President Trump says the war in Iran was won in the first hour, but we haven’t won enough, and we don’t want to leave early as the country’s regime shows no sign of falling. (Furthermore, Iran now has every incentive to continue to wreak havoc across the region.) He’s in way over his head and can only make things worse by putting the world’s access to oil in greater peril.
This is an unnecessary fight from which we gain nothing. And if Plan B is getting allies to send ships into the Strait of Hormuz and risk getting blown up, or for China to join a coalition of the willing to protect the oil lanes, it will take more than Trump issuing mafia-like threats to make it happen.
It’s a moment for diplomacy, but the president is fundamentally unqualified in this vein.
“This is not our war. We didn’t start it,” Germany’s defense minister Boris Pistorius has said, rejecting Trump’s request for backup. Argentina, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Japan have all followed in short order. “(Does) Donald Trump expect a handful or two handfuls of European frigates to do in the Strait of Hormuz what the powerful U.S. Navy cannot do?” Pistorius questioned.
America’s NATO allies are not interested in helping Trump out after their countries were insulted and demeaned over the past year.
“Every major conflict the U.S. was involved in over the past 25 years, the president made an attempt to build a coalition and build international legitimacy,” Damian Murphy, head of the national security and international policy team at the Center for American Progress (CAP), told the Daily Beast. “The fact that Trump did none of that is a strong signal of weakness.”
It was just a month ago that Trump enraged many of these allies with his absurd threats of seizing Greenland. “To expect them to step up and support war in Iran is the height of arrogance,” Murphy continued.
This is what happens when you treat your allies like dirt and then expect them to run to your rescue. China is the big dog here; Xi the restrained statesman on the world stage, while Trump is throwing ketchup against the wall backstage, angry because he forgot his lines.
In this moment of crisis-as-opportunity, Xi is almost certainly sitting back and assessing what it might take to ‘re-patriate’ Taiwan, a goal he has made clear he wants to achieve before he leaves office. At 72, he is president for the foreseeable future, but not forever. Xi may conclude he’s never going to have a better chance than in the next few years, with his rival superpower drained of resources and lacking the political will for another foreign conflict.
Trump’s buddy, Putin, is also sitting pretty—oil revenue is flowing his way thanks to Trump waiving sanctions on Russia selling oil to India. Because of this largesse, Putin is raking in money for his war machine in Ukraine. (And yes, the US is left needing to ask for Ukraine’s tech, with drone warfare a key facet of this new conflict.) Putin has even gained some moral high ground. President Biden had organized NATO and the world against Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. Now, Trump has legitimized invading another country on spurious grounds.
All this even as much reporting alleges that the Kremlin is aiding Iran’s military establishment. Asked what he and Putin discussed in a phone call early in the war, Trump reported that Putin is “impressed” by the U.S. military’s performance.
The hand-picked head of Trump’s counter-terrorism office, Joe Kent, resigned on Tuesday, saying he could not in good conscience support war with a country that posed “no imminent threat,” and that was started “due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”
A Green Beret veteran whose wife died in a suicide bomber attack in Syria in 2019, Kent had been a far-right Trump true believer who never strayed from the party line. His very public departure accentuates the dismay among MAGA loyalists over what seems like an outright rejection of their isolationist agenda.
And it comes as Israeli forces report the deaths of more Iranian leaders, decimating not only the hardliners but a more moderate leader who had negotiated the JCPOA, the agreement Iran signed in 2013 with six world powers, including China and Russia, to restrain its nuclear ambition.
The complications and unintended consequences of war stack one upon the other like a ten-layer cake. But why stop there? In the Oval Office on Monday, asked about Cuba, Trump waxed almost poetic about “having the honor of taking” the island nation: “Whether I free it, take it–I think I could do anything with it, to tell you the truth.”
Well, perhaps he does need a shiny new renovation or land grab to fixate on. Can’t someone find him a resort that needs a big, beautiful ballroom? Because it’s time for Trump to cut his losses, to say we won, and he’s going home.
Under the guise of projecting America’s unrivaled military strength, Trump has inadvertently exposed the weakness of his “America First” go-it-alone ideology—so much so that you’re left wondering (at best) if he ever really believed in it. He loves to dominate and humiliate people, but he doesn’t understand he’s the one who’s getting humiliated. A war without public support is one man’s rampage, or two men, if you count Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu. It can’t end well if it ends at all.
