A month from now, I expect Donald Trump to wind up the Iran war, with the rest of the Western world left holding the bag.
I have been circumspect when it comes to commentary on the Iran war, even as it necessarily forms the backdrop to my other work over the last month and a half. The main reason for this is that I have little confidence in the reporting from all sides — the mainstream media, partisans in favor, those opposed, foreigners, and administration sources alike. Never before, in such wildly momentous times, have I felt less certainty about where to turn to for accurate information nor been more alert to how many people wish to spin me in one direction or another.
The Trump administration’s remarkable failure to publicly engage with the country on the Iran war has made that task even more difficult. (No, angry and hyperbolic Truth Social blurts do not count as “serious communication.”) We were not nationally prepared for a war by the president, either politically or rhetorically, and the national polling on the matter quite simply cannot be gainsaid. Americans are bemused, skeptical, and increasingly angry about knock-on effects of the war, like the price at the pump.
So when the bombs first began to drop, I signed off until further notice. On February 28 I wrote a simple plea: “Donald Trump Needs to Explain Himself Further to the American People.” Two days later, I added a second and final thought: “Nobody Knows How Trump’s Regime-Change War Will End.” And since then, I’ve found other things to write about. Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.
Now Donald Trump has delivered his first prime-time speech to the American people on Iran since attacks began, and I am no closer to clarity. For 21 minutes last night, Donald Trump spoke with only the loosest sense of narrative coherence as he boasted about the smashing success of the joint U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran.
In these past four weeks, our armed forces have delivered swift, decisive, overwhelming victories on the battlefield. Victories like few people have ever seen before. Tonight, Iran’s navy is gone. Their air force is in ruins. Their leaders, most of them, terrorist regime, they led, are now dead. Their command and control of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is being decimated as we speak.
All well and good. But this sort of bragging confuses U.S. military domination — which has never been in doubt — with strategic victory. And strategic victory is very much in doubt in any situation where an Islamist regime remains in place, regardless of how “decimated” it becomes. Trump sought to have his cake and eat it too: Regime change was both “not our goal” and “has already occurred.” (In his speech Trump threatened to bomb Iran “back to the Stone Age” unless it surrendered. America tried that once already with the North Vietnamese; they’re still there.)
Trump apparently believes that the religious and geopolitical imperatives of the Islamic State will vanish with their senior leadership and after their military cadres have been given enough of a beating. I am not so sure. Iran is not Venezuela and will never be converted into a client state; its decision-makers are motivated by implacable religious fanaticism as much as they are by money.
And in the meantime, the Iranian regime — decimated and all — has a fantastic way of causing global havoc, using its asymmetric (and eternal) geographic advantage to choke off shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. Oil prices have risen precipitously as Iran has begun attacking (and tolling) international shipping, while prices at the gas pump are now a dollar higher on average nationwide than they were before the war.
Trump’s response to this is an almost textbook nonanswer: It’s not a problem for the United States, he claims (in the face of all evidence), and even if it is it’s incumbent on the other nations of the West to police their own damn strait — you know, the one we gunked up:
The United States imports almost no oil through the Hormuz Strait and won’t be taking any in the future. We don’t need it. We haven’t needed it, and we don’t need it. We’ve beaten and completely decimated Iran. They are decimated both militarily and economically and in every other way. And the countries of the world that do receive oil through the Hormuz Strait must take care of that passage. They must cherish it. They must grab it and cherish it. They could do it easily. We will be helpful, but they should take the lead in protecting the oil that they so desperately depend on. [. . .] Go to the strait and just take it, protect it, use it for yourselves. Iran has been essentially decimated. The hard part is done, so it should be easy.
This is not the political response of a man with a plan to extract the world from a global economic quandary he created. Come to the Strait of Hormuz with your navies, ye nations of the West, and steal this oil from the Iranian people — please? (Trump’s appeal to Europeans to go and “get their bag” was so appalling as to be comical — a desperately flat-footed appeal to 19th-century imperialism designed to set European capitals ablaze with anti-colonialist guilt.)
Trump further reassured us: “In any event, when this conflict is over, the strait will open up naturally. It’ll just open up naturally.” Will it now? How, without a permanent occupation of the Iranian coastline? That presumes an end to the conflict, which itself presumes a new regime, which sure isn’t the one we’re currently dealing with. (The fifth guy down in an org chart stocked with Islamist fanatics is still an Islamist fanatic.)
The Iranian regime is desperate to survive as an ideological continuity above all else, and its ability to cripple or dictate shipping through the Strait of Hormuz will be the key to that. So yes, expect it to be reopened — as an Iranian tollbooth, used by the regime to rebuild its economic and military strength. Do we really want the Iran war to end with Iran, temporarily reduced in strength but unrepentant as ever, metering the flow of oil throughout half the world for its own ends?
We might. At the end of Trump’s speech I was filled with doubts: We are going to be bombing Iran for two to three weeks more — what then? When whatever’s left of the IRGC remains holed up in its mountain fastnesses refusing to surrender, will Donald Trump simply declare victory and go home? Unless you believe we’re sending in the Marines, the question answers itself — which means that a month from now, I expect Donald Trump to wind up the Iran war, with the rest of the Western world left holding the bag.