No one is coming to bail Trump out of his disastrous war
He's the only one who can end this.
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It was just a couple of weeks into his war in Iran that President Trump began demanding other countries solve the problem he had created.
“Many Countries,” he said on social media on March 14, “will be sending War Ships, in conjunction with the United States of America, to keep the [Hormuz] Strait open and safe.” He added that “Hopefully China, France, Japan, South Korea, the UK, and others” would put their own sailors in harm’s way on his behalf.
They didn’t.
“This is not our war, we have not started it,” said the German defense minister, and other countries had the same response. Trump quickly turned petulant.
“Whether we get support or not, I can say this, and I said it to them: We will remember,” he said.
Two months have passed since then, and Trump is still trying to convince someone else to fix what he broke. That was one of the goals of his trip last week to China, as he thought he might persuade Xi Jinping to intercede with Iran and pressure the regime to allow unimpeded traffic through the strait to resume.
“We hope to convince them to play a more active role in getting Iran to walk away from what they’re doing now,” said Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Xi Jinping, however, was unconvinced.
At the end of Trump’s trip, the White House issued a statement saying the two “agreed that the Strait of Hormuz must remain open to support the free flow of energy.” But China is not doing anything to make that happen. The problem may be that Trump is asking China to bail him out, but offering nothing in return for that favor. It’s one of his favorite negotiating techniques: Demand everything, offer nothing, and wait for the other side to submit. But it doesn’t work.
So this is where we stand: The only person who can bring Donald Trump’s war to an end is Donald Trump.
Eisenhower he ain’t
When Trump is asked about the war, his answers inevitably feature a description of what a grand military success it has been: We destroyed their navy, their air force lies in rubble, our military is an unstoppable force! The administration even says that “Operation Epic Fury” has now concluded in glory, and if we have to start bombing again, we’ll call it “Operation Sledgehammer” this time, forcing Iran to cower in the face of our muscular war-naming powers.
“All [Iran’s leaders] understand is bombs,” Trump reportedly told an aide, which is quite clearly the opposite of the truth; if anything, he was describing himself.
As anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the last century of warfare could have told him, the side with the biggest bombs doesn’t always win. And threats do not seem sufficient to convince Iran to give up its control of the strait, which turned out to be the most important piece of leverage it has.
Trump either underestimated how powerful that weapon was, or didn’t believe Iran would use it. And now that Iran has successfully created a global energy crisis that’s rapidly turning into an economic crisis, he still wants someone else to solve the problem. Yet he keeps getting turned down.
Who could have imagined that after a year-plus of insulting erstwhile friends of the United States, denigrating our alliances, threatening to take over other countries’ territory, and imposing pointless tariffs on almost the whole world, when Trump needed someone else to come to his aid, he’d have trouble finding anyone willing to help him? The answer, as it so often is with this president, is that everyone understood it but him.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth called the war “a gift to the world,” but it was last thing the world wanted.
Who wants to make a deal?
During the 2024 election, Trump made dramatic and specific promises about inflation on an almost daily basis.
“Starting the day I take the oath of office, I will rapidly drive prices down and we will make America affordable again,” Trump said multiple times; he even promised to cut energy prices in half in just 12 months. But with inflation now higher than it has been since the post-covid spike and gas averaging over $4.50 a gallon precisely because of the war Trump started, he can’t escape questions about how the war is affecting people’s economic circumstances.
That connection was crystallized last week in one of those emblematic moments, when a reporter asked Trump “to what extent are Americans’ financial situations motivating you to make a deal?” in Iran.
“Not even a little bit,” he replied. “The only thing that matters when I’m talking about Iran? They can’t have a nuclear weapon. I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation, I don’t think about anybody.”
Trump’s defenders say he was just talking about how single-mindedly focused he is on the nuclear question, but the trouble is that Iran doesn’t have nuclear weapons, never had nuclear weapons, and was constrained from getting nuclear weapons by the agreement finalized in 2015, which Trump blew up in his first term.
Last summer, the US bombed Iranian nuclear facilities, and Trump claimed afterward that its nuclear program had been “completely and totally obliterated.” Then he started this war, saying it was necessary to destroy Iran’s apparently not obliterated nuclear program. It should not be a surprise that Americans have trouble believing both that stopping Iran’s nuclear program for all time is worth the cost, and that more bombing will do the trick.
There was no clamor for this war from anyone but Benjamin Netanyahu’s government in Israel, and just as it belongs to Trump, so too do the accompanying spike in inflation and skyrocketing gas prices. About that, there is no doubt: The American public, whose attention and understanding of public affairs may wax and wane, knows exactly what’s happening and whose responsibility it is. And no one else can bail him out of that either.
Asked about the “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation” comment this Sunday, Sen. Lindsay Graham said it was “Trump’s Churchill moment,” because like Trump, Churchill “promised blood, sweat, toil, heartache” until the Nazis were defeated. And like the British in World War II, “whatever price we have to pay, we will pay” to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.
This highlights another reason Trump’s persuasion campaign is failing. He is not promising toil and heartache. He is delivering those things, but simultaneously telling the public that everything is going great and they won’t have to pay any price at all.
Asked on Fox News about whether he should have said what he did, Trump responded, “That’s a perfect statement, I’d make it again,” adding that “when people hear me say it, everybody agrees. Short term pain, it’s gonna be short term pain.”
If Trump actually thought about the pain Americans are experiencing, he would feel more urgency about getting a deal to end the war. But he still seems to believe that he can do so without having to give up anything. He talks all the time about how desperate the Iranian leadership supposedly is to make a deal, and claims “I have all the cards.” He has also said “they have to cry uncle” — in other words, surrender unequivocally — for him to end the war. This is not a leader willing to compromise.
Part of what makes this situation so tragic is that it wouldn’t be that complicated to negotiate an end to the war. Iran would have to accept limits on its nuclear program (perhaps like the ones in the 2015 agreement, or even stricter) and agree to allow free traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, and in exchange the US would loosen sanctions and give Iran the ability to reconstruct its economy.
Those aren’t the only issues, but it covers everything Trump cares about. Unfortunately, from where we stand today, Trump seems unwilling to accept that obvious compromise. He keeps looking for someone else to swoop in and end the disaster he caused — first Europe, now China, and who knows whose help he might plead for next. Unfortunately, no one can end this but him.
That’s it for today
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While I get a bit of grim satisfaction from seeing Trump suffer politically from the stupid war he needlessly started the fact remains that tens, indeed hundreds of millions of people around the war are suffering substantially from something they did nothing to bring upon themselves.
I think US citizens (including those who didn't vote for him) need to take on board that the rest of the world looks upon your country as a not very bright rogue elephant, however wisely we may keep those thoughts to ourselves. You will never be looked upon as the leader of the free world again - or at least not in my lifetime.
Donald Trump always lashes out when he’s caught in some peccadillo