Trump’s Iran Miscalculation

T he cease-fire in the Iran war is an ambiguous outcome.

The Iranian regime has taken a pounding and will not, for a long time, be in a position to project power globally at close to its capacity back in February. Or better, at close to its capacity early last year — because we should see the latest fighting as a continuation of last June’s Twelve-Day War, in which the U.S. and Israel took out Iran’s nuclear program and air defenses.

On the other hand, as I’ve maintained from the start, by imposing an artificial deadline of four to six weeks — one that was driven by the stock market, negative opinion polls, and American electoral politics, rather than geopolitics or the prospects of military victory — President Trump ensured that the Iranian sharia-supremacist regime will survive. It will continue to control the Strait of Hormuz as a chokepoint on global trade. And it will, despite its battered state, persist in brutally dominating the Iranian people.

The president went with his gut and was wrong. The regime in Tehran did all the things he gambled they wouldn’t do. He was sure that they’d surrender (unconditionally!), but the regime never considered it, confident that it could hold out for a few weeks despite the onslaught; and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ decentralized combat structure allowed it to continue fighting notwithstanding the decapitation strikes against regime leaders. The regime broadened the war by attacking the Arab states (especially those that host American military bases and otherwise abet American military operations) — something longstanding U.S. intelligence warned Iran could do but Trump assumed the regime would not do. (Trump on March 10: “One of the things that surprised me most was when they attacked countries that were not attacking them”; Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth the same day: “I can’t say that we anticipated necessarily that’s exactly how they would react, but we knew it was a possibility.”) And the regime de facto closed the Strait of Hormuz, another card Trump had convinced himself the Iranians wouldn’t play if he threatened to blow them to smithereens. (Iranian officials let the traffic of their choosing get through, particularly oil shipments to China, correctly betting the U.S. would not impede that traffic for fear of widening the war.)

We could have gotten a better, more decisive outcome on all these fronts, but not on Trump’s timeline of four to six weeks.

The self-imposed failure to do better doesn’t minimize the profound damage American and Israeli forces inflicted on the regime. It just illustrates what I argued over the weekend: A win can be made politically to look like a loss if a president fails to bring the country along on clear, consistent, achievable objectives that are obviously achieved. Democrats and their allies in the progressive-leaning media want to make this look like a loss for Trump; as usual, he has given them ammunition.

I’ve contended through both Trump terms that the president does not comprehend Islamic fundamentalism, very much including the revolutionary Shiite ideology of the regime founded by Ruhollah Khomeini in 1979. Trump sees himself as a dealmaker and everyone else as biddable, holding no principle that doesn’t have a price point at which it will be tossed aside. That worldview is incompatible with fervently held ideology.

So is madman theory.

Trump is a practitioner of madman theory — not, as his most rabid opponents claim, an actual madman. He calculates that he’ll get his way if the other side thinks he might just be crazy enough to make good on his unhinged rhetoric: bombing the enemy “to the stone ages,” “a whole civilization will die tonight,” “Open the F***in’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH!”

This may work in comparatively polite company (it has terrified congressional Republicans, for example). It doesn’t work against other madmen — the sort that, like Iranian regime leaders, used child soldiers as human shields during their barbaric eight-year war against Iraq and that similarly mobilized human chains yesterday, to shield power plants and other infrastructure in response to Trump’s “civilization” threat.

What I can’t help but find wryly amusing, the high stakes notwithstanding, is how Trump, a flimflam man if ever there was one, has recognized and tried to exploit the flimflam in the Iranian system.

Iran plays a game by which those who want to be deceived (namely, transnational progressives) are encouraged to believe that the regime is evolving into a normal government. Mainly, they do this by holding faux elections. The winners occasionally include ostensible moderates who are duly dispatched to pick the West’s pocket at the negotiating table; but it’s all a sham because, behind the curtain, the sharia-supremacist leadership (a) controls who is allowed to run in the elections and (b) ultimately makes all important decisions.

Ever since the first week of the latest fighting, Trump has been groping for an off-ramp — once he realized that Iran was not going to surrender, that the war could not be ended with something that looked like a swift victory (à la the Maduro extraction from Venezuela), and that rising prices were driving down his approval ratings (which were not good in the first place). He has settled on pretending that he has achieved regime change.

The tall tale is that, thanks to the decapitation strikes, Iran is now run by far more moderate, reasonable leaders (you know, the kind that order human chains to shield power plants from bombs). How is he doing this? By pretending that the Iranian officials with whom the administration says it is now negotiating, some of whom became officials through the sham Iranian election process (such as President Masoud Pezeshkian and Parliament Speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf), are the real leaders of the country — the new, reasonable, moderate Iranians.

Hence, in the past few hours, we’ve seen Trump inveigh against CNN for what is apparently the high crime of publishing the statement issued by Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, the voice of the regime, immediately after the cease-fire agreement. Here is how that statement opens:

The enemy, in its unjust, illegal, and criminal war against the Iranian nation, has suffered an undeniable, historic, and crushing defeat. By the blessing of the pure and sacred blood of the martyred leader of the Islamic Revolution, Grand Ayatollah Imam Khamenei (peace be upon him), the measures of the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution and Commander-in-Chief, Grand Ayatollah Seyyed Mojtaba Khamenei (may God protect him), and the struggle and bravery of the fighters of Islam on the fronts – and especially the historic, enduring, and epic presence of you, the dear people, on the scene from the very first days of the war – Iran has achieved a great victory and forced the criminal United States to accept its ten-point plan.

In this plan, the United States has, in principle, committed to non-aggression; the continuation of Iran’s control over the Strait of Hormuz; acceptance of enrichment; the lifting of all primary and secondary sanctions; the termination of all United Nations Security Council and Board of Governors resolutions; compensation to Iran; the withdrawal of U.S. combat forces from the region; and the cessation of war on all fronts, including against the heroic Islamic resistance in Lebanon. We congratulate all the people of Iran on this victory and emphasize that until the details of this victory are finalized, continued resilience and prudence by officials, and the preservation of unity and solidarity among the Iranian people, remain necessary.

In fact, contrary to Trump’s claim, this statement is not “fake news.” It was issued by regime-controlled media, has been posted in English on Iran’s Tasnim News Agency’s website, and has now been reported on by several other news outlets, including Fox News (citing the Times of Israel), the New York Times, CBS News, the Washington Post, and PBS, among others.

Understand: The fact that the IRGC-controlled regime has survived doesn’t mean that Iran has won (as Iran would like the world to believe), much less that the regime is going to get satisfaction on all of its far-fetched demands. But there is no regime change. It’s the same regime with the same “Death to America” objectives. Iran’s elections have always been a sham; our president’s attempt to spin victory out of ambiguity by suggesting that the regime has been supplanted by the kind of phony moderates it has always used as frontmen is no more real.

Now, with the strait reopened, we move on to the umpty-umpth round of negotiations with the same old regime. And we know how well that tends to go.