Trump’s War With Iran Is a Product of His Deep Stupidity
What can be said about Trump’s war with Iran that isn’t already abundantly obvious? The answer: not much. It is not going well, and it probably won’t end well. But having spent time in the salt mines of Trump punditry, I can tell you that we’re going to endure a difficult round of think pieces purporting to explain How This Happened. So maybe this is the best time to assert the obvious, using my favored rubric of Trump analysis: Imagine if the dumbest person in the world and humanity’s biggest asshole were the same person, and that guy was president. Then imagine he started a war with Iran. Now check the news. One look, and here’s what you should be thinking: “Yep, that tracks.”
As with all of Trump’s presidential exploits, success is always constrained by two factors: The aforementioned sharp limitations of his intellectual capabilities and the fact that he is perpetually surrounded by an inner circle made up of clowns somewhere on the spectrum between “rampantly evil” and “thoroughgoing dipshit.”
“Why did President Trump decide to attack Iran?” The Atlantic’s Yair Rosenberg recently mused. “It depends on what day of the week you ask.” On some days, Trump was acting on (roundly discredited) intel that Iran was on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons. On others, there is a scent of regime change in the air. Sometimes we are told that we were doing a classic “leading from behind” maneuver, trailing Israel into a conflict it’s long sought. Frankly, I give a lot of credit to the “wag the dog” scenario: With the economy in shambles and Jeffrey Epstein riding high in the headlines, Trump needed a distraction. Also, we mustn’t forget that he’s a warmonger who just thinks it’s fun to blow things up. (For Iran War Stupidity completists, Popular Information’s Judd Legum has rounded up 17 separate and frequently contradictory reasons that the administration has submitted for our approval.)
I’ve been reading the comment sections (of the Financial Times, anyway), and Trump is getting his ass roasted: “Let me get all of this straight in my head. They want their allies to join in an ill-thought-out war of choice with unclear aims and an uncertain chance of success for any of the myriad aims stated so far. They want everyone else to just absorb any of the externalities, like influxes of refugees, disruptions to shipping, higher oil and commodity prices, and maybe even some incoming missiles. And then they also want to tariff everyone at 15 percent.” Brother, you seem confused, but you got it absolutely correct.
Trump is really going through it with the nations that were once, putatively, our allies before Trump launched a trade war with all of them and threatened to seize Greenland in an act of colonial conquest. In the space of days, Trump has gone from begging for European naval support to free the Strait of Hormuz to having those requests punted back in his face to spiraling out on Truth Social about how he didn’t actually need anyone’s help in the first place. Since then, he’s petulantly suggested that he might wreck the whole shop and leave the nations that rebuffed him to clean up the mess. Meanwhile, countries like France and Italy are simply working on side deals with Iran to be allowed to use the strait.
My colleague Heather Souvaine Horn recently expressed to me how maddening it is to see the Trump administration treat Iran’s clampdown of the Strait of Hormuz as if it’s some unfair trick the Iranians pulled and not one of the most singularly obvious strategic choices the regime could make under the circumstances—the other being Iran’s decision to attack other Gulf states, knowing that it would be a pain point for the U.S. both economically and diplomatically. But by Trump’s own admission, the very fact that Iran retaliated in any way has caught him completely flat-footed. “They weren’t supposed to go after all these other countries in the Middle East,” he told reporters on Monday. “They hit Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait. Nobody expected that. We were shocked!” Right now, there are 13-year-old kids about to invade Kamchatka in their first-ever game of Risk that look like Carl von Clausewitz compared to Trump.
This week, The New Republic’s Alex Shephard wrote that it will be Iran, not Trump, that dictates when and how this conflict ends. At least one anonymous administration official concurs, telling Politico that Iran’s leaders “hold the cards now.” “They decide how long we’re involved—and they decide if we put boots on the ground. And it doesn’t seem to me that there’s a way around that, if we want to save face.” Sounds great. Until then, if you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a rake—forever.
This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.