Alternate Shots.

America's fastest-growing podcast, maybe.

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(‘Alternate Shots’ with John Ellis and Richard Haass. Episode #22. Recorded Thursday, 2 April 2026. Produced by Dale Eisinger.) You can listen to this episode (and all the previous episodes) by clicking on these hyperlinks — Apple, Amazon, Spotify and most of the other major podcast platforms.

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Richard wrote up a concise summary:

In this episode of Alternate Shots, hosts John Ellis and Richard Haass dissect a familiar American illusion: that battlefield dominance equals strategic victory. Yes, Iran has taken a beating; but, as Haass notes, capability plus will still makes for a dangerous adversary. The conversation skewers the president’s speech which failed to articulate a strategy for what comes next.

Meanwhile, Gulf allies fret, NATO frays into a polite fiction, and China quietly enjoys the distraction. The verdict: the U.S. may be winning the war it is fighting, but risks losing the one that matters. A classic case of measuring what’s measurable and missing what’s decisive. Plus a few thoughts on Cuba, Tiger Woods, and the Masters.

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I suspect we’ll be talking about this war for months, not weeks.

One person we pay careful attention to is Professor Robert Pape of the University of Chicago, whose Substack newsletter “The Escalation Trap” is always worth reading. (It’s also free). His most recent post analyzed the president’s speech. Here is a lengthy excerpt:

Last night, Trump did not stabilize the crisis—he accelerated it.

He offered no plan to restore reliable energy flows through the Strait of Hormuz, and made clear that escalation remains his primary tool.

The result is not resolution.

It is deepening instability.

The immediate consequence is not abstract. Roughly one-fifth of globally traded oil—nearly 20 million barrels per day—normally transits Hormuz. That system depends not just on physical passage, but on continuous insurance coverage, predictable routing, and tightly sequenced refinery deliveries across Asia and Europe. Those conditions are now breaking down. Tankers are delaying entry into the Gulf, war-risk insurance premiums have surged several-fold in days, and shipping schedules are slipping in ways that force buyers into volatile spot markets.

This is not a closure.

It is a loss of reliability.

What actually happened in Trump’s speech

1. The world now sees there is no plan to fix the problem.

Not because of rhetoric—but behavior.

• No mechanism to reopen stable shipping

• No timeline for restoring normal energy flows

• No alignment between military operations and economic stability

In practical terms, this means that the actors who actually move the global economy—energy traders, insurers, shipping firms, and central banks—are repricing risk in real time and adjusting behavior accordingly. Gulf exporters are redirecting flows and storage strategies where possible. Asian importers are accelerating contingency purchases. European governments are coordinating in parallel rather than waiting for U.S. sequencing.

So actors are not waiting.

They are adjusting.

2. Escalation is now clearly the US default tool

The signal from the speech is simple:

When pressure rises → increase threats and expand targets.

That tells:

• Iran to prepare for continued confrontation

• Markets to price ongoing risk

• Allies to expect instability, not resolution

Historically, this pattern is not incidental—it is inherent to coercive campaigns. Limited strikes designed to compel adversaries expand when initial effects fall short of political expectations. The target set widens—from military assets to economic infrastructure—while timelines extend without formal acknowledgment. This is how short wars become coercive campaigns.

3. The war now has no defined endpoint

Not rhetorically—structurally.

You cannot end this war if the system it disrupted remains unstable.

Right now, there is:

• a military timeline measured in weeks

• an economic disruption with no clear end

• no constraint on Israeli military action

That gap means the war is not actually contained.

It also means something more dangerous:

The United States and its allies are falling deeper into an escalation trap—where each attempt to impose control through force increases the instability it is trying to resolve.

An escalation trap is a structural condition in which each effort to impose control through force increases the instability that makes control necessary. That is now the trajectory at Hormuz.

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Let’s hope he’s wrong.