How Trump lost the war with Iran
By Chris Truax
For months now, we’ve been concerned by President Trump’s increasingly erratic decision-making and the clear signs he may be suffering from the early stages of dementia. Now Trump’s impaired judgement has caused him to start — and lose — a foolish war and plunge the world economy into chaos.
The entire project has been a fiasco from the beginning. The decision to attack Iran made so little sense that no one in the administration, including Trump himself, could offer a consistent explanation as to why we did it. Iran’s response — closing the Strait of Hormuz and attacking infrastructure in the Persian Gulf — was so predictable that preventing those things from happening has been a cornerstone of American policy for decades.
History will record that the turning point of Trump’s war came on Mar. 18, when Iran wiped out 17 percent of Qatar’s LNG production capacity in a single strike in response to an Israeli attack on Iran’s South Pars oil field. Trump was forced to effectively apologize for the attack and promise it would not happen again. From that moment, the U.S. had lost the initiative and, as a practical matter, the war.
Despite suffering massive physical damage from American and Israeli bombardment, Iran is now in a far stronger military, economic and diplomatic position than when the war began. After a month of intensive bombing, it retains both control of the Strait of Hormuz and the ability to attack ships and destroy infrastructure anywhere in the Persian Gulf at will. Iran is still launching missiles and has a large supply of drones, along with one of the largest arsenals of naval mines in the world.
In short, Trump may have started the war, but Tehran will decide when it ends.
Even if Trump were to somehow open the strait itself, likely suffering serious U.S. casualties in the process, shipping in the Gulf would remain at a standstill.
Trump’s war has also ended Iran’s diplomatic isolation — something America has tried to enforce for the last 47 years. By allowing “non-hostile” nations to transit the Strait, Iran has neutered the U.S. sanctions regime and driven a wedge between America and many of its traditional allies. To make matters worse, Iran will likely insist that negotiations to end the war eventually involve the European Union, Russia and probably China.
Trump’s war has also given Iran a new source of revenue: tolls on ships passing through the Strait. Iran is currently charging many ships a flat $2 million. But there is no reason Iran couldn’t eventually charge, say, five dollars a barrel for oil exiting the Gulf. That would just about match their pre-war oil profits, and the world would happily pay up if the alternative is a closed Strait and oil at $150 a barrel.
In effect, Iran has become Trump’s most loyal pupil. Trump jettisoned the rules-based system of international relations that the U.S. has championed for more than 125 years in favor of “might makes right,” threatening and attacking other countries simply because the U.S. had the power to do so. Iran has discovered it has the power to collect tolls in the Strait of Hormuz, so why shouldn’t it?
As a result of all this, Trump has gone from demanding unconditional surrender to begging for negotiations. But to understand how serious our predicament really is, we need to zoom in on what Trump is saying.
Trump’s attempts to end the war are just as disconnected from reality as his reasons for starting it. He insists that he will personally select Iran’s new leader and believes that he can choose who will negotiate on Iran’s behalf. In an effort to bring Iran to the table, he has threatened to destroy all of Iran’s civilian power plants, which would be a textbook war crime.
He also seems to believe that extensive negotiations with Iran have already taken place and that Iran has agreed to most of America’s demands, including agreeing to abandon its nuclear program. This may be yet another example of Trump confabulating. As of this writing, there are no direct negotiations taking place and Iran has not agreed to anything. Instead, the United States has been reduced to passing along peace proposals through intermediaries.
If Iran were negotiating with the U.S., they would be using negotiators of their choosing, not Trump’s. If some member of the Iranian government were to hold freelance negotiations with the U.S., that person would be arrested and probably summarily executed as a traitor. Imagine how Trump would react if the Iranian government insisted on negotiating with Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.).
America used to have a foreign policy process driven by deep expertise and extensive consultation. It made thoughtful, robust decisions that were often followed by presidents of both parties for many years. In contrast, consider the description offered by The Atlantic’s Ashley Parker of that process in the Trump White House.
“One person we talked to said: Look, when the president asks for something twice, we have an unofficial rule, which is that we do it,” Parker said in a recent podcast. “And I said: Well, why twice? And they said: Well, to be fair, he does say a lot of crazy things, but if he says it a second time, we know he’s serious. And we know — regardless of whether it’s to fire the board of the Kennedy Center and take it over or to potentially march on Greenland — if that’s what he wants, we are there to make that happen.”
The U.S. economy is on the brink of disaster. The world economy is in even worse shape. In this grave moment, we cannot abandon American policy to whatever crazy thing Trump asks for twice.
- Chris Truax is an appellate attorney who served as Southern California chair for John McCain’s primary campaign in 2008.
- First published in THE HILL
