Trump’s War is the Worst Conceived in American History

Ignoring experts comes at a steep price

General Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned Donald Trump that an attack on Iran would provoke its closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Every president contemplating war in the Middle East has known this and therefore avoided a full regional war. But Trump said he knew better and plunged into war. Of course, Trump was wrong — monumentally, predictably, and inexcusably wrong. Now, the Strait is mined and closed, the war rages out of control, oil prices have spiked, and the economy is teetering.

This catastrophic blunder stems from Trump’s delusion that a forty-seven-year-old Islamic regime insulated by layers of bureaucracy, an enormous military, an entrenched ideology, and a fervent national identity could be bombed out of existence. He convinced himself and his cult that — without adverse consequences — he could replace the mullahs with a friendlier regime (who, exactly, he never said). This madness, enabled by the phalanx of yes-men afraid to tell Trump he is wrong (even about their shoe size), was not unique to Trump.

(Dan Scavino, via Wikimedia Commons)

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, another regime change fabulist, frequently insisted, as he did at the war’s start, that full-scale war would “create the conditions for the brave Iranian people to take their destiny into their own hands.”

Netanyahu is now back-pedaling furiously. “I can’t tell you with certainty that the Iranian people will bring down the regime,” Netanyahu said at his first wartime press conference last week. “If it doesn’t fall, it will be much weaker.” Oh, now he tells us.

The realization that regime change is a pipe dream, which U.S. presidents have learned repeatedly, has swamped Trump’s megalomania and Netanyahu’s dream of “forever” removing an Iranian threat. (The latter requires forever war.) By Friday, even Trump figured out that toppling the regime is a “very big hurdle.” He sounds as if he just discovered his goal’s impossibility: “Who’s going to do that? They literally have people in the streets with machine guns, machine gunning people down if they want to protest.” What did he think would happen?

On the American side, sane voices consistently have derided labeled regime change as a fantasy. The U.S. intelligence community reiterated its view that the Iranian government “is not at risk of collapse,” Reuters reported. It turns out that Trump’s “feeling” he could pull it off was baseless, perhaps a function of untreated malignant narcissism.

The reasons other presidents avoided war against Iran — economic cost to the U.S., bombardment of our Gulf allies, closure of the Strait of Hormuz and soaring oil prices, high civilian casualties, a vengeful regime still in place but more determined to pursue a nuclear weapon, and Russia’s economic bonanza — all have surprised Trump and his regime of lickspittles. “When past presidents balked at the possibility of war with Iran, they weren’t just dodging a hard choice; they were deterred by all of the obvious reasons a conflict could perilously spiral,” Franklin Foer wrote recently. “Nobody should be shocked that the expected is now coming to pass.” Except the least competent president ever.

The annals of regime change are not littered with success stories. Wherever attempted (e.g. Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya), it begat endless, bloody war and an inconclusive outcome, at best. While we may wish for a better Iran regime, Phil Gordon at Brookings wrote early in the war: “By thinking he can defy deep historical lessons from the region, and by launching a war with no congressional mandate or significant public support, Mr Trump is taking a massive and unnecessary gamble—not just with his presidency but with the lives of countless Americans, Iranians and others.” He is losing his gamble, with others to pay the price.

Atrocious economic news (“Fourth-quarter GDP revised down to just 0.7% growth; January core inflation was 3.1%”) makes the added economic pain that much harder to tolerate. Moreover, in past wars, the U.S. has restrained Israel; in this war, Netanyahu and Trump have egged each other on with no plan for when to stop or evident consideration of what happens afterward.

The war reminds us that the current right-wing Israeli government and the U.S. do not have identical interests, although Netanyahu and Trump personally are two peas in the autocrat pod (e.g., corrupt, contemptuous of the press, law, and public opinion; antagonistic toward democracy). Netanyahu, in search of his white whale of regime change/redemption for the October 7 catastrophe, might be content with perpetual war. The U.S. public and sane bipartisan foreign policy voices have limited appetite for casualties, soaring oil prices, and long-term strain on our other alliances. Israel’s right-wing government may want to turn Iran into a failed state. From the U.S. perspective, a failed state of 90M people will likely become a hotbed of terrorism, a source of mass migration and violence, a spur to regional instability, and an elevated risk of nuclear proliferation.

The two powers now differ even on targeting. Yousef Munayyer wrote for The Guardian: “Israel struck oil facilities in Tehran that led to apocalyptic scenes in the Iranian capital, heightened Iran’s resolve to target oil infrastructure in neighboring US allies, sent shockwaves into the oil market that puts the greatest pressure on Trump and poisoned the environment in a city of 10 million people.” (Of course, the Gaza War already demonstrated the countries’ divergent interests: Netanyahu’s one-state fantasy to completely subjugate the Palestinians without regard for civilians’ well-being is both unattainable and, to most Americans, reprehensible.)

Polls, oil prices, and/or casualties may force Trump to find an off-ramp. But after the fighting, the region will be more volatile, the human cost breathtaking, and the need for an agreement to contain Iran’s nuclear program that much more essential. To both allies and foes, the U.S. will appear unreliable and disingenuous.

This war may be an even greater strategic disaster than the Iraq War. “[I]t is really incredible malpractice that they have launched this war, created the set of circumstances in the region that has long-term economic and strategic consequences without fully thinking through the potential outcomes,” Brookings Institution’s Suzanne Maloney observed.

Democrats need a different Middle East vision, one grounded in four principles:

1.) The U.S. does not unconditionally arm Israel or approve every Israeli action (as is true with all allies);

2.) The U.S, needs regional stability, which requires containing Iran, preventing more failed states, and protecting Israel’s legitimate security needs but restraining its regional aggression and working toward resolving the Palestinian crisis;

3.) A robust clean energy policy must weaken dependence on fossil fuel (while a net energy exporter, the U.S. is in a global oil market); and

4.) Wars (whether labeled “excursions” or without the malapropism, “incursions”) must be a last resort, never undertaken without public and congressional support.

In sum, only public pressure will force Trump to end his war. Going forward, policymakers should remember Trump’s blunders and do the opposite. Finally, voters must remember that regardless of what they say, Republicans cannot resist a Middle East war and invariably underestimate its cost in blood and treasure.