Don’t read The New York Times.

That was Donald Trump’s advice to Americans as the Iran war approached its two-week anniversary.

“[I]f you read the Failing New York Times, you would incorrectly think that we are not winning,” Trump seethed, in an irritable post to his social media platform.

Trump’s taking his own advice. That is: He’s not reading the Times, or at least not in any systematic way. I read the Times religiously, and I’m certainly not under the impression the US isn’t “winning” Trump’s war of choice with Iran. It’s a bloody rout, and exactly no one other than Iranian state media says otherwise.

What Trump doesn’t understand is that because the firepower asymmetry guaranteed a first-half blowout, no one’s dwelling on the scoreboard at halftime. No one, that is, except Trump, who reminded the world Friday that “Iran’s Navy is gone, their Air Force is no longer, missiles, drones and everything else are being decimated, and their leaders have been wiped from the face of the earth.”

Again, no one questioned America’s capacity to destroy Iran’s conventional fighting force and assassinate its leaders, just like no one questioned whether America was capable of subduing the Iraqi army in 2003 on the way to Baghdad.

The question isn’t whether the deployment of $20 billion in superpower “fire and fury” is devastating to a middling military with no remaining air defenses and no allies willing to, or capable of, coming to its aid. It is. Devastating.

Rather, the questions center around America’s capacity to manage the knock-on effects and plan for the day after. What’ll be the blowback from the blowout, so to speak, and how prepared is the US to manage it?

Economically, the blowback’s unprecedented oil price volatility. Consider the staggering figure below.

At one point Thursday, the most widely-tracked (or I should say the most readily-accessible, easily-tracked) gauge of implied vol for US oil hit its highest levels on record if you don’t count March and April of 2020.

That’s completely untenable, and although Scott Bessent this week said the Pentagon anticipated it might have to provide naval escorts through the Strait of Hormuz (the fact that Bessent’s weighing in on military strategy says a lot about Pete Hegseth’s credibility, by the way), anyone familiar with oil markets will attest that no contingency planning’s sufficient for a scenario where you attack Iran but don’t completely eliminate the regime’s capacity to obstruct that maritime chokepoint.

The figure below shows the high-low range for WTI this week — it was >$40.

Again, that’s untenable. For corporates, for consumers, for oil importing nations and even, on some vectors, for oil exporting nations outside the Gulf. (For those in the Gulf, it’s a moot point. Their oil’s marooned. It’s stranded product.)

It’s impossible to plan when the price of energy’s that unpredictable. We’re talking about a $40 range from something that traded between $120 and $76, and that something happens to be the world’s most important commodity.

Trump has to get a handle on this somehow, and to reiterate my warning from Friday of last week, I worry that’s going to entail the carpet-bombing of Tehran.

Apparently, the Iranian people aren’t going to rise up and overthrow the regime. To the extent that “failure” is a function of falling bombs and an inability to organize amid apocalyptic chaos, I don’t blame them.

But (and this is crucial) there was never an organized, coherent resistance, let alone any single figure around whom those opposed to the regime might rally.

Israel’s probably fine with creating a failed state in Iran as a second-“best” option, but Trump shouldn’t be. If you think the Strait’s dangerous now, it’d be even more so in an “Iran as Libya” (or “Iran as Yemen”) scenario.

And the problem is, wiping out the regime with a scorched-earth campaign in the capital’s a “good” way to get to that failed state outcome.

In the same social media message, Trump said the US has “unparalleled firepower, unlimited ammunition and plenty of time.”

“They’ve been killing innocent people all over the world for 47 years, and now [I’m] killing them,” he added. “Watch what happens to these deranged scumbags today.”