There is an old sailor’s proverb: the first casualty of a storm is not the ship, but the illusion that the water was ever calm. On the evening of April 1, thirty-three days after the United States launched Operation Epic Fury, President Trump gave a late night speech to a nation that had been living inside that illusion.

Markets had spent the day rising in cautious anticipation, with Bitcoin climbing to $69,230, Brent crude briefly dipping below $100, and investors leaning forward in their chairs for the off-ramp they had been promised. What they received instead was a twenty-minute speech that vowed to hit Iran “extremely hard over the next two to three weeks,” threatened to bomb Iran’s power plants if no deal was…