When does this idiocy stop?

Data is the new oil. Who has it and how do you distill the insights from it, and then productize and monetize those insights, is the new economic driver that in the long run will determine a country’s wealth and security in the 21st century — not black crude. That is why former Saudi oil minister Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani’s old warning — the stone age did not end because we ran out of stones; it ended because we invented new tools — is more relevant today than ever.

Both Trump and Khamenei will now each claim some sort of victory: Trump for killing an Iranian killer with lots of American, Arab and Iranian blood on his hands. (Suleimani got what he deserved.) And Khamenei for “retaliating” by launching 22 rockets at two bases in Iraq where American troops are stationed. (He saved some face.)

But let’s look closely at what each side actually “won.”

I suspect that the U.S. will get some improved deterrence from killing Suleimani — precisely because it went against the rules of the game as it had been played between the U.S. and Iran all these years: Don’t target each other’s leaders. The Iranian leadership now has to assume that Trump may be crazy and could react even more harshly and unpredictably in response to any further Iranian retaliation or escalation.

This is surely disorienting for Iran’s clerics. Iran and Suleimani always assumed that they could out-crazy everybody else through proxies and cutouts. They or their proxy Hezbollah could brazenly blow up the former prime minister of Lebanon, Rafik Hariri, or blow up a key Saudi Arabian oil pumping facility, and then turn around and say to the world: “Gosh, who did that? What a tragedy.”