There is no way to sugarcoat the epic scale of America’s humiliation in Donald Trump’s disastrous and irrational war with Iran, or the damaging global effects that will endure years or decades into the future. With the “stable genius” and “extraordinarily brilliant person” in the White House visibly decompensating into impotent rage and erratic burst of mania, there is no obvious exit strategy that will allow him to declare victory (as he must, for interwoven and deeply unfortunate psychological and political reasons).
This war has accomplished exactly none of its stated objectives — even with those constantly shifting and being defined downward — and has almost certainly strengthened the regional power and global reputation of the Iranian regime, despite weeks of bombing and the deaths of much of its leadership. Trump’s options would seem to be a negotiated settlement that might, at best, approximate the pre-war status quo; a potentially catastrophic military escalation favored by literally no one except Lindsey Graham, the Israeli government and a handful of right-wing Iranian expatriates; or an indefinite continuation of the current phony war over the Strait of Hormuz, in hopes that the Iranian economy will suffocate before global recession sets in (an outcome that may be unavoidable no matter what else happens).
That’s a doubleplus-ungood list of options, and while it’s easy to say that the first one presents the most rational outcome for all sides, it’s not clear that even matters. The Pakistani government’s effort to play peacemaker has once again collapsed, with neither Iran’s foreign minister and Trump’s amateur-hour negotiators willing to show up in Islamabad this weekend. Trump is “quite fed up” with this war and eager to make a deal, reports Amos Harel of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, but is trapped between Benjamin Netanyahu on one side and Iran’s new war-hardened governing faction on the other, both of whom are more than willing to fight on.
We know Trump wants something he can sell as a big win to his dead-ender congressional loyalists and his declining support base, and that Netanyahu still hopes for an all-out U.S.-led war of destruction (although Harel reports that the Israeli leader now understands that’s unlikely). Opinions about what Iran’s new leaders want are all over the map, but in the words of Foreign Policy columnist Michael Hirsh, they now seem to be “calling the shots.”
From the beginning of this conflict, the Iranians identified the fundamental weakness of U.S. strategy, which was based on a litany of false assumptions, starting with the premise that total victory could be achieved with air power (something that has never happened in the history of warfare) and that killing Iran’s senior leaders would cause the regime to surrender or collapse. Trump and Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio and whoever else somehow persuaded themselves — or allowed Netanyahu to persuade them — to ignore the obvious Heffalump trap that was right in front of them, that being yet another protracted, expensive and massively unpopular foreign war likely to crater or destroy a presidency.
Trump and Pete Hegseth and whoever else somehow persuaded themselves — or allowed Netanyahu to persuade them — to ignore the obvious Heffalump trap in front of them, yet another protracted, expensive and massively unpopular foreign war.
Hai Nguyen, a Vietnam War scholar at the Harvard Kennedy school, told Hirsh that he saw history literally repeating itself. Like the Viet Cong of 50-odd years ago, the Iranians have perceived the American superpower’s Achilles heel: “They understand that the U.S. could drop thousands of tons of bombs, but it does not possess the patience to withstand a prolonged war.” In refusing to negotiate despite the risk of further devastation and the immense hardship inflicted on its own people, the Iranian regime is observing a time-honored principle attributed to Napoleon: Never interrupt your opponent when he’s making a mistake.
It’s almost possible to concoct a silver lining from this dreadful situation, but only by focusing on short-term electoral politics in the most bloodless and instrumental fashion. I have no doubt that Rahm Emanuel and James Carville are whispering to Democratic leaders that they need to do almost nothing from here to November in order to win back the House, and quite possibly the Senate too. Whether they can or will do anything meaningful after that, amid the likely global chaos caused by this war, remains to be seen.
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Whether or not this war will outdo the long-term destructive consequences of George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq is a question for future historians to sort out (should there be any). But these military misadventures 23 years apart already appear as aspects of the same historical phenomenon, despite the ardent claims of the Trump administration and its defenders that everything is different now because real men are in charge. Both these wars represent desperate, doomed efforts to reverse the inexorable process of imperial decline that’s been underway for several decades, and has constrained or dictated the actions of at least the last five American presidents.
If the 9/11 attacks marked an obvious turning point in recent American history, they too were symptoms rather than causes of the gradual decay of U.S. power and influence, which goes back some distance before that. We still live in a country that was fundamentally reshaped by defeat in the Vietnam War, the social and cultural revolutions of the 1960s and the economic crises of the 1970s and ‘80s, even if most living Americans do not remember those events. Today’s intractable political divisions have their roots in that era, as do the worsening economic inequality and the cultural and geographical divides that lie beneath them.
We still live in a country fundamentally reshaped by defeat in the Vietnam War, the social and cultural revolutions of the 1960s and the economic crises of the 1970s and ‘80s, even if most living Americans do not remember those events.
We also live in a country whose political and media elites systematically deny that any such process of imperial decline is underway, or that the changes it has brought to American society and global affairs may be irreversible. Politicians of both parties must loudly proclaim a quasi-religious belief that America is an exceptional and “indispensable” nation, anointed by God or history or the unique genius of the Founders. To suggest otherwise is tantamount to treason, even if Trump’s MAGA motto seems to carry a heretical subtext: Somewhere along the way, it’s implied, America’s greatness has been lost or stolen or corrupted by corporate diversity programs, NFL rule changes, renewable energy and, of course, Barack Hussein Obama.
Let’s come back around to Tucker Carlson, whose self-serving reverse heel-turn feels partway between the old saw about rats leaving a sinking ship and a harbinger of the apocalypse. Two years ago, Carlson conducted a very long and very strange interview with Vladimir Putin, who seemed almost visibly to conclude that America wasn’t sending its top talent. It’s worth watching the whole thing, if you’re exactly the right kind of sicko. Toward the end of their conversation, Putin says that this era of history will be determined by one question: Whether America will decline in a gradual and orderly fashion, or catastrophically and all at once. We don’t have to hand it to him either, but it’s a good question and the answer is now becoming apparent.