David Cohen @dcpersonal01 - Twitter Profile

Jeff, you know I love you as a person and a friend, but your motivated reasoning in this article falls flat with me and with America 🇺🇸. Here is my response to your piece: The Iran War Was Not a Defeat — It Was a Reckoning Your piece on Trump’s “defeat” in Iran is a masterclass in motivated reasoning dressed up as geopolitical analysis. Let’s deal in facts. On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched coordinated military strikes against the Iranian regime, targeting its nuclear facilities, military infrastructure, and leadership…following a determination that diplomacy had been exhausted and a nuclear-armed Iran posed an unacceptable threat to the world. What followed was not a defeat. It was the systematic dismantling of the most destabilizing terror regime in the Middle East. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei…Iran’s iron-fisted ruler since 1989, the architect of Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis…was killed in strikes on Tehran. Senior advisers and military leadership were eliminated alongside him. The man who spent four decades exporting terrorism across the region is gone. You somehow forgot to lead with that. CIA Director John Ratcliffe confirmed severe damage to Iran’s nuclear facilities that will take over a decade to rebuild. A U.S. naval blockade choked off Iran’s oil exports. Ambassador Mike Waltz confirmed Iran’s currency was in free fall and its foreign reserves were near zero. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called the collapse of the Iranian currency the strategy’s “grand culmination.” This is what economic obliteration looks like. The U.S. Navy sank over thirty Iranian ships. Iran’s capacity to mine or close the Strait of Hormuz…the threat that has hung over the global economy for decades…has been shattered. Your piece wrings its hands over the MOU’s imperfections. But consider what the agreement actually reflects: a theocratic regime that once strutted across the Middle East through its terror proxies now sitting at a table in Versailles, reaffirming it will not pursue nuclear weapons, agreeing to open the Strait of Hormuz, and accepting a 60-day framework for further nuclear talks…after its navy was sunk, its Supreme Leader killed, its air defenses shredded, and its economy reduced to rubble. That’s not capitulation by America. That’s the posture of a beaten adversary buying time. While I don’t believe the IRGC will ever give up their highly-enriched uranium, this has been a decisive victory to date. Now…about proportionality and concern for human life. You cluck solemnly over 3,375 Iranian casualties across the entire conflict. Chicago recorded 416 murders in 2025 alone with nearly 2,800 people shot in a single year in a single American city. A typical violent summer weekend in Democrat-run Chicago produces more American bloodshed than the entire Iran war cost in U.S. lives. Where is the Time cover story on that? Where are the Sonnenfeld op-eds demanding accountability from the Democrat officials who have presided over that carnage for decades? You invoke Roy Cohn and the Marx Brothers to paint Trump as a con man declaring false victories. But the real sleight of hand is yours…treating the elimination of the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, the destruction of its nuclear timetable, and the cratering of its economy as a loss, because the terms of surrender weren’t worded to your satisfaction. The Iran war has removed a knife that had been held to the throat of the Middle East for forty years. That’s not nothing. That’s the whole thing.

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