Trump lost his war on Iran, bigly
His nonstop bullshitting can't change the facts on the ground.
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Though it’s far from over, Donald Trump’s illegal war of aggression in Iran has dead-ended in disaster and failure.
Ceasefire negotiations could at least theoretically resume and the situation remains chaotic. But right now, it looks like the United States, in a war of choice with a regional power, has suffered arguably its most thorough and unambiguous strategic rebuke of the postwar era.
Losing a war — like waging one in the first place — can have ugly long-term consequences for the country as a whole. It can also, at least sometimes, lead to a healthy reassessment of foreign policy priorities and methods. That reassessment, though, depends in part on acknowledging the failure. A healthy democracy should be able to honestly assess past actions, hold bad actors accountable, and more forward to better solutions.
But the United States is not, unfortunately, a healthy democracy. The ability of the free press, much less regime propagandists, to grapple with the scale of the loss and its implications is very much in doubt. It’s worth, therefore, laying out the nature of the defeat, who’s unwilling to describe it as such, and why.
Incoherent flailing
There is broad agreement that the war has been very costly. Mark Cancian, retired Marine colonel and a senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told NPR last week that US had spent about $28 billion during the first 40 days of the war. That’s about as much as it would have cost to extend ACA subsidies through 2026.
There is a heavy loss in lives as well as dollars. US human rights group HRANA estimates that more than 3,500 people have been killed in Iran so far, including more than 1,600 civilians and at least 240 children. Thousands more have been killed by Israeli strikes in Lebanon and by Iranian attacks on other countries. Thirteen US service members have been killed in action; 365 have been wounded.
Trump and his cronies claimed the cost in life, equipment, and outlays would buy the US … well, it was never exactly clear what. Trump has suggested he launched his (again, illegal) war in order to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapons program and/or to force regime change and/or (in passing) as revenge for Iran interfering in US elections (which, to be clear, it never did). Reporting by the New York Times indicates that in internal deliberations, Trump toyed with various rationales — including simply killing Iran’s leader. He went ahead because he wanted to hurt Iran and because, as he told anti-war far right pundit Tucker Carlson, “It’s going to be OK …because it always is.”
Of course, it has not in fact been okay. The US and Israel did assassinate Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, but his son took his place, and the regime was never in serious danger of collapsing. Rather than surrendering, Iran blocked the Strait of Hormuz, mining the waters and attacking merchant shipping. Per the New York Times, Trump, his advisors, and Israel had all dismissed the possibility that Iran could retaliate by closing the strait — a stunningly foolish miscalculation.
The strait is responsible for a quarter of global oil shipping; with it shut down, oil prices jumped to over $100 a barrel, fueling a dramatic inflation spike in the US. The war was already extremely unpopular, in part because Trump made little effort to sell it to the American people. Now his approval has plunged to new depths, hitting mid 30s in some polls. Support for the war among the half of Republicans who do not identify as MAGA fell 48 points in a month.
In response, Trump thrashed around, crawling to the allies he’d alienated to help him, and threatening genocidal war crimes and mass murder of civilians. Ultimately, though, he had no real ability to open the strait without a massive escalation for which he had no domestic support. So he begged Iran for a ceasefire.
Trump has variously said he has no plan to open the strait, suggesting instead that European and Asian countries should open it themselves, or they should buy more oil from the US, or that “the strait will open up naturally.” Meanwhile, Iran — which has suddenly discovered just how much leverage it has over the waterway — has started imposing a toll of about $2 million per tanker. If traffic resumes, the country could make some $100 billion a year, two times its annual budget and more than 25 percent of its GDP.
Oh, and Trump also said he no longer cares about whether Iran has enriched uranium which could be used in nuclear weapons asserting — with no evidence — that the country’s nuclear ambitions have been thwarted.
A strategic debacle
Negotiations began last weekend, and have already broken down. Trump responded by saying the US would itself blockade the strait, which would prevent Iran from selling its own oil. Trump avoided doing that previously because it will put even more pressure on gas prices and on the world economy; he’s now essentially ramping up the pressure on himself that caused him to seek the ceasefire in the first place.
Trump’s confused strategy, and his lack of options, underline US weakness. This is why experts have already said that the US has suffered a stunning strategic defeat — a failure to attain objectives and the granting of long-term advantages to an opponent.
Political scientist Dan Drezner points out that Trump’s major goals — regime change, destruction of Iran’s nuclear capabilities, destruction of its ability to arm terrorist proxies — have failed. That means “Trump has lost this war. The only question now is how bigly he loses it.”
That is not a controversial opinion. Authoritarianism scholar Timothy Snyder pointed to the removal of sanctions on Russian oil as a way to lower gas prices and concluded, “we fought and lost a war in Iran so that both the Iranians and the Russians could make far more money from oil.” Obama national security official Ben Rhodes said that American “standing in the world” had been “obliterated,” noting that US embassies and bases in the Middle East were damaged and munitions “badly depleted.” Political scientist Elizabeth Saunders added succinctly that “we are worse off than before the war.”
Even neocon hack Bret Stephens admitted that if Iran retains control of the strait, “Tehran would see it as victory and vindication. Of course Stephens believes this means that we should continue the war indefinitely, even if Trump, and for that matter Bret Stephens, have no idea how to win it.
Why can’t we say we lost?
While the expert consensus is clear, mainstream news sites have been shy of acknowledging the defeat in such an unambiguous way.
Politifact, for example, confined itself to saying that, contra Trump officials, the US did not achieve “total victory.” The Hill similarly temporized, arguing that Iran could simply win by virtue of not losing. The Guardian argued that both the US and Iran were losers, without mentioning the massive bonanza the Iranian regime seems poised to reap in tolls. The Bezos-ified Washington Post insisted, inevitably, that the US could still win.
Democrats have been very critical of Trump’s war, of escalating gas prices, and of his genocidal threats. But they have mostly avoided characterizing the war as a loss for the US or a win for Iran. Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, for example, called the war “madness,” but not a defeat or a loss. Vermont senator and left-wing leader Bernie Sanders has emphasized similar themes. Democrats argue that Trump has damaged US standing and is unfit for the presidency, but Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy has been somewhat of an outlier in making a case that “we are losing this war.”
There are probably a range of reasons for the reticence. Mainstream media prefers to cite sources on both sides of an issue rather than take a stand itself. Right now the US is saying it won and Iran is saying it won, and for those whose chief moral touchstone is neutrality, it seems safer to split the difference. Democrats, for their part, may worry that saying “we lost” would make them seem unpatriotic — or, even worse, that they could push Trump to prove that we haven’t lost by extending the conflict.
To some extent, Democrats don’t really need to come down hard on the message that this is a defeat. The war is, again, brutally unpopular already. And as political scientist Jonathan Bernstein points out, voters don’t pay attention to foreign policy, and most are not all that aware of the nuances of the debate about the war. But they will undoubtedly notice the effects in higher prices and recession if Iran retains control of the strait and continues to either block shipping or demand tolls.
When you lose a war, things get worse, and voters blame the president when things get worse. At some point, though, the US will need to reckon with this loss as a loss if it wants to prevent such debacles in the future.
You would think that after Vietnam and Iraq, America would have recognized the danger of giving the president a blank check for foreign adventurism. But somehow the bipartisan appeal of more money for more guns and for equating “security” with “belligerence” never seems to get old. As recently as last October, with Trump in power and his approval already sinking, 48 percent of Americans believed the GOP was the party that could best protect the US, compared to only 41 percent who preferred Democrats on national security.
Trump’s Iran mis-excursion could be a chance to argue not just that the US needs to avoid intervention and regime change, but that allowing a president to declare war unilaterally, without congressional oversight or involvement, puts America in danger and makes us less secure and less safe.
We just lost a war. If Trump and the GOP have their way, we will lose more.
That’s it for today
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“It’s going to be OK…because it always is.” That’s not strategy. That’s magical thinking with a $28 billion tab and 240 dead children attached to it.
Bret Stephens knows it’s a loss. He just can’t say what that implies—-that there was never a path to victory, only a path to more war. That’s not hawkishness. That’s a personality disorder with a defense budget.
The “healthy democracy” capable of honest reckoning? It left the building before the first strike. What we have now is a regime that started an illegal war on vibes, lost it on vibes, and will spend the next decade explaining why losing was actually winning.
Iran kept the strait. Russia kept the oil premium. China kept winning without lifting a finger.
The U.S. kept the bill.
—Johan
Former FSO
The euphemisms change but the song remains the same. Since the "Peace with honor" days, and the constant shuffling of the dramatis personae, the public has endured and succumbed to learned helplessness. It cuts across many issues and I lay the blame squarely at the feet of greed. Occam's Razor.