If you’re trying to keep up with the latest in the Iran war, you’d be forgiven for being a little confused. Just this weekend, we went from Donald Trump declaring on Friday that the Strait of Hormuz was “COMPLETELY OPEN AND READY FOR BUSINESS” to accusing Iran on Sunday of violating the ceasefire by firing in those same waters. Hours later, U.S. forces reportedly seized an Iranian-flagged vessel attempting to cross the strait, with Trump signaling that it’s “highly unlikely” he’ll extend the two-week ceasefire—set to expire Wednesday—without a deal.
It’s a head-spinning sequence of events. And it raises a basic question: How much of what’s being said online—including by the president—tracks with what’s actually happening on the ground? For an answer, we turn to historian and Free Press columnist Niall Ferguson. In today’s Big Read, he examines the widening gap between Truth Social and reality—and what that space in between tells us about where this war is headed. —The Editors
President Barack Obama was fond of the phrase the arc of history. His supporters, he said on the evening of his first election in 2008, had voted to “put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.”
I have long doubted that history has an arc any more than it follows predictable cycles. Obama was, in fact, adapting something the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. said in a sermon at Washington’s National Cathedral in 1968. “The arc of the moral universe is long,” King declared, “but it bends toward justice.”
