The Brooklyn Rail

Watching the reentry of the capsule containing the Artemis II team on April 10 was deeply moving, for complicated reasons. Here was an endeavor deploying the best of human scientific and technical expertise carried out with competence and courage. The astronauts are highly trained and disciplined pilots who accomplished their mission flawlessly and with a sense of working for the common good.

This stood in such stark contrast to what Tech Bros continue to inflict on humanity of late, with stultifying hubris and venality. These billionaire engineers have unleashed an artificial intelligence that may very well turn against us, while privately striving to fashion their own personal technological immortalities. Against this, under the aegis of Artemis II (successor to the Apollo program of 1969-72), four humans traveled farther than any of us have gone, to circle the moon. Amidst all the lies and corruption and ineptitude perpetrated by the other parts of the engineering class, this was an achievement worthy of our awe and admiration.

Artemis, twin sister of Apollo, is the goddess of the moon and protector of women and children. Both Artemis and Ares are children of Zeus, but they are polar opposites in their fundamental aspects. Artemis is the goddess of the hunt and wilderness, and Ares is the god of the brutal and barbaric aspects of war, the aspects that Trump and Hegseth bray on about. The Thracian Ares loved battle for its own sake, delighting in the slaughter of men and the sacking of towns. All the other gods hated Ares. Sophocles called him the “god unhonored among gods.” And the poet Robert Graves wrote, “The Athenians disliked war, except in the defense of liberty, or for some other equally cogent reason, and despised the Thracians as barbarous because they made it a pastime.”¹

Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth have made war a pastime. They have approached the war in Iran, which has killed more Iranians in six weeks than Putin killed Ukrainians in all of 2025, as a lark and a game. Bibi Netanyahu has been trying to convince an American president to go to war with Iran for four decades, but all previous presidents have recognized that it would be a fool’s errand, and refused. Trump once again got played by Netanyahu and was convinced to go to war with Iran on a whim, thinking that it would go quickly and bring immediate spoils, like Venezuela.

David Ignatius pointed out that only twenty percent of Iranians (at best) like the regime in power there. Before the war, the regime in Iran was even less popular than Trump is in the US. But Trump has changed all that, while also trashing 80 years of alliances in Europe and Asia. He has repeatedly enhanced our enemies and attacked our allies.

After the ceasefire, the Iranian regime was in control of the Strait of Hormuz and planned to collect up to $90 billion a year in tolls. The corrupt regime doesn’t care how much suffering is visited on the Iranian people. The US fired 850 Tomahawk missiles at Iran in the first month of war, which represents fifteen years of US missile production. Trump has depleted our weapons stockpiles and exposed America’s weaknesses. Trump’s war against Iran has been strategically incoherent from the beginning, and ultimately counterproductive. As Tim Snyder said recently, “Every time a nuclear power attacks a non-nuclear power, it’s making an argument for nuclear proliferation.”²

On April 13, after a charade of negotiation by the hapless trio of JD Vance, Steve Witkoff, and Jared Kushner, Trump imposed a blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, supposedly to supersede the blockade already put in place by Iran. The bet the Iranians are making is that Trump will not be able to withstand the political and economic pain the blockade will inflict on American voters, and will be forced to relent. Iran’s top negotiator and speaker of its Parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, posted to American consumers on April 12, “Soon you’ll be nostalgic for $4 to $5 gas,” and Trump himself rescinded his boast that gas prices would drop as soon as the ceasefire went into effect and now says gas prices “should be around the same” by the time of the midterm elections, and might be “a little bit higher.” At this point, Trump just wants the humiliation to stop.

The overwhelming defeat of Viktor Orbán in Hungary is Trump’s future. Orbán lasted sixteen years, longer than any other leader in Europe, but in the end, people stood up against his us-against-them, corrupt politics. No matter how much Orbán tried to suppress the vote and rig the election, the people still rose up and beat him. They had finally had enough. At a very different rate, people have had enough of Trump, and they’re recognizing it now in his catastrophic mishandling of the war in Iran. Given the choice, most people will choose Artemis over Ares.