Iran is right: Trump has already lost this war

More than 30 years ago, historian Eric Hobsbawm wrote that most young people in the late 20th century “grow up in a sort of permanent present lacking any organic relation to the public past of the times they live in.” (Apparently an “intelligent American student” had asked him whether the phrase “Second World War” meant that there had been a first one.)

That’s not the only moment in Hobsbawm’s 1994 book “The Age of Extremes” that now reads as uncanny. He also foresaw that the global victory of American-style capitalism in the Cold War was not the “end of history,” but contained the seeds of a coming global crisis, notably in the form of worsening inequality and a reversion to “barbarism.”

It might be foreshortening the narrative too much to say that those two observations explain where we find ourselves today, with another American president having ignored the most obvious possible lessons from history and blundered into another disastrous overseas military adventure, for even dumber and less comprehensible reasons than the last several times it happened. But it’s not wrong, either.

Donald Trump’s war with Iran marks his administration’s “looksmaxing” moment: It’s preening before the mirror, repeatedly smashing itself in the face with hammers and launching banger memes, while aggressively pretending not to notice external reality, especially not the mockery, pity and terror it provokes in others. It now seems clear there was internal disagreement about launching this war in the first place, and that there’s now widespread internal bewilderment about how to end it.

Trump and Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio and whomever else were lured into this war by Benjamin Netanyahu, pushed into it by the billionaire donors of the Israel lobby and, more than anything else, seduced into it by massive institutional incompetence and their thoroughly unfounded belief in their own awesomeness. As one Bluesky poster put it in early March, those guys believed they could wage and win a war easily just by being “based chads” (i.e., white dudes with retrograde attitudes about literally everything) who would avoid all the weak, woke, DEI-informed mistakes made in previous conflicts by such lily-livered libtards as, um, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.

Virtually no one in foreign policy circles, whether at think tanks or academic institutions and regardless of their position on the ideological spectrum, thought the U.S.-Israeli air war was likely to end the way Trump and Netanyahu wanted, presumably with a subservient new regime in Tehran. (It’s a well established military principle that air power can destroy cities and demoralize the civilian population, but it doesn’t win wars.) Of course the based chads of the Pentagon and White House and Fox News were sure they knew better than a bunch of Poindexters with fancy degrees and foundation grants. Now that the actual conflict has gone almost as badly as it could have, its defenders have returned to their natural environment, cable TV, to conduct a rear-guard action aimed at swamping the American public in outlandish, boastful, prancing propaganda about “our” glorious victory, the one that has killed 1,500 civilians, cemented Iran’s surviving hard-liners in power, driven gasoline to $4 a gallon ($6 or more on the West Coast), cratered the stock market and spiked inflation.

Most Americans are understandably more concerned with those painful details than on the larger global picture, and may not care that this conflict has already resulted in world-historical humiliation on a scale likely to destroy the last shreds of America’s postwar reputation as an intermittently benevolent superpower. When The Economist, essentially the house organ of global capital, publishes an openly mocking cover illustration of a wartime U.S. president, the global zeitgeist has shifted gears. If it’s going too far to say that Iran is winning the war — the Iranian people certainly are not — the United States has already lost it.

No observer with a hint of objectivity can avoid the conclusion that the Iranian regime, for all its despicable qualities, has been a more reliable narrator during the course of this conflict than the U.S. government. An Iranian military spokesman taunted Trump last week, rejecting an American 15-point peace plan by asking: “Has the level of your inner struggle reached ‌the ⁠stage of you negotiating with yourself?” Around the world, anyone who’s had dealings with our president recognized that as a clean hit. 

As economics reporter Eduardo Porter writes in the Guardian, Trump’s “Persian TACO” pattern — the acronym stands for “Trump always chickens out” — that is, making extreme threats against Iran and then walking them back, may offer Trump “the illusion of agency,” but in fact “he no longer has control of events in Iran.” Despite the enormous damage and loss of life inflicted by the bombing campaign, the Iranians still control the Strait of Hormuz, retain most of their ballistic missile arsenal and have caused enormous economic disruption through attacks on neighboring Gulf states, a strategy U.S. and Israeli war planners did not foresee. Trump “does not get to decide when the conflict ends,” Porter concludes. “Markets are figuring out that that will probably be up to Tehran.”

Similarly, George Beebe and Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute (a moderate think tank devoted to “responsible statecraft”) agree that “the war cannot end without Iran’s consent” and propose Vladimir Putin, of all people, as potential peacemaker, a notion so flat-out bananas that it might happen. (He’s the one world leader who’s close to the Iranian regime and also friendly with Netanyahu, who has conspicuously avoided taking sides in the Ukraine war.)

Oman’s foreign minister, Badr Albusaidi, who tried to coax Trump into a peace deal in February, wrote a curious op-ed last week in The Economist arguing that “America has lost control of its own foreign policy,” and that smaller nations like his should take pity on Trump, and help pull him out of the mire: “What can we do to extricate the superpower from this unwanted entanglement?”

It’s true, of course, that Trump and Hegseth still possess vastly superior firepower, and could order a ground invasion out of rage or desperation. (The AP Stylebook advises us to avoid the cliché “boots on the ground.”) But it’s tough to imagine that would end well, except in the sense that it would end JD Vance’s presidential campaign before it starts.

Speaking of elections, is it even a silver lining that the Republican Party’s already dire prospects in this year’s midterm elections have been rendered dramatically worse by this epic fiasco? There’s certainly some schadenfreude available in watching GOP members of Congress in panic mode, but there are also good reasons to fear the enraged and embittered lame-duck Donald Trump of 2027, after a hypothetical walloping at the polls and a less-hypothetical helter-skelter retreat from a misbegotten overseas war. Prospective House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries has learned that profanity inflames the Democratic base, and that’s great. Has he shown any signs of being ready for the next chapter in America’s brave experiment with fascism?

* * *

Let’s get back to Eric Hobsbawm’s formulation and how we wound up with a president who has veered from literally waging war on his own people to one of the most spectacular own-goals in the history of U.S. foreign policy. As we learned not long after the Golden Escalator Ride of 2015, the MAGA worldview proudly refuses to engage with history, expresses contempt for all forms of academic or professional expertise and embraces a metaphysical faith in its god-emperor’s ability to reshape reality to suit his needs or desires. For the novelty-seeking 24/7 information economy of our “permanent present,” that was at first entertaining and then addictive and then all-corrosive, like a science-fiction virus or the Monty Python joke that kills everyone who hears it.

That joke-virus then became a pseudo-fact, sustained for far too long by a collective suspension of disbelief — or by something more insidious, a form of willful self-hypnosis: Mainstream media practitioners, foreign leaders and political opponents danced around the Trump paradox, normalizing him as a political “maverick” with an “unconventional” style who could almost be wedged into existing templates of How Things Work. Hey, he certainly wasn’t the first political figure to tell outrageous lies, spread conspiracy theories, threaten his foes with imprisonment or death and use public office to enrich himself — although, if we were the kind of woke weaklings who consulted history, the parallels were less than reassuring.

Many observers convinced themselves, not entirely without reason, that Trump had channeled an authentic current of populist outrage that ran beneath the paralyzed pendulum-swings of normal politics. From there, it was a smooth glide to the less logical but secretly thrilling conclusion that maybe this accused sexual abuser and serial con man really was a history-shifting dynamo, a lardass Napoleon who could shove the world off the cliff into a vertiginous and exciting new era.

I get it, up to a point: “I alone can fix it,” Trump told the 2016 Republican convention on a hot summer night in Cleveland. I was there, 30 yards or so behind his head, and the mixture of adulation and yearning coming back at him from the crowd was almost a physical sensation, unlike anything I have experienced before or since. As I wrote at the time, it was a 7.8 on the Nuremberg scale. (Back then, it was still rude to say such things about him.)

All journalists want to witness history happening, and on a more basic level they hope to see something new and different, something that will make headlines, create viral content and break through the scripted surface of public affairs. Trump delivered all that in spades, and won two presidential elections that most people in the educated classes expected him to lose, bracketed around a vigorous effort to steal another one. He was and is an extraordinary character in a still-unfolding story, and that made it way too easy for some of my colleagues in content-creation land to slide into knockoff postmodern relativism: Welp, we can never be entirely sure what truth is (true!) and maybe Trump’s version of reality is just as valid as, y’know, the kind that comes with lots of evidence (false!).

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What has happened in Trump’s second term — and has made it so enormously stressful for most people reading this — is a far more ambitious fascist-flavored agenda than the first time around, fueled by a limitless appetite for revenge and entirely unconstrained by normal policy debates or political considerations. But that agenda is also profoundly narcissistic and poorly conceived, not to mention managed by shameless lickspittles whose only authentic job skill lies in praising the boss. As Michael Crowley acridly observed last week in the New York Times, Trump sent a pair of real estate executives — rather than, let’s say, diplomats or weapons experts — to negotiate with the Iranians in the days before the war. One of them concluded that a proposed deal negotiated by Oman’s foreign minister “smelled fishy.”

Objective reality has made at least a limited comeback, in other words, and Team Trump keeps being surprised to discover that it won’t bend to their will. As Stephen Walt writes in Foreign Policy, the spreading global fallout of the Iran war “underscores that the administration either didn’t understand how its actions would affect other states or simply didn’t care.” Hegseth’s video-game fantasies and braggadocious talk about his manly “warfighters” raining down “unlimited lethality” on the enemy may thrill the MAGA faithful (those who can still afford to fill up the F-150) but have not forced the mullahs to capitulate or opened the Strait of Hormuz.

In a similar vein, Trump’s secret-police roundup of immigrants has become broadly unpopular, and his attempts to prosecute perceived enemies on spurious charges have almost entirely failed. Many mainstream journalists, to their credit, have heard the reality alarm go off during the second term and repented of their Trump-curious indiscretions. It’s good to have them back, even as we watch legendary institutions like CBS News and the Washington Post disappear into end-stage pseudo-MAGA self-parody. There’s hope to be found in all these cases. But, damn — the damage has been extensive.