While global stocks have largely sustained the relief rally that followed Monday’s wild swings, fear is again resurfacing as Iran vowed to step up its missile strikes.
President Donald Trump’s assurance that the war with Iran was “very complete” and could be “over soon” initially injected optimism into markets, even as Iranian hardliners rallied behind new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei and said their blockade of oil would continue.
Within hours of Trump’s statements, Iran’s military dashed markets’ hopes. “We are the ones who will determine the end of the war,” Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said.
Such comments brought the exchange back to a familiar tempo with Trump then threatening to hit Iran “TWENTY TIMES HARDER than they have been hit thus far.”
Trump struggles to understand the most basic question of warfare, which is “What are my strategic objectives?”
To put that in simpler language, “what do you want to get out of this?”
To put this in context, it’s important to understand that, in purely strategic terms, the second, Iraq war war successful. Keep in mind that “successful” doesn’t mean “a good idea”. It was horrendously immoral, did serious longterm damage to the US’ global standing and reputation, cost far too much in lives and dollars, and caused untold harm to the people living in that region. But the goal for the US was to install a compliant government and gain access to military staging points in the region. They succeeded. The cost was far too high, the execution was an endless series of blunders, and they shouldn’t have done it for numerous reasons, ethical and practical, but they did technically succeed in their objectives.
If we were to hazard a guess at Trump’s goal with this military action against Iran - and we have to guess to some degree, because Trump has offered so many different justifications - probably the most consistent goal would be “Regime change.” This has been a fairly standard goal for US policy; replace a hostile regime with a compliant one.
So far they have not achieved anything remotely close to that. The exact opposite, in fact. Arguably, the Iranian regime is now more strongly entrenched and more firmly anti-American than it has been in years. There is little hope for a return to the negotiating table, and the nascent revolution that was brewing prior to the war has been severely damaged, especially by idiotic, self-defeating actions like bombing a girl’s school.
If this war is complete, then it has been one of the least successful wars America has ever prosecuted. Not the most costly by any metric, but the degree to which they have managed to damage their own interests in such a short period of time might be unprecedented.
Many Iranians and some Americans are dead. A lot of military hardware has been expended and destroyed on both sides. But none of those things constitute a goal, or meaningful progress towards one. America’s actual strategic goals in the region are now significantly further away.
Do I believe that Trump will try to declare victory and walk away anyway? Absolutely. In fact I think it’s probably the most likely outcome. This is a consistent pattern with Trump. He doesn’t have the attention span for long term projects, and war is very much a long term project. He loves military power, but he loves to exercise it in brief, explosive orgies of destruction. He’s a man of instant gratification. Pure, unbridled id.
But what it will take to get what he wants out of this - if he actually focuses on his goals for long enough to recollect what they are - is boots on the ground, and that will be one of the hardest and bloodiest military campaigns the US has seen in a very long time.
Well, y that metric, it’s successful. He wanted to flex and bomb. He did. That was the goal. Mission accomplished.
People keep ascribing normal behaviours and motivations to Trump. He clearly doesn’t fit in that box due to mental health issues. He neither understands the purposes of his actions nor has the foresight to see their effect. It’s all reaction, but as long as the emperor continues to have clothes, it works, unfortunately. Those around him can manipulate him until he turns on them. It’s a constant shuffling of loyalties and policies for self benefit.
It’s assumed this was Israel’s doing. Not trumps. As are all his actions. Someone else is pulling his strings.
This is a completely valid point, and I don’t disagree with the idea that Trump simply did not have any strategic goal in mind when he started this war. I nodded in that direction in my previous comment. I’m definitely not presuming long term thought. Not sure how you would have gotten that impression from my describing him as a being of pure id, incapable of long term planning. You did read far enough for that part, right?
Anyway, I’d still contend that “Bomb shit and feel powerful”, while objectives, do not qualify as strategic objectives. Its certainly possible those were Trump’s only goals - and it does look like he mostly got dragged into this by Isreal anyway - but if that’s the case then we have to conclude that it’s impossible for the war to be anything other than a failure, strategically, because you cannot achieve your strategic goals if you don’t have any.
Or, if you’ve no strategic goals, you never really fail. It’s a matter of perpspective. And when friendly media take his word as does a cult following, that perspective will be magnified.
I agree, you’re looking at his actions similarly to me, but you’re trying to fit that into an assessment compared to peers or conventional thinking and/or planning. He doesn’t follow norms as he’s not normal.
See, I think this is a mistake people make a lot with Trump. They start at “Trump doesn’t follow norms” which is a completely true and correct statement, and continue to “Trump has proven that a lot of our assumptions about politics are incorrect”, which is also true and correct, but then they seemingly progress from there to a position that tends to land somewhere around “Trump is an eldritch being unbound by all laws of reality.”
Obviously, I’m being hyperbolic there, but it really does seem like a lot of the thinking about Trump skews that way. People over-correct from our assumptions and norms to this world where nothing will ever affect Trump because he’s got some kind of magical power to warp reality.
Trump exists in the same physical universe we all do. When something happens that breaks our understanding of reality, it’s not magic, it just means that our understanding was based on faulty assumptions. Trump is forcing us to update and correct a lot of our assumptions about political realities, but he’s still bound by political realities. We just need to understand those realities better. His support is steadily crumbling, and we can see that in both how his poll numbers are falling, and how he is panicking about the mid-terms. Whether Iran will meaningfully affect that support is an open question, and whether or not Iran can be judged as a strategic success does not necessarily have any bearing on that question. Whether or not the Iran war is a political success, for example, would be an entirely separate question.
But just because the question of strategic success or failure in Iran doesn’t necessarily matter to the question of political success or failure, doesn’t mean that we can’t still ask the question. It’s not about trying to fit Trump into any kind of box, it’s just about judging him, and his administration, by all of the criteria available.
It’s important to ask these questions, and be clear about the answers, because there will be a myriad of defenders of his who will parrot any claim he makes that Iran was a success, however it goes down. There’s no reason for us to allow his lackeys to freely rewrite history.
I agree with what you’re saying. I also think it’s important to seperate trump as a person to trump as a political entity or trumpism (maga) as a cause.
Trump gets away with stuff, bit because we let him, but because he demands it and does everything to get it. Someone else might retire in disgrace. Hell make claims of fraud and try and incite violent upheaval to auit his purposes.
It’s not so much that he is exempt from consequences, political or legal, it’s that those consequences aren’t being upheld. It’s very groupthink and emperora new clothes. If he thought he was immune, he wouldn’t need to get rid of opposition and stack everywhere with allies and yes men.
Should have nuked the whales to get back on what they did to Japan in ww2. I wont here any of the it was really chicken and cow nonsense.