Trump Loses To Iran
And: Kiev Lavra Burns; Archbishop At Mosque; Requiem For Boomer Spielberg
I hope the US-Iran war really is over, but look: we lost this war, or rather, Trump lost the war he started. I wish it were otherwise, but as someone who supported Trump in 2024 in large part because I counted on him not to start any foolish wars, I have no interest in listening to his excuse-making.
The New York Times is correct here, I’m afraid:
That was the measure of victory, declared by Trump himself, though as usual, he kept moving the goalposts. Back at the start of this thing, I either wrote in this space, or mentioned to friends, can’t remember which, that if the Iranian government merely survives, it will have won, no matter how badly its military capacities will have been degraded. What I did not foresee is that not only would it have won by surviving, but Iran will have demonstrated that it has a weapon more powerful than a nuclear bomb: the capacity to control the Strait of Hormuz at will.
My guess is that Trump believed the same thing that George W. Bush believed before going into Iraq: that the might of the US military, and the wealth of the USA, would be enough to allow America to impose its will on a lesser power. That might have been the case were the US willing to mount a massive ground invasion of Iran. Maybe (our ground invasion of the vastly weaker Iraq was no cakewalk, as neocon Kenneth Adelman predicted it would be back in the day).
But Trump was never willing to do that, because it would have been a catastrophe. He counted on US and Israeli air and missile power to complete the job. It wasn’t enough. Not even decapitating the Islamic Republic’s leadership worked, because the Iranians, being Persians (and therefore one of the oldest and wisest peoples on the planet), had already figured out how to be resilient, by decentralizing its command.
Moreover, Iran had capabilities we hadn’t figured on, it appears. All the Gulf Arab states that counted on us to defend them successfully learned otherwise. Now, assuming the war really is over, Iran still retains its uranium, and we are left having to trust them not to make nukes. Well, I don’t trust them at all, but this is what we are left with. If this deal holds, then yes, the Strait of Hormuz will be open again … but it was open before Trump started the war. Now it is once again open, but at the pleasure of the Iranians. We now know that they can close it whenever they like — and that the US can’t, or won’t, do a thing about it.
Like I said, we lost. We lost not by being defeated on the battlefield, but by fighting a very expensive, in terms of loss of materiel and economic capacity, without achieving our key objectives.
Yes, Iran suffered immensely, but it triumphed in the ways that count. The Iranian government is an apocalyptic Islamic theocracy that hates Jews, hates the West, and remains determined to wipe Israel off the map. And yet, they stood up to the militarily superior US and Israel, and survived. This is a catastrophe, the broader effects of which will be felt for a very long time.
On May 10, the neocon uberhawk Bob Kagan, who never met a war he didn’t want America to undertake, wrote this. Excerpt:
It’s hard to think of a time when the United States suffered a total defeat in a conflict, a setback so decisive that the strategic loss could be neither repaired nor ignored. The calamitous losses suffered at Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, and throughout the Western Pacific in the first months of World War II were eventually reversed. The defeats in Vietnam and Afghanistan were costly but did not do lasting damage to America’s overall position in the world, because they were far from the main theaters of global competition. The initial failure in Iraq was mitigated by a shift in strategy that ultimately left Iraq relatively stable and unthreatening to its neighbors and kept the United States dominant in the region.
Defeat in the present confrontation with Iran will be of an entirely different character. It can neither be repaired nor ignored. There will be no return to the status quo ante, no ultimate American triumph that will undo or overcome the harm done. The Strait of Hormuz will not be “open,” as it once was. With control of the strait, Iran emerges as the key player in the region and one of the key players in the world. The roles of China and Russia, as Iran’s allies, are strengthened; the role of the United States, substantially diminished. Far from demonstrating American prowess, as supporters of the war have repeatedly claimed, the conflict has revealed an America that is unreliable and incapable of finishing what it started. That is going to set off a chain reaction around the world as friends and foes adjust to America’s failure.
I wish I didn’t believe that, and I hope I am wrong, but we gain nothing by pretending that Trump won this thing, as the president would have us do.
Here’s what I think the consequences are likely to be:
massive loss of US military and diplomatic credibility worldwide; our enemies now know what our limitations are
Iran emerges as the dominant power in the Middle East, especially over its oil production; the US Navy has, since the end of World War II, been the de facto guarantor of free passage on the world’s seas — but now Iran has demonstrated that it can defy the US Navy, and get away with it
More economic shocks as it takes a year to 18 months to get Persian Gulf oil back into the global pipeline, to say nothing of the years it will take to repair damaged and ruined oil and gas facilities in the region
An America that has much-reduced material capacity to respond to more important threats, such as China
The possible end of the Emirates as a financial hub of the Middle East; the Emiratis now know that their five-star hotels can be bombed by the Iranian regime, which is still in power — and the world knows that too
Loss of credibility of Trump and the GOP among American voters, who are now very hard-pressed with the cost of living
An acceleration of the weakening of the petrodollar system (in which oil is priced in dollars, globally), and with it, a slide in US global economic power
In addition to the damage Trump’s foreign policy has done to the traditional American alliances, this will make other countries much less trusting of befriending the US. Advantage: China, and to a lesser extent, Russia
Here is what the White House would like us to think about the “Memorandum of Understanding,” the step now underway towards a final treaty ending the war:
Iran will never have a nuclear weapon. Oh really? How’s that going to work?
President Trump ended the fighting on every front, including Lebanon. No forever war. That’s rich. He started the damn war!
The Strait of Hormuz is open again. Yeah, until the Iranians decide to close it again, in which case we can’t, or won’t, do a damn thing about it. The world knows this.
Iran’s rewards come from its own unfrozen money… . And how is this different from the situation before the war?
Obama never even got a signed document… . Wow, a “signed document” from the Iranians. About as valuable as Monopoly money. And did Trump really dismantle Iran’s program? They still have uranium. We don’t know what capabilities they still have underground, untouched by US bombs.
Here is a clip of Trump announcing the start of hostilities, on February 28. I’ve cued it to the part near the end in which he says: “Finally, to the great proud people of Iran: I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand...When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take.”
And here we are today.
A friend tells me that this is “America’s Suez.” He’s analogizing this to Britain’s 1956 humiliation in the crisis over Egyptian president Nasser’s seizure of the Suez Canal. Britain’s failure to reverse that — the US refused to back the UK — was a sign of Britain’s decline. True, the United States today is far stronger overall than was Britain in 1956, exhausted from the Second World War. But the analogy is hard to get around. Nasser emerged from that showdown owning the Suez Canal, a vital economic waterway. Iran emerges from this fight with America with de facto control over the Strait of Hormuz, a far more important waterway for global trade.
How is America better off for having started this war? Seriously, how? How is this not a betrayal of Trump’s promise to keep America out of foreign wars?
Don’t misread me here: the Iranian government is a very bad actor, and I don’t think it should have nuclear weapons. But the US started a war to end Iran’s nuclear program and to overthrow the Islamist regime — and failed. By Trump’s own metrics stated at the war’s beginning, America failed.
If you are anti-Trump, and take pleasure in his failure, you shouldn’t. This is going to cost us all, for long after Trump leaves office. At the very least, let us not pretend that Donald Trump has won some kind of victory here. This is a humiliation of immense strategic and historical consequence. And you know, I feel in a sense personally humiliated, because I wanted Trump to be president again, despite his many flaws, because I trusted him more than any other senior American politician to keep us out of these useless damn wars. Now look.
