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A rare thing happened on Sunday night: One of President Donald Trump’s posts on social media was absolutely true. He said that Iran’s response to the U.S. ceasefire proposal was “TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE”—and he’s right, it is totally unacceptable.
But what is Trump going to do about it? What can he do about it? The answer, alas, is not much—at least not much that is likely to have an effect on the Iranian leaders’ behavior. Trump is caught in a trap, and it’s a trap of his own making.
Iranian spokesmen laid out their counterproposal in a statement Monday morning. They demand an end to the war (including Israel’s war in Lebanon), an end to the U.S. blockade, a pledge of no further U.S. or Israeli attacks, reparations for damages, a lifting of Western economic sanctions, the release of Iran’s frozen assets, Iran’s continued control over the Strait of Hormuz (which is in international waters), and a postponement of any negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program until all of these demands are satisfied.
These are the sorts of demands that the winner of a war would issue. By making them, Iran’s leaders are proclaiming that they won this war—and, in a sense, they are right. Victory in war means making an opponent bend to your will. In asymmetric war, the ostensibly weaker power wins by not losing. The Iranians have bowed to none of Trump’s stated war aims (regime change, dismantling all nuclear assets and ballistic missiles, abandoning terrorist militia groups, or opening the Strait of Hormuz). Meanwhile, Iran’s continued ability to keep the Strait closed to all but its preferred customers (mainly Russia and China) is squeezing the global economy, including that of the United States. The fact that it is able to do so, despite a massive U.S.-Israeli bombing campaign that destroyed or damaged more than 13,000 Iranian targets and killed the entire top echelon of its political leaders, has bolstered Iran’s image of strength—and made the U.S. and Israel seem weak or aimless.
Trump said last week that if Iran rejected his peace proposals, he would resume bombing—but to what end? In an interview on Sunday, Trump said that the 38 days of airstrikes, which began on Feb. 28, had destroyed about 70 percent of the structures on U.S. war planners’ list of Iranian targets, but, he added, there are “other targets that we could conceivably hit.”
The remark wasn’t likely to make Iranian generals tremble. First, it’s not a threat of high confidence to say we “could conceivably” hit some targets. Second, if hitting the first 13,000 targets on the list didn’t make the Iranians surrender, there’s no reason to believe that hitting the next few thousand would clinch the contest.
For all his talk of “winning,” Trump doesn’t know what the term—or its opposite, “losing”—means. In his first televised speech on the war, back on April 1, he boasted that “our armed forces have delivered swift, overwhelming victories on the battlefield”—but, in fact, the armed forces had merely been destroying targets, which, as any military adviser could have told him and as we’ve all since seen, doesn’t mean the same thing. Similarly, in his interview this past Sunday, Trump said the Iranians “are defeated, but that doesn’t mean they’re done.” Well, actually, if they really were defeated, it would mean precisely that they’re done.
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The war has been a moral, political, and strategic failure for the United States. The strategic failure is threefold. First, Trump never expressed a consistent rationale—never formulated a strategy—for going to war. Second, to the extent he stressed a particular goal, it bore no relationship to the bombing campaign. For instance, he sometimes said that his main goal was to keep Iran from getting a nuclear bomb, yet few of the targets he destroyed had anything to do with Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.
Third, and in some ways most critically, Trump—and, perhaps even more, the prodding instigator of this war, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—made victory all but impossible on the war’s first day by killing all the Iranian leaders who might have ended the war with authority and power. Most wars end in a negotiated settlement. In this war, there are no powerful, authoritative Iranians to negotiate with—except, perhaps, for the senior officers of the Revolutionary Guard, Iran’s most heavily armed and ideologically hard-line entity, who have little or no interest in surrendering.
When he started the war, Trump said Iran’s masses of anti-regime protesters should exploit the situation by taking power themselves—a notion that even some of his top advisers derided in meetings as “bullshit,” and for good reason. These protesters had no weapons; thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of them had been killed in recent protests; the survivors had no means of organization, since the Internet had been shut down; and their oppressors—the Revolutionary Guard—were left in firmer control of Iran’s politics and society than before the war started.
Trump also said early on that intelligence agencies had identified plausible successors to Iran’s supreme leader who would be more pliant to Western interests, but that the bombing campaign had killed them too. Perhaps more than any other single fact, this signifies just how stupid this war has been from the get-go.
So what does Trump do now? One way to open the Strait of Hormuz would be to occupy the land around it—but Trump seems, thankfully, unwilling to go that far. Such an operation would require massive numbers of armed forces—the Marines that storm the beaches, the logistics troops to supply them (for who knows how long), more troops still to protect the Marines and the logistics teams, other crews to occupy nearby airbases where the supplies can be flown in, still more troops to stave off the Iranian soldiers who would no doubt be mobilized to repel the occupiers, etc., etc.
As he has done before, Trump hinted at an apocalyptic solution. On Thursday, he said that if his peace proposal was rejected, the world would see “one big glow coming out of Iran”—which sounds a lot like a threat to hit Iran with a nuclear bomb.
Trump has grumbled such threats before. In his April 1 speech, he threatened to bomb Iran “back to the Stone Ages” if its leaders didn’t surrender. Four days later, on Easter Sunday, he warned them to “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell.” Two days later, he threatened to obliterate all of Iran, saying, “a whole civilization will die tonight” if its leaders didn’t give in.
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He backed off those threats without asking Iran to do anything in return, and there’s no reason for anyone—least of all the Iranians—to believe he’ll carry out these latest threats either. The nuclear threat is particularly unbelievable. The reasons are obvious: Iran poses no threats warranting a nuclear attack; the United States would become an irredeemable outlaw nation; an untold number of nations would start building nuclear arsenals to deter further U.S. aggression; more immediately, nuking Iran would spread radioactive fallout to America’s allies in the region.
Trump may think he’s following the “Madman Theory” that Richard Nixon tried out in the Vietnam War (if he acted crazy enough, Nixon thought, Ho Chi Minh would rush to the peace table). But it didn’t work for Nixon (Ho and the North Vietnamese Army kept fighting), and it won’t work for Trump either. In fact, the more often he makes such threats, and the more wild-eyed they become, the less believable any of his threats or promises become—and the weaker he appears, and, by extension, the weaker our country appears too.
