John Heilemann on Iran: It’s Still TBD Whether This Is Humiliating Defeat or Not

EXCERPT:

HEILEMANN: “I would say, you know, it’s a little bit still TBD on whether it’s a humiliating defeat or not, Joe, but it certainly is not the quick win. And it’s just incontrovertibly correct that the cycle of maximalist military threat followed by climbing down when the moment arrived to make good on that threat, that that was not a strategy that was going anywhere, that was not achieving anything for the president, either militarily or politically. And so finding some other path was clearly the only thing for him to do. And everybody that I — you know, all the people that you and I respect and have listened to over the course of the last 48 hours in this context are all kind of in the same place, which is, this is not a great situation to have the president trying to explain how he’s going to have a light touch. We don’t know what that means, but it’s also better than the prior situation that he was in that cycle. And it seems to be the best available option in a very, very, very bad, very entirely self-inflicted circumstance and one where the political consequences of it, if we want to move to that, look increasingly inextricable, I would say, for the Republican Party that Donald Trump leads."