No matter what you may have heard, we didn’t lose the war in Iran. As you know, neither we nor those who putatively represent us in Congress were ever asked whether we wanted to go to war there in the first place.
Turns out we didn’t. Even when the war began back in February, polls showed more Americans opposed the war than approved of it. And now, as the war seems to be nearing some kind of unsatisfying conclusion, nearly two-thirds of Americans oppose it.
Which is as close to unanimous as we get in this fractured country, even when faced with a presidential blunder of historical proportions.
This is and always has been Donald Trump’s war, and he alone has lost it — unless you want to include JD Vance, Pete Hegseth and his war department and the minor-league negotiators Trump sends to the world’s hotspots. Not to mention Israel.
And the thing is, he’s losing a war against a country that is a well-earned pariah to much of the world and one whose military is no match for America’s military might.
And so, Trump is desperately searching for an off-ramp, whatever it costs him or us. He basically wants to get back to the pre-war status quo, when the Strait of Hormuz was unblocked, untolled and unthreatened. Is that even possible now? I mean, Pandora is definitely out of the box, the genie out of the bottle, Kash Patel off the wagon. Where do we go from there?
The rest of the negotiations — scheduled to last as long as 60 days, which will surely not be enough time to resolve many of the outstanding issues — are a matter of Trump trying to save face for a war that strengthened Iran’s position in the region and diminished America’s.
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SUBSCRIBEWhen I was talking to a highly placed Democratic pol the other day, I asked him when the war might be over. He said, “Whenever Iran says it is.”
And many Middle East experts believe that Iran, with its control of the Strait of Hormuz and with its ability to still hit U.S. bases and oil infrastructure in the region, has much of the leverage as negotiations begin, shakily as they do — with the U.S. still making, uh, “defensive” strikes and Iran threatening to reciprocate.
My guess is that the talks will nonetheless continue because Iran wants the bombs to stop and Trump prefers to talk rather than return to his barbaric pledge to destroy Iranian civilization.
If you’re skeptical that Trump has lost this one bigly, let us count the ways.
When the U.S. and Israel launched their joint shock-and-awe campaign against a third-rate power, the stated U.S. goals included regime change and freedom for the Iranian people. Bibi Netanyahu assured Trump the mullahs would fall and the restive population would grab its chance for freedom. You don’t hear back about either of those these days. You do still hear a lot, though, about the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, which remains firmly in control of the country.
We learned later that Trump planned to arm Kurdish rebels, a plan that went nowhere. He had also planned to install Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a former Iranian president known for his hardline positions against the U.S. and Israel, as Iran’s new leader. Ahmadinejad was under house arrest in Tehran, but he was injured when the U.S. dropped bombs that freed him on the first day and the plan went awry from there. The U.S. did kill Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and many of his advisers on the first day, but Iran responded by immediately naming one of Khamenei’s sons as his successor.
The plan would come to include stripping Iran of its power in the Middle East through its proxies by destroying its ballistic missile program. That hasn’t worked out too well either. Many missiles survived, and Iran can surely build more. And don’t forget the drones.
And consider the many changing deadlines and oft-changing goals. The war was “a short excursion,” supposed to last four to five weeks. Trump first declared victory on, I think it was Day 3, but said the war would continue, adding that the only option for Iran is “unconditional surrender.” A week into the war Trump told reporters on Air Force One, “We’re winning the war by a lot. We’ve decimated their whole evil empire. It’ll continue, I’m sure, for a little while.”
Does any of that hold up?
And when Iranians figured out they could block the Strait of Hormuz and there wasn’t much, short of putting boots on the ground, that America could do to stop them, everything changed. The world economy, including the U.S. economy, was under assault, prices were soaring, especially gas prices, and even though Trump said, incredibly enough, that he doesn’t think about Americans’ financial struggles — “not even a little bit” — we know, with the midterms looming, he cares about them a lot.
What Trump thinks about, he says, is Iran’s ability to make a nuclear bomb, which, you’ll recall, Trump said he had completely obliterated with his bunker-busting assault of Iran, along with Israel, nearly a year ago.
Now, to get Iran to give up its nuclear assets, including 970 pounds of enriched uranium that could be weaponized, the U.S. has considered relaxing sanctions, giving back billions in frozen Iranian assets — a program Trump is calling “(nuclear) dust for dollars.” The costs make some yearn for Barack Obama’s 2015 Iranian-nuclear bomb deal, which Trump immediately abandoned, calling it the worst deal ever because it was, you know, negotiated by Obama, meaning it had to be bad.
That’s even though, as Obama said recently, Iran gave up 97% of its enriched uranium without the U.S. firing a single missile, or killing “a whole bunch of people” or Iran shutting down the Strait of Hormuz.
In any case, Iran has not publicly agreed to give up its uranium or to whom. Do you believe Iran or the last thing Trump told us? That we have to ask the questions says everything.
Whatever comes of negotiations, Iran has shown it can block the strait at will. (Remember when “Project Freedom” was launched, which would have had U.S. warships guide stranded tankers through the Strait? That plan lasted, I believe, for two days.)
And the U.S. has seen that blockading ships from Iranian ports has no more brought Iran to its knees than the weeks of ceaseless bombing.
And to show how difficult negotiations would likely be, Iran says it has agreed to drop tolls for ships going through the Strait, but may charge “fees” for “navigational services” and for environmental costs.
Which part of that sounds like victory to you?
Republican hardliners in the U.S. Senate didn’t seem to think that any of it did. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said the negotiations would likely “be a disastrous mistake.” Roger Wicker, R-Mississippi and chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, also chose “disaster.” He said, “Everything accomplished by Operation Epic Fury would be for naught.”
Even Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina and Trump toady, criticized the plan, saying that if it is believed that the Strait of Hormuz “cannot be protected from Iranian terrorism,” and that Iran can still threaten oil infrastructure, it could change the power dynamic in the region.
Graham, of course, has already backed off his criticism. Others will likely follow, but what will change Iran’s ability to blockade the strait or to threaten oil facilities in the region?
There was a fascinating piece in the New York Times Tuesday, pointing out that Trump’s idea of resolving the Iran crisis resembles the deal he brokered in Gaza — declare a ceasefire and get to the tough stuff later, if ever.
The article noted that the approach — which Trump also used in Gaza to get a truce between Israel and Hamas, the Iranian-backed militant group — has largely failed there. In Phase 2 of the agreement, Hamas was supposed to disarm and Israel would allow Gaza to rebuild. Well, Israel continues to bomb Gaza — just as it continues to bomb Iran’s militant ally Hezbollah in Lebanon — and Hamas continues to control part of the country.
Phase 3, I believe, was for Trump to set up casinos on an ethnically cleansed Gazan coastline.
In a move that Trump must see as a distraction from the negotiations with Iran, he is “mandatorily requesting” — whatever that means — that countries such as Saudi Arabia sign onto the Abraham Accords, a Trump agreement that aims at Middle Eastern countries normalizing their relations with Israel. He even suggested that Iran could eventually sign on.
He knows Saudi Arabia will never sign the accords, and that the Iran suggestion sounds something straight out of a Saturday Night Live cold open. Does he think he’s fooling anyone? (Well, of course, he does, but what con man doesn’t?)
Last Friday, Trump told Axios that the chance of reaching an agreement was a “solid 50-50” and that if he didn’t get a “good deal” — meaning a deal better than Obama got — he would blow Iran “to kingdom come.”
But as David Graham pointed out in The Atlantic, Trump is, in truth, a terrible negotiator who has a history of getting rolled (See: Putin, Vladimir, or Xi, Jinping). Graham notes that though Trump got his reputation as a dealmaker in “The Art of the Deal,” the irony is that he didn’t even write the book. A ghostwriter did.
Still, I’m certain that Trump believes he is winning the war, because he’s Donald Trump — always winning like never before, always winning like no one has ever seen.
And so, as negotiations begin, he’s daring Iran — and he’s daring us — to say he’s wrong.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
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