What a strange war.

It began with death from the skies and dread around the world, and has now settled into kabuki theater.

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump extended the ceasefire with Iran—indefinitely, he said, until Tehran produces a “unified proposal” to end the war, a war he has already declared, again and again, that the US has “won;”

Meanwhile, Iran breathes fire on social media, accuses the United States of violating the truce, hints at new weapons it has prepared for the battlefield, and declares victory, too.

But neither side is fighting. And neither side will admit it is looking for a way out.

Make no mistake: This is a real war. Americans and Iranians have felt it in blood, in fear, in economic pain, and in the realization that life will not go back to normal anytime soon, for any of the combatants.

The rising price of a gallon of gas. Missiles screaming through the sky. Ships plying the waters of the Persian Gulf taking fire. The mass graves of the schoolgirls of Minab. And the sense around the world that great forces have been loosed in one of the most strategic and economically crucial places on earth.

The consequences of the war launched by Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu will be deep and prolonged.

“Truth is the first casualty of war,” they say. This war is no exception.

So something I’m watching closely these days isn’t just how major stories are covered, but where they are covered.

Lately I’ve noticed examples in both directions, including starkly different descriptions of developments in Iran, where the details of a ceasefire or blockade are reported very differently depending on the outlet. The truth is being shaped on the battleground of public opinion.

And it’s not just war where you see this. The Trump administration’s vaccine policy shifts get heavier attention in some parts of the press than others; even Tucker Carlson’s recent unexpected statements expressing regret for supporting Trump that show up widely in some coverage streams and barely at all in others.

That’s why I check in frequently with Ground News. It’s an app and site that curates and analyzes thousands of news stories to highlight bias or balance across coverage. My favorite feature is The Blindspot; it shows you stories that are receiving strong attention on one side of the media landscape and much less on another. Fascinating.

Ground News has been a generous supporter of Real Patriotism helping make my independent journalism possible, and I hope you’ll consider giving them a look.

If you’d like to support my work and get 40% off Ground News’ Vantage plan, you can subscribe here: https://ground.news/moran.

The United States brought its terrifying firepower to bear on Iranians, striking targets both military and economic. And by the narrow arithmetic of destruction, this is an unqualified win for the USA.

But wars are not won by arithmetic. They are won by outcomes. And on that score—on the question of what this war was for, and what it has achieved—the picture is far murkier, and far more dangerous.

Consider the objectives. Trump and his team had so many, and they kept shifting—which is itself a tell. Remember regime change? Kill the Supreme Leader. Decapitate the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Let the Iranian people fill the vacuum with something better.

Yeah, not so much.

It didn’t work. Or rather, it worked in the worst possible way. The Islamic Republic, instead of collapsing, hardened. Ayatollah Jr. took over. Moderates were swept aside, the Republican Guard moved from the shadows to the center of power, and Iran became, more nakedly than before, a military dictatorship wearing a theocratic mask. Plus, a lot of Iranians rallied to their flag.

Then came Iran’s answer to US firepower. It was textbook asymmetric warfare—the kind of response American war planners always seem to underestimate.

Tehran seized the Strait of Hormuz, and ended the sense of security that the people of the Persian Gulf had taken for granted for years, threatening the flow of oil that the entire global economy depends on. The economic shock was immediate and severe.

That’s when the arithmetic of destruction ran up against the reality of strategic leverage—and Trump blinked. Faced with a choice between escalating further, with all the risks of a true ground war, or cutting a deal, he chose the deal. But the deal he got—or rather, the deal he claimed he got—has not materialized.

Iran has learned something from this war that it will never unlearn. Closing the Strait of Hormuz works. Iran has discovered, at great and terrible cost, that it holds a lever powerful enough to bring a superpower to the negotiating table in a matter of weeks. That knowledge does not disappear when a deal is signed.

Still—Trump has already claimed victory. And he will continue to do so, over and over, until the end of his days, no matter what.

Polls show that, for now, the American people are not buying what Trump is telling them.

Are you?

—Terry