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Whenever President Trump talks about the Iran War, one can feel his frustration that the public isn’t more enthusiastic about it — or at least unconcerned.
“After we finish defeating Iran, which is being very badly defeated,” Trump told a crowd last week, “pretty soon I’ll be declaring the Hormuz Strait a territory of the United States.”
Perhaps realizing that reminding people (even in jest) of the waterway that has caused him so much trouble is not such a great idea, he then got serious.
“For you to pay a tiny little bit more for your gasoline, just remember, you’re doing it so a very evil country cannot have — a country, really, it’s the number one state sponsor of terror in the world — we don’t want to have them have a nuclear weapon.”
It wasn’t exactly the stuff of “we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds … we shall never surrender.” But Trump does not do stirring calls to sacrifice; instead, he tells the nation that while it may seem like you’re sacrificing if you listen to the lying media, you really aren’t. You’re just paying “a tiny little bit more for your gasoline.”
This reveals just how deeply he has misunderstood how the American public actually thinks about war, and why as the Iran conflict drags on, his effort to win the public to his cause has been as complete a disaster as the war itself.
The lessons Trump mislearned
While the Vietnam War was one of the defining events in his generation’s coming of age, Trump seems to have emerged from it with few ill effects.
Like many sons of wealthy men, he managed to finagle his way out of serving without too much trouble (the doctor who testified to little Donnie’s supposedly crippling bone spurs just happened to be one of Fred Trump’s tenants). When it was over, he learned not much more than that the war was bad and Americans turned against it because it went on for a long time and a lot of our soldiers died.
That analysis isn’t wrong, just woefully incomplete.
It’s true that the public was affected by seeing the endless stream of body bags arriving back home, young men (and some women) with lives cut short, and hundreds of thousands more with physical and psychological wounds they would carry for the rest of their days. But though support had been fading steadily over time, it wasn’t simply a matter of too many months and years.
That was evident in the way the Tet Offensive in January 1968 turned the public decisively against the war. It wasn’t because Tet was a defeat for the US and its South Vietnamese allies; it wasn’t. Instead, the offensive demonstrated that all the government’s assurances that the war would be over soon were lies. North Vietnam was not on the verge of being broken, and we were not seeing “the light at the end of the tunnel” as military leaders had said so often.
When CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite told his viewers a month later that “it seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past,” he gave voice to what most Americans had already realized.
Fast forward a few decades, when Trump ran for president in 2016. The Iraq War was over, but his party was still dragging it around like an anchor — and he alone among the primary candidates was untainted by it (even if his story about having publicly opposed it from the beginning was a ridiculous lie).
As Trump promised to turn away from that kind of adventurism, he seemed to take the same lesson from Iraq that he did from Vietnam: It was long and bloody, thousands of Americans died, and the public doesn’t like that one bit.
Trump’s rhetoric on Iran revolves around these two points: My war is short, he insists (so far anyway), and only a small number of Americans have died!
In May, he posted a chart to Truth Social comparing the length of other American wars to the current one (with the caption “Wow. Study this chart!”). The message was apparently that the war was no big deal because it was only in its sixth week.
Then in July, he followed up with another chart comparing the small number of deaths among US forces in this war to those of the past. This comparison is one he frequently makes in spoken remarks as well, often getting his facts wrong.
“In Vietnam, we lost 200,000,” he said not long ago (in fact, 58,000 Americans died in the Vietnam War).
The shambolic sales pitch falls flat
Perhaps Trump might have done better to consider not just why the public eventually turned against those wars, but also why it supported them in the first place.
The truth is that watching your government wage foreign wars is part of what it means to be a American; seldom do more than a few years go by without us bombing, attacking, or invading some country or other. Many of those wars received ample public support — all, in fact, were more popular than the Iran War at their outset. That was because the public was told why the war was necessary, a story that always included some kind of threat to Americans.
Sometimes the threat was real (Germany and Japan in World War II) and sometimes it was phony (Iraq), but it made enough sense for Americans to feel that their safety was genuinely at risk. In Vietnam, the Cold War placed the conflict in a broader context in which America had something at stake. In Iraq, Americans were told not only that Saddam Hussein was about to attack us with his fearsome arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, but that he was plotting with Al Qaeda and we could visit revenge for September 11 upon him and his country.
Eventually the public realized that the WMDs didn’t exist and Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11. But it wasn’t until the war had been going on for a couple of years that a majority of Americans finally concluded it was a mistake.
Trump understood that history, but made the mistake of thinking it meant that he had plenty of time to carry out a splendid little war in Iran before the public would turn against it. The problem was that he never gave them a good reason for the war in the first place. There was no grand conflict of civilizations of which this was supposedly a part, and no dire threat to the homeland. The average American might think (accurately) that the Iranian regime is a bunch of nasty fellows who do nasty things, but they don’t fear that the Revolutionary Guard is going to kill their children any time soon.
In other words, Americans don’t like long wars and they don’t like casualties — but only when the stakes don’t seem to be worth it and we don’t seem to be winning. A short war with few American deaths won’t necessarily gain their support, especially if they’re going to be asked to pay an economic price for what appears to be a pointless escapade.
There may have been another factor at play: Trump loves little more than to do things other presidents didn’t do, to demonstrate his unique power and importance. But as Dalia Dassa Kaye wrote in March, as much as Trump’s predecessors would have liked to see the demise of the Islamic Republic, “there is a reason no previous president authorized a war against Iran … there is wide consensus — among previous US officials and the expert community — that overthrowing a regime through external military force, and certainly by airpower alone, is unlikely to work and risks unleashing dangerous consequences.” And here we are.
Where exactly is that? The war may not have gone on long by the standards of some previous disasters, but it’s getting longer every day.
In an echo of all those “light at the end of the tunnel” briefings in Vietnam, Trump and his aides tell us that everything is going great, and a few more threats of destruction is all it will take to convince the Iranian regime to capitulate — as if they haven’t been trying and failing with that very approach for months.
“The crushing sanctions and one of the most successful blockades in history have crippled Iran’s economy and has left Iran completely broke, and it would be wise for Iran to agree to a deal,” a White House official recently told Politico. “Otherwise, they know what will happen.”
Yes, they know exactly what will happen, and so does the American public: The US will drop some more bombs (maybe), and nothing will change.
Now it appears that since bombing hasn’t worked and we’re pretty much run out of military targets, and diplomacy hasn’t worked (no doubt having something to do with Trump’s impossible demands), economic pressure might do the trick. As Jonathan Lemire of The Atlantic reports, “In recent weeks, aides have shown Trump the significant impact that existing sanctions are having on Iran’s economy,” designed to convince the president “that tightening the current sanctions and issuing fresh, tough ones could force leaders in Tehran to buckle.”
In other words, they’re trying to fool him, so he can fool himself, and he’ll then try to fool the public. It doesn’t seem like a strategy built on a very sophisticated understanding of what might be necessary to win the war or persuade Americans — which makes it much like all the other decisions that led us to this point.
That’s it for today
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There was a perfectly good treaty in place. Trump tore up an intelligently negotiated treaty for no other reason than it being a diplomatic achievement of Pres Obama.
Trump really can’t sell many people on the idea he was consumed with worry about Iran gaining nuclear capability, as he destroyed the previous compact.
Trump engaged in this to cover for the attention to the Epstein files. Trump didn’t care about the cost in lives, munitions&money.
In a very shallow world view, Trump acquiesced to Netanyahu&thought Americans would rally around him.
No one in the entire world, even our former allies think US should control the Straights of Hormuz.
BTW: we’ve seen this rodeo before. Both Bush presidencies. Some actions were a response to 9/11. Most an attempt to control oil.
I think it isn't only that Trump doesn't understand the American people's views about war, but he also doesn't really care. He believes he has a "mandate" to do whatever he wants, whenever he wants.