If you can count the costs but can’t count your winnings, you are likely to conclude that you lost the game.
Jim Antle offered a pithy summary of the postmortems on Trump 2025–26: “Some people think the Iran war is worth the costs. Some people think the tariffs are. Trump is nearly alone in thinking both are. Voters think neither are.” I would add that it was Trump and Trump alone who is responsible for deciding not to involve Congress or the public in either decision. Even if you like one or both policies, that now looks like an obvious, indefensible blunder of immense proportions.
It ought to be clear, and equally admitted by all, that both tariffs and the Iran war were politically costly. Has the war been worth it? My problem is, I still don’t know. In part, I don’t know because we haven’t seen yet how it ends. If the war pushes the Iranian regime at some point over the next few years into the dustbin of history where it so richly deserves to end, it will have been worth quite a lot. But the Trump administration has never announced regime change as a war aim and has not pursued the war as if it was a war aim. So that part is completely speculative.
If the war ends in a negotiated agreement, we could judge the agreement’s terms and its likelihood of being enforceable. I remain completely unpersuaded that a deal will do more good than harm or that it would deliver any better result than just hitting Iran until we decide that we’ve done all we’re going to accomplish.
That leaves the more modest aim of a war to degrade Iran’s offensive military capacities — its nuclear program, its missiles, its navy, its terror proxies, etc. Now, on that front, I don’t see why we needed a war that lasted longer than a few weeks. But as to whether it’s worth it, I can’t evaluate that. And neither can the electorate. Sure, I can read public sources estimating the progress we have made from what Iran had before to what it has now. But are those estimates accurate? Derived in good faith or bad faith? Correctly described by the press or the government? Again, because I lack direct access to classified information, I can’t know the answer. This is why I have argued since very early in the war that victories need to be visible: The costs of war need to be sold on the basis of things that allow the ordinary citizen to tell whether or not we got what we fought for. If you do a quick military strike and say “trust us,” they will often let it go. But an extended campaign that costs lives, treasure, and economic pain that is visible to the public cannot be justified on the basis of “trust us.” If you can count the costs but can’t count your winnings, you are likely to conclude that you lost the game.
This is why the biggest losers in the Iran-war debate are not the neoconservatives and other hawks who wanted regime change and didn’t get a regime-change war, or the “restrainers” who didn’t want war at all: It’s the people who thought you could do a middle-ground war on the cheap, but not cheap enough. War is never that easy.