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We’ve been getting reports all morning that Trump is about to fire DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, and has been asking around about what various allies think of the idea.
Just minutes ago, he broke the news on Truth Social (where else?) that Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) will take over for Noem, “effective March 31, 2026.” Presumably that means he is Trump’s nominee to be Senate-confirmed.
Noem will be shuffled into a new “special envoy” position.
Here’s another post following up on the earlier one about free passage through the Strait of Hormuz, the pinched off little turn in the Persian Gulf where the waterway is at its narrowest. On Bluesky, in response to my earlier post, one user pointed me to this video, a daily ~30 minute update on a YouTube channel called What’s Going on With Shipping.
I want to start by stating clearly the basis upon which I’m sharing this video. I’d never heard of the channel before a couple hours ago. It’s run by a guy named Sal Mercogliano who says he’s a former merchant mariner and historian who teaches maritime history and also consults on the topic. In other words, he appears to be a merchant shipping and tanker professional/nerd. And he runs this shipping news channel. I can’t independently vouch for his credibility. However, I watched today’s episode and a number of factors — subscriber count, reliance on credentialed news articles and industry data sources, tone, meticulousness and more — make me think that it’s at least legit enough to get a beginning overview of the situation in the Gulf. I found it fascinating. It reminds me — sadly — of reporting on the supply chain breakdowns at the beginning of the COVID pandemic. You suddenly had to come up to speed on the complex but to most of us little-understood world of global supply chains, the underbelly and machinery of how the modern interconnected world actually runs.
Out of the blue we learn tonight that U.S. Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT) isn’t running for reelection. Montana is one of those states that is certainly a tough challenge for Democrats. But it’s not impossible. So this adds to Republican challenges in holding the Senate. But we also seem to have a replay of what Dem Rep. Jesus “Chuy” Garcia caught grief for last year. Garcia waited for the very last moment under the filing deadline to announce his retirement, leaving only enough time for his hand-picked successor, Garcia’s Chief of Staff Patty Garcia (no relation), to file her candidacy papers for the election. Since Garcia’s is a solid Democratic district, allowing Patty Garcia to run in the primary unopposed means that she is basically guaranteed to be elected. Daines appears to have done the exact same thing with a heads up to current Montana U.S. Attorney Kurt Alme.
Here’s a very interesting detail about risk, economics and military power that is kind of under the headlines in the expanding U.S.-Iran War. Iran is in a very, very bad position. Its military and deterrent power have already been badly damaged over the last three years. And it’s facing the top regional military power (Israel) and the top global military power (the U.S.) at the same time. It’s best bet to bring the war to a stop is to create huge international pain, and the best way to engineer that is to throttle oil deliveries from the Middle East, specifically by threatening shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.
It’s the perhaps tired refrain of foreign policy and defense professionals that wars are easy to start (if you’re still, mostly, the preeminent global military power) but much harder to finish. They are unpredictable. They quickly spread in directions you don’t anticipate. As the still preeminent global military power, you tend to be on the line for other sorts of instability that your war of choice creates. And yet Donald Trump has mainly been able to engage in what we might call impulsive unilateralism without generating too many problems for himself in the short run. He decapitated the Venezuelan regime through what amounted to a dramatic raid and is now, improbably, running the country as a kind of American presidential subsidiary through the mechanisms of the Chavista regime itself. He assassinated Qasem Soleimani in 2020. He launched a massive but brief bombing raid against Iranian nuclear facilities last year. In each case the U.S. was mostly able to end things quickly and on its own terms.
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Until two minutes before Montana’s 5 p.m. filing deadline, Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT) was running to keep his seat.
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