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Sending in the Clowns
I fail to understand why the United States sends relateively inexperienced negotiators to whatever meetings take place to resolve the war President Trump started with Iran.
Presidential son-in-law and investor Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff lack the bargaining skills to carry out high level international negotiations as well as sufficient knowledge of the history of the issues involved. Success in the business world, or friendship with Donald Trump, does not justify their role in these meetings, whenever they resume.
Even Vice President Vance and Secretary of State Rubio lack all of the necessary skills and deep knowledge required when dealing with trained professional diplomats representing other countries, including of course, Iran. They need experts sitting at their side at the table. I am not certain that such expertise is available to them.
When the United States competes in international athletic events, we try to send our best and most qualified to represent our country. We have such people available in the world of diplomacy. Unfortunately, often they turn out to be government employees (as diplomats usually are) and using them is difficult because Republican leadership, leaning in a libertarian direction, seems to think government is the enemy, not the friend, of the people. And those who come from the academic world might not profess loyalty to the Administration.
So we send in amateurs which is little better than ‘sending in the clowns,’ a decision made by the chief clown himself.
JL
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Is Peace in Sight?
If we are to believe what their respective governments tell us, the Strait of Hormuz ought to be open, and cease fire talks between the United States and Iran proceeding now that Israel and Lebanon are now talking to each other.
But each side, however, puts its own spin on to what it agreed, providing them with ‘wiggle room.’ I still wish we had better negotiators involved than those described above.
Right now, the United State Navy is still chasing down shipping all over the world that has Iranian connections and blockading Iranian ports by air, which acts have moved Iran to once again close the Strait of Hormuz, now renamed by them as the Strait of Iran.
And israel is supposedly only targeting Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, but they are still difficult to separate from other locations there. By the time you are reading this, these things may have changed … again.
JL
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Continuing Research into Artificial Intelligence
The previous posting of Jackspotpourri suggested keeping up with articles concerning Artificial Intelligence. Those interested in doing so might start by clicking here or copying and pasting https://www.forbes.com/lists/ai50/ on their device’s browser line.
This Forbes Magazine article is a summary of the businesses actively involved in Artifical Intelligence’s development.
Anyone who does anything on the internet should be familiar with tools such as Claude and ChatGPT and what has been going on with Anthropic, the developer of Claude. This article may provide a starting point for those who want to do more than just scratch the surface of information technology.
JL
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Comments from New Yorker's Editor
Originally written ten days earlier, the following piece by New Yorker magazine editor David Remnick appeared in its issue dated April 20. (That magazine dates its issues at least a week ahead so that they appear to be current when made available for purchase on newsstands.)
Trump’s Strategic and Moral Failure in Iran
From the first day of his Presidency, Trump has posed an emergency to both his country and the world - By David Remnick
April 10, 2026
“Not many years ago, a ruthless man with an uneasy mind took power in his country and created a cult of personality. In the center of the capital, he erected a gold statue of himself that rotated with the sun.
He stashed billions in a foreign bank. He closed the academy of sciences, the ballet, the philharmonic, the circus, and all provincial libraries. His autobiography became the nation’s spiritual guide. He banned dogs from the capital for their “unappealing odor.” He renamed the months: January for himself, April for his mother. He was fond of melons. The second Sunday of August became National Melon Day. Such was the world of Saparmurat Niyazov, Turkmenistan’s leader from 1985 until his death, by cardiac arrest, in 2006.
For the Turkmen people, there was nothing comical about life under his dictatorship. He barred dissent and packed his jails with prisoners of conscience. The only consolation was that he could not impose his grandiosity on the globe.
Donald Trump, by contrast, has, from the first day of his Presidency, posed an emergency to both his country and the world, even as he has ceaselessly invoked the language of “emergency” to inflate threats, suspend norms, and expand his own power.
A decade ago, he was already making statements that flouted the ordinary standards of adult behavior. When it came to North Korea, for example, he alternated between cooing words of affection for Kim Jong Un and issuing taunts that mixed nuclear brinkmanship with masculine insecurity: “I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”
Trump embodies the notion that, with age, you become what you always were, only more so. In the final days of the 2024 campaign, he met with the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board. When asked whether he would deploy the U.S. military if China, under Xi Jinping, were to blockade Taiwan, Trump replied, “I wouldn’t have to, because he respects me, and he knows I’m fucking crazy.”
The MAGA coalition has long countenanced Trump’s bigotry and cruelty. But now, with the repeated violations of an America First foreign policy, his poll numbers have plummeted. Since returning to office, Trump has ordered military strikes on Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, Venezuela, and Iran, and has felt little need to provide a coherent rationale for any of them.
According to reporting by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, of the Times, Trump and his national-security advisers gathered in the Situation Room on February 11th to listen to the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, argue for a coördinated attack on Iran. Even though the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, the C.I.A. director, John Ratcliffe, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Dan Caine, made their reservations plain—Rubio called Netanyahu’s talk of regime change “bullshit”—Trump blundered ahead. And, as in the days of the Turkmen dictator, everyone fell into line.
But when the Iranian regime failed to collapse or capitulate, when Netanyahu’s prediction of a national uprising failed to materialize, Trump turned to threats of war crimes and genocide against the very people he claimed to be helping liberate: ‘A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS?’
These were not the words of a strategist. They were the words of a maniac. And they had a galvanizing effect, though hardly in the way Trump might have intended. Some of his erstwhile acolytes—Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones—seem to have woken up to how dangerous he has always been.
Yet around the Cabinet table, at Mar-a-Lago, and in the Republican caucus on Capitol Hill, it is gospel that his deranged threats forced a ceasefire and scored a major victory. The President’s war, though, seems poised to achieve little that was not already available through prewar diplomacy, or through some renewed version of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or J.C.P.O.A., the Iran nuclear deal secured by the Obama Administration.
In fact, the original sin of this disaster was Trump’s abandonment of that deal, in 2018. For all its limits, it had stalled Iran’s march toward an atomic weapon.
But Netanyahu, long eager for a full-scale war against Iran - aimed not only at its nuclear program but at its proxies, such as Hezbollah - shrewdly played on Trump’s vanity and his contempt for Barack Obama. Trump destroyed the J.C.P.O.A. with nothing to replace it.
So the war stands as a strategic failure and a moral calamity. The ceasefire is already fragile. “The whole point of this exercise was supposedly to advance the cause of freedom in Iran,” Karim Sadjadpour, a Washington-based specialist on the country, said. “To go from ‘help is on the way’ to ‘we are going to wipe out your civilization’ is strategic malpractice.”
According to Danny Citrinowicz, an Iran expert who formerly worked in Israeli intelligence, Trump’s principal envoys to the region, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, almost certainly misread Iran’s capabilities and intentions. “This is a colossal disaster and should never have happened,” Citrinowicz said, noting that it will “haunt the region and world for many years to come.”
I
In the opening days of the war, the United States and Israel killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and wiped out much of Iran’s defense and intelligence leadership, apparently believing that the regime would somehow give way to “moderates” and “pragmatists.” Instead, the theocracy and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps remain in place, equally radical, equally repressive, and more determined than ever to acquire the ultimate deterrent: a nuclear weapon. Why give up that pursuit, as Libya did, and leave yourself exposed, when you can, like North Korea, achieve it and deter attack?
Trump has gone far toward shattering what’s left of America’s global stature.
His preposterous bluster about Greenland, Cuba, and NATO has undermined the postwar alliance. He has humiliated and betrayed the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky.
And all the while Vladimir Putin, who aims to press Ukraine for still more territory, and Xi Jinping, who keeps Taiwan in view, watch the spectacle of Donald Trump for what it reveals about both his instability and the cratering credibility of American leadership.
In the midst of the war, Trump released plans for his Presidential library. Its centerpiece will be an auditorium with an immense gold statue of himself. Whether it will turn with the sun is not yet known.”
(Published in the print edition of the April 20, 2026, issue of the New Yorker with the headline ‘Global Threat.’)
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In my opinion, it is up to Rubio, Ratcliffe, and Caine, as well as any others present at that February 11 meeting in the White House’s Situation Room, to recognize that they had been misinformed and misled by Netanyahu and Trump and to lead an effort, directed primarily at Republicans, to remove Donald Trump from office, using whatever means is available to accomplish that most quickly. He must go!
Whoever succeeds Trump is certain to be a great improvement over a president who actually boasted to the Wall Street Journal two years ago (see above New Yorker article) that the president of China respects him because ‘he thinks that I’m fucking crazy.’ If that’s the self-image Trump is content to project, we have great reason for concern. Being thusly detached from reality is not a virtue.
It is that simple.
He is, as Remnick puts it, a ‘Global Threat.’
Perhaps coincidentally, the New Yorker magazine issue from which the above article is reproduced also included a lengthy review by critic Louis Menand of a book about the end of the lost Vietnam war, a point at which all the United States was doing was attempting to ‘save face.’ It seems to me, right now, that is the same thing that we are attempting to do in our misguided war against Iran.
JL
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You Want Evidence?
And speaking of Trump’s alternate reality, economist Paul Krugman addresses it truthfully in his posting dated April 18. To read it, click here or copy and paste paulkrugman@substack.com on your device’s browser line.
And then, if you need further evidence of the President’s illegal activities, and those of his appointees, check out what Professor Heather Cox Richardson has been writing and documenting with links to her sources in her ‘Letters from an American’ by clicking here or copying and pasting https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/ on your device’s browser line.
In her past few postings there, she touches a lot of bases, too many to list here … so take advantage of the suggested links. Do not remain confused by the alternate reality in which Donald Trump dwells.
Don’t try to find some relief in the comic pages either.
So long for now.
JL
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Housekeeping on Jackspotpourri
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More on the Sources of Information in Jackspotpourri: The sources of information used by Jackspotpourri include a delivered local daily ‘printed’ newspaper (now the South Florida Sun Sentinel) and what appears in my daily email; that includes the views of many contributors, including the New York Times and other respected journals.
Be aware that when I open that email, I first quickly glance at and screen out those sent to my very old former email address and those considered ‘promotional’ by Gmail’s system as no more than advertisements or requests for donations. Besides emails, I also utilize the Google search engine where I can look up any subject I want.
Lately, these search results have been headed by a very generalized summary clearly labeled as being developed by AI (Artificial Intelligence). On occasion I might use such search results, but when I do, I will say that I am doing so. Generally, however, I try not to use such summaries in preparing Jackspotpourri.
Following such ‘AI’ search results, there follows the other results of my search. Unlike the anonymous AI-generated summaries, the sources of these results are clearly indicated, giving them a greater credibility than any AI summary. It comes down to who YOU want to be in the driver’s seat in seeking information: yourself or something else (Artificial Intelligence), the structure of which somewhere along the way had to have been created by others, with whose identity I am neither familiar nor comfortable. At least when I read a column by Timothy Snyder, for example, I know from where it comes, and to some extent, what to expect.
Caution should be exercised in using Artificial Intelligence. Always!!
JL
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