads.

Sidelined from the ceasefire negotiations and facing what it perceives as an absolute threat of extinction, what stops Israel from deciding that a preemptive first strike on a dangerous Iran is its only path to survival?

By washing his hands of the conflict, Trump hasn’t created peace; he has backed a nuclear-armed ally into a corner where dropping the Big One becomes a logical choice.

As for the G7, Macron altered the starting date to accommodate Sunday’s bash. Musn’t upset the volatile president.

European leaders must now wade through the wreckage of his current
unilateralism. Blinded previously by his February bombing of Iran, what hidden concessions lie buried?

In sum, we have an incompetent president devoid of any defined, consistent policy, ruthless to his critics, including members of his own party. Narcissistic, pecuniary, dictatorial, and omnivorously menacing, he is our Caesar.

His Brutus lies in a looming midterms Democratic sweep in both chambers, reducing his regime to a lame-duck presidency.

Still, the idea he’s in the White House for another two years—I don’t want to think about it!

–RJ

Wendell Berry and the Things That Matter

Unsplash: Amy Reed

I’ve finished my clustered reading of Wendell Berry with his Port William novel, Hannah Coulter, and feel I know him now as an adamant lover of the old ways: the community of belonging; simpler living and inherited traditions; the sanctity of the family farm; nature’s cyclic wheel, ushering change and mortality’s inevitable visit; the enduring power of love to redeem life’s frequent anguish.

Reading Wendell Berry has made me more mindful of what truly matters and, like him, I mourn the passing of a better way of life—less angry, more humane, sustaining in the daily beneficence of the familiar and the abiding.

—rj

Culture as Reenactment: Wallace Stevens, UNESCO, and the Fate of Living Traditions

Recently I posted my personal reading of Wallace Steven’s “Sunday Morning,” exploring what might replace religious transcendence once belief dissolves. Stevens’ answer is not despair but immanence, the sufficiency of the natural world, apprehended through the shaping power of imagination.

Yet it is not only religion that now shows signs of erosion. Embedded cultures, those dense inheritances that confer identity through their singularity, are likewise under strain.

In an increasingly global village, accelerated by digital transmission, the world assumes a more monocultural cast, often shaped by the diffuse reach of corporate and algorithmic influence. Against this drift, UNESCO convenes its Intergovernmental Committee each year to review additions to its Intangible Cultural Heritage lists.

Among these is the Urgent Safeguarding List, devoted to imperiled dialects, ritual songs, oral epics, and traditional crafts, forms of life whose disappearance would constitute not mere loss, but erasure.

We are inclined to think of culture as something we visit: a museum, a concert hall, a staged performance. But culture, more fundamentally, is not exhibition but enactment, a way of life sustained through repetition. When cultural memory vanishes, what is lost is not simply artifact but identity itself, as irreplaceable in its domain as the disappearance of elephants, lions, or polar bears from the natural world.

Meaning, then, is not merely conceived; it is made. It inheres in what a people does repeatedly, across time. Imagination, Stevens’ great theme, does not operate in abstraction alone; it is embedded in language, craft, music, and ritual. Culture is the accumulated expression of that imaginative labor.

I am no anthropologist, nor a specialist in indigenous societies; yet it is difficult to ignore the accelerating pressures placed upon such cultures, systems of knowledge refined over centuries of intimacy with specific environments, often encompassing ecological and medicinal understanding that modern systems only belatedly recognize.

Missionary activity, whatever its intentions, has frequently contributed to cultural leveling, supplanting local cosmologies with imported belief systems. Likewise, the expansion of agribusiness, mining, and deforestation, whether in the Amazon Basin or regions such as Papua New Guinea, has disrupted not only ecosystems, but the cultural worlds entwined with them.

The history of the Waorani in Ecuador offers a particularly stark instance. In 1956, a group of missionaries, including Jim Elliot, made contact with a people then labeled “Auca,” a Quechua term meaning “savage.” The encounter ended in violence, an event long framed as martyrdom but more plausibly understood as the defense of a bounded world.

Subsequent missionary and governmental incursions encouraged the Waorani to settle in centralized villages, disrupting their semi-nomadic, kin-based lifeways. The introduction of Christianity and Western norms altered not only belief, but social organization itself.

These transformations deepened with the discovery of oil. Companies such as Texaco, along with the state firm Petroecuador, initiated exploration and drilling across Waorani territory. Roads penetrated previously isolated tribal habitat, bringing loggers, settlers, and a cash economy. Environmental degradation followed: oil spills, polluted waterways, and the decline of flora and fauna, some unique to the region.

Cultural consequences were no less profound. Native language use diminished; oral traditions weakened; customary practices eroded. Some Waorani communities entered agreements with oil interests, while others resisted. Still others, the Tagaeri and Taromenane, remain in voluntary isolation, defending their autonomy with increasing difficulty.

In effect, a territory once lived as its own world has been recast as resource. Missionaries sought to save souls; governments and corporations sought to extract value. The result has been not only cultural change, but a destabilization of the very conditions under which meaning is made.

To read the Waorani encounter alongside Wallace Stevens and UNESCO is to see more clearly the stakes of each. Stevens imagines that, in the absence of transcendence, meaning may be remade through attentive presence to the world.

UNESCO seeks, more cautiously, to preserve the practices that make such meaning possible. The Waorani experience, however, reveals that these practices are neither secure nor easily restored. They can be fractured by missionization, by development, by the redefinition of land itself.

What follows is not silence, but improvisation. Meaning persists, though not intact: a continual effort to live coherently amid altered circumstances.

If Stevens offers a philosophy of immanence and UNESCO a strategy of cultural continuity, the Waorani expose their shared vulnerability, as meaning clings precipitously to practices that can be weakened, displaced, or undone.

For indigenous cultures like that of the Waorani, what is at stake is existential: the vanishing of a way of life, uniquely intelligible to those who inhabit it.”

—RJ

The Perfecț Evening: Tips on Social Etiquette

”If one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out.”
—Oscar Wilde

Pretense pervades most social relationships, less a flaw than a civic duty. There are ground rules that could be taken right out of Dale Carnegie’s landmark playbook, How to win Friends and Influence People. Obsequiousness is in. Sincerity a no-no.

When out with friends, be sure to temper news of your successes. It may sound like you’re boasting and, after all, your friends may have had a bad day. Best serve up your triumphs like a weak tea: faint, apologetic, and quickly forgotten.

Equally your woes. Everybody has them, and they’ll certainly not want subscribing to yours. And besides, nobody likes being cornered into false condolence. Nothing clears a room faster than earnest despair.

Try to agree with everyone. The food may be awful, but keep it to yourself. Silence signals discontent. Try a “thank you for a memorable meal!” It might get you invited again, and since you thought it “memorable,” having it again. If someone tells you of their transcendent ski venture at Aspen, a simple “awesome” suffices.

Whatever you do, don’t huddle up with someone, conversing in a corner. Avoid lingering In a conversation long enough to be known. Circulation’s democratic; depth, exclusionary. A minute per person hits the right balance between recognition and escape.

Encourage others to talk about themselves. Make them feel they’re the night’s chief exhibit, the most important person in the room, even though you can hardly stand them. It’s important to have people like you and, doing this, you can’t miss. It’s not an emotion but a technique. And who knows—this evening’s bore may prove tomorrow’s benefactor.

Be sure to dispense hugs liberally, even to those in daily life you eagerly avoid. Distribute them as though they were small-denomination currency passed out. Make them feel they’ve made the team.

At evening’s end, offer to help—clear plates, stack glasses, perhaps gesture nobly toward the tip if at a restaurant. Accept, with serene gratitude, the inevitable refusal. The offer, not the act, is what counts.

Should you encounter someone who violates these protocols—who speaks too candidly, listens too intently or, worst of all, means what they say, withdraw promptly. Avoid authenticity like a draft in an old house,

For instance, I have this “friend” on Facebook who “doth protest too much”(Hamlet). Practicing social etiquette, I don’t travel to his page anymore.

With these modest disciplines in place, your evenings are granted success: pleasantly forgettable, flawlessly managed, absent of those awkward intrusions—honesty, feeling, intuitive vapors that have been known to unsettle a perfectly good night.

—rj

ON TRUTH, POWER, AND THE STORIES WE TELL OURSELVES

In moments of political outrage, we often hear that some “moral compact” has been broken between the government and the people, as though public life rests on an understood promise of honesty and good faith. It is a comforting idea. It’s also, I think, a naïve one.

The record we inherit suggests otherwise. Bill Clinton misled the public under oath. John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson deepened American involvement in the Vietnam War under a widening credibility gap. Franklin D. Roosevelt withheld the full truth of his condition from the electorate. These are not anomalies. They are reminders.

None of this excuses Donald Trump, whose conduct stands as an extreme case in its brazenness. But it does suggest that the deeper problem is not the breaking of a compact, but our belief that such a compact has ever governed political life in more than name.

Niccolò Machiavelli understood that those who govern must often act against truth while preserving its appearance. Thomas Hobbes argued that we submit to authority not because it is virtuous, but because it is necessary. Between them, the so-called compact begins to look less like a foundation than a useful fiction, one that steadies public faith even as it obscures political reality.

If that is so, then the question is not how to restore a moral politics, but how much of our moral life we should ever have entrusted to politics in the first place.

Here Henry David Thoreau offers a necessary restraint: that government is best which governs least, not because it is especially good, but because it is always liable to be otherwise.

And Wendell Berry reminds us, more quietly, that the work of responsibility does not belong first to governments at all, but to persons, living within limits, bound to places, accountable to one another in ways no distant authority can finally secure.

We have asked too much of politics, and in doing so, we have misunderstood it.

Power does not keep faith; it manages necessity. It persuades, it conceals, it endures. It cannot bear the weight of the moral order we would like to rest upon it.

That burden remains where it has always been—closer to home.

Not in the abstractions of the state, nor in the promises of those who govern, but in the small, stubborn practices of truthfulness and care: in what we say, what we refuse to say, what we permit, and what we will not.

If there is any compact worth defending, it is not the one we imagine between ourselves and power. It is the one we keep, or fail to keep, with one another.

—RJ

A War America Can’t Win: The Iran Crisis

On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched coordinated aerial strikes on Iran, ostensibly to induce regime change and secure stability in the Middle East.

Central to this strategy was the expectation of a mass popular uprising—something glimpsed in January 2026, when tens of thousands of unarmed civilians took to the streets and were met with lethal force. Estimates suggest as many as 30,000 were killed, 7000 independently confirmed. The regime they opposed—a repressive Islamic theocracy entrenched since 1979—remains intact.

This is a war America is unlikely to win.

Despite the destruction of command centers, arsenals, and the targeted killing of senior leadership, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran has demonstrated a capacity for resilience that was either underestimated or ignored.

Its response has been asymmetric and expansive: ballistic missiles and drone strikes aimed not only at Israel but at a widening circle of nations hosting American bases—Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. Recent launches have extended even farther, toward Crete, Turkey, and the joint UK–U.S. base on Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, 2400 miles distant.

At such range, the perimeter of vulnerability shifts. Southeastern Europe comes into view; with further technological refinement, even cities such as Rome or Berlin may not remain beyond reach; in a decade, the United States.

As this conflict widens, its economic consequences are already apparent. Iran’s disruption of the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil supply passes, has driven prices upward, with projections rising sharply. The leverage is stark: Iran need not defeat the United States militarily to impose severe costs. It need only prolong the conflict.

The political implications are equally stark. Domestic opposition is mounting here at home, shaped less by geopolitics than by inflation, felt daily in grocery bills and at the gas pump. A war that amplifies those pressures becomes difficult to sustain, regardless of its stated aims.

Even proposed escalations such as a seizure of Kharg Island, which handles a significant portion of Iran’s oil exports, risk becoming symbolic victories at disproportionate cost.

The comparison to Iwo Jima is not misplaced: a tactical gain unlikely to alter the strategic reality. Much of Iran’s missile infrastructure remains embedded and protected, beyond the reach of conventional assault.

Recent Trump statements suggesting that U.S. objectives have largely been met already signal a search for an exit. Yet an off-ramp may not be readily available. Iran’s advantage lies in time. By sustaining pressure, economic as much as military, it can compel concessions without decisive confrontation.

There was another path.

Rather than precipitating war, a strategy of containment through sanctions and patience might have allowed the regime to atrophy under the weight of its own contradictions. Iran faces converging crises: acute water scarcity, environmental degradation, declining agricultural productivity, economic duress, and deep internal dissent. A large portion of its population—diverse, young, and increasingly disillusioned—has already demonstrated a willingness to demand change at great personal risk.

That internal pressure, not external force, may have proven the more decisive agent of transformation.

–RJ