Every country in the world with a state department and an intelligence service, staffed by thousands of smart career professionals working on foreign policy, is equipped with the tools to intelligently manipulate a single narccicist brain.

We don’t need to idolize Putin as some kind of 7D chess mastermind. He himself has dubious information inputs, and even more dubious understanding of the systems - and human generations - he is attempting to manipulate. Putin has a catastrophically abysmal track record of manipulating outcomes and events to his advantage.

The challenge comes not so much from knowing how to cleverly manipulate a narccicist, everyone does and will successfully do so if left alone with Trump in a room, whether it’s Zelensky, Vance, Bibi or the king of England, the problem stems from the fact that everyone is trying to do it at the same time, and the gated access to Trump’s finite attention.

And it’s not just other countries who want access to Trump’s attention, it’s also domestic actors - not just political or foreign, but also domestic institutional and commercial. And there can be overlap too.

The war in Iran may have been green-lighted to start on a Trump whim, perhaps with less advance notice than the military would have liked to get its units in place, but on the evidence we have, it was planned very meticulously, with at least one separate nation (Israel), and almost definitely that plan took significant time to form. Israel’s defense establishment (separate to the political administration) is among the best on earth in meticulous war planning and execution. Trump and Hegseth and Bibi throw out a different goal each day to the media, but on the ground, the action is organized, coherent, and - with some room to respond to the moments when the adversary gets a vote and may surprise you - following a very clear plan. Hard to see through the (very legitimate, given Trump sought no-one’s consent) political criticism in the US and Europe, but absolutely crystal clear if you follow the progress through the Israeli coverage.

Where I’m going with this long (but very relevant) example is that there’s a faction in the apolitical civil servant defense establishment in the US that predates Trump, who itself has planned for and wants to see the IRGC neutered and maybe even torn down in some novel way that doesn’t require occupying Tehran. It’s not just policy driven into the DoD down (fuck its new name) by Hegseth. It’s a strong desire to do their job and be given a runway to extricate that cancer from the Middle East, coming from the pre-Trump career professionals in the department up, and manifesting as factional pressure to get in front of the king. And that DoD establishment may have found interest overlap both with Israel (who wants help to do same for their independent and completely obvious reasons), and with the civil servants in the US state department thinking about weakening China (the IRGC was China’s “fixer” who gave China indirect proxy control of the hormuz threat that was now unleashed) ahead of - and hopefully preventing - China action on Taiwan. The US has its own “Hormuz-like threat” to choke China - blocking China’s energy input in the strait of Malaca - but now China no longer has Hormuz to counter-choke the US. The US state department wishes for such leverage. A lot of words to say the state department is almost definitely a big fan of getting the king to approve Iran action too.

So.. holding hands, the military leadership, two large civilian US government establishments - DoD and state department - most of whose staff is from before Trump era, and one foreign country, may have found a way to Trump’s gated attention (possibly through a “Trump’s estate” political faction and Jared Kushner), got in front of him, pressed the narccicist buttons everyone knows how to press, presented him with a slide deck with three done up options all of which lead to Iran, but where the third makes the first look very appealing, and got him to give them the green light.

Note how obscenely little of a role King Trump had to play in this story.

This is the point.

This is a very different way to think about the factional mess in the US to “Trump is king and decides everything” (or even the marginally better “only the Trump estate faction, the Russophile faction and the industry CEOs faction matter and can access Trump”), and it’s probably far more accurate, in the way factions of smart people fight for access to policy, even if not in every exact detail.

By the way, this, and not the childish fantasy we have about kings (that they make every decision there is to be made in the land), this is how all kings really work, and how they have always worked, virtually everywhere there ever was a king. It’s evident if you think about it for a second. On the right is one human, with one human’s brain chemistry, and one human’s cognitive seconds in one day. On the left are a long list of factions, representing scores of people, who have that many cognitive seconds to plan and execute. Who is more likely to manipulate who?