I was in the middle of writing a piece about The New York Times’s foremost hawk, Bret Stephens, when in the span of about a day we saw Trump threaten civilizational annihilation and then agree to a temporary ceasefire.

The ceasefire is obviously precarious (Israel has continued its invasion of Lebanon, and negotiations are reportedly going poorly) but the tentative deal reflected a near-total victory for the Iranian state. The terms will be very different if there’s ever a final agreement, but the mere fact of the ceasefire signals that Iran found a significant point of leverage in its control over the Strait of Hormuz.

What would be the most embarrassing thing to have published immediately before this ceasefire began? Here’s a contender: just hours before the preliminary agreement was announced, Stephens published a piece titled “The Iranian Advantage is an Illusion” (the alternative title: “No, Iran Isn’t Winning the War”). 

The premise of the piece (which he writes, for no practical reason, as a second-person account of “a gifted midcareer intelligence officer in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps”) is that Iran is, contrary to widespread belief, losing the war. The regime’s regional proxies are weakened, its leadership and military are depleted, and its people are in a state of unrest.

This framing is telling. Bret insists that “Western commentators” believe that Iran is winning the war. But that’s not exactly right. What most commentators believe is that the United States is not winning the war, in the sense that it is not achieving anything concrete. Bret can list off the various ways that the Iranian regime is depleted, but he doesn’t, other than in abstractions, explain how any of it redounds to the benefit of the United States. 

Bret’s column comes on the heels of another, from just a couple of weeks ago, titled “The War Is Going Better Than You Think,” where he argued that compared to past American wars, Iran has been a success. But the metrics he uses are selective. He mostly argues that American losses have been minimal. Which is true, and especially compelling if you believe that Iranian lives don’t matter. Stephens delineates exactly how many aircraft were lost, but doesn’t mention Iranian civilians even briefly.