Uncle Sam Cries Uncle

Thanks, Donald

Donald Trump will only ever declare victory. And so he did, last week, as he agreed to pay Iran hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars to open up the Strait of Hormuz, which had been open before we attacked them. So we’re paying this kingly sum to the ayatollahs in exchange for the status quo ex ante. In financial terms, it seems very much like we and the rest of the good guys in the world have now found ourselves on the receiving end of a cram down. Still, Trump declares victory: “Oil down, stocks up,” he says. Well, probably. But that’s just a way of saying I’m trying to undo the financial harm I’ve caused; it’s not a victory of any kind.

On the one hand, none of this is surprising. As I wrote back in February when this started, I felt there was a strong moral case for the US - Israel joint effort. The Iranian regime’s crimes against its own people and others have led to at least 100,000 murders and other deaths over the years - including well over a thousand American service members. And their efforts to develop a nuclear weapon arsenal are now only questioned publicly by them themselves. Further, they have long been the world’s primary supporter of terrorism. They are a bad actor of the worst sort.

Nonetheless, the political gain that both Trump and Netanyahu very clearly anticipated for themselves with the attack made me uncomfortable because both of them so consistently act with their own political fortunes almost exclusively in mind. For Netanyahu, the political gain of killing the Ayatollah and his inner circle as well as prosecuting the battle beyond that overlapped almost entirely with his country’s vital national security interest. They would be, after all and unquestionably, in existential jeopardy if Iran were to secure a nuclear arsenal. And even short of that, Israel and her citizens have been forced to live under a near constant barrage of thousands of missiles fired indiscriminately into the Israeli homeland by Iranian sponsored terror groups like Hezbollah and Hamas. Toppling the regime in Iran would be great; seriously degrading its conventional arsenal and its economy would also be strategic wins without a doubt.

For Trump, on the other hand, while accomplishing all of this would be great, none of it rose to the level of a strategic imperative. All of it would fall in the category of “should”; none of it was a “must.” All the talk of Israel dragging the US into this was and remains antisemitic garbage. Regardless of what Israel might have hoped for (and why not wish for the US to team up), the US did not have to participate. Trump saw what he was easily persuaded would be an easy win. They say victory has a thousand fathers. Well, Trump foresaw a military victory and wanted to claim paternity. That’s why we joined in.

What Trump and his erratic, amateurish team failed to focus on was how unlikely a quick and easy victory was. The regime has shown us over the decades its willingness to weather years of crippling economic sanctions and intense popular dissatisfaction. Short of a commitment measured in months to years, including boots on the ground, the objectives we set out would never be accomplished - aside from killing one iteration of Ayatollah leadership and badly damaging the regime’s military capability.

Those are real accomplishments. And those were accomplished quickly. A strong argument can be made that we should have declared victory then. Had we done so, it would have been a genuine victory even if limited in scope. Everything changed once the Iranians seized control over the Strait of Hormuz. Our largest failure was that we didn’t imagine Iran would do this because we imagined they would be unwilling to endure the brunt of the sort of counter embargo that we imposed once they took control of the Strait. Again, this badly miscalculated their willingness to endure economic stress, which they had repeatedly demonstrated over a span of decades. Decades. We, on the other hand, were not willing to endure very much at all. And so Trump caved. And his victory speech is “oil down, stocks up” when the only reason oil was up and stocks were down was his own action.

There are many, many costs to having an erratic, narcissistic megalomanic as President. This is just the latest.