The Iran Nutcracker

Trump Creates A Problem That Defies Solution

This Iran “excursion” must be driving Donald Trump crazier. He has a need for immediacy, for results, for news, for “winning,” but he has on his hands a stalemate or worse, as the (former?) Neoconservative Robert Kagan, suggests in The Atlantic:

Defeat in the present confrontation with Iran will be of an entirely different character. It can neither be repaired nor ignored. There will be no return to the status quo ante, no ultimate American triumph that will undo or overcome the harm done. The Strait of Hormuz will not be “open,” as it once was. With control of the strait, Iran emerges as the key player in the region and one of the key players in the world. The roles of China and Russia, as Iran’s allies, are strengthened; the role of the United States, substantially diminished. Far from demonstrating American prowess, as supporters of the war have repeatedly claimed, the conflict has revealed an America that is unreliable and incapable of finishing what it started. That is going to set off a chain reaction around the world as friends and foes adjust to America’s failure.

Not sure I’d go all the way with Kagan. But, at the very least, Trump’s Iran war has been a phenomenal miscalculation—or lack of calculation—that may finally demonstrate his incompetence to even his most avid followers. Obviously, he was thinking Venezuela. Obviously, Iran isn’t Venezuela. Although, even now the most rabid of hawks—like John Bolton here—persist in their fantasies about the nature of the proud Iranian people:

[If} regime change were ever a goal, Trump apparently did little or nothing to coordinate with dissidents inside Iran. Long-standing economic hardships across the country engendered enormous opposition, embodied in the nationwide demonstrations murderously crushed in January. Half of Iran’s population is under age 30, and these young people largely reject the ayatollahs’ radical ideology. Ever since Mahsa Amini was killed in the custody of Iran’s morality police in 2022, many Iranian women have openly defied the regime’s fundamental claim to legitimacy. Iran’s ethnic groups, particularly Kurds and Baloch, have reached new levels of discontent.

This is balderdash of the same sort that Neoconservatives peddled in Iraq, imagining Ahmed Chalabi as a dissident Abraham Lincoln in waiting, when he was actually a grifting flim-flam artist with no constituency at all within that country. Actually, this is an order of magnitude stupider than that: Iran is not Iraq. It is a real country, an ancient civilization with a proud populace, perpetually misunderstood by not only American hawks but also by Bibi Netanyahu.

The following is an old story, which I think I’ve told here before, but it bears repeating because Trump allowed himself to be so spectacularly suckered by the Israelis:

I last met with Netanyahu about ten years ago. He told me at the time that he had it “on the very best authority”—you know what that means—that as soon as the Iranian regime got a nuclear weapon, they would launch on Israel.

“Why on earth would they do that?” I asked, having recently visited Iran. “They know you have the deterrent capability to vaporize Tehran 10 minutes after they launch.”

“Because they’re religious fanatics,” Netanyahu said.

The next day, I had lunch with a Mossad source—my own very best authority—who started to laugh when I told the story. “What’s so funny?” I asked.

“That’s what Bibi tells all the Americans,” the source said.

Mossad—which quietly favored the Obama nuclear deal with Iran (the IDF was opposed)—had a more realistic view of the Iranian regime, which was shared by the American intelligence community: that the regime was actually pretty conservative when it came to overseas aggression. Yes, it sponsored proxy groups like Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis—but those groups, before October 7, were more an irritation than an existential threat to Israel—and no threat at all to the United States. The memories of the Iran-Iraq War, the million casualties, the use of poison gas by Saddam Hussein, were still too fresh in Tehran. The anti-regime Iranians I met with wanted no part of a violent overthrow of the Ayatollah. “We don’t want a revolution,” one Iranian. businessman told me. “We want a refolution—we want reform. We’ve had too much violence. We remember Saddam’s rockets landing in residential neighborhoods.”

When I returned home in the days after the Iranian presidential election was stolen by the Ministry of the Interior in 2009, I had a brief confrontation with John McCain on CNN. He was all for “going in” and supporting the Green Revolution. I argued that was the worst possible course of action: the only thing the Iranian reformers hated worse than the regime, was the idea of a western imperial power intervening in the affairs of their nation.

That remains the case today. It is entirely possible that the regime will collapse of its own economic and strategic stupidity next week, month or year. But that will require creative restraint—and a good deal of patience—on our part. It will certainly require an extended blockade of the Straits of Hormuz. And I believe, with Kagan, that Iran has now figured out that control of the Straits is a more powerful deterrent than a nuclear weapon….Indeed, the parade of Republicans repeating the nonsense that Iran was “two weeks” away from a bomb is a pathetic capitulation to Trump’s delusions —and a real doozy after the “total destruction” of Iran’s nuclear facilities that the President trumpeted a year ago.

Actually, this misadventure might be remembered in history—ironically—as the “two week” war, since that has been Trump’s repeated mantra for the past two months. Only a few weeks more, folks! We’ve already won!

Now, make no mistake: I want us to win. I want the wicked Iranian regime battered into submission. I want regime change. But that is going to take a military effort, probably including boots on the ground, and more American economic suffering—high gas, fertilizer, food and other prices—which, I suspect, Trump is unwilling to make. He is a bully not a warrior. He deludes himself into celebrating the easy win, even when nothing has been won. He is the master strategist and the rest of the world is Venezuela…except he isn’t and the world certainly isn’t, either.

But a fellah can dream, can’t he? It’s amazing how many of Trump’s dreams have come true, a consequence of his gut instincts about the American people and the Democratic Party’s lack of same. Indeed, the Iran war is the first time Trump’s fantasies have met a pretty immovable object. And it reflects the desperate reality of his Administration—inflation is a pretty immovable object, too, and may last through the 2026 election; the cascading incompetence of his appointees is a slightly more movable object—the most recent of the defenestrated being Dr. Marty Makary at the FDA—but the impact of such fools as Kash Patel and Robert Kennedy Jr. and Pete Hegseth will linger malodorously at the periphery of the public consciousness; as will the gilded monstrosities Trump is proposing for our traditionally staid and magnificent nation’s capital; his playground vendettas against James Comey, John Brennan, Senator Mark Kelly, the aforementioned John Bolton and so many others must seem questionable or irrelevant to Trump’s most cult-like supporters as they spend $50+ to fill up at the gas pump (or worse, as they spend $5 to get themselves through the next few days’ commute until their paycheck arrives).

I don’t rule out the possibility that Trump will find his way back to public acceptance. He is a resilient dude. But the failure of a quick-win scenario in Iran has made it painfully obvious how overmatched Donald is in the office he cosplays holding. This has been a very bad year for him, and for our country.