There is a sound a negotiation makes when it has stopped being a negotiation. President Trump described it Wednesday from the Oval Office, and he described it twice, because he wanted it understood. Tap, tap, tap. That was the noise of Iran, in his telling — not signing, not refusing, just tapping. And the President had decided he was done listening to it. “We’re going to be attacking them, attacking them very hard,” he told reporters. The justification was a helicopter, the Army Apache that went down near the Strait of Hormuz earlier in the week, and Trump reached for

The thing happened at night, which is how these things often happen. A pair of Apache helicopters was flying over the Strait of Hormuz, that narrow and consequential stretch of water where a third of the world’s oil moves and where patience has been running thin for a hundred days. One of them went into the sea. By Tuesday morning, the President had a verdict. Iran shot it down, he wrote on TRUTH Social, the helicopter “highly sophisticated,” the military “Great,” the two pilots aboard “safe and uninjured.” Then the line that mattered: the United States “must, of necessity, respond