OUR DAILY THREAD: No Laughing Matter
That joke isn't funny anymore
THE SET-UP: Trump’s Oval Office pool spray with Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi gave us this memorable moment:
Q: Why didn't you tell US Allies in Europe and Asia, like Japan, about the war before attacking Iran? So, we are very confused about -- we Japanese citizens.
A: Well, one thing, you don't want to signal too much, you know. When we go in, we went in very hard and we didn't tell anybody about it because we wanted surprise. Who knows better about surprise than Japan, OK? Why didn't you tell me about Pearl Harbor, OK? Right? He's asking me -- no, you believe in surprise I think much more so than us and we had to surprise them and we did.”
The news media didn’t characterize it as an insult or a gaffe. It appears years of working the refs has finally paid off:
Fair enough. Seems like a cheap laugh, but okay.
On the other hand, just writing it off as just a joke misses the admission in his punchline. He admits that his attack on Iran was a sneak attack. And that’s not the first time he’s touted the element of surprise. He’s too proud of himself to hide it. But is it something to be proud of? Is it wise for a nation-state to acquire a reputation for being duplicitous?
That’s how many Americans thought of the Japanese after the “sneak attack” on Pearl Harbor.
Now Trump is associating his attack on Iran with a date that still lives in infamy.
Ironically, Imperial Japan was negotiating to end an embargo on oil. There are differing schools of thought about their intentions during the final weeks leading up to a fourteen-part message the government in Toyko sent to the embassy in DC prior to the attack. It was meant to be delivered just before the bombs dropped, but the delegation took a long time to compile the message, perhaps misunderstanding its true nature. They delivered it more than an hour after Pearl Harbor was hit. Just how clear their intentions were in the final communique is a source of debate, but they did plan on informing the US that Japan was pulling out of negotiations.
So, when Trump said, “you believe in surprise I think much more so than us,” he’s both wrong and he’s projecting. He’s wrong because the Japanese don’t “believe in surprise.” Not anymore. In fact, the Japanese government issued an apology in 1994 for failing to properly break off negotiations in 1941. Per the Los Angeles Times:
“There can be no excuse,” the Foreign Ministry said, for Japan’s delay in delivering a message to Washington on Dec. 7, 1941, that it would negotiate no longer.
But the apology wasn’t directed at the United States. The Foreign Ministry said “the statement was directed to the people of Japan.” The Los Angeles Times attributed that to Japanese culture’s “generalized concept of shame” and “the particular sense of shame many Japanese feel about the beginning of World War II.”
Shame is, sadly, hard to find in Trump’s America. To the contrary, shamelessness is the coin of his realm and it is the new standard in international affairs. He set that standard when he shamelessly proclaimed he was taking Venezuela’s oil after capturing its leader.
Like it did with Iran, the US was negotiating when Trump launched his surprise attack on Venezuela’s capital.
The pattern is clear … it is Trump who believes in sneak attacks and it sure seems like negotiations are nothing but a ruse.
Does anybody actually believe Trump would assemble a massive armada and not use it? That’s to say nothing of the troop movements, the prepositioning of aircraft, the evacuation of embassy staff, the signing of an anticipatory Executive Order targeting soon-to-be fertilizer or the way he conveniently took control of Venezuela’s oil before throwing the global market in turmoil.
This war was always on Trump’s to-do list. And I suspect the negotiations were designed to lull the Iranian leadership into exposing themselves to Israeli targeting systems. The negotiations drew them out and made them easier to kill. They foolishly believed Trump was negotiating in good faith. Netanyahu may have forced his hand by, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in an apparent moment of truth, launching an attack that made it necessary to join if only to protect US assets from the counterattack. But if so, it would have only been a matter of timing.
It was coming, if not then … then soon.
That said, I do wonder how many of the reported conflicts between the two are just convenient “outs” Trump can use when fielding objections from his Gulf Arab benefactors. It’s a cake-and-eat-it-too mechanism that allows Israel to conduct its brutal brand of civilian-punishing warfare while Trump walks away with plausible deniability.
No, Trump’s little “joke” is more than a crass example of the unrepentant style of “diplomacy” he presaged when he pushed past the Prime Minister of Montenegro at his first NATO summit and jutted out his chin like Mussolini posing on a Roman balcony. The real joke is the claim—which Trump characterizes as a “feeling” he got—that the US had to attack to stop an imminent attack by Iran, which he claims was poised to “takeover” the Middle East.
As Joe Kent confirmed in his resignation and subsequent interviews, Iran posed no immediate threat, nor was it anywhere close to posing a nuclear threat. Netanyahu knew it. Trump knew it. And the Iranians knew they were down to their last bargaining chip—the remaining enriched uranium. In a sense, the first attack on Iran—the so-called Twelve Day War—made the second attack likelier. Had Trump’s beloved bombing run—Midnight Hammer—eliminated the enriched uranium and verifiably so, what pretext would there have been to do what the US and Israel are doing now … which is to lay waste to the country’s infrastructure and hobble it for decades?
This war is not about nuclear weapons. This is about creating another failed state and capturing some control over Iran’s hydrocarbons. An Israeli official admitted that if the Iranian people would be “slaughtered” if they rose up like Trump and Israel suggested. That, in turn, suggested their suggestion is just one of the many fig leaves they’ve tried-on along the way.
So far, none have been able to hide the war boners Trump and Netanyahu get from bombing Iran.
Maybe that’s the point.
They want the world to see them screw the international system and realize there isn’t a thing they can do about it. They are operating with the kind of impunity that ultimately fueled the building of the system they’ve nullified with a ghoulish glee.
Instead of circumspection about the kind of total warfare and defiant inhumanity that led to the world to promise “Never Again,” Trump said, ”you don’t do a ceasefire when you are literally obliterating the other side.” - jp
Joe Kent doubles down: ‘No intelligence’ of an Iran ‘sneak attack’
https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/18/politics/video/joe-kent-iran-tucker-carlson-vrtc
‘Iranians Do Not Sneak Attack’: Iran FM Refutes Trump’s Claim Of Tehran Planning Strike On US
https://www.news18.com/world/iranians-do-not-sneak-attack-iran-fm-refutes-trumps-claim-of-tehran-planning-strike-on-us-ws-l-9989162.html
Iran war’s horrors are why we should teach the Geneva Conventions in schools
https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2026/03/19/the-war-in-iran-is-another-reason-the-geneva-conventions-should-be-taught-in-schools/
Attacks on hospitals are surging in war zones. What do the laws of war say about protecting them?
https://www.downtoearth.org.in/health/attacks-on-hospitals-are-surging-in-war-zones-what-do-the-laws-of-war-say-about-protecting-them
Israel Killed Over a Dozen Lebanese Paramedics in Three Days, Now Claiming That Ambulances Are “Hezbollah” Targets
https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/lebanon-medical-workers-paramedics-israel-targeted-ambulances-hezbollah-islamic-health-authority
Israel urges Iranians to revolt but privately assesses they’ll be ‘slaughtered’
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/03/17/israel-iran-cable-revolt-slaughtered/