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Several times in the last 60 years, the United States fought a war in which it not only failed but came to realize long before the fighting ended that it was likely to fail—yet fought on anyway.
Vietnam is the most notorious example, Afghanistan (and to a lesser extent Iraq) the most recent. Those are the “forever wars” to which the president contemptuously alluded as a candidate in 2024 when he attacked Washington’s liberal foreign policy consensus. And so one of the few virtues of a second Trump administration, we might have surmised, would be that it wouldn’t get sucked into a conflict whose initial rationale has decayed into an elaborate sunk-cost fallacy.
His personal history almost guaranteed it. In his career as a developer, Donald Trump declared corporate bankruptcy no less than four times. When the going gets rough on an endeavor, the president is used to cutting his losses and leaving others to clean up the mess.
His aversion to using infantry also reduced the risk of a “quagmire,” to borrow a media cliche for military stalemates. Deploying thousands of ground troops in the “forever wars” I mentioned earlier gave the White House and Pentagon an argument for extending the fighting indefinitely: Our boys can crush this insurgency. All they need is more time.
But the president sticks to air power, which has the upside of minimizing American casualties and the downside of being a blunt-force object. Once an air campaign is reduced to bouncing the rubble, having failed to break the enemy’s will or ability to resist, the case for staying the course and continuing the bombardment collapses. One would think.
Put all of that together and you might have reasonably assumed back in February that there was no scenario in which the United States would end up fighting on in Iran aimlessly. Either the regime would quickly be brought to its knees or Trump, finding himself stymied, would bug out. He’d take the bankruptcy option and leave others to clean up the mess, as he threatened to do when the agony in the Strait of Hormuz first began to confound him.
You would have been wrong. Remarkably, in less than five months, we’ve arrived at a point that it took many years to reach in Vietnam and Afghanistan: Strategic defeat seems assured, yet the United States sees little choice but to keep going.
As I write this on Friday morning, all signs point to escalation. The Pentagon is surging soldiers and weapons to the Middle East in case the president opts for all-out war, replete with special operations forces this time. And despite warnings from his own intelligence deputies that more bombs won’t break the regime, Trump is rattling his saber. “I am considering a massive attack. Bigger than ever before,” he told Axios on Thursday, insisting that the Iranians “haven’t received enough pain yet.”
The president “believes that the only thing Iran understands is military force,” the Wall Street Journal reported, citing a senior administration official. Allegedly he’s now in “revenge mode” against the Iranians for spoiling his peace deal, “calling them scumbags and lunatics, and unleashing a series of expletives” in a recent Oval Office meeting.
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Nick Catoggio is a staff writer at The Dispatch and is based in Texas. Prior to joining the company in 2022, he spent 16 years gradually alienating a populist readership at Hot Air. When Nick isn’t busy writing a daily newsletter on politics, he’s … probably planning the next day’s newsletter.
Ha ha haa! That picture at the beginning of the article looks like a wax statue in a London museum!
For whatever reason, as mentioned on the TD podcast, Iran is making decisions now that aren't really rationally in their self-interest. My guess is a lot of this is because they now deeply want to humiliate Donald Trump in every way they can. They might not have another chance this stark to be able humiliate an American president again and they're willing to take risks to do so.
Let’s imagine we are on Earth 2, instead of the Earth 1 which we currently live on.
On Earth 2 we still have a morbidly obese president with a ridiculous combover, but instead of being a narcissistic megalomaniac and imbecile that thinks he can start major wars all on his own without asking for approval from Congress or making his case to the American public, this Earth 2 president acted like a president of a democracy and sought the approval of the public and its elected representatives before committing a country of over 300 million people to war.
Do you think on Earth 2 Iran would be able to bring him to his knees by making gas prices rise?
The only thing worse than being an evil sociopathic national head of state is being an evil sociopathic imbecile who’s a national head of state.
Please God, give us a midterm trouncing that allows the country to remove this creature from the Oval Office.
The reason this is still going on is the Iranians couldn't resist threatening The Don. Had they not done that, he would have accepted Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz as a necessary part of ending free trade.