Donald Trump’s selfish ‘excursion’ crashed into reality

“Many questions, few details in the latest peace proposal in Iran,” headlined a New York Times article on Sunday. As the subtitle explains: “It’s too early to say exactly what Trump and Iran agreed on, or whether they agreed on much.” » The article, by the way, was written by David Sanger, whom Trump called a “traitor” because of his clearly accurate reporting on the scale of the war.

But in reality, Trump’s war in Iran may be over, or nearly over. America lost.

Iran may or may not agree to exercise restraint in its control over the Strait of Hormuz and its nuclear program. But as Donald Trump should know, deals can be broken. At a fundamental level, Trump, who began by demanding an UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER and attempted to impose a new submissive regime, is now walking away, leaving power to Iranian hardliners – and America’s reputation broken.

How did this happen? America is a superpower, Iran, at best, a mid-sized regional power. Spending is not the only determinant of armed power, but even so, a comparison of the two governments’ military budgets is ridiculously one-sided:

Yet not only is the Iranian regime still standing, it is stronger than before. Meanwhile, Trump flees.

Trump’s disastrous leadership is not the only factor behind this debacle, although it is a large part of the story. In my opinion, there are four main reasons why Trump’s “excursion” to Iran ends in humiliation.

First, it was a fundamentally unwinnable war.

Once the first decapitation strike against Iran’s leaders left the regime’s grip on power intact, Operation Epic Fury became an attempt to end Iran’s threat to global oil supplies by suppressing its missiles and drones through air power. Unfortunately, as Substack History Does You has documented, such campaigns have never worked. Allied air forces attempted to prevent Nazi Germany from launching V1s and V2s during World War II; they failed. During the first Gulf War, coalition air forces devoted enormous resources to trying to prevent Iraq from launching Scud missiles; they also failed. Tracking down mobile launchers, especially in the age of cheap and abundant drones and in a huge, mountainous country like Iran, is an impossible game.

Of course, leaders who are not arrogant and ignorant do not start unwinnable wars.

Second, as painful as it is to recognize, the U.S. military, after decades of unchallenged dominance, appears to have lost much of its edge. As Phillips O’Brien recently wrote:

The lack of a thoughtful response from the United States to the technological changes we are witnessing [especially in the Russia-Ukraine war] before embarking on bombing Iran shows how complacent the military can be – and the bigger and more powerful they think they are, the more complacent they tend to be.

…

There is far too much complacency in the United States about its military, the belief that the American armed forces are very professional, show initiative, are thoughtful, etc. This is a romantic vision that Americans are now using to place all the blame for Iran’s failure on the Trump administration.

That said, the Trump administration has further degraded the military.

Pete Hegseth, the self-proclaimed Secretary of War, carried out an unprecedented purge of military officers with impeccable reputations, the majority of them discharged, black or female. He replaced them with political loyalists like Admiral Brad Cooper, head of Central Command, who effectively led Trump’s war.

The officers who survived the purge got the message. Under Hegseth, official accounts of the war’s progress were a flood of bombastic assertions of victory and ridiculously rosy descriptions of the situation on the battlefield. Less than two weeks ago, Cooper was still peddling his fantasies of easy victory to Congress, claiming among other things that the United States could easily open the Strait of Hormuz by force.

Do you believe that these illusions are only for public consumption, that Hegseth obtained accurate information and acted on it? I don’t know. It is far more likely that Hegseth and Trump were also given false and optimistic information, because no one in the military dares tell them the uncomfortable truth.

The sycophancy and flattery that Cooper displayed in this testimony surely reflects groupthink that has led to many poor decisions. For example, reports from CNN, the Washington Post and the Times reveal that US bases and installations have suffered considerable damage from Iranian drone and missile strikes, with casualties and very expensive equipment and aircraft destroyed. Why was the American military not prepared for this eventuality?

The lack of preparation clearly reflected a predetermined view that Iran would be so devastated by U.S. attacks that it would be unable to retaliate. And it is reasonable to infer that any officers who attempted to warn of the dangers were treated as defeatists and silenced.

Finally, success in modern warfare essentially depends on each person’s ability to think about their enemies. But MAGA aims to demean deep thinking and valorize belligerent ignorance.

On Saturday, Hegseth spoke to the West Point graduating class. In war, he said, “you can’t throw your pronouns at the enemy.” He praised the cadets for being “fit, not fat.” Despite a humiliating failure, Hegseth still has his job – and continues to assert that eliminating IED wins wars and that bulging biceps can beat drones.

Can America still snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, or should it accept a deal that leaves us clearly worse off than before the war? The answer is that running away – if that’s what Trump does – is now the right decision. It is better to accept a bad deal, which leaves America much weaker than it was a few months ago, than to double down on a failed war. Time is not on our side: the looming shortage of critical weapons, the impending depletion of global oil stocks, and the loss of support from our allies and the American public mean that this war must end quickly.

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