Everyone can see that the Iran war has been a strategic disaster for the US, while a failing president pretends he is winning
Now is the twilight of Donald Trump’s supremacy. The US is still the richest and most heavily armed nation on Earth. That status is secure. The current president, contemptuous of law and indulged in lawlessness by a supine Congress, enjoys even greater power than the constitution allows.
With those advantages it takes a special talent for incompetence to look as thwarted and impotent as Trump does with more than two years of his second term still to run.
History will record the war against Iran as a turning point in the fortunes of the current US administration and a grievous wound to national prestige.
Pumped with hubris after the audacious military operation to kidnap Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, Trump believed an equally brisk triumph was available in the Middle East. The Tehran regime would be decapitated. The country’s hydrocarbon resources would then be available for US exploitation.
Six months later, Iran is controlled by a new generation of hardliners. Emboldened by resilience under US and Israeli bombardment, they demand financial concessions from Washington as the price for peace – reparations and a right to toll the strait of Hormuz.
The war is not over, it has just turned cold. Trump believes Iran’s fragile economy is close to collapse. He threatens to push it over the brink with “D-day” sanctions. The metaphor of second world war amphibious assault is supposed to make yet another round of financial coercion succeed where past embargos have failed.
It is true that ordinary Iranians are suffering terrible privations, but repression limits their capacity to translate discontent into demands for political change. By contrast, US consumers, aggrieved by the inflationary consequences of the war, and confused about its purpose, get to express their unhappiness in midterm elections in November.
The calculation in Tehran is that American tolerance for economic pain is low enough that Trump will be forced to blink first. It is a reasonable assumption: the need to declare mission accomplished to a domestic audience – even on terms that amount to defeat by any objective measure – drive an impatient president’s actions more than long-term strategy.
If sanctions fail, diplomatic climbdown is the only remaining move. The Pentagon couldn’t revert to the all-out military option even if Trump ordered it, because Operation Epic Fury burned too much of the national munitions stockpile.
This is where an asymmetry of cost and capability comes into play. Iran can frighten ships out of the Gulf with a few mines. It can harry neighbouring states with drones knocked together for less than $50,000 and dispatched from mobile launchers that are hard to target. The Patriot interceptors that protect US forces and their allies in the region cost $4-5m apiece. (More than 1,500 Patriots are thought have been fired in the war so far, leaving fewer than 830 in the US inventory.)
That depletion has global repercussions, most pressingly in Ukraine where top-end US interceptors are essential for shielding civilians from Russia’s most sophisticated ballistic missiles.
Trump’s attitude to that conflict has evolved from craven pro-Kremlin partisanship and an assumption of inevitable Russian victory to grudging respect for Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s fortitude and ingenuity in proving that assumption wrong. But the shift is not stable. It depends on undertakings by Nato’s European members to cover the cost of arming Kyiv.
If Trump had used normal diplomacy to cajole European democracies into financing the defence of their eastern flank, it would count as a foreign policy success – rebalancing the relationship to both sides’ benefit. But he did it with credulous admiration for Vladimir Putin and deranged demands for territory in Greenland. As a result, the European drive to autonomy looks less like burden-sharing and more like a hedge against American perfidy.
It isn’t just Europe where US allies feel burned. Gulf states that found themselves on the frontline of Iranian retaliation in a war they didn’t start or want, expected a more reliable umbrella of protection. They feel unrewarded for their decades of service, hosting US military bases and functioning as proxies for American interests in the region.
