On: Intemperate Trump brings chaos and confusion to Iran talks

April 1, 2026

Chaos, they call it. Confusion. As if a sparrow’s erratic flight were a new meteorological phenomenon, and not merely the bird being precisely what it is. The report is a masterclass in institutional vocabulary. “Unreliable style.” A splendid euphemism. Let us correct the definition.

Diplomatic confusion, n. The state of being forced to acknowledge that a foreign power has correctly interpreted your bluster as having no strategic content whatsoever, leaving you with no move but to pretend its understanding is a misunderstanding.

They fret that Tehran sees the Strait’s value clearly. Of course they do. One does not need to be a Persian admiral to understand that water flows, and oil upon it. The “confusion” is entirely our own, born from the quaint and persistent official belief that a man who speaks solely for the moment can build policy for the decade. The finding is null, and perfectly clean. The signal - the torrent of words - predicts exactly nothing beyond its own immediate emission. It is not a failed test of diplomacy. It is a successful test of a null hypothesis: that noise is not signal.

The weary work of the lexicographer is to record the meanings that are, not those we wish were so. Today’s entry: Strategic dialogue, n. The process by which one party calculates the tangible value of a geographic chokepoint, while the other calculates the intangible value of television ratings. The gap is not a mystery. It is the whole of the result. And when the gap is the whole of the result, the only thing left to define is the cost of pretending otherwise. That ledger, I suspect, remains open. And it is being filled in not with words, but with the quiet, patient accrual of advantage by those who have stopped listening to them.