ED MORRISSEY: Hegseth: ‘Decisive’ Days Ahead for Iran; Regime ‘Fractured?’

Trump sounds like he wants to abruptly leave; Hegseth wants to go the full Curtis LeMay; Rubio wants to talk with rational alternatives. Either this is the most incoherent winning side of a war in human history, or there’s a strategy in place.

Eli Lake argues vociferously for the latter. Trump and his team are waging “psychological warfare” against the Iranian regime, Lake declares, and it’s working:

Trump is waging psychological warfare with the remnants of a battered regime. Israel has killed 16 top regime leaders since the fighting began on February 28. These include Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, national security adviser Ali Larijani, and minister of intelligence Esmaeil Khatib. Then there are the lower-level commanders in the Revolutionary Guard Corps and Basij state militia who have perished in drone and missile strikes. The current supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, has not been seen in public since he ascended to the post held by his father.

“If you are sitting in Tehran, you are underground if you are in the leadership tier,” Joel Rayburn, former U.S. Army colonel and senior diplomat in Trump’s first term, told me. “You know if you can be located you will be killed. Your command and control is severely disrupted, and now you see the United States is a few days away from having a half a division worth of ground forces in the Gulf region and you can offer no resistance. Your leverage is waning.”

In such an environment, who wants to be the leader of a “new and more reasonable regime”? For the true believers left, like the recently promoted Ahmad Vahidi, who now heads Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps after the former chief was killed, negotiations with Trump are tantamount to capitulation. For the unlucky Iranian president, Masoud Pezeshkian, who is stuck with managing an economy that’s ground to a halt, Vahidi’s escalations are national suicide.

As Ed concludes, “Stay tuned.”