War is a Reality Check on Even the Maddest of Kings
Trump now has three choices in Iran, none good.
Imagine if the coach of a bad football team called a press conference after a 40 to 0 loss and said: “We’re winning games like no one has ever seen before” and denounced the “fake news” sports pages that published the score. Even the team’s most loyal fans — no, especially the team’s most loyal fans — would demand the delusional coach be fired. They would do this even though professional sports — and I say this as a passionate Giants/Yankees/Knicks fan myself — don’t really matter to our lives.
Yet somehow when it comes to governing our country, which matters a bit more than the outcome of a football game, millions of us tolerate a leader who says things that are completely divorced from reality. “A tariff is a tax on a foreign country.” “We’ve taken in $18 trillion” in foreign investment. “Grocery prices are down.” “Drug prices have dropped 600%.” Donald Trump’s advisers humor these obvious lies. Republican lawmakers ratify policies based on them. Aww shucks, they say, the head coach of our government just has a unique way of communicating.
But war is a reality check on even the maddest of kings. The war in Iran will not bend to Trump’s bullshit. It won’t lie to him, or for him, as his cabinet does. It won’t cover up his incompetence. For once in Trump’s political life, pretty much everyone sees the score and knows who is to blame.
A recent poll asked Americans the most important question about the war: Have the costs been worth the benefits? Only 24% said yes, a stunningly low level of agreement with a wartime commander in chief, especially in this age of hard-to-shake partisan loyalty.
So, let’s run the tape on the past eight weeks of this excursion in the Persian Gulf — you know, the one that Trump said was “over in the first 24 hours” — and measure what’s been lost, what’s been gained, and what can be done now.
We should begin with the human cost — 13 American service members dead, plus dozens of civilians in Israel, Iraq, and in the Gulf States, hundreds more in the related fighting in Lebanon, and at least 1,700 civilians in Iran, according to anti-regime human rights monitors.
There were understandable hopes among the Iranian diaspora that this was going to be a war of liberation for their people and that the civilian toll would thus be worth bearing. But Iran’s regime was never going to surrender to air strikes alone — no tyrants ever have. And Trump doesn’t care — he says the hard-line Revolutionary Guard commanders now running Iran are a “whole different group of people” who have been “very reasonable.”
So, yes, as proponents of the war keep reminding us, Iran’s evil regime killed tens of thousands of its own people during pro-democracy protests earlier this year. The United States and Israel then killed a couple of thousand more. All the survivors have gotten so far is a “transition” to a younger and more radical version of that same regime.
Then there are the economic costs. The military operation alone cost U.S. taxpayers more in its first month than the amount needed to extend Obamacare health insurance subsidies for a year. Even if the current ceasefire lasts, Americans will be paying more for gas, for food (because of higher fertilizer prices), and for everything that moves in trucks, ships, or planes through next year at the least. Virtually every other country on earth will be feeling even more pain — empty shelves, canceled flights, and broken government budgets.
The countries hurt most are America’s allies in Asia and Europe, which Trump refused to consult and then began to insult for not helping him clean up the mess he made. The countries hurt least are China, which has significant reserves of fuel and cash to ease the shock, and Russia, the war’s only outright winner. Russia is making an extra $10 billion a month from higher oil prices and will profit even more as Trump keeps waiving energy sanctions. Russian President Vladimir Putin doesn’t spend such windfalls on Kremlin ballrooms; he builds drones and missiles. The war Trump chose to start in Iran will thus fuel more death in the war he failed to end — the one in Ukraine that actually threatens the free world.
America’s rapid expenditure of munitions against Iran will also hurt our readiness to meet threats elsewhere. It could take two years for the Pentagon to replenish the Patriot missile defense interceptors and five years to replenish the cruise missiles that it fired in just the first 16 days of the war. Virtually the entire stock of a long-range air launched missile critical to our defense plans in Asia — the JASSM-ER — has been diverted to the Persian Gulf from reserves allocated to other regions, including the Pacific. As China keeps making munitions for a potential war over Taiwan, we are depleting ours.
We shouldn’t underplay the pain Iran’s regime has absorbed in this war. It did not want to lose its top leaders, most of its air force and navy, or much of its arsenal of ballistic missiles. But Iran still seems to have 40 percent of its drones and access to 60 percent of its missile launchers. As long as it survives, it will be able to rebuild what it lost.
Trump’s more ambitious and worthy goals — ensuring that Iran will never have a nuclear weapon or threaten us or its neighbors — were absolutely achievable by military means but only if he’d had the stomach to remove Iran’s regime. That would have required a land invasion with significant American military casualties and Iranian countermeasures that would have made us nostalgic for $4 a gallon gas.
Trump was never going to do this. He wanted Iran to be easy, not hard.
So that leaves him with essentially three options, the same ones he’s had from the start.
First, he could declare victory and pull back. His decision yesterday to extend the ceasefire suggests this is a strong possibility. It would mean absorbing all the costs of the war with Iran’s nuclear program intact, and the added pain of leaving it in effective control of the Straits of Hormuz — though at least the economic disruptions would gradually ease as shippers negotiate safe passage with Tehran.
Second, he could concentrate U.S. forces in the Gulf indefinitely, striking Iran periodically to prevent it from rearming and to bludgeon it into letting ships through the straits. This is likely Israel’s preferred option, but it would be even worse for the United States — a permanent drain on our resources and military readiness elsewhere.
Or, third, he could make a deal with Iran that would not be much better, if at all, than the one President Barack Obama struck a decade ago, which Trumpers have denounced ever since. This would be the least bad of the lousy available choices.
The current negotiations seem to revolve around Iran forgoing nuclear enrichment for some time, perhaps 15 years, while diluting its stock of highly enriched uranium, reopening its facilities to international inspections, and reopening the straits without charging a toll, in exchange for the United States unfreezing Iranian assets, lifting sanctions, and pledging not to strike again. This would end the war and put Iran’s nuclear program back into a box but give its regime the money it needs to rearm and probably to survive politically.
Trump will not do better than this by continuing to blockade Iranian shipping or making genocidal threats that discredit the United States without impressing Iran’s leaders. They see what we all see — that his patience for pain is far smaller than theirs. If he resumes bombing to get a better deal, the dynamic will not change. He’ll face the same three choices when the next round of violence is done.
Perhaps at that point, his ability to lie to himself and to others will come in handy again, because to walk away, with or without a deal, he’ll need to pretend that the war was the greatest triumph in the history of triumphs. Let him repeat then the dumbest line by a leader in the history of warfare: “Regardless what happens, we win.” We need the war to end.
But the truth will remain undeniable. Before Trump’s war, Iran’s leaders knew what we could do to them, and that served both as a deterrent and an incentive for negotiations. Now they have survived our worst, and found in the closure of the straits new ways to deter us, while our allies have found new reasons to divorce us. We won’t repair the damage until there is a new regime in Washington, an outcome that this war at least makes more likely.
Tom Malinowski is a former member of Congress from New Jersey who was an assistant secretary of state in the Obama administration.
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