Donald Trump’s threats toward Iran have historically proven to be ineffective—something he would know if his advisers did their jobs or if he had any sense of history, one foreign policy expert says.
David Rothkopf, appearing on The Daily Beast Podcast, said the president’s options after a month of war have “become worse and worse,” in part because the Iranian regime, unlike the U.S., considers the war “existential.”
“We are willing to fight it out. We are willing to take the punishment. We know that we have time on our side, just like the Afghans did in a 20-year war, just like ISIS and Al-Qaeda did in a 20-year war,” Rothkopf told host Joanna Coles, from Iran’s point of view.
“The point is Trump is using a weapon, a cudgel, a threat that has historically proven to be ineffective in these kinds of conflicts, and he doesn’t know it because he doesn’t have advisors, because he doesn’t listen to anybody, because he doesn’t know anything about history, because it’s all about him and how he’s perceived,” Rothkopf continued. “Whether he is in his own mind perceived as somebody who’s being powerful, not even effective, but powerful, it’s leading to one bad decision after another.”
Rothkopf then shared what he took away from his conversations with military insiders. And the prognosis was not good.
“The people I talked to in Washington, the people who cover the Department of Defense, people who are senior military people, people in the defense and in the diplomatic communities, they’re sort of hunkering down, expecting that there is another shoe to drop here, that the Iranians will not give in to Trump’s demands, and that at some point in the not too distant future, there will be American troops on the ground getting shot at in Iran, and that none of the boots-on-the-ground scenarios turn out very well for the United States,” he said.
The Trump administration has never ruled out putting U.S. forces on Iranian soil as part of the war, which the president has at times claimed has been “won” but which still needs to be finished. Earlier this month, the Pentagon sent 5,000 Marines to the region, part of what was reported as an “Amphibious Ready Group.” The following week, Trump told reporters that he was “not putting troops anywhere,” only to add: “If I were, I certainly wouldn’t tell you.”
If Trump does, in fact, start a land war, the U.S. military, despite its strengths as a whole and of each service member, is not poised for success, Rothkopf said.
“Iran is 92 million people. It’s three or four times the size of Vietnam. When we went into Vietnam to fight a long war there, we had 500,000 troops and we lost,” he said. “We had hundreds of thousands of troops in the Middle East for the wars of the prior part of this century, and we lost. Having military strength—running successful military operations—does not ensure a successful outcome.”
“And when somebody says, ‘Well look, our fighters are doing these amazing things, and our bombers are doing these amazing things, and our Navy is doing these amazing things’—Yes... we’ve run good operations before... [but] it doesn’t change the political situation on the ground,“ he said. ”It doesn’t change what people believe. It doesn’t change the motivations of the people that we are fighting in these cases. And that’s why we keep losing. We’ve been losing wars of this kind since the 1960s."
What certainly doesn’t help Trump, Rothkopf added, is that advisers Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, are “a little distracted” by making financial deals.
“They’re deal guys, and I think that when the history of this period is written, they will have gotten a lot of good deals out of it. As it happens, none of them will be good for the U.S.” Rothkopf predicted.
“It’s not just that Witkoff and Jared are doing good deals while they do bad deals for the U.S., because they have no experience, right? They don’t know what the f--- they’re doing.”
When reached for comment, White House Communications Director Steven Cheung doubted Rothkopf’s credibility.
“Nobody knows who David Rothkopf is,” Cheung told the Daily Beast. “He sounds like a loser and cuck. David is likely angry he was part of a generation that allowed the Iranian Regime and America’s enemies to kill and threaten Americans at home and abroad. Nobody should take him seriously.”
Cheung, a former spokesperson for the UFC, is an apparently single man in his mid-forties and a self-proclaimed “NBA encyclopedia.” Trump outed him as being on what the president called “fat drugs” during an Oval Office meeting in November.
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