President promises to knock Iran out 'a lot harder' after Strait of Hormuz exchange.

Three U.S. Navy destroyers transited the Strait of Hormuz on Thursday. According to U.S. Central Command, Iranian forces took some kind of run at them. Missiles, drones, small boats. The Navy fired back. Central Command says they hit. Iran disputes a few details. This is the part of war that doesn’t make the front page anymore because there’s already a war on every page.

What did make the page is what the President said next. We’ll knock them out a lot harder, and a lot more violently, if Iran doesn’t sign a deal soon.

A lot more violently. With his whole chest. On camera. With three networks rolling. With Iran’s negotiators in another room reading the wire feed.

Buddy. I tended bar to a brigadier general for nine years. He was Marines. Two tours. Came back wearing a sport coat over the same haircut. We talked about a lot of things. He never once told me a war was going to get more violent. He told me he’d hit harder. He told me he’d put more iron on the target. He used the active vocabulary of a man who had seen the receipts. He never used adverbs, because adverbs are what you use when the verb isn’t carrying the load.

Lot more violently is an adverb sandwich. It is the kind of phrase a man at a microphone produces when he wants the headline to be the sentence rather than the action. The brigadier would have said we will sink them. Three words. Subject, verb, object. Done. The Strait would clear or it would not. The point would land or it would not.

The President of the United States, instead, picked the maximalist adverb at the maximalist moment, in the middle of a peace negotiation he had not, four days earlier, even read. Iran’s diplomats are now sitting in their hotel suite trying to decide whether more violently is a real escalation or a podium choice. The diplomats, hon, are not sure. I am not sure either. That is the problem with adverb sandwiches in foreign policy. Nobody knows whether to take the wrapper off.

Funny how that works. The destroyers were fine. The deal might not be.

Funny how nobody at that podium asked the brigadier.