Instead of regime change, Trump has succeeded merely in swapping one Supreme Leader named Khamenei—the aging ayatollah whose killing Trump celebrated on the first day of the war—for another Supreme Leader named Khamenei, the ayatollah’s son, who appears to be even more of a hard-liner than his father was. As for the many, many other goals for the conflict that Trump had offered at various points, suffice it to say that he failed to achieve anything like the obliteration of Iran’s nuclear program, ballistic-missile arsenal, or proxy network of terrorist allies that might have constituted a positive outcome. (The reason, no doubt, that Israel kept firing away at Hezbollah in Lebanon even after the ceasefire was announced.) “Unconditional surrender” this was not.
The costs of Trump’s folly include far more than the thousands of deaths or tens of billions of dollars the Pentagon has spent on the war—from billions of dollars in damage to U.S. military installations, oil-and-gas production facilities, and civilian infrastructure in Bahrain, Iraq, Israel, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, to the disruption of global supply chains and air-traffic routes and the depletion of hard-to-replace air-defense and munitions stockpiles. The longer-term and less tangible costs may be even higher, as measured in the strained alliances in Asia and Europe with allies who refused to join Trump’s war and the erosion of the very idea of America as a global leader
No wonder, then, that where the Trumpists see victory, the rest of the world does not. A sampling of headlines from the past few days: “Donald Trump is the war’s biggest loser” (The Economist); “ ‘There are no winners’: US and Iran enter into a fragile truce” (Financial Times); “Trump’s Iran War Leaves the US Looking Weakened to Adversaries” (Bloomberg); “Why the US-Iran ceasefire is seen as a failure for Donald Trump” (South China Morning Post). Even Trump-friendly Fox News displayed a huge graphic that listed the President’s various unmet goals in the war, as a host announced, “the President’s demands—we have not reached any of those objectives.” Superpowers rarely inflict such swift and straightforwardly embarrassing injury to themselves. The Vietnam War lasted nearly two decades. The war in Iraq unfolded over nearly nine years. This act of self-harm took just thirty-eight days.
That Trump’s experiment in military adventurism would end so badly was not much of a surprise. For years, experts have gamed out exactly such a war with the Islamic Republic of Iran, with predictable consequences just like those that awaited Trump. This is why his predecessors Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden didn’t try it—it wasn’t because, as Trump suggested the other night, they were all cowards and losers.
The shocker here was more that Trump—he of the “no new wars” campaign pledge—chose to go for it. This was no doubt because he was operating under his own version of the autocrat’s delusion: that he would achieve fast and nearly cost-free victory over a weakened enemy. As the Times reporters Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman revealed this week in their in-the-Situation Room account of how Trump decided to start the war, no one in his Cabinet of courtiers had the guts to challenge his mistaken assumptions. Reading it, I could not help but think of Vladimir Putin back in 2022, ordering his generals to invade Ukraine with their dress uniforms packed and ready for the victory parade in Kyiv that would surely soon follow. Sycophants make terrible war planners. Is it Hegseth’s fault, or Trump’s, that all that divine intervention and all those thirteen thousand strikes that our leaders have bragged about did not enable them to defeat Iran?
