I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Sunday Planning, I plan for the week ahead.
I didn’t expect that in this reinvention I would cycle around through so many interests. I spent time developing my abstract art practice and showing my work in juried shows, experimented with producing YouTube videos about living your best midlife, wrote a draft of a nonfiction book about romance and dating at midlife, and, of course, blogged on this site and my earlier reinvention site nearly every day.
Now my mind, and my writing, has turned to three new interests: international relations because of the war with Iran, managing my money in ways other than buying and holding passive index funds, and learning to manage a leash reactive dog.
How long will these fascinations last? A month or two, six months? Years? I don’t know, but I am grateful I’m at a point in my life where I can just follow my interests. In December I wrote about writing from interest not deprivation, riffing about Martha Beck’s distinction between interest curiosity when you want to know something and deprivation curiosity when you need to know something to achieve some sort of financial or other security. And in that post I celebrated that I have “loosened the grip of burnout society on my psyche.” I need to keep reminding myself of this fundamental approach to my reinvention: at every step leave the demands of the achievement society behind.
While today is nominally a Sunday Planning post, I’m going to share my latest readings and reactions to what’s going on in the Middle East, before reviewing my plans for the week.
Latest readings about the war
In Two Books that Explain This War, Bobby Ghosh writes of the idea that war is communication, that bombs send messages that cannot be issued by other means, or not so forcefully anyway. This idea comes from Nobel laureate economist Thomas Schelling’s 1966 book Arms and Influence:
Schelling’s insight was elegant and, in the right circumstances, genuinely powerful. Military force, he argued, is most usefully understood not as destruction but as communication. What matters is not the damage already done but the damage credibly threatened. The coercing party signals to the adversary: compliance will stop the pain; defiance will deepen it. The adversary, calculating rationally, chooses compliance. This framework helped explain the Cuban Missile Crisis, various Cold War standoffs, and the measured signaling that kept superpower competition from becoming superpower conflagration.
Later in his article, Ghosh turns to another classic book on war strategy: Every War Must End, from 1971. In that book, Fred Charles Iklé argues that wars often begin without their instigators having any idea of how they might end, without a clear specification of off-ramps for the attacked to take so that the “communications” of war might arrive at resolution.
We’ve seen with the war in Iran all the dysfunction that Iklé outlined in his book to include the “fog of military estimates” where information and data being communicated don’t accurately reflect what is happening, war objectives drift, and those in the administration who wish the war to end argue with those who wish to continue it.
Ghosh writes that this is not a matter of uncommon incompetence or evil:
The particular cruelty of Iklé’s insight is that it applies not to the wicked or the stupid but to the ordinary. He was not writing about villains. He was writing about the structural incentives that bend even capable people toward continuing wars they no longer know how to end. The question he asked was whether political leaders could ever build in the discipline of thinking about termination before they committed their forces.
This reminds me of Hannah Arendt’s theory of the “banality of evil” in which evil deeds may be taken on by ordinary people with very normal human motivations, working within human bureaucracies.
In Every War Must End, Iklé writes:
In part, governments tend to lose sight of the ending of wars and the nation’s interests that lie beyond it, precisely because fighting a war is an effort of such vast magnitude. Thus it can happen that military men, while skillfully planning their intricate operations and coordinating complicated maneuvers, remain curiously blind in failing to perceive that it is the outcome of the war, not the outcome of the campaigns within it, that determines how well their plans serve the nation’s interests.
Last night’s talks in Islamabad failed to result in an agreement to end the war. VP JD Vance said of the talks, “We just could not get to a situation where the Iranians were willing to accept our terms.” For Vance, the purpose of the negotiations was to demand Iran capitulate and project strength, attempting to confirm Trump’s claim that the U.S. has already won the war. Meanwhile, Iran’s Parliamentary Speaker Mohammad Baqer Ghalibaf said that even as his delegation raised forward-looking concerns, the United States failed to gain their trust. Vance left Pakistan having communicated what he called the United States’ “final and best offer,” and stating that the U.S. administration needed “to see an affirmative commitment that they will not seek a nuclear weapon, and they will not seek the bools that would enable them to quickly achieve a nuclear weapon.”
What did the JCPOA say?
It’s useful to look back at the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), signed in July of 2015 by Iran and the “P5+1” (the U.S., UK, France, Germany, Russia, and China) and see where we are relative to that today, post Trump withdrawing from the agreement in 2018 and choosing to communicate and negotiate with attacks instead.
This agreement was intended to significantly constrain Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for the lifting of international economic sanctions. Under the deal, Iran agreed to limit its uranium enrichment to 3.67%, reduce its centrifuge stockpile by two-hirds, and redesign its heavy-water facilities to prevent plutonium production, all under unfettered monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). In return, Iran gained access to frozen assets and the global oil market.
Trump believed that the agreement was a “horrible, one-sided deal” that provided Iran with a legal path to a nuclear weapon rather than permanently blocking it. He thought the deal was weak because key provisions were set to sunset after 10 to 15 years, because it didn’t cover ballistic missiles and regional proxy groups such as Hezbollah, and didn’t include strong enough inspection practices. He thought the U.S. had more leverage outside the deal than in it. By withdrawing and reimposing secondary sactions (forcing foreign companies to choose between doing business with Iran or the U.S.), he thought he could crater the Iranian economy and force them back to the table for a comprehensive deal that would be permanent and would cover not just nuclear-related activities but all security concerns.
This context provides a better perspective for me of what Trump hopes to accomplish and why he didn’t think the JCPOA was worth keeping. At the same time, one wonders whether he can achieve anything that is as strong as it was. The current administration is essentially trying to negotiate a JCPOA+ agreement from a much weaker starting position.
For many reasons, the U.S. is unlikely to get back even to JCPOA level restrictions on Iran:
- Under the JCPOA, Iran’s enrichment was capped at 3.67%. Between 2018 and now, when they were released from those restrictions, they boosted that to 60% enrichment, “at the doorstep” of a bomb according to Trump. You can’t unlearn the technical expertise they’ve gained in the last few years. Iran sees their advanced enrichment as important leverage against military pressure.
- The JCPOA was a negotiated agreement not a forced capitulation. Iran got their money back and they gave up their centrifuges. The 2026 U.S. administration logic is “you give up everything, in return we won’t bomb you back to the stone age.”
- In 2015 the Strait of Hormuz was open. Today it’s become the main point of leverage for Iran. We’re on the brink of a global energy emergency (which does affect the U.S. despite Trump’s claims it doesn’t).
- The U.S. is negotiating essentially alone now, without other great powers helping. The JCPOA was a P5+1 effort with Russia and China at the table. Now Russia is more dependent on Iran for military hardware like drones and missiles and China signed a 25-year cooperation agreement with Iran.
The outlook for the resolution of the war
Trump has said the U.S. already won the war, and yet it doesn’t look like that. The Strait is still essentially closed, with very few ships going through. Iran has not agreed to give up their nuclear ambitions, their ballistic missiles, or their regional proxy armies.
Middle East expert Danny Citrinowicz writes that Washington faces three potential ways forward, each unpalatable in its own way:
A. Renewed negotiations may simply reproduce the same dynamics, with Iran unwilling to concede and the U.S. unwilling to settle for less.
B. Ending the confrontation without an agreement risks signaling weakness and undermining deterrence. Escalation, meanwhile, carries the most significant risks of all.
C. A return to high-intensity conflict is unlikely to produce decisive results. While strikes on Iranian infrastructure, or even more ambitious military moves, could impose real costs on the regime, they would almost certainly trigger a broader response. Iran has both the capability and the willingness to expand the conflict horizontally, targeting U.S. interests, Israel, and regional partners. The result would not be a quick resolution, but a wider war with direct implications for global energy markets and economic stability.
Citrinowicz says that the U.S. is “operating under an illusion of leverage, one that recent events have already begun to expose.”
I give option B a 60% chance. This has been Trump’s approach with the tariffs: come out with outlandish demands that aren’t grounded in what your position and hand actually counts for, then fold when something bad happens e.g. in the stock market, asserting that you are the most powerful negotiator ever and that you are winning all the time.
This will leave the world in a much worse position than it was when the JCPOA was in effect. And much worse than before the Trump administration decided to attack Iran as the first “communication” in a new set of negotiations.
So about my week
I’m still on restricted duty so I can’t walk Bo or do any major gardening or home tasks. I feel only the tiniest bit of pain though so I seem to be healing well.
I’m getting foster dog Sally next Sunday, and then will be back to dog walking except with two instead of one (not sure if I will be able to handle walking them together at first).
My older daughter is in town to help me with dog walking and other tasks during my recovery. Tonight, we’re doing an April Birthday Dinner at The Fort with my younger daughter, my dad, and my dad’s partner. April is our family’s big birthday month (my younger daughter – the 16th, my dad – the 25th, me – the 26th).
I’m planning to start experimenting with the wheel options strategy this week. The idea with this is that you use cash-secured puts (or naked puts) and covered calls with a very select set of stocks or ETFs to generate income and gains. I’ve done some options trading before so pretty familiar with the basics. But I’ve never fully committed to one strategy including careful risk management and then tracked profits and losses from it. Right now is not the ideal time to do it. The markets are choppy — that’s good for the wheel — but also may be in a downtrend — not good for the wheel. I’m going to be very ungreedy in my inital forays, choosing very out-of-the-money options with low deltas (implying that I have a good chance of claiming profits without getting assigned any stocks).
Just like with war, with investing it’s important to know what your objective is and know when to exit a particular investment. This is something I’m working on. My objective has been, “Make as much money as possible.” That’s not really a useful objective. It’s not achievable or operationalizable. I want to refine that objective to include a bunch of subobjectives: “Learn about the world by my investing research,” “Come up with an investing plan and style that suits my temperament,” “Generate adequate returns while managing risk of capital loss,” and so forth.
And of course I’ll be keeping up to date on the Middle East conflict.